‘That’s just a couple of kilometres from Halle farm,’ Espen Mortensen said. ‘Could he have dumped the bodies in his own backyard?’
‘Why hasn’t he appeared on any of the lists?’ Leif Malm asked.
‘Too old,’ Torunn Borg explained. ‘He’s four years older than Robert Godwin, and we worked on parameters of plus or minus three years.’
The communications adviser entered the room. ‘Press conference in fifteen minutes,’ he reminded.
Wisting ignored him. ‘Do we have a photo?’ he asked.
Torunn Borg returned to the computer screen. A couple of keystrokes later Ole Linge’s passport photograph filled the screen.
‘That’s him!’ Donald Baker whispered. ‘We’ve found him.’
The narrow face shone from the computer screen, its dark eyes hidden behind thick glasses. It was him. Wisting felt perspiration break out on his entire body. His mouth became dry as dust, and a nerve vibrated in his face.
81
For the third time the Emergency Squad drove out of the police garage but, on this occasion, Wisting sat in the passenger seat.
Tactically, their subject was in a challenging position, under a rocky ridge with open terrain to the front, and would probably see them approach. In a planned action, the crew would normally inch towards the rear of the building under cover of vegetation, but the officer in charge decided instead to launch a sudden attack. They would drive to the house at top speed, storm out and enter the building. Simultaneously, the police helicopter would shine its searchlight on the house from above, watching for any attempt to flee from the back.
‘Suspect uses a grey Mercedes E220, 1993 model, with registration number AX81212,’ was relayed over the police radio while they drove.
Leaning forward, the officer in charge picked up the microphone. ‘Received,’ he said. ‘Arrival in approximately one minute. Initiating immediate action.’
The driver dropped his speed and, swinging off the main highway, advanced along a bumpy side road. Wisting held tightly to the handle above the door. Lights were showing in the house but no one appeared at the wide panorama windows to take a closer look. They could see no car parked in the yard, and there was no garage on the property, only an open carport where outdoor furniture was stored for the winter.
They stopped a few metres from the entrance, the side door slid open, and the armed officers piled out in a carefully practised manoeuvre. Two of them carried a crowbar, while a third wielded a sledgehammer. The crowbar was inserted between door and frame and splinters flew as it broke open.
They entered the house in a snaking line, commands shouted and answered. Wisting knew that the leading officers would break to right and left as they encountered doors and rooms, while those bringing up the rear would continue into the house. Through the windows he could see sweeping flashlights and the narrow beams from red dot machine gun sights. The police helicopter hovered overhead, shedding its powerful floodlight in expansive circles.
‘All clear,’ was the report. The house was empty.
Two other cars drove up. Nils Hammer emerged from one in company with the Swedish detective, while Leif Malm and the two FBI agents stepped out of the other. ‘We’ll have teledata on him in less than ten minutes,’ Malm said.
Wisting entered the house, keen to discover how the serial killer lived. The smell of paint hit him as he entered a basement room. Apart from this renovation, little had changed since the house was built. It was furnished with moulded plastic chairs and rosewood veneer furniture, everything durable and easily cleaned, and a yellowish-brown colour scheme repeated on wallpaper and rugs.
The Emergency Squad crew conducted a thorough search, looking underneath beds, rummaging through cupboards and storerooms while Wisting stood in the centre of the living room to survey the scene: furniture along the walls made the room seem more spacious, and a shelf unit was crammed with books. A book collection expresses the owner’s personality. Titles and authors speak of character and individuality.
This collection had a preponderance of American writers: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill and William Faulkner. Some books were present in more than one edition, both English and Norwegian. Apart from these books, he noted a total absence of personal touches. No ornaments or pictures.
His mobile phone rang: Torunn Borg. ‘I’ve spoken again to Odd Werner Ellefsen,’ she said. ‘It turns out that Bob Crabb visited him in the summer as well. Wanting to talk about Ole Linge.’
Wisting nodded. Bob Crabb’s behaviour had been that of an investigator, interviewing people and gathering evidence, such as the flyer from the MS Elida with Robert Godwin’s fingerprints, photographing and documenting. Probably he had been on the brink of contacting the authorities when Godwin realised what was happening.
Leif Malm shouted to him from further inside the house. Wisting ended his conversation with Torunn Borg to find Malm in a room equipped as an office, its shelves stacked with books, ring binders and boxes of periodicals. On the desk sat a laptop computer, and beside it a camera with a powerful lens. Malm held a blue passport in his hands. United States of America. He raised it to Wisting’s eye level: Bob Crabb. These were the American university professor’s passport and missing belongings.
‘Godwin must have felt extremely safe here,’ Malm said, ‘leaving all this in plain sight. Or perhaps he thought he could somehow make use of it in some way.’
Wisting lifted the camera and located the on-button, but nothing happened. It must have run out of battery power.
Replacing it, he contemplated how the man who had once lived here, the original Ole Linge, had probably lain at the bottom of a well with two eels for company for the past twenty years. Since then, Robert Godwin had lived in his stead, until Bob Crabb arrived. Crabb had talked to the same people as Line when she was familiarising herself with Viggo Hansen. In Bob Crabb’s case, that had cost him his life.
His train of thought was broken by Leif Malm’s mobile phone. Malm answered in monosyllables before disconnecting. ‘Ole Linge’s phone is somewhere in Sweden. The police there are collaborating with the Telia phone company to locate it.’
‘Sweden? What’s he doing there?’
‘He may have gone on the run. If so, he’ll probably try to travel farther, over the Øresund Bridge to Denmark or on one of the Baltic ferries.’
Ingemar Bergquist bounded upstairs two at a time, with Nils Hammer following.
‘He’s in Sweden,’ Malm told them.
‘I know,’ the Swedish investigator replied. ‘We’ve run his name through our records, and it appears the real Ole Linge owned a smallholding in Tanum district. He inherited it from his father in 1982.’
‘His father was German,’ Wisting said. ‘At least he was rumoured to be.’
‘According to our records, his father’s name was Olle Fredriksson and he came from a small place called Vremmen.’
‘Whereabouts in Sweden is that?’
‘In Western Götaland.’
Wisting conjured up a mental map of that part of Sweden, remembering how the E6 motorway stretched from the border to Gothenburg. He glanced through the panorama window to the helicopter still hovering above.
‘Can you get that to land?’ he asked.
82
Line fell asleep wrapped in several layers of canvas sacks. Having at last stopped shivering, her eyes had slid shut. When she opened them again, the room was dark except for the moonlight shining through the narrow window high on the wall.
She kept still and considered her position. Wet and cold, she had no idea of her whereabouts other than that it was a desolate spot. Somewhere ‘out there’ was the man who had killed Viggo Hansen. Though she had no idea why, she knew that was how all this must hang together. Neither did she understand what she had done, or what questions she had asked, that had brought her to this.
A noise had roused her from sleep. She heard it again: a car driving past, followed immediate
ly by another vehicle.
She threw the sacks aside and rushed to the door, struggling at first to push it open. When that proved useless, she pulled it towards her, again failing. Wrenching the handle up and down she applied her shoulder, still without success. Taking a couple of steps back, she twice launched herself at the door. It rattled on its hinges but did not yield.
He must have found her, she realised. Her footprints would not have been difficult to follow. He must have found her while she slept and barricaded the door from the outside. The narrow window was high on the wall, but if she succeed in climbing up she could squeeze her way through.
She clambered onto the workbench, crouching down under the ceiling to peer outside, and froze when she saw Ole Linge shovelling snow only a few metres from the barn wall, his powerful flashlight illuminating the scene as he cleared an area about two metres square. After clearing a few more patches he straightened and drove the shovel into a snowdrift. Lifting the flashlight, he trained the beam down at a trapdoor. Fiddling with a metal hasp he lifted the cover from the farm’s old well.
83
The helicopter crew consisted of a pilot and a systems operator. Wisting and Nils Hammer squeezed behind them with Ingemar Bergquist. Wisting would have preferred Leif Malm to have come but, as the helicopter had only three passenger seats and their intention was to traverse Swedish territory, he chose Bergquist.
Flying across the outer part of the Oslo fjord, they reached Sweden south of Strömstad and followed the coast southwards, looking down on the lights of densely populated areas before the helicopter abruptly changed course. The flight took less than thirty minutes. Robert Godwin would have taken at least three and a half hours by car.
‘Down there,’ the pilot said, his words strangely distant through the headphones although he sat directly in front of them.
They circled and hovered above the red painted buildings of the smallholding Ole Linge had inherited from his father. Beside the road, several Swedish police vehicles were parked, and a number of police officers were tramping through the snow. A few peered up at the helicopter.
Changing channel on the radio, the systems operator called the forces on the ground and a number of brief messages were relayed back and forth without Wisting understanding much of what was said. ‘They’ve been in,’ the pilot told him. ‘It’s empty.’
Keeping the engine steady he directed the helicopter floodlight onto the road and an unmarked car parked at the verge beside the driveway. Turning in a semi-circle they dropped enough to identify it as an ancient Mercedes, stuck in a snowdrift.
‘That’s his car,’ Wisting said.
The pilot switched on the heat-seeking camera and the policemen were transformed into red blazing figures on-screen. As they turned in widening circles the camera under the fuselage swept across the terrain in pursuit of temperature differences, but all that was visible on-screen remained in shades of grey.
‘We have less than forty minutes flight time left,’ the pilot said. ‘We’ll soon have to head back to Rygge airport for refuelling. Do you want me to land here and drop you off, or are you returning with me?’
Wisting stared out into the darkness, at the grey silhouettes of endless forests blanketed in snow: ‘Go down,’ he said.
84
The man in the yard pointed his flashlight into the well, staring into it for a long time before switching off, turning on his heel and approaching the barn entrance. Line’s panic rose inside, but she needed to keep a clear head. If she could not think, every chance of escape would be lost.
Fumbling along the edge of the window she used her fingers to search for the hasps, but realised that this window had no hasps or hinges: it could not be opened. She supported herself with one hand on the ceiling as she searched among the tools on the shelves for something to smash the pane of glass with until, suddenly, she noticed that the ceiling panels above her head were loose. She pushed at one, lifting it without difficulty, and shoved it aside. Cold air blasted her face.
With wall shelves serving as ladder rungs, she clambered to the dark opening in the ceiling, kicking aside objects that dropped noisily to the floor. At the same time she searched for something to defend herself with: an iron bar, knife, or chain. On the top shelf she found an axe and a box of matches. Ignoring the axe, she grabbed the matchbox and hauled herself up the last stretch. Behind her, she heard the barn door banging shut, but also another, fainter sound she could neither locate nor identify.
On her knees, she pushed the ceiling panel back into place, struggling to make out her surroundings in the darkness. She was almost at the mid-point of the barn, with the large room she had left directly below. The barn door was ajar, admitting moonlight from outside, and drifts of snow had been blown inside by the wind. Only a few metres away, Ole Linge was removing the barricade from the interior door, pushing the wooden chest along the floor, his flashlight beam sweeping to and fro, but then he stopped in mid-movement. The cone of light froze and was directed at the ceiling as he strained to listen.
The distant sound she had heard earlier increased in volume and became the pulsing sound of helicopter rotor blades.
She retreated farther inside the barn to the hay loft. Just below the roof, several peepholes lined the wall. Balancing on a beam, Line reached the nearest, which was just wide enough to squeeze through, thrust her head out and looked down. It was almost three metres to the ground, but the deep snow would cushion her fall.
She looked behind and heard the room door open as the sweeping beam of light vanished, feeling that she had blundered by not bringing the axe. If a crooked ceiling panel gave her away, letting him realise how she had escaped, then she could have slugged him as he poked his head through. Too late for regret, but she already had a plan. Putting one leg through the peephole she took out the box of matches, opened it, removed a match and drew it along the rough sandpaper. Though it sparked slightly, it did not catch. She tried again, but the sulphur only smouldered.
The matches were old, and not until the fourth attempt did she strike a flame. Using her hand as a shield, she held the match in front of her until it was going well, and lobbed it at the hay. Nothing happened. It must have gone out.
Her plan had been to attract attention by setting the barn alight. In the meantime all she could do was hide in the forest. The helicopter in the vicinity might be sheer chance, but might also mean they were searching for her.
A fifth match also would not light, and then a powerful ray pierced the darkness. Ole Linge had discovered the only possible way out of the room. The light struck her face, blinding her as she fought panic. A pulse beat behind her eyes. She fumbled for another match, but it broke when she tried to strike it. Ole Linge was about to haul himself up through the opening in the ceiling. There were only two or three matches left. She struck one and this time it lit immediately and burned with a clear flame.
She tossed it with care, aiming for the closest pile of hay. A second or two elapsed before the flames caught hold and the dry grass began to crackle. The fire spread rapidly, and smoke spiralled from the barn roof.
Line hauled her other leg through the peephole, lowering herself until she was hanging by her fingertips. She let go.
85
There was enough time for a final flight over the terrain. The pilot pointed the helicopter’s nose in an easterly direction, its searchlight following the road that advanced into the forest. Treetops swayed beneath them, releasing a shower of snow from their branches. Two red flecks appeared on the infra-red camera screen and remained totally still until both suddenly bounced out of sight. ‘Elk,’ the systems operator explained.
Wisting watched them disappear from the screen before his attention returned to the road. After a few hundred metres, a cluster of buildings came into view on the left. A barn, a farmhouse and associated outbuildings. On the screen, heat loss from the windows and doors appeared as yellow squares with green edges.
A figure emerged onto the steps, w
ith another person in the doorway behind. Wisting peered down at a man with his hand to his forehead to shield himself from the strong light, a woman in a skirt at his back. A dog dashed between them to stand in the farmyard, barking.
The pilot banked the helicopter, turned and flew back. Sweeping past the red cottage where the Swedish police officers were still working, they increased their altitude to cross power lines at a safe height.
‘One o’clock,’ said the systems operator on the intercom, pointing simultaneously. Between the trees up ahead they could see an orange glimmer.
The pilot pushed the control stick forward, dipping the helicopter’s nose, and gave it full throttle.
A barn was on fire, with flames leaping from just below the roof, black smoke belching.
The systems operator called the ground crew, giving specific directions, and the pilot directed his searchlight onto the area at the front of the burning building. Tracks in the snow led to the barn door.
‘Down!’ Wisting commanded, loosening his safety harness. ‘Take us down!’
The helicopter ascended, turned round and flew to a straight length of road where the pilot switched on his landing lights and dropped to fifty feet. Spruce trees loomed above them on either side as the rotor blades whirled up snow. They landed with a bump and the doors were pulled aside. Wisting leapt out into the snowstorm, stooping under the rotor blades as he raced towards the blazing barn.
86
A sharp pain shot from her foot up through her left leg as she hit the ground. She must have landed on a stone lying under the snow. Stretched on her back she floundered with her leg dragging behind, listening to the fire take hold as it spread rapidly on the other side of the barn wall.
As she approached the fringe of the forest, she stood and tried to hobble between the trees, but the snow was too deep and she stumbled and fell. Hauling herself up again she toiled on, though painful shudders coursed through her whenever she put weight on the injured foot.
The Caveman Page 28
