Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy: an Inspector Sohlberg mystery (Inspector Sohlberg Mysteries)

by Amundsen, Jens

  “Yes.”

  “What have you there?” said Rønning. He pointed and cast a leering glance at Constable Wangelin and the boxes in her arms

  “Your favorite.”

  “Ha! That’s not exactly what I meant . . . who’s the pretty lady . . . your daughter?”

  “No.”

  “My my my . . . well she’s not your wife . . . you’re not the kind of man to dump an old wife to marry a newer gal half your age. A mistress? You have a mistress? . . . No. That’s certainly not your style . . . my straight straight arrow. Don’t tell me . . . she’s just a co-worker?”

  Sohlberg nodded.

  “Interpol? . . . No. She looks like one of ours. Home-grown I’d say. Quite lovely.”

  “She’s Norwegian . . . from the Olso district . . . if that’s what you mean.”

  “That so? . . . Are the Police and the Ministry of Justice finally figuring out that it’s best to catch criminals with honey and not with vinegar?”

  “I wanted to ask you—”

  Anton Rønning raised his hand. “One minute please . . . let me hear the end . . . oh . . . oh . . . this is so good . . . Vivaldi . . . The Four Seasons . . . played by Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante. Oh my! How they play . . . so much energy . . . how exciting.

  “I can almost see that redheaded priest Vivaldi playing the violin in Venice like the devil himself! I’m surprised the church didn’t burn him at the stake for such outrageous music . . . it just burns with passion . . . and lust for life. Just like me . . . don’t you think?”

  Sohlberg shrugged and said, “I wonder what the world would be like if we brought back burning at the stake for society’s heretics.”

  “Hot my boy. The world would be hot for devils like me.” The old murderer laughed lustily at his own joke. “Anyway . . . what goodies have you brought me in those boxes?”

  “Your favorite chocolates.”

  “How kind. How lovely. You know . . . I have always depended on the kindness of strangers . . . just like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Again . . . so soon?”

  “Yes.”

  Anton Rønning laughed and took one of the milk chocolate bars and it disappeared into his cavernous mouth in one stealthy move. “Sohlberg I’d like to get transferred out of here. Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful very grateful to be here. After my last beating I probably had days to live in Spain before you got me out.

  “But I’m getting old Sohlberg. I’ve spent what? . . . The last thirty years in prison? More than fifteen years in Spain and more than ten here.”

  Sohlberg removed his glasses and carefully cleaned them with a small soft blue cloth that he used only for that purpose. “Crime and punishment. Acts and consequences. One follows the other . . . no? As night follows day.”

  “But another day follows the night. Doesn’t it? . . . Sohlberg I’d like to spend my last days without looking at any walls. I want to move to Bastøy Prison.”

  Sohlberg was not surprised. The minimum security prison on Bastøy Island was an idyllic resort-like facility less than 50 miles south of Oslo. Inmates could easily swim to the mainland but did not for fear they’d be sent to less hospitable lodgings. Bastøy Island held 115 inmates who lived in cozy wood cottages when they were not working in the organic farm or horseback riding or fishing or swimming or playing tennis.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” said Sohlberg. “Halden is as good as it gets. I will not be personally recommending that you get transferred to Bastøy.”

  “Fair enough. Will you at least let them know that’s my request if I help you?”

  “I’ll let them know about your request. Now . . . will you help me?”

  “Of course. You got me out of that nightmare down in Spain. We have a good working relationship.”

  “I and the constable here are going to tell you everything about a case we’re working on.”

  “The Karl Haugen case?”

  “Oh?” Sohlberg raised his eyebrows. “You heard anything about the case here in prison?”

  “Yes but not what you think. Most of the inmates are outraged that someone would take or harm the boy. We were even more outraged at the incompetent police investigation.”

  “We’re going to lay out some basic facts for you to consider about the case.”

  “Alright.”

  “You can ask me all the questions you want. Constable here will answer what I can’t.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Who is the person most likely to have taken the boy.”

  “What’s the other thing you want to know?”

  “I”ll tell you after you hear us,” replied Sohlberg who was thrown off balance by the question and by the killer’s lifeless flat eyes which stared out at odd angles like one of those horrid Picasso portraits.

  How did Anton Rønning know that he wanted another piece of information from him?

  The killer had a knack for always being one step ahead of everyone around him especially law enforcement. Rønning had only been caught because of one little slip-up—a parking ticket that linked Rønning’s car to the scene of another molestation. Sohlberg’s mentor Lars Eliassen had noticed and persistently investigated the parking ticket and Rønning himself long before Inspector Eliassen got to arrest Rønning for crashing a getaway car while fleeing from one of his victims. Like an obsessed bloodhound Eliassen had single-mindedly followed the trail of clues that ultimately unmasked Anton Rønning as the Smiley Face Killer.

  An hour went by. Then another. Rønning listened intently to Sohlberg and Wangelin. At the start of the third hour the killer said:

  “Enough.”

  Constable Wangelin started to speak but Sohlberg held up his hand.

  Rønning lapsed into silence. Fifteen minutes passed. Sohlberg and Wangelin waited in the growing shadows thrown by the forest around them. The lonely sun moved to the far west. Finally the killer spoke from the darkening shade:

  “I seriously doubt if the boy was taken by a stranger . . . least of all for deviant entertainment purposes like mine. . . . No. . . . Everything you’ve told me tells me one thing . . . that one of the parents took the boy. The father or the stepmother. But you I think already suspected that.”

  “Yes,” said Sohlberg. “But why . . . why do this?”

  “The third oldest motive in the world after lust and greed. . . . Revenge.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?” said Anton Rønning while another chocolate bar disappeared into his mouth like so many of the hapless victims who fell into his voracious pit of depravity. “Sohlberg . . . these chocolates remind me of my sweet grandmother . . . when she wasn’t beating the life out of me she always quoted me an old saying. . . . Revenge converts a little right into a great wrong.”

  PART THREE: DOORS OF PERCEPTION

  To get a confession the police detective must offer the suspect a series of doors that must be attractive enough for the suspect to open and step through. Each door should open the path to a damaging admission or a provable lie.

  — Lars Eliassen, Police Inspector

  Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no fibs.

  — Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774)

  If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

  — William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  Chapter 10/Ti

  MORNING OF 1 YEAR AND 25 DAYS

  AFTER THE DAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 4

  The evidence room in the basement smelled as all evidence rooms smell: moldy. The clerk handed Sohlberg a numbered box with Karl Haugen’s backpack which the police had picked up at the school at 11:02 PM on the Friday that he disappeared. The red backpack held the usual collection of a child’s school supplies and life: pens and pencils and notebooks and books and rocks and Pokémon trading cards and chewing gum and a blue plastic grasshopper.

  Sohlberg looked around
the bag and noted that Karl Haugen’s lunch box or pail was not in the backpack. He checked the list of evidence and it did not mention any school lunch.

  In the elevator that took him back up to his office Sohlberg wondered why Karl Haugen did not have his lunch with him that day if the parents were correct in telling the investigators that Karl was supposed to be at the school all day long and that they always prepared a lunch for Karl to eat at school.

  Why send a boy off all day to school without his lunch?

  Was it because one parent or both parents never expected Karl to eat his lunch or come back home?

  The question had intensely bothered Sohlberg ever since he had formed a mental outline of other troubling questions that he needed to ask the parents.

  “Hei,” said Constable Wangelin cheerfully as she walked into Sohlberg’s cubicle at 9 AM. He had given her permission to come in one hour late because they had returned exhausted to Oslo after midnight from their excursion to Halden Prison. “Chief Inspector . . . I just got a return call from one of the constables who worked on the early stages of the investigation. He says that we must talk to Karl Haugen’s teacher . . . Lisbeth Bøe.”

  “Why?”

  “According to him she’s always been very angry about being made a scapegoat and blamed by everyone for not alerting the school administrators early enough about Karl Haugen’s disappearance.”

  “Why was she blamed?”

  “Because she saw Karl Haugen early that day at the science fair . . . and yet she did not raise the alarm when Karl was absent from her class at nine o’clock when she took roll.”

  “But you previously told me that she marked him absent. Obviously she did not find his absence that strange.”

  “That’s correct Chief Inspector . . . and that’s the key . . . why didn’t she find it unusual that Karl Haugen was there earlier for the science fair and then gone from the class?”

  Sohlberg rubbed his eyes. “My suspicions are coming true . . . we are dealing with a brilliant devious mind. . . . Do you now see Constable what I meant when I said that this case is intricate . . . brilliantly designed with a purpose that we still cannot even come close to understanding?”

  “True . . . but we have an inkling . . . do we not . . . that the taking of Karl Haugen was probably for purposes of revenge?”

  “Yes. But by who . . . why . . . over what minor slight or great injury or wrong?”

  “Chief Inspector . . . you agreed with Anton Rønning that it was most likely one of the parents.”

  “I did agree it was one of the parents . . . but in this family just who is the parent? . . . We have the birth mother and all of these messy entangled relationships . . . such as the ex-husbands of Agnes Haugen who’d love to get even with her from what you’ve told me. The stepmother has left behind a small army of angry ex-husbands.”

  “That’s true . . . shall we leave now and go interview this school teacher who’s being blamed for Karl’s disappearance?”

  “By all means. I’ve always found that scapegoats offer unique truths from their down-and-out point of view.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “I want to see my Dad and Mom. Please . . . I have to see them.”

  The man said and did nothing but the woman smiled.

  “I wanna go back home!”

  The woman shook her head.

  Karl refused to believe that he could not go back home to his father or mother. He no longer got angry about not seeing his father or mother. But he got ever so sad whenever the woman hugged him and told him:

  “It’s going to be alright.”

  ~ ~ ~

  By the time they drove into Holmenkollen the entire Oslofjord had clouded up. A cold front moved in from the North Sea and furiously dropped an inch of chilled rain.

  “This almost feels like autumn,” said Sohlberg. “I wish I’d brought my parka.”

  “We’ll have more sunny warm days.”

  Sohlberg nodded but he wondered if his fellow countrymen felt as surprised as he was at how quickly the promise of summer had disappeared. Nature seemed intent on reminding him that the long grim dark days of winter would be back soon.

  Hairpin switchbacks led all the way to the top of Pilot Hill. The school’s one-floor red building seemed cheerful enough as did the surrounding playground ringed by grass and then forest.

  “Very nice school up here,” commented Sohlberg. “But I expected more rural surroundings. I remember this was all farms and ski slopes back when I was a kid.”

  “You had no idea the area was so built up?”

  “No. I can’t believe all these buildings have been put up here on top of the high hills of Holmenkollen.”

  “Well Chief Inspector . . . the Holmenkollen ski festival is still up here.”

  “But this urban sprawl is hideous.” Sohlberg looked sadly at another piece of Norway’s rural splendor chewed up by long rows of two- and three-floor luxury condominiums and apartments.

  “You can’t blame people for wanting to live up here . . . this suburb is very nice. I could never afford to live here.”

  “Let’s take a walk,” said Sohlberg. “I need to get a feel for the crime scene.”

  The school offered spectacular views of Oslo and Oslofjord. Sohlberg noted that the school sat between two dead end streets: Grindbakken and Måltrostveien.

  “What’s the street that passes below the school grounds? . . . I hear traffic on it.”

  “Oh that? . . . It’s Olaf Bulls vei.”

  “Could someone have parked down there and come up here to take Karl Haugen?”

  “Highly unlikely. They’d be blocking traffic even if they parked on the shoulder.”

  “I can also see why a stranger is unlikely to have walked or driven to the school to take the boy in broad daylight. Look at all these condos and apartments around us . . . anyone on a terrace or window on the second or third floor would’ve seen something suspicious.”

  “Chief Inspector . . . that’s why we interviewed every single person living within a half mile of here. And . . . nothing. Absolutely nothing. No one inside or outside the school that day saw anyone who did not belong here.”

  “What about Bogstad Lake . . . it can’t be more than a half-mile from here. I imagine Nilsen had the lakeshore searched?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the lake dragged for a body?”

  “Of course . . . we sent in boats with sonar and scuba divers. Nothing. Not a shred of evidence by the lake or anywhere else.”

  “Interesting . . . if this abduction was for revenge then why not plant a false clue out there . . . place one of Karl’s belongings out by the lakeshore . . . a shirt or a toy . . . that would have thrown the investigation into confusing turmoil . . . and led us down a wild goose chase. Wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes . . . you’d think so,” said Constable Wangelin hesitantly.

  “And yet the criminal did not plant red herrings to shift the investigation in any particular direction. How brilliant . . . and how cruel since those who love Karl are left permanently in a daily agonizing state of suspense as to whether he’s dead or alive . . . tortured or hurt.”

  “Diabolical.”

  “And . . . at the same time our criminal has been arrogantly confident that he or she will never get caught. . . . That’s the genius of this criminal. He or she tortures the family and stumps the investigators.”

  “What a monster.”

  A chill crept into Sohlberg. He had half-expected to find something unusual about the school’s location or something else that would explain how a child could vanish in the middle of a school that was filled with more than 200 adults and children that fateful Friday. But Grindbakken skole at 106 Måltrostveien seemed no different than any of the other well-kept elementary schools in Oslo’s suburbs.

  They met Karl’s teacher at a conference room near the principal’s office. Karl Haugen’s 26-year-old teacher Lisbeth Bøe was no different than any of the other young elementary school t
eachers. She was caring and competent and supremely confident about her skills. The cares and disappointments of life had not yet aged her.

  Constable Wangelin made the introductions.