A few minutes later they both stretched to shake off their grogginess. Wangelin drove expertly at high speeds on the highway.
“Constable Wangelin. . tell me about the Haugen family. Tell me everything. I’m meeting the father and stepmother tomorrow.”
“I’m looking forward to that. We interviewed them five times each but they gave jumbled confusing explanations that only made sense when you heard them and no sense at all after you left the parents and had time to think about their statements. In hindsight. . they bamboozled us.”
“Let’s start with the biological mother.”
“I feel sorry for her and what she’s going through but she’s a bit of a flake.”
“ How so?”
“She’s not crazy but somewhat slightly unbalanced.”
“How so?”
“You’ll notice that her hair style and hair color change radically and constantly. One day it’s straight black-hair. . the next day frizzy blond-ish hair. . a week later she has dreadlocks and a month later she has bleached spiky hair. . ”
“Come now Constable Wangelin. Surely her hairstyle is not that important.”
“Maybe yes. Maybe no. Why does she do it? I can’t even imagine the amount of time she puts into fixing her hair.”
“You should’ve asked her. Why do you change your hair style and hair color so frequently? How much time does it take? Her answers truthful or not would’ve been revealing.”
“Ja! I should’ve asked.”
“You’ll see as you get more experienced how those little open-ended questions add up. . the innocent little questions about so-called meaningless or trivial or irrelevant matters almost always bring you tremendous insights into the person’s mind. . that’s what you have to do. . ask ask ask. . dig the truth out.”
“Ja.”
“Ask questions even when it feels very uncomfortable. Sometimes the stress in awkward personal interactions will break down the walls and let you take a peak inside.”
“But it feels so awkward to ask personal questions of a stranger.”
“I know it goes against our famous Norwegian reserve. But you have to do it to be an effective police officer. You have to put aside our Viking tradition of living in extreme isolation because of the steep mountains between each fjord. . you have to get past the ingrained mind-set where everyone from the next isolated fjord is a total stranger who speaks a totally different dialect.”
“I never saw it that way but it’s so true.”
“Tell me about Maya Engen. Start with her reaction to Karl’s disappearance.”
“In a nutshell. . she’s a woman with a guilty conscience. . for abandoning Karl Haugen when he needed her the most.”
“How so?”
“In her mind she brought Karl into the broken home of a failed marriage. . she separated from Karl’s father less than two years after marrying him. The marriage went bad shortly after the first year anniversary. . if not beforehand.”
“What caused the breakup?”
“The father is vague on the reasons but he insists that he and his wife led separate lives while living together as husband and wife.”
“Interesting. . a man who insists that things are one way under his roof when things are in fact another before the eyes of the law. In other words he was married in the eyes of the law to Maya Engen but in his eyes he’s not married to her under his own roof. The man seems to live in his own universe. . his own version of reality no? He is married but insists he is not. Interesting. A man who denies reality. . or creates his own reality.”
“He says that their separate lives were the reason for why he started dating Agnes Haugen then known as Agnes Sorensen. . her maiden name.”
“What’s his first wife’s version of the breakup?”
“According to Maya Engen their marriage ended because of his adultery with Agnes. Of course he continues insisting that by the time he met Agnes the marriage was on the rocks and that they were already separated. I checked and found out that really was not true. . he was still living with his wife in the same house when he began a relationship with Agnes.”
“That was gutsy of him.”
“Or cowardly. Anyway. . they got a divorce when Maya Engen was eight months pregnant with Karl. And by the time Karl was born the father had his new woman Agnes living in the house with him.”
“How convenient.”
“It gets more convenient for him as you’ll see in a few minutes. Gunnar and Maya have Karl on April. . they file for divorce in May. . and the divorce is final five months later in October. . just two years after they got married.”
“He’s a fickle man,” said Sohlberg who detested uncertain men. “The wishy-washy sort who change wives like they change shirts or shoes. A fickle man would explain why Karl’s mother is always changing her hairstyle and colors.”
“How so Chief Inspector?”
“She does that to keep a fickle man happy. . the constant hairstyle and hair color changes mean that he has a new wife to look at every day.”
“Very good Chief Inspector. That fits perfectly with her behavior. Also she was briefly married before she met and married Karl’s father.”
“So the Haugen marriage was her second marriage by age thirty?”
“Ja Chief Inspector. She had a son with her first husband and that boy has always lived full-time with the father.”
“Huh! So she too changes husbands as frequently as her hair style and color. Think of it. She’s now on husband number three by the age of thirty-eight. Or an average of one husband and one child per decade. . ”
“Ja. That’s how it is nowadays. . not unusual,” said Constable Wangelin. She again gave Sohlberg a look that made him feel like some old-fashioned prude.
“What else?”
“After the divorce Maya Engen the mother has primary custody of Karl and the father Gunnar has visitation rights. He always pays the child support on time and in full. Gunnar and his live-in woman Agnes pressure Maya Engen to let Karl spend more time with them.
“Maya Engen doesn’t want Karl to have an absentee father and she has to work and needs someone to watch the baby in the afternoons after daycare. So Maya and Gunnar reach an agreement. Karl stays nights with his mother Maya after he spends two to three hours every afternoon with Gunnar and Agnes. . and Thor who is Agnes’s nine-year-old son by another marriage.”
“What a cozy family. The father. . the mistress. . and the son of the mistress. I don’t see Karl fitting easily into that cozy family.”
“Karl had to fit in because a year later his mother Maya gets very sick with liver disease. . hepatitis B. . she is forced to go to Sweden for life-saving treatment.”
“What? I’ve seen her on television and the newspapers and she looks like a picture of perfect health!”
“The fact is that she had to go to Sweden for treatment.”
“Sweden?. . Don’t we have good doctors in Norway?”
“I-”
“What’s wrong with Norwegian medical care?” shouted Sohlberg. He was extremely sensitive about Norway’s humiliating subjugation until 1905 to Denmark and Sweden which had respectively ruled over Norway since 1536 and 1814.
“Chief Inspector. . we checked and her doctors confirm that only Sweden offered her an innovative drug treatment that attacked the virus.”
“I don’t see why she couldn’t have gotten just as good care in Norway.”
“Maybe it’s because Norway sometimes doesn’t have everything we need.”
“Norway has everything Norwegians need.”
From her pitying looks Sohlberg could tell that Wanglein found his patriotism touching if not quaint and old-fashioned.
In high school Sohlberg had joined Ny Norge. The nationalist group advocated eliminating Norway’s monarchy because the king came from a line of Danish royalty that had served as puppets for Denmark. Sohlberg like most other Norwegians felt that Denmark had ruthlessly ruled Norway as a colony to be exploited. Ny Nor
ge also advocated moving the capital out of Oslo and back north to Trondheim the old Viking capital. And Sohlberg like most other Norwegians was perfectly aware of the fact that Denmark and then Sweden had kept Oslo as the capital in southern Norway in order to control and keep tabs on Norwegians. The Ny Norge group also pushed hard for nynorsk or “New Norwegian” to be the only official Norwegian language to the exclusion of bokmal or "book language" which is a Danish bastardization of the Norwegian language.
“Chief Inspector. . regardless of how you feel about Sweden. . the fact remains that Karl’s mother went to Sweden. . where she got the medical treatment that successfully controlled her hepatitis. She was forced to let Karl live with his father and Agnes the stepmother when her Swedish doctors informed her that she would not be able to care for the child while she got the debilitating treatments.”
“So just like that she left Karl with the father and stepmother?”
“Ja. . Maya Engen came back a year later and she was still too weak to care for Karl. The father made it clear that Maya should spend her time and energies on recovering and not on Karl since he and Agnes were already raising him. Because of her illness Maya reluctantly agreed.”
“I can see why Maya Engen has a guilty conscience. First she brings her son into a broken marriage. Then she dropped the boy off with those two odd ducks because she was sick. . and then she was maybe too lazy to care for the boy during her recovery.”
“Could be. . but who knows what she was really going through during her recovery period. Regardless. . time passes and the father and stepmother kept finding excuses to keep Karl away from Maya. Three years later they flat out refused to return Karl to her because. . according to them. . Karl had already bonded with Agnes the stepmother. . apparently Karl was already calling her ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’.
“The father and stepmother insisted that the proposed change in living arrangements would be too disruptive for little Karl and that any judge or social worker or psychologist would see it their way.”
“Did they actually state that or is the birth mother making that up?”
“I’ve look at e-mails and they actually did say that.”
“How convenient for the father. He has no more child support to pay now that the boy lives with him. . and his live-in sex partner serves as a free nanny for the boy. How very convenient eh?”
“Ja.”
“Constable Wangelin. . we need to look more closely at the father. . he’s a piece of work. Interesting how he arranges people like pieces on a chessboard. . to be moved around for his pleasure and convenience.”
“He’s big into ‘people management’ as he calls it. . he gave me a long boring lecture on that topic when I asked him what he does at work. Nokia is apparently thinking of sending him to finish his business school education at Harvard or Yale in America. His library is filled with tons of books on that topic.”
“How can Gunnar Haugen work as a people manager at a big corporation when he can’t even manage the location or safety of his own son?”
“I guess. . Chief Inspector. . that big corporations have their own version of reality that is the opposite of reality.”
“Ja! That’s why absolute idiots thrive in big corporations. Anything else on the biological mother?”
“She eventually gave up on getting custody of Karl. She worked for a time as a secretary here in Oslo. . then two years after she returned from Sweden she went to Trondheim to visit relatives. That’s where she met Police Inspector Arvid Engen of the Sor-Trondelag district. They married and live in Namsos. Karl visited them every two weeks for the weekend during the school year. . and he spent most of his summer vacations with them.”
“Do the birth mother and her husband Arvid Engen have alibis for June fourth?”
“Airtight. She was at work at the courthouse in Trondheim. Arvid was also at work. . chasing down and arresting a gang of burglars all during that Friday with four other officers.”
“Has the Engen house been checked and searched in Namsos?”
“Ja. Nothing.”
“Could Karl have been taken by a friend or relative of Maya or Arvid?”
“I doubt it. . not after the commotion in the media over the boy. Anyone would have to be pretty stupid to keep little Karl Haugen after all that publicity. . and the massive five-hundred-thousand kroner reward that Karl’s father posted for Karl’s return or clues leading to his whereabouts.”
“Constable Wangelin. . another thing I’ve been thinking about. . was Karl supposed to be seeing his mother Maya Engen on the weekend after the Friday when he disappeared?”
“No. . the next weekend. . Now that I think of it. . the Engens and Haugens had some rather strange arrangements for those weekend visits.”
“Strange how?”
“Every other weekend Inspector Arvid Engen or Maya Engen drove down from Trondheim on the E-Six and they picked Karl up at a gas station in the small town of Otta. . which is about the halfway point between Oslo and Trondheim and Volda.”
“Why Volda?. . Isn’t Volda a little town on the coast. . about two hundred miles south of Trondheim?”
“Ja. Volda is where Maya Engen’s first husband lives with her first son. The man owns a goat farm that sells goat milk for a cheese factory. So. . every two weeks. . on the same day that Maya and Inspector Arvid Engen drove south to Otta. . the goat farmer drove east from Volda with his son on Highway Fifteen to Otta. . They all met at the same gas station. . at the same time. . with Karl and his father Gunnar Haugen and his stepmother Agnes.”
“So every two weeks this woman. . Maya Engen. . reunites for the weekend with the two sons that she abandoned to their fathers? How cozy.”
“It gets better. Karl doesn’t come alone on the hand-off trips with his father and stepmother Agnes. Oh no. He comes along with Thor Jenssen. . who is the first son of Agnes from her third marriage. . actually her second marriage. . but she got the dumb and wealthier third husband to adopt Thor as his own child.”
“Agnes Haugen. . has been married four times before she’s forty?. .”
“Ja. We found out quite a lot about her from her ex-husbands. Her first husband she married right after graduating from high school. . she married him so she could get out of her parents’ house and away from their control. Her own friends and family agree that she pursued him hard in high school and did her best to bed him down.”
“I know the type,” said Sohlberg as he thought of Margerete Frederisksen his old high school vixen on Ulvoya Island.
“You do?”
“Ja. . Constable Wangelin. . believe it or not I was young once upon a time.”
“Well. . anyway. . Agnes Haugen’s friends and family all agree that the young man wouldn’t spend much time with her because his parents were wealthy real estate developers who were adamant about Agnes not hanging around their son or their house. They hated her. . still do with a passion.”
“So how did she get around the young man’s parents?”
“Agnes’s own friends told us that she lied to him about being pregnant. . and how she might even press rape charges against him. So he was forced to marry her. Then. . when no baby bump showed up on her belly she claimed that she had a miscarriage. That’s when his parents swooped in and paid her off handsomely to get a divorce.”
“This belongs in some Hollywood tabloid.”
“Happens all the time Chief Inspector.”
“Not when I was growing up. That would’ve been extremely unusual. A young woman sleeping around like that to get a monied husband. Huh!” Sohlberg immediately noticed that Wangelin gave him a pity look as if saying, “Boy did you lead a sheltered life. You need to get on with modern times and not be an old-fashioned prude.”
“Now Chief we have Agnes’s husband Number Two. . a good-looking hunk but not too smart. She used the divorce pay-off and her parents’ money to try to get him set up in several businesses. . but they all failed. He’s broke. . a ne’er-do-well who’s failed in t
oo many business ventures. . but he does succeed in impregnating her.”
“Don’t they always.”
“They have a son Thor. . but by then the marriage is an unhappy disaster. . each spouse accusing the other of infidelity. . seems they each had lots of casual sexual liaisons. Then she marries husband Number Three. He seems to know the most about her. . he has quite a lot of dirt on her. . on account of him being in contact with all of the husbands. . including the current Number Four. . who is of course. . Karl’s father.”
Sohlberg nodded in glum silence as Constable Wangelin proceeded to tell him about the many lies that Agnes had used to ensnare Gunnar Haugen into an unhappy marriage. Sohlberg wondered if someone — an ex-husband or her current husband — was trying to frame Agnes Haugen the stepmother with a salacious if not controversial past. Solhlberg sighed and said:
“I’m not surprised about her lies to get this man Gunnar Haugen since. . as you can imagine. . I’ve come across far worse marriages in my more than twenty years of investigations. . but my head is still spinning from all these crazy family relationships.”
“They are complicated.”
“What bothers me the most Constable Wangelin. . is that these adults meet twice a month to trade kids as if they were collectors who meet to trade Pokemon or baseball cards or some other collectible. So. . who picks up Agnes Haugen’s son Thor?”
“Her third husband’s parents. . the paternal grandfather is retired Navy. . they live near Trondheim.”
“Alright. Do this today. . since I doubt Nilsen ordered this. I want to find out what happened at the gas station where the parents met to trade the children. Call whoever’s in charge of policing Otta. . get whatever constables are necessary out there today or tomorrow at the latest. . have them find any witness who may’ve come into contact with this sad bunch of parents. Also. . have them check out all of the closed circuit cameras at or near the gasoline station. . maybe a camera filmed something interesting on the Friday of Karl Haugen’s disappearance. . or the Saturday after.”
Death on Pilot Hill (an inspector harold sohlberg mystery) Page 12
