When It Grows Dark (William Wisting series)
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Parts of the tarpaulin still hung over the rear of the vehicle. Wisting tugged it off to inspect the bodywork. He was unable to find an exit hole, which told him the bullet was inside the car, somewhere behind the back seat.
Folding the tarpaulin over the rear wheel arch, he concealed the bullet hole. Back with the others he said, ‘I have a suggestion. I can try to find out what happened when the car was brought in here, and who owns it. Then we can come to an arrangement of mutual benefit.’
The others were happy with this.
‘In the meantime, you can leave the car here, but don’t let anyone else see it,’ he suggested, making eye contact with Knut Heian.
‘What if you don’t discover anything?’ Heian asked.
‘Then you’re free to sell it and let Rupert take the risk that someone might turn up and claim to be the owner.’
This was an arrangement they were both willing to go along with. Wisting grabbed the tarpaulin and, with the help of the other two, drew it back over the vehicle. They left the barn together and pushed the doors closed.
‘Do you have a new padlock?’ Wisting asked.
‘I can get one tomorrow,’ Heian said, as he hooked the damaged padlock through the shackle that held the bolt in place.
Rupert Hansson held out his hand. ‘Do we have a deal?’
‘Deal,’ Heian replied, giving them both firm handshakes.
Wisting and Rupert Hansson returned to their cars as Heian clambered into his tractor.
Wisting had held on to one of Rupert’s flashlights. Backing out from the track, he put his car in gear and accelerated rapidly, leaving the scene before Rupert began to look for it.
He drove inland towards Tveidalen, meaning to hang around for fifteen minutes or so before driving back to the barn. He wanted to examine the vintage car more closely on his own.
The road he took was one of the possible escape routes following the bank robbery, but the least likely one if Oslo criminals were involved. The road through Tveidalen ran west, towards Telemark. An Oslo gang would probably have taken the fastest route in the opposite direction.
Snow began to fall again and the wipers snicked across the windscreen. The road ahead was desolate and bare, with snow banked up on either side. He searched for a turning place. Numerous holiday cottages dotted the area, but none of the tracks had been cleared, and he considered doing a three-point turn on the main road. It did not strike him, what he had seen, until he had passed a group of mailboxes mounted on a frame.
He glanced in the mirror for confirmation – a pair of tyre tracks visible along one of the snow-covered driveways. It was a chance observation, but he had gained some experience by now and knew to trust his gut feelings.
Reducing his speed, he drove to the verge and turned, stopped at the mailboxes and stepped out. The tyre tracks led in only one direction, from the cluster of cottages to the main road. The driver had struggled to negotiate the bank of snow and had required someone’s help to push the car. His conclusion was that the car must have driven in when the road was still clear, and out again after the heavy snowfall.
Wisting climbed over the bank of snow, wading out and sinking up to his knees. There were prints from a pair of large boots where a man had stood behind the car and pushed. One behind the steering wheel, and one behind the car: the two ram-raiders?
He wondered what he should do, whether he should report this to CID or follow the footprints among the trees. He chose the latter. After all, a few tracks in the snow might mean nothing at all. His observations were still too vague to justify bringing anyone else in at present.
He waded further on, following the tyre tracks. After only a few steps his boots had filled with snow. The trees on either side of the narrow track were laden and sagging towards him. After about five hundred metres, the tracks turned ninety degrees to the left and disappeared through a gate. A red-painted cottage was situated on a plateau in the steep landscape. The car had been parked between the cottage and the fence, on a rectangular space where tufts of yellow grass appeared through the sparser layer of snow. Footprints showed that whoever had been here had made several trips between the cottage and the car.
Wisting climbed onto the decking, cupped his hands on the window and peered inside. It was a simple cottage with modern pine furniture. From where he stood, he could see a coffee table, a settee and two chairs. In the centre of the room was a substantial, cast-iron wood-burning stove. He moved to the next window, where he looked in on a blue-painted kitchen with dead flies scattered on the windowsill. There were cotton runners on the worktops. Apart from that, the room contained cupboards, a kitchen table and a gas cooker. Everything was neat and tidy, as if the last occupant had been fastidious about not leaving any traces.
Wisting stood in the snow, deep in thought. The cottage was exactly what a gang of robbers would need, a place to lie low for a few hours after the raid, while they mulled things over and got some idea of the robbery proceeds. This would mean opening hundreds of night safe envelopes.
They would have to get rid of the sealed envelopes, and the pay-in slips that accompanied them, to avoid being directly connected to the bank raid.
He took another step back and looked up at the chimney. There was no snow on it, indicating that the stove had been used recently. The heat had prevented the snow from lying.
It did not necessarily mean anything. With the temperature sitting around zero, it was natural to light a fire.
A little metal plate was attached to the cottage wall, bearing a number: H292. He took out his notebook and pencil and wrote down the digits. The local authority kept a register of holiday cottages. Earlier that autumn, there had been burglaries in seventeen cottages along the Naver Fjord. Wisting had been assisted in finding the affected owners by the Building Control Department. It should be an easy matter to identify who owned cottage H292, and so learn who had been there. If he were lucky, the name and cottage number would be on one of the mailboxes by the roadside.
His thoughts drifted back to a break-in the previous year, in which the thieves had not exactly broken in, but used keys left outside. It turned out that it was a widespread practice to hide keys under a paving stone, on a shelf, under a ledge or in a wood store.
A gust of wind shook a scatter of snow from the nearest trees. Looking around, he spied an old log chair on the decking in front of the cottage. He walked across and looked underneath it, finding several dead bugs, but no key.
As he scanned the area for alternative hiding places, he noticed footprints around the cottage wall. He followed them and ran his hand along the back of the drainpipe. His hand encountered a nail with a dangling key.
Crouching down, he studied it more closely. It crossed his mind that any search would be illegal but, on the other hand, he had uncovered fresh traces. The wood stove might contain charred bank slips that were even now being slowly consumed by the dying embers.
From where he stood, he could see Mørje Fjord and Håøya Island, and in the background a gas tanker gliding along the fjord, most likely heading for one of the major industrial installations in Grenland.
It did not take him long to make up his mind. Clutching the key, he walked purposefully to the door and inserted it in the lock. He looked over his shoulder before turning the key, and then he was inside.
The cottage was still warm, and a distinct smell of tobacco smoke hung in the air. He took a long step from the doormat to a rag rug, before removing his boots and padding onwards in his stocking feet. What he was looking for was something that might give an indication of who had been there, and whether they were linked to the robbery.
A visitors’ book lay in the centre of the coffee table. Pulling the sleeve of his sweater down below his jacket to avoid leaving fingerprints, he flicked through to the last page where someone had written something, dated September 7th, and captioned Thanks for this summer! Whoever had been here in the last twenty-four hours had not left a message in the vis
itors’ book.
He looked at the first few pages to see whether the owner had written anything about the place. Welcome to Seaview, it said. We’d appreciate you leaving a few words after your stay. Vivian and Roger.
That did not help much. Vivian and Roger.
The stove was no longer giving off any heat, and ash trickled out when he opened it. It was too dark to see anything inside, but he picked up a box of matches from one of the shelves, struck one and pushed it in. He saw nothing but grey ashes.
Lifting a poker, he rummaged around and lit another match, but found nothing to suggest that anything other than wood had been burned.
The cottage contained two bedrooms, one with a double bed and the other bunk beds. There was room to sleep seven altogether, but the beds were all made and the bedside tables bare.
He left the living room and entered the kitchenette where the curtains were slightly askew, as if they had been closed and not arranged properly when opened again.
A bottle of white wine was stored in the fridge. The larder was filled with cans and packets of food. The bin underneath the sink was empty.
On his return to the front door, he tripped on the rag rug. Squatting down to straighten it, he discovered a one-krone coin underneath the rug. He was about to pick it up, but on reflection decided to leave it there. Instead, he knelt, bent over and squinted under the settee. Among the balls of dust and fluff, he saw another three kroner and one larger coin.
8
Wisting remained on his knees, head tilted, staring at the coins under the settee, before standing up and gathering his thoughts.
Two men had spent some time in an out-of-the-way cottage. The curtains had been drawn. Coins had been dropped on the floor. In total, all of this fitted the hypothesis that the robbers had used this cottage as a hangout, but each element of the theory could also have many other logical explanations, and need not have anything to do with the crime. Nevertheless, it was information he could no longer keep to himself.
He left, locking the door behind him and returning the key to its previous place. He followed his own footprints back to his car and drove slowly down the narrow track to the mailboxes. They were not furnished with cottage numbers, but one of them was marked ‘Vivian and Roger Brun’.
The mailbox contained a flier from a timber felling company and another from a tradesman who carried out all kinds of maintenance, but no addressed letters. Kripos, the national serious crime unit, had direct access to the citizens’ database at Statistics Norway. Consulting them would be easier than going to the local authority headquarters to browse through their folders. In the future, he thought, it should be possible for every police district to be connected to this data system.
The old car with the bullet hole would have to wait. He drove into town and parked in the street outside the police station.
Inside the Criminal Investigation Department, it was quieter than he had anticipated, though he could hear typewriters working in the nearest offices. Farther along the corridor, a burst of laughter rang out, and three men emerged from a conference room en route to their individual offices. They were unfamiliar to Wisting and he assumed that they were the detectives from other police districts, or from Kripos.
The Chief Inspector’s office door was ajar. Ove Dokken, seated behind his desk, had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and was reading a report. Deep furrows lined his face, spreading in every direction, as if to mark every difficult decision he had made in his career. Wisting wished he possessed a mere fraction of the experience and knowledge that a lifetime in the police had given him.
As if sensing Wisting’s presence, Dokken lifted his head and gazed at him through the fog of cigarette smoke.
Wisting stepped into the room. ‘Do you have a minute?’ he asked.
Dokken’s eyes looked down again at the papers he was reading. ‘Not really.’
‘I had reason to go out to Tveidalen today,’ Wisting ventured, undeterred, holding the back of the empty chair with his right hand. ‘Not far from where the getaway car was set on fire.’
Dokken finished reading a sentence before setting aside the report and signalling that he was willing to hear more.
‘It looked as if people had spent some time in a cottage out there, close by.’
‘So?’
‘Tracks in the snow had been left by a car and two people. They must have arrived before the snow fell, and had difficulty getting back to the road after the last heavy snowfall.’
The Chief Inspector appeared to be anticipating more. Wisting had decided not to tell him that he had been inside the cottage.
‘Holiday cottages are mainly used only in summer,’ he added. ‘I thought of the bank robbers, that maybe they were the ones who had been there.’
‘Great,’ Dokken said, stubbing out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. ‘Excellent idea. Write it down and send it in to me.’ He pointed at a blue document tray marked Tip-offs, already filled with a stack of notes.
‘Okay,’ Wisting agreed. ‘Could I borrow an office here?’
Dokken eased another cigarette out of the packet. ‘You can have Wrangsund’s office,’ he said, glancing over Wisting’s shoulder. ‘He’s on sick leave and won’t be back.’
The office was situated at the far end of the corridor, and looked as though it had been abandoned in haste, as if the investigator who worked there had taken ill suddenly. A notebook was open on the desk with a pen beside it. A sheet of paper remained in the typewriter, and green mould was floating in a half-empty coffee cup.
Wisting opened the curtains to let in more light. Across the street, where the Salvation Army premises were located, two men were carrying a fund-raising container out to a car.
He sat down and drew the chair up to the desk, trying it out for size, testing the springs and swaying slightly from side to side. There was a family photograph on the desk in front of him. He knew that the man in the picture had been suspended on suspicion of theft from the evidence store, but this was something no one spoke about. Officially, he was on long-term sick leave.
The sheet of paper in the typewriter was the beginning of a report concerning an inspection of dealers in second hand goods. Wisting removed it and laid it aside.
He spent quarter of an hour writing notes. No matter how he worded them, the content ended up seeming inconsequential. Everything grew insignificant on a typewritten sheet.
Pulling out the paper, he smoothed it out and signed underneath. One of the experienced investigators walking along the corridor stopped, took a step back, and gave him a questioning look.
‘I’m just borrowing a typewriter,’ Wisting explained.
The detective shrugged and walked on. Wisting took the blue file, Norway’s internal police directory, from the shelf before him and leafed through to find the number for Oslo police district’s traffic section.
A man’s grumpy voice answered, and Wisting gave his name and police station. ‘I’m not sure if you’re the right person to speak to, but I’m trying to find the owner of an old car.’
‘Then you’ll have to contact the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency,’ the man replied.
‘I’m talking about a vintage car. From the time when police kept records of chassis numbers.’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ the other man said. ‘But I know who you should speak to – Arne Vikene. He has a vintage car himself, and is a member of the Police Historical Society.’
Wisting made a note of the name. ‘Could you transfer me to him, please?’
‘He works in administration. I can transfer you to the switchboard and you can ask for him there.’
Wisting thanked him and waited while the phone rang. After some to-ing and fro-ing, he reached the appropriate office, where he learned that Arne Vikene was off duty, but would be back the following day. He was given a direct number and expressed his appreciation for their help. Carrying his sheaf of notes, he closed the door behind him.
9
By half past three, Wisting had returned to the barn and parked his car beside the black, charred tree trunks. With their sprawling branches, and in the fading daylight, they conjured up an eerie and unnerving atmosphere. He took Rupert’s flashlight from the back of the car.
He entered through the barn doors, pulling them shut again as soon as he was inside. He pointed the flashlight beam at the chain on the floor. This padlock was not as rusty as the one on the outside, but it had been sheltered from wind and rain.
From a purely theoretical point of view, it would have been possible to thread the chain through the bolts on the inside while the doors were open, and pull the chain taut while closing them again. You could then rotate the key in the padlock from outside when the doors were almost shut and push the lock and the remaining chain through the narrow gap between the doors before they shut fast.
No matter that it was possible to lock the doors on both sides, it still made no sense.
If he had been a detective examining a crime scene, he would have placed the chain and padlock in an evidence bag. Instead, he left them untouched.
He went to the filthy mattress. Mice had been nibbling at it. The damage looked like frayed bullet holes after a hail of gunshots.
The newspaper at one end was a copy of Verdens Gang for 24 July 1973. The front-page splash was the story of a Palestinian liberation group that had hijacked a Boeing aircraft en route between Amsterdam and Tokyo. The journey had ended in Libya, where the terrorists freed the hostages and blew up the plane.
That was ten years before, when Wisting had been at the start of his teens. He vaguely remembered hearing about the incident.