It had obviously been a hot summer. There were warnings about the great danger of forest fires, and prognostications that the drought would have severe consequences for the potato and grain harvests. He smiled to himself at the sight of the old advertisements, but found no news that could possibly relate to the vintage car in the barn.
Leaning back in his chair, he stared absentmindedly through the window. Squalls from the sea lashed the pane with snow that melted and trickled down the glass.
The vehicle need not be local, he thought. It could have been in transit. Aftenposten was chiefly an Oslo newspaper in 1925, and the main road south from Oslo passes through Larvik.
He spooled back the microfilm, replacing it in the metal tin, and handed it in at the front desk. ‘Do you have Aftenposten on microfilm?’ he asked.
‘Not here, I’m afraid,’ the librarian said, ‘but we can order it from the National Library.’
Wisting gave this some thought. He was reluctant to make unnecessary work, but when the librarian asked whether they should order it, he accepted and said what year he was interested in.
‘I’ll phone in the order,’ she said, glancing at the clock. ‘If you’re lucky, we’ll have it here by the weekend.’
12
On his way home, Wisting popped into the local shop and bought several items on a list Ingrid had given him. Afterwards they cooked dinner together, pork chops with gravy and potatoes. The atmosphere between them had improved since Ingrid had managed a couple of hours’ sleep during the day, and the feeding had gone smoothly. They talked about how they planned to celebrate Christmas. They had invited both sets of parents to dinner on Christmas Eve, and this was something they were looking forward to.
‘What would you like for Christmas?’ Ingrid asked.
He prodded his fork into a piece of potato and moved it towards his mouth. ‘I don’t know. Maybe some new clothes.’
‘They’ll be cheaper in the January sales,’ Ingrid said. ‘There must be something else you’d like.’
He could not think of anything and, really, there was nothing he needed. ‘What about you?’ he asked.
Ingrid shook her head. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t buy each other anything this year. We have the children to think of, after all, and they’re going to need lots more things soon.’
Wisting didn’t reply. He knew that Ingrid would find something for him whatever they agreed now.
‘I’ve volunteered for some overtime shifts.’
Ingrid nodded, as aware as he was that they needed the extra money. At the same time, she wanted to have him at home as much as possible.
He pondered whether to tell Ingrid about the private investigation he was conducting, but decided to hold back. He knew that he really ought to spend his free time at home with his wife and children, and that this continual absence would not bring more money into his pay packet.
Afterwards, he tackled the washing up, wondering whether to go outside to clear the snow before having a snooze. He decided to do it immediately before setting off for his stint of night duty.
He gave Ingrid a goodnight kiss before heading into the workroom and closing the door behind him. Before he lay down he sat at the desk and riffled through the Minerva notes, thinking that sooner or later he would have to approach Ove Dokken with his discoveries. It could concern a murder, and at some time or other the investigation would have to be elevated to an official footing. However, he had no wish to submit another memo, only to have it land at the bottom of a heap.
Before he took any further steps, he decided to complete as thorough a preliminary investigation as possible. The car had been hidden in the barn for almost sixty years. Whatever had taken place had become time-barred long ago, and the participants were probably no longer living. A few more days would not matter much.
When he got up a few hours later, Ingrid had gone to bed. Yet another layer of snow had enveloped the previous one, and he went outside to clear the driveway before having a shower and getting dressed for work.
He left early, hoping that a fax from Arne Vikene with information from the old vehicle records would be waiting for him in his pigeonhole. All he found there was a list of the extra shifts he had been allocated. Three tours of night duty, the first of these the very next night, meaning that not only would he have to work a double shift, but also he would be paid extra, money that would certainly come in handy.
‘Early tonight?’ asked the officer going off duty.
‘Did a fax come for me, by any chance?’
‘For you?’ The Duty Sergeant pulled his glasses down from his forehead.
‘From Oslo.’
The Duty Sergeant took out a book with a stiff, green cover in which all ingoing and outgoing faxes were logged. His finger ran down the lines.
‘Maybe it’s been sent to CID by mistake,’ he suggested, glancing upwards.
‘Maybe.’
Wisting headed for the stairs.
The fluorescent tube in the ceiling buzzed, and then the light began to flicker before the whole corridor in the Criminal Investigation Department was flooded with harsh light.
The fax machine was located in the records office, and a red light was flashing: Paper empty.
Taking a step inside the photocopy room, he found a stack of A4 paper. He had never filled the machine before, and fumbled around a bit before he managed to open the drawer. The red light went out, but apart from that, nothing happened when he slid the drawer back. As he was about to leave, the machine began to tick over.
Wisting went back to check the sheet of paper on its way out, and saw that Oslo Police District – Administration Department was given as the sender, and that this was Page 1 of 3.
The first page simply identified Arne Vikene, but the next page was a copy of a handwritten record. The letters were small and neat, although ink stains from the rollers in the machine made it difficult to read.
He waited until the third sheet emerged before taking the printout with him to the office he had used the previous day. It was unlocked.
He left the overhead light switched off, but sat down at the desk and turned on the lamp. Yellow light cast a circle in front of him.
Arne Vikene had located the right car. Both the chassis and engine numbers agreed with Wisting’s notes. It was a Minerva Saloon with four doors and twenty-horse power, imported via Oslo Harbour on 17 June 1920. The owner was the Kristiania Haulage Company. The name and title of a contact person was listed: Martinius Bergan, haulier. The registration number allocated to the vehicle was A795. Near the foot of the page, a comment was added but had faded and was impossible to read.
The third sheet was a copy of the ownership records, with a list of all the cars belonging to the Kristiania Haulage Company. Every one appeared to have been sold off, and the names of the new owners were recorded. A795 was mentioned around the middle of the page, and in the column concerning the sale and new owner, he saw the following comment: Lost, 21.08.1925.
Wisting leaned back in his chair. ‘Lost,’ he said aloud to himself. It was a strange choice of words. Not stolen or missing, but lost. Gone.
The date coincided with the newspaper he had found inside the car, dated four days prior to the car being regarded as lost.
To make further progress, he would have to talk to someone connected to the Kristiania Haulage Company, or else get hold of descendants of the contact person listed on the form.
He wrote down the name: Martinius Bergan.
Kristiania Haulage Company could be a courier firm, or a forerunner of Transportsentralen, the present-day major distribution, transport and haulage company.
Folding the fax in two, he slipped it inside his notebook before switching off the desk lamp and leaving the room.
The door to the Chief Inspector’s office was open. Wisting stepped inside to check the tray of tip-offs, and found that not only had the pile reduced, but also his own memo was no longer there. On a nearby sideboard he found a separate in-tray for ne
w documents. He thumbed through them and noticed that most dealt with routine investigations, such as interviews with bank employees and conversations with people who had observed what they thought were suspicious persons and vehicles.
Almost at the bottom of the pile, he found a report about investigations into holiday cottage H292. Wisting felt a frisson of excitement, pleased that the information he had contributed to the case had been taken seriously and investigated further.
He had to sit down to read it. The report writer had been in contact with Vivian Brun, co-owner of the cottage with her husband, Roger. They lived in Oslo, and had not visited their cottage since September. She had no idea who could have been there last weekend, but a nephew with a talent for joinery work, and who lived in Larvik, had taken on renewing the fascia and exterior cladding of the south-facing wall. This was during the autumn. She did not know whether the work was completed.
The report writer had followed up by phoning the nephew, who said he had postponed the straightforward job several times, but that last weekend he and a friend had finally begun. They had used a key left in an arranged spot, but had started by having a few beers. Not much had been achieved on the first day. The following day, they had been surprised by the snow, and had had left with the work unfinished. The renovation would now have to wait until spring.
Wisting read the document twice, and made a note of the nephew’s name: Jens Brun. The name of the friend who had been with him was not given. Neither had any control questions been posed about when they had arrived and when they had left.
The explanation was plausible but, before Wisting put back the report, he underlined the name of the nephew in his notebook with two emphatic strokes.
Erling Storvolden had taken over the duty desk when Wisting returned downstairs, and sat sorting through some papers.
‘Do we have a phone catalogue for Oslo?’ Wisting asked.
Storvolden turned to the wall and selected the correct directory. ‘It’s a few years old,’ he said. ‘I usually just phone Directory Enquiries.’
Wisting opened the catalogue at the letter B and found more listings for Bergan than he had anticipated, running from the foot of one column to the middle of the next. There was a Martin, but no Martinius. He had not really expected to find one, anyway. If Martinius Bergan had been a grown man in 1925, he was probably no longer living.
He took the directory with him to the photocopy machine and copied the page. It was too late to start phoning round, so he folded the sheet and inserted it into his notebook alongside the fax.
He liked to take these small steps that steadily brought him closer to an answer. This was what investigation was all about.
13
The night hours crawled by without much happening. They patrolled the deserted streets, stopped a car with a broken headlight and checked on an elderly woman who was driving erratically.
Just after one o’clock they received a report about a man who had climbed a ladder and broken through a window on the first floor of a house in Valby. It turned out that the man in question was the householder who had locked himself out.
Around two it stopped snowing, and the weather improved for a few hours before snow began to fall again.
At three o’clock they showed up in the patrol car to monitor the car park outside the chemicals factory. After staring at the wintry night for half an hour, Per Haugen began to snore. Thirty minutes later, a tractor equipped with a snowplough appeared to clear the area around the factory. Haugen suggested that they should drive back, and sat dozing in a chair until their shift was over.
Wisting had to clear a space in front of the house before he could park. By then, Ingrid and the twins had already been up for a few hours. He could see that she had not managed much sleep that night either.
‘You go and lie down again,’ he said. ‘Take the bed settee.’
‘What about you?’
He shook his head. He was keen to make as good an impression as possible at work, which did mean he had to be in good shape, but not at Ingrid’s expense.
‘I’ll go to bed too, as soon as they’re asleep.’
Making no protest, she cleared away the breakfast dishes before closing the door behind her.
Wisting buttered a slice of bread and ate while watching the two babies in the playpen. Thomas lay chewing his fists, while Line played with a plastic toy.
He took out his investigation notes. While he was at Police College, he had looked forward to going out on patrol. The first few weeks had lived up to his expectations: there was a certain excitement in never knowing what was going to happen and what a spell of duty might involve. Now though, he longed to move on and away from shift work, from getting up as other people were going to bed. He wanted to work in an office where he could make a real effort to do something about crime, not simply trail along at the back once something had occurred.
An hour later, the twins were sleepy. He lifted them up, one at a time, and laid them in their cots in the bedroom. He was leaning in to kiss Thomas on the forehead and tuck the blanket round him when, suddenly, the room began to spin. The dizziness lasted no more than a second. As he used the wall for support, it brought home to him how tired he was.
He undressed and crept silently under the quilt, aware that his body did not benefit from this changing daily rhythm. Even though he was tired, he had difficulty sleeping. Tossing and turning, for some reason his mind dwelled on the man who had locked himself out and climbed in through the window. Something about it rankled, and it kept him awake. His thoughts forged ahead, ending up where they had often done in recent days: back at the barn at Tveidalskrysset.
Knut Heian had spoken of how, as a boy, he had climbed in and out of the barn by pulling a ladder up through the opening in the north wall. Wisting had walked around the barn and peered in through the gaps before the snow had fallen. There had been no ladder outside the barn. However, on the inside there had been an old wooden ladder, with fishing nets and glass floats dangling from the treads. That could be the same ladder but, if the ladder was inside the barn, how had Alfred got out?
The barn door was locked on the inside, and the only alternative exit was the opening high on the wall. That turned the old barn into a locked room.
His thoughts churned as sleep closed in. Half in dreams, he visited the barn again, picturing in his mind’s eye the mattress, the old newspaper, the rucksack with the letter to Anna, and the worn-out boots. Dusty folding chairs, rusty tools, cobwebs, paint tins, car tyres, corrugated metal, potato crates and thick ropes hanging from roof beams.
Just before he dropped off, the solution came creeping up on him. Whoever this Alfred was who had slept on the mattress, he was still somewhere inside the barn.
14
Wisting woke with a sense of unease at half past one, two and a half hours before the double shift. First the evening shift, and then overtime.
Propped on his elbows, he looked across at the cots. Ingrid must have come in to fetch the twins without him waking. He lay down and reconsidered the deduction he had made before falling asleep. It did not seem so clear cut now, but all the same it possessed a certain logic. What, obviously, counted against it was that they had not found a corpse inside the barn. If Alfred had ended his days in there, the most natural thing would have been for them to find him lying on the mattress. Of course, the body could be hidden, but whoever had done the hiding would also have been unable to get out. The most obvious explanation would be that Alfred had taken his own life. The unsent letter to Anna might be a letter of farewell.
A note from Ingrid lay on the kitchen table: At Ellen’s. Ellen was a friend from school who had a son three months older than the twins.
He carried his thoughts outside and cleared away the last layer of snow. His idea that there was a corpse inside the barn grew more distant as he worked. The most plausible explanation was that there had been another ladder that had later been removed.
Ingrid drove up when he h
ad finished clearing the snow. He helped her out of the car with the twins. Thomas had fallen asleep, but Line was wide-awake and wide-eyed.
As they ate at the table, he told Ingrid about the bullet holes in the car and the information he had gathered about the owner. He simply had to share these thoughts with someone.
Ingrid put down her fork. ‘Bullet holes! It must have been something serious. You have to go on with this.’
‘I’m too much away from you and the children as it is. This is almost certainly something I’ll have to investigate in my free time, as I’ve been doing up till now.’
Ingrid gave this some thought.
‘We’re fine,’ she said. ‘Just stick to our arrangements and help when you’re here. You know, I like it when you get so enthusiastic it’s impossible for you to let things lie.’
Wisting smiled, aware of how lucky he was. It was a common subject in conversations with his colleagues that their wives complained about them being so seldom at home.
‘You must do something with it,’ she said. ‘Go and speak to some of the detectives.’
‘I’ll do that eventually,’ Wisting said, ‘but right now they’re all engrossed in the bank robbery. I’ll find out a bit more before I broach it with them.’
It was just after three o’clock, barely an hour before he had to return to work, but he had time to phone some of the names on the list of people with the surname Bergan.
He took the phone cable with him into the workroom and shut the door.
Anders Bergan was the first, but there was no reply. The next one was Bjørn Bergan, who seemed annoyed. Wisting explained who he was and asked if the other man knew of someone called Martinius Bergan.
When It Grows Dark (William Wisting series) Page 7
