Dagbladet had a special story further up the page, illustrated with a reader’s photo of the missing taxi behind a tow vehicle, partially covered with a grey tarpaulin, making the photograph even more effective and allowing the journalist to speculate on what it might hide.
Line could feel her journalistic instincts quicken. The discovery site was situated only a few minutes’ drive away. She knew people here and could find angles to ensure her own newspaper won the battle of the tabloids. All of a sudden, the baby gave a hefty kick inside her womb, and she gasped softly. It was the first time it had felt painful when the child moved. She sat with her hand on her stomach, waiting, but no more kicks followed. The fine skin on her belly only trembled when the baby turned.
On the radio, they were playing a Swedish summer song, something about blue winds and water. She hummed along until the baby obviously found a comfortable position and settled quietly. She cleared the table, went into the living room and examined the newly painted ceiling. Before she could paper the walls, the frames around the windows and doors would need another coat, which she could manage by herself.
She opened all the windows and a warm summer breeze drifted in. The paint would dry in the wink of an eye.
She had finished the frame round the first window when her mobile phone rang in the living room. The number was unknown. Now that she had stopped submitting material to the newspaper, she seldom received calls from people she did not know. She wiped her fingers on her trousers before she answered.
‘It’s Sofie,’ said the caller, ‘Sofie Lund from yesterday. I found your number on the Internet.’
‘Hi,’ Line said cheerfully, sweeping her hair back from her forehead. ‘Thanks for your hospitality yesterday. I really enjoyed it.’
‘I’ve phoned for a locksmith for the safe,’ Sofie explained. ‘He’s coming about twelve o’clock.’
‘That’s exciting.’
‘I don’t know anybody here. I’d hoped you might be here with me when he comes. I don’t know what’s inside, you see.’
‘Of course I can,’ Line said. ‘I just have to finish painting some frames, and then I’ll be there.’
‘See you soon, and thanks.’
Line returned to the living room window and picked up the paintbrush, her thoughts transferred from what the newspapers were calling the Hummel Mystery to the old safe in the basement of the Mandt house.
15
The door to the conference room was open, and every eye on Wisting as he entered. He closed the door and sat at the head of the table, flanked by Christine Thiis. Also present were Espen Mortensen, Torunn Borg and Nils Hammer. Wisting would have preferred a larger number, but the most crucial thing was that he had a team of dedicated and hardworking investigators. He opened the meeting by summarising the previous day’s events before asking Espen Mortensen to run through the work undertaken by the crime scene technicians.
Mortensen pulled a cordless mouse towards him and displayed a picture of the ramshackle smallholding on the overhead screen. ‘We can start with the barn,’ he said. ‘We know it has been used by Frank Mandt since the nineties, apparently as a warehouse for his liquor operations. Among other things, there are pallets of empty plastic containers. Most are covered in dust, and it doesn’t look as if it’s been in use for a long time.’
‘The spirits market has been taken over by East Europeans,’ Hammer said, as photographs of the rooms inside the barn flitted across the screen. ‘In recent years, Mandt has been more involved in drugs.’
‘We haven’t found any trace of Jens Hummel in these locations,’ Mortensen said, ‘but we are going to spend a few days in there and expect what we find will be linked to illegal activities.’
He showed them several more pictures, including of a room furnished as an office. Telephone numbers and names were jotted on loose sheets of paper on a desk. A fine layer of dust blanketed everything.
The next photo was of the vehicle. ‘We’ve made two extremely interesting discoveries inside the taxi,’ Mortensen said, moving a little cardboard box on the table in front of him. ‘A couple of minor aspects first, however.’
Wisting’s curiosity was growing, but he leaned back patiently in his seat. The work of the crime technicians was always fascinating. Every case reached a point where the technical and tactical lines of enquiry crossed, and at that point the solution might well be found.
Mortensen exhibited a picture from the car interior. The half-empty cola bottle was in the centre console and the mouldy, half-consumed baguette on the passenger seat, just as Wisting had observed when they first found the taxi. ‘This matches the movements we mapped out last winter,’ Mortensen said, presenting a picture taken from the CCTV footage at the 24-hour Shell station in Storgata.
Wisting recognised the image. It showed Jens Hummel standing at the cash desk with a bottle of cola and a baguette, about three quarters of an hour before he disappeared. They had used a segment of it to demonstrate both what he looked like and what clothing he was wearing when he went missing.
It was satisfying to see these two images side by side, the past fitting into the present. It felt as if a little piece of the jigsaw had fallen into place.
Mortensen made reference to the mileage, explained how the seats and the interior mirror were positioned, and showed some parking receipts that helped to draw a timeline to the point of disappearance.
The next picture was of the almost empty car boot, with a plastic bottle of windscreen wash liquid and an umbrella lying inside, but bare apart from those. ‘We believe there had been a rubber mat in the boot,’ Mortensen said. ‘That is to say, we believe Jens Hummel was lying there and the mat was removed with him.’
Wisting leaned forward. The next image was a close-up of the exterior wall of the boot compartment, just to the left of the lock. Four consecutive dark marks had been identified, one of them slightly larger than the rest.
‘That’s human blood,’ Mortensen said. ‘We’ve found it in a couple of places on the sides of the boot compartment, but not on the floor. Therefore we believe an injured person has been lying in the boot and the rubber mat was removed at the same time as he was.’
It had pervaded the case from day one, but not been articulated. Suddenly they were sure that the Hummel case was a murder enquiry.
‘When can we confirm that the blood belongs to Hummel?’ Hammer asked.
‘In a few days. We have reference samples from his toothbrush. As soon as we have a DNA analysis from the blood in the car, we can run a comparison.’
‘You said there were two interesting finds?’
‘I’ve got the other one here,’ Mortensen said, pulling across the small cardboard box he had placed on the table. Opening it, he drew out a transparent evidence bag containing a mobile phone. ‘This was hidden under the steering wheel column,’ he said. ‘Jens Hummel had a mobile phone we knew nothing about. It’s registered to a false pay-as-you-go account taken out more than two years ago. Registered to Ola Nordmann from Oslo,’ he added, drawing air quotes with his free hand.
Nils Hammer swore aloud as he took the plastic bag out of Mortensen’s hands. ‘There’s only one reason people have two mobiles,’ he grunted. ‘They’re doing something they don’t want anyone else to know about.’
Wisting rubbed the bridge of his nose. An increasingly clear picture was emerging that Jens Hummel had been involved in Mandt’s narcotics trade and that there had been some kind of internal confrontation.
‘That fits,’ Torunn Borg said, leafing through one of the ring binders. ‘We have several statements to the effect that he worked as a courier transporting prostitutes and narcotics, which tallies with all those long trips of his.’
‘And that he turned off the taximeter before he went missing,’ Hammer continued. ‘He was going to a meeting and didn’t want tracked.’
Wisting listened with his fingertips pressed to his lips. They had spent time and resources following up these rumours about both narcotics
and prostitutes. When they had not provided any immediate results, they had progressed the enquiry on a broad front instead of delving deeper into this single lead. ‘What can we get from the phone?’ he asked.
Nils Hammer inspected the phone in the transparent bag, turning it one way, then another. ‘If we’d had it a fortnight ago it might have given us the solution. After six months, the telecommunications companies delete their data. We won’t get anything more out of it than what’s stored on the phone itself.’
‘That could still be a considerable amount?’ Christine Thiis suggested.
Hammer agreed. ‘Give me a few hours.’
Wisting gazed at the two pictures on the screen. ‘What about fingerprints and DNA?’
‘We have both, but the taxi has carried passengers for a number of years. The steering wheel looks as if it’s been wiped clean, but on the roof above the passenger door we’ve found a partial palm print. It’s not good enough to run through the records, but probably belongs to the last person who got into the car.’
Wisting jotted a few more notes and looked at Torunn Borg. ‘What about the door to door enquiries?’
‘The most interesting scrap of information is that we have the name of a tractor driver who had agreed to keep the track to the smallholding clear of snow during winter. The track must have been ploughed clear in order for them to drive the taxi all the way up there. He’s coming in for questioning today.’
‘Excellent,’ Wisting said, before turning to the potato cellar. The narcotics haul that had fallen into their lap was something tangible, a chink they could explore and broaden out and bring more into the light of day.
‘It weighed 12.4 kilos,’ Mortensen told them. ‘We’ve brought the drugs in for analysis, and it’ll also be interesting to compare the soles of Aron Heisel’s shoes with the prints on the earth floor.’
Wisting nodded and turned to Christine Thiis. ‘I’m preparing a remand hearing,’ she said. ‘We’ll charge him with possession and ask for four weeks’ custody.’
The meeting dragged on for another half hour as they allocated assignments and discussed theories and possibilities, continually returning to the most central topic: where was Jens Hummel?
16
A fly landed on the massive safe. Line ran her hand over the cold steel and chased it away. The surface was rough and cracks scarred the pale green enamel.
‘I don’t like it down here,’ Sofie said, folding her arms. ‘Last night I heard noises.’
Line looked up at the pipes that ran underneath the basement ceiling, one of them covered with a fine layer of condensation. ‘Maybe there’s air in the pipes?’ she suggested. ‘We had that where I lived in Oslo. It bumped and banged and made all sorts of strange noises.’
‘It’s true there are lots of noises in old houses,’ Sofie agreed. ‘But it’s not much fun being here all on our own, just Maja and me.’
Line straightened up, placing her hand on her bump. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
Sofie brushed a fly away. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the Old Man haunted this place. That would be just like him.’
‘I’ve got two dead men in my house,’ Line said. ‘Neither of them haunt the place. You’ve only got one.’ Giggling, they stared at the big metal box in the centre of the room. ‘It’s going to be damaged if he drills into it. Are you sure there isn’t a key somewhere here in the house?’
‘It still hasn’t turned up,’ Sofie said.
Line took a few steps back and observed the safe from a short distance. ‘Do you know whether your grandfather used it at all?’
‘I didn’t even know there was a safe here until the lawyer told me.’
‘If he did use the safe, then the key must be in the house somewhere. After all, he did die in here, behind a locked door. Didn’t he have a bunch of keys?’
‘All I got was a single house key. He had two cars, but they were sold without me seeing them.’
Three flies buzzed round the narrow basement window high on the wall. Sofie opened it to let them out and the sound of a lawnmower somewhere in the neighbourhood reached in.
‘Perhaps you ought to change the lock?’ Line suggested.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There could be stray keys. There were three keys when I took over my house.’
Sofie crossed the room and stood with her back to the wall. ‘I can ask the locksmith when he comes,’ she said. At that moment the doorbell rang. ‘I hope he doesn’t wake Maja.’ She rushed up the basement steps with Line following.
The locksmith, in his late twenties, was tall and muscular, wearing work trousers with multiple pockets and a T-shirt as black as his hair, and carried a large toolbox. The T-shirt was like an extra layer of skin on his tanned body and concealed nothing of the strong physique underneath. Line and Sofie exchanged glances.
‘I’m looking for Sofie Lund,’ he said.
‘That’s me.’ Sofie took a step back to let him into the house.
‘I’m Atle.’
‘Come in,’ Sofie said. ‘We have to go down to the basement.’
Atle placed the toolbox on the floor in front of the safe. ‘It’s an old Kromer,’ he told them, ‘German. Made some time in the thirties.’ He hunkered down, with one hand on the safe door to support himself.
‘Will it be difficult?’ Line asked.
‘Not terribly, but a bit tricky. Very few safes can withstand professionals with proper tools and sufficient time. This is really just a fireproof safe. The steel wall is not as thick as it looks, a thin steel plate over a layer of insulation material. But I do need some stronger equipment.’ He got to his feet. ‘Have you searched for the key?’
Sofie and Line answered in an affirmative chorus.
The locksmith smiled. ‘I have to ask,’ he said, holding his hands up as he backed out of the room. When he returned, he had brought an electric drill, a drill press with a magnetic foot and an extension cable. He attached the drill press at right angles to the steel door, mounted the drill and looked round for a power point. Sofie took the plug from his hands and pushed it into a wall socket.
‘I’ll drill a trial hole,’ Atle explained, putting on protective glasses and earplugs. A deep, whining noise filled the room as the drill bit into the steel of the safe. Line put her fingers in her ears.
‘I’ll need to see to Maja!’ Sofie shouted across.
Line nodded and went on watching the man on his knees on the floor. The hairs on the back of his hands were finer and lighter than the ones on his head; he had long fingers and narrow wrists. He was smiling to himself, as if he knew something no one else did. Or perhaps he just enjoyed his job.
The drill ate its way through the steel, millimetre by millimetre, until the pitch changed and he withdrew the drill bit. Line wrinkled her nose. ‘What’s that smell?’ she asked.
‘The metal overheating.’
‘Have you drilled right through?’
Atle shook his head. ‘That’s just a peephole into the lock casing.’ He removed the drill press and rummaged around in his toolbox until he found an instrument reminiscent of what doctors use when they examine the eye and retina. ‘So I can see where I am,’ he said, staring into the hole he had just made. ‘Slightly down and to the left,’ he muttered to himself. He took out a felt tip pen and made a mark on the steel door before attaching the drill press again. ‘If I hit the right spot now, I can turn the lock round with a screwdriver.’
Sofie reappeared with a baby alarm in her hand. ‘She’s still sleeping,’ she said. ‘You don’t hear the noise much on the next floor when the doors are shut.’
Atle glanced up at them. ‘Are you ready?’
They both nodded and covered their ears until the drill was through.
‘Have you done this before?’ Line asked. ‘Opened safes, I mean?’
‘Lots of times.’
‘What do you usually find?’
He shifted his position on the floor. ‘As a rule, they’re em
pty,’ he said, peering into the new hole, ‘but now and again there’s something odd inside. Old cognac and art, but mostly keys, insurance papers, pictures and worthless old share certificates.’
‘You can have it,’ Sofie said, looking at Line.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If there’s anything inside, you can have it.’
Atle looked up. ‘I’ve also known them to contain money.’
Sofie shrugged and looked over at Line. ‘Are you not renovating a whole house?’
Line would not have minded a more generous renovation budget, but knew it would be wrong to accept.
‘You know what I think of the Old Man and what he left behind. I don’t want it.’
Line shook her head. ‘Me neither. If there’s anything valuable in there, you’d be better giving it to charity.’
‘We’ll see,’ Sofie replied.
The locksmith moved the drill press to the other side of the keyhole and started on a new hole. He crouched over his equipment, deep in concentration, the tip of his tongue between his lips. Tiny beads of perspiration began to appear on his forehead. After half an hour, there were seven holes in the metal door.
‘So,’ he said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘That should do the trick.’ He put a slim screwdriver into one of the holes and the inspection instrument into another. ‘It’s been in regular use. No trace of rust; tumblers easy to push.’
A fly landed on his forehead. He blew it away before the tip of his tongue slid out between his lips again and he focused his attention on the lock. ‘I’ll just turn a cylinder that pulls the deadbolt with it, and then it’s done.’ There was a dull thud inside the safe as something heavy fell into place. He pulled out the screwdriver, turned the handle and pulled the door open.
Ordeal (William Wisting Series) Page 7
