Ordeal (William Wisting Series)

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Wisting stood where Elise Kittelsen had lain. From there he identified where the three witnesses and killer had been. Terje Moseid and Finn Bjelkevik had been walking towards her. Dan Roger Brodin had come out of the dark playground with the revolver raised. Einar Gjessing had come round the street corner twenty metres behind only seconds before the shots were fired.

  Wisting took a side step and changed role. He raised his right arm and cocked his finger and thumb, as if holding a gun. Adopting the role of the killer, but instead of running, he walked with determined steps in the direction Brodin had run off. At the corner of Holbergs gate, he had passed Einar Gjessing who took up chase. His onward getaway had passed a music shop and diagonally crossed a small square that the case papers had called Olav Vs plass, and on down to Østre Strandgate where Einar Gjessing had abandoned pursuit.

  The simple reconstruction was useful, but did not provide a different picture of the chain of events from that outlined in the reports.

  At ten o’clock exactly they parked in front of the large police headquarters nearby in Tollbodgata. Stepping from the car, Wisting put his head back and peered up at the nine-storey-high concrete building. The two top floors belonged to the prison service and contained forty-four jail cells. Dan Roger Brodin was incarcerated in one of them.

  They reported to a young uniformed police officer behind a glass window and, five minutes later, a man emerged from the lift to take them up to the criminal investigation department.

  The detective was called Ivar Horne. Wisting recalled the name from the case papers. Scruffy, dressed in denim jeans and a white T-shirt, with unruly hair and stubble on his chin, his appearance contrasted with the tidiness and reliability of his reports.

  ‘The documents are ready for you,’ Horne said, leading them along a grey corridor. In one of the offices they passed, an investigator behind a computer screen did not look up. Slightly farther along the corridor, they heard the sound of a radio. Apart from that, the section was silent.

  ‘Here,’ Horne said, pushing open a conference room door. Three cardboard boxes were in the middle of the table, crammed with ring binders.

  ‘I worked on that case myself,’ he said as he headed for a kitchen worktop at the far end of the room. ‘What is it you’re actually looking for?’

  ‘A connection to Jens Hummel’s murder,’ Wisting said, picking up a blue ring binder marked Interviews – drugs scene.

  Ivar Horne opened a cupboard above the sink and took out three white coffee mugs. ‘What kind of connection?’

  Wisting put down the folder, drew out a chair and sat down. Christine Thiis chose a seat opposite. ‘These two cases are connected somehow,’ Wisting said, ‘in that the same weapon was used.’

  Ivar Horne lifted the coffee pot off the machine and looked at them quizzically. Wisting nodded. ‘In addition, there are other, slightly more tenuous connections.’

  The local detective poured coffee. ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Firstly, we know that Jens Hummel was in Kristiansand on New Year’s Eve. Second, an interesting name has cropped up in our enquiry. A man from Kristiansand.’

  Ivar Horne returned the coffee pot to the machine. ‘Who’s that?’ He took a seat at one end of the table.

  ‘Phillip Goldheim.’

  ‘PG?’ Horne asked with raised eyebrows.

  Wisting nodded.

  ‘Yes, well, that is an interesting name,’ Horne said, ‘that I don’t think you’ll find in any of those folders.’

  ‘What do you know about him?’ Christine Thiis asked.

  ‘He’s mainly involved in the import and sales of narcotics under cover of different types of legal activity. He has operated for a number of years. We’ve made a few attempts to catch him, and were close on his heels six months ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Horne said. ‘We had an informant who pulled back and shut up. Most of it had been built round him. He was in a position to tell us about the next consignment and how we could link Phillip Goldheim to it.’

  ‘Project Mister Nice Guy?’

  ‘No more Mister Nice Guy,’ Horne said, beaming.

  Wisting lifted his mug to his mouth. ‘You say that this took place six months ago. When was this consignment actually supposed to arrive?’

  ‘In the middle of January. The project was left in abeyance when we lost the informant, but now it’s up and running again. We’re carrying out a surveillance operation on him now.’

  Wisting drank his coffee. The information police obtained from inside criminal circles was important. Informants usually played a major, crucial role in solving serious narcotics cases, a concealed method that neither courts nor defence lawyers were aware of, which could be a dangerous game. Informants had to violate the trust of people on whom they had information, and no one likes traitors. Mere rumour that someone had talked to the police could lead to reprisals. The safety of informants was crucial, and therefore it was an unwritten rule that police colleagues never revealed the identity of a source, even to one another.

  Ivar Horne got to his feet, still holding his mug of coffee. ‘I’ll not detain you any longer,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in the office across the corridor if you need anything.’

  50

  Wisting crossed to the kitchen worktop and refilled his mug. He had felt uncomfortable in his phone conversations with Harald Ryttingen, almost as if mocked and ridiculed. The detective who had met them now, on the other hand, had been extremely obliging and pleasant.

  ‘Where do we begin?’ Christine Thiis asked, bending over a cardboard box.

  ‘Anywhere you like.’ Wisting selected the ring binder of interviews of people involved in the drugs scene. It contained identical forms on which people involved in the narcotics milieu had given quick, informal statements about what they knew of Dan Roger Brodin. Detectives on the streets had filled out the forms by hand.

  Wisting skimmed through the first few. What the police were obviously looking for was whether anyone had seen Brodin with a gun. The weapon was the loose thread in the case, and if anyone gave evidence that he had access to a gun the case against him would be considerably consolidated.

  Several of the people interviewed did not know who Dan Roger Brodin was. Others had not seen him for a long time. Those who knew him described him as a pleasant boy and said that they could not comprehend him doing this.

  Wisting’s phone rang when he was halfway through, an unknown number. ‘This is trainee lawyer Olav Müller,’ the man said. ‘I represent Dan Roger Brodin.’

  He grabbed a pen and jotted down the name. In the case documents and newspaper coverage, it had been a celebrity lawyer who had fronted the case. ‘I thought Kvammen was defending?’

  ‘I’m working with Kvammen,’ the trainee lawyer said. ‘He was prevented from doing it. I’ve taken over the main responsibility and am going to be representing Brodin in court.’

  ‘I see,’ Wisting said. The star counsel now regarded the New Year Murder as a lost cause and had relegated Brodin’s fate to a proxy.

  ‘Thanks for returning my call.’

  ‘You wanted to talk to me?’

  ‘Yes, that is to say, I’d like to talk to Brodin.’

  There was silence at the other end of the phone. Wisting waited for a reply to the effect that Brodin was not willing to give a statement to the police. ‘Was it you who found the murder weapon?’ the lawyer eventually asked.

  ‘It was handed in to us. Tests showed it had also been used in our case.’

  ‘Do you suspect Dan Roger Brodin of that murder as well?’ Müller knew that Brodin had been in custody when Jens Hummel was murdered and his tone was slightly sarcastic.

  ‘I suspect the case against Brodin is not exactly as the police in Kristiansand would like it to be,’ Wisting replied.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Wisting glanced at Christine Thiis, listening with a ballpoint pen in her mouth. ‘It’s too early for me to go into
details,’ he said. ‘But there are obvious shortcomings in the investigation.’

  ‘Brodin doesn’t know any more than he has already stated. He wasn’t the one who shot Elise Kittelsen.’

  Wisting shifted in his seat. He would have to go further in his efforts to persuade Olav Müller to give him permission to meet his client. ‘I’m working on a murder case with an unknown perpetrator. If what your client claims is true, then there could be a closer connection than simply that the same gun was used.’

  ‘You mean that it could be the same perpetrator?’

  ‘I mean that it’s important for me to speak to Dan Roger Brodin.’

  On the other side of the table, he heard a crunching sound as Christine Thiis chewed too hard on the plastic pen.

  ‘I’m going to meet him in prison at three o’clock this afternoon,’ said Müller. ‘You can come with me then.’

  Wisting’s face lit up. He thanked him before hanging up.

  Christine Thiis took the pen out of her mouth. ‘Do you believe that?’ she asked. ‘That there’s a closer connection between these two cases than the coincidence of the same gun being used?’

  Wisting gazed at her, wondering if he should tell her what he thought about the connection between the two cases, but decided to leave it. ‘I don’t believe in coincidence,’ he said.

  51

  Light from outside filtered through the venetian blinds, throwing shadow stripes on the conference table. Wisting and Christine Thiis sat on opposite sides, working their way through the ring binders, the silence between them broken only when one of them turned a page.

  The papers were smooth and stiff, as if no one had leafed through them before or shown any interest in their information. At the corner of his eye, Wisting noticed when she made a note and sat with pen poised on her lower lip. ‘Have you got something?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a tip-off from an employee in McDonald’s in Markens gate. The guy who works there knows Dan Roger Brodin from junior high school. They were in the same class until Brodin moved away.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He was working on the morning of New Year’s Eve and remembers Brodin coming in to buy a hamburger. It was memorable because at first Brodin wanted to pay with a thousand-kroner note. They didn’t have change.’ She glanced down at the note again. ‘There were more thousand-kroner notes in the bundle he stuffed back into his trouser pocket.’

  Wisting leaned back in his chair. ‘That seems unlikely.’

  ‘It certainly doesn’t chime with him robbing someone a few hours later. Maybe he’s confused about the date?’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Mathias Gaukestad.’

  Wisting took out the ring binder of official case documents. He could not recall seeing that name before, nor could he find it on the list of witnesses. ‘He hasn’t been interviewed,’ he said.

  ‘Shouldn’t he have been?’

  Wisting did not answer. Instead he thumbed through to another document, the report of Dan Roger Brodin’s arrest, where the time and place of his capture were stated, together with what clothes he had been wearing, and what possessions had been removed when he was searched in the custody suite. However, one detail had slipped past the radar. ‘He had a total of 643 kroner on him when he was taken into custody,’ he said. ‘Something doesn’t add up here.’

  ‘What happened to the rest of the money?’

  ‘Not only that. The entire case is built on the theory that this was a robbery that went wrong.’

  ‘He was found guilty before of bag snatching and using a knife to threaten victims.’

  ‘Those were instances when he was desperate to get money for drugs or needed money fast to repay debts to people threatening to kill him,’ Wisting said. ‘But that wasn’t the situation on New Year’s Eve. 643 kroner would have been enough for a fix that day and the next.’ He indicated the ring binder open in front of her. ‘He’d had more money earlier in the day.’

  ‘So why haven’t they followed up this information?’

  Wisting closed the folder of case documents. ‘Because it doesn’t fit their theory.’

  ‘Do you have a different theory?’

  ‘Could Mathias Gaukestad have been mistaken?’

  ‘What should we do?’

  Wisting tore off a Post-it note, leaned over the table and attached it to the tip-off form in front of her. ‘Continue,’ he said, turning back to the forms detailing the individual interviews.

  Five minutes later, he found something to support the witness in McDonald’s. A girl of the same age involved in the local drugs scene said the same as the others, that she had never seen Dan Roger Brodin with a gun. In answer to the routine question about when she had seen him last, she replied that it had been at the Amfisenter shopping mall in Vågsbygd outside the city centre, two days before New Year’s Eve. One sentence referred to him having treated her at the Kafé Seblis on the first floor.

  Wisting passed this information to Christine Thiis. ‘It looks as if he had money after all,’ he commented, tearing off another Post-it note. He attached it and continued to peruse the folder. Another girl from the local drugs scene, Leni Dyste, confirmed this. Her answers had only been noted as keywords on the form. Wisting read them aloud: ‘Known Danny for years. Never seen/heard anything about a gun. Saw him last, day before New Year’s Eve, outside library. Had lots of money from a “job”. Was to get more where that came from.’

  ‘What sort of job?’ Christine Thiis asked.

  ‘There’s nothing more here,’ Wisting said, checking for Leni Dyste’s name on the witness list. ‘She hasn’t been formally interviewed either.’

  Ivar Horne entered the room with an empty mug. ‘Find anything interesting?’ he asked, making for the coffee machine.

  Wisting responded with an evasive ‘Nyeah’. What they had found so far was flimsy and had no direct relevance to their own case.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll find very much,’ Horne said, filling his mug with coffee. ‘It’s a solid case.’ Leaning against the kitchen worktop, he fixed his gaze on the boxes. ‘What’s ironic is that the main witness actually shouldn’t have been there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Christine Thiis asked.

  ‘Einar Gjessing,’ Horne said. ‘The guy who ran after the killer. He should really have been inside.’

  Wisting leaned back, wanting to hear more.

  ‘The finance group has been working on him for nearly a year,’ Horne continued. ‘I don’t know much about that kind of thing, but he started a company involved in microcredit. Some sort of Internet-based lending company. It was called P2P, short for “person to person”. The idea was that he arranged loans directly between individuals. Instead of putting your money into an ordinary bank, you made it accessible on his Internet pages to people who might not be able to obtain loans by the usual means. High interest rates and hidden costs for the person who needed the money, and huge risk of loss for the person who lent it. The only person who made any money out of it was Gjessing himself, of course.’

  Wisting nodded. He had read about new operators who offered quick cash loans without security.

  ‘It was the Financial Supervisory Authority who reported him, because he did not have a licence to run credit activities. He was accused of tax evasion, insufficient accounting procedures, fraud, money laundering and a few other financial crimes. Pretty comprehensive, with high prison tariffs.’

  ‘Fraud and money laundering?’ Wisting repeated.

  ‘Yes, or participation in money laundering. Not all the money that ended up in his lending capital came from legal activities.’

  ‘So your main witness has been convicted of fraud?’

  Ivar Horne took a step forward and waved his coffee mug over the conference table. ‘No, that’s my point, you see. He was never convicted. Most of the charges were dropped.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Harald Ryttingen was what happened.’

  ‘Ryttin
gen?’

  Ivar Horne’s smile grew even broader. ‘You know him,’ he said, moving his mug to his other hand. ‘At least you’ve spoken to him. He doesn’t like to lose. Doesn’t like to go into court without having a case all sewn up. The P2P case was complicated, with a host of reluctant witnesses, especially when it came to the money laundering part. A lot of resources and prestige had been tied up in it, but the outcome was far from certain, and so they entered an agreement. Einar Gjessing admitted the minor charges and received a lesser penalty than if he’d been convicted of everything. At the same time, we spared the courts months of work.’

  ‘What was he convicted of in the end?’ Christine Thiis asked.

  ‘Something about not having a licence to operate and market financial services, and breach of tax regulations. He got six months, half of which was suspended and he was out before Christmas.’

  The sound of a police siren reached them. Ivar Horne crossed to the window and looked out. ‘Many of us here at the station thought it was blameworthy,’ he added, turning to face them again. ‘But the most important thing, of course, was to make sure Einar Gjessing’s company was wound up. The ironic thing is, though, that if Ryttingen had done his job that time, then he wouldn’t have a key witness now.’

  ‘There are three eyewitnesses,’ Christine Thiis reminded him.

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ Horne replied. ‘But Gjessing was the only one who was sober, and the one who saw the perpetrator best. Brodin ran right past him.’

  Wisting refrained from commenting on the professional abilities of the leader of the department he was visiting, and decided to change the subject. ‘Do you know where we can get hold of Leni Dyste?’

  ‘You can’t, I’m afraid,’ Horne answered quickly. ‘She’s dead. Took an overdose in May. Why do you ask?’