‘Not really,’ Moseid admitted. ‘But he answered the description.’
Wisting took a step forward. ‘What description?’
‘The one they relayed on the police radio. They repeated it twice.’
A nerve on Wisting’s temple began to pulse. He took out the copy of the police interview and showed it to the young man facing him, pointing out the paragraph containing the description.
‘When you say that the perpetrator has a Nordic appearance, is twenty-five years of age and wearing a black, turtle-neck sweater with writing on the front, it’s not because you’ve seen that, but because you heard the description on the police radio?’
Terje Moseid threw out his arms. ‘That was what he looked like. I saw that when they drove up with him. They caught him just nearby.’
Wisting lowered the papers. ‘But was that what the man who fired the shots looked like?’
Terje Moseid picked up his bag and began to walk towards the car. ‘That’s what I’m standing here telling you,’ he said, shaking his head glumly.
‘No,’ Wisting said, blocking his path. ‘You say the man the police arrested fitted the description you heard on the police radio, but was it the same man that you saw?’
Moseid peered down at Wisting’s forefinger pointing at his chest. The interview printout was crumpled in Wisting’s hand. ‘I’ve already said that I didn’t see him very well. That other guy saw him much better than we did. He ran right past him. He even ran after him. He was the one the police spoke to when they sent out the description.’
Gulls were squawking in the harbour behind them.
‘Okay, then,’ Wisting said, letting his hand sink. ‘Thanks for your assistance.’
Terje Moseid looked at him in confusion before slinging his bag on his back. ‘It’s only in the movies that police arrest the wrong person,’ he said, heading towards his waiting friends.
‘This changes the whole case,’ Christine Thiis said, removing her sunglasses.
Wisting looked directly into her eyes. ‘There aren’t three eyewitnesses,’ he said. ‘There’s only one.’
‘We need to talk to the people responsible for this case,’ she said. ‘About this and about the fireworks.’
‘Not yet,’ Wisting replied, noting how reluctant he felt to speak to Harald Ryttingen. ‘We need an alternative answer first. We must be able to point to someone else.’
59
The balmy summer evening covered the city like a soothing blanket. People who were out and about moved slowly through the streets of the city centre. At an intersection, Wisting braked for a dog that sauntered on to the road, crossing the street with its tongue lolling and its tail down.
When the car moved off again, he noticed a Kiwi supermarket up ahead, with green rubbish containers on either side of the entrance, hard plastic of the type usually used in public places. One looked slightly cleaner and newer than the other.
The shop was still open. Wisting turned the car and parked at the pavement. ‘I’ll just go and see if it’s true,’ he said, pointing at one of the rubbish bins. ‘If one of them was blown up on New Year’s Eve.’
‘I’ll wait here.’
He left the key in the ignition. The air was filled with the smell of asphalt cooling after a long, hot summer’s day. Only one of the checkouts was open. A young girl with lilac streaks in her hair was buying a frozen pizza, cola and potato crisps. Wisting waited until she had paid before approaching the boy at the checkout and showing him his police ID. ‘I’ve a short but rather strange question,’ he said. ‘Do you know if one of the rubbish bins outside was damaged by fireworks on New Year’s Eve?’
The boy looked at him oddly.
‘Someone’s supposed to have set off a barrage of fireworks in one of the rubbish bins.’
The boy shook his head. ‘I’ve just got a summer job here,’ he explained.
Wisting peered into the interior of the shop. ‘Is there somebody else here who might know about it?’
‘Karsten probably does. He’s the shop manager. Do you want me to call him?’
‘Yes, please.’
The boy pressed a button three times in rapid succession. Farther inside the shop, a bell rang. Wisting stepped aside and let a woman with a full trolley pass.
A man with glasses and a beard, dressed in the supermarket chain’s green uniform appeared between the shelves. He looked round and made eye contact with Wisting.
‘Police,’ he said, showing his ID again. ‘I’m wondering if one of your rubbish bins was vandalised on New Year’s Eve?’
The shop manager looked past Wisting and out to the pavement. ‘Why are you wondering about that now?’
‘It’s in connection with another case,’ Wisting said. ‘An unconfirmed detail in connection with a murder.’
The manager nodded his head, but did not appear to understand the link.
‘The court case begins next week,’ Wisting added.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ the shop manager confirmed, adjusting some bars of chocolate on the nearest shelf. ‘Some idiot or other lit a big barrage of fireworks and dropped it into the rubbish bin. It could have been really nasty.’
‘Was the fire brigade called?’
‘No, the fire died out by itself, but it made a good blaze for quite a while. The whole container was damaged, cracked and blackened with soot. I had to buy a new one. They cost nearly eight thousand kroner.’
‘Did you report it to the police?’
‘I filled out a form, but nothing happened. The excess on the insurance policy is ten thousand, more than the cost of the damage.’ He glanced at the CCTV camera on the ceiling. ‘I have pictures of the guy who did it, if you’re interested?’
Wisting was more than interested. ‘You have pictures?’
‘In my office.’
He ushered Wisting past shelves of packets and tins of soup into a crammed office at the far end of the premises. Food that had gone out of date was stacked on the floor, as well as old newspapers and magazines. The walls were covered in notes about ordering procedures, emails from suppliers and unframed photographs of the staff. The breeze from a table fan fluttered the notices.
He sat behind a desk and moved a couple of unwashed cups. The computer screen was divided into eight squares, one for each camera in the shop. None seemed to be mounted internally, but one showed the customers as they entered. The push doors closed behind a young woman in a tracksuit, and Wisting could see the two green rubbish bins outside. ‘The actual film has been deleted,’ he explained, opening a drawer, ‘but I have printouts.’
He took out a grey envelope and withdrew a bundle of colour printouts. The top one showed an inferno of light that the camera lens had difficulty coping with. The next two images showed the same blinding intensity.
‘I took this myself in daylight,’ he said, showing a photo of the damaged rubbish container.
The next picture showed the remains of the burned-out barrage of fireworks. At the bottom corner the manufacturer’s name was legible. Svea. According to the article in the local newspaper, this was the same manufacturer as the fireworks stolen at Christmas.
‘Do you have any pictures of the person who put the fireworks in there?’ Wisting asked.
The manager leafed through the sheets and handed him the entire bundle that showed a man at the side of the container. The printouts had been produced on ordinary copy paper, and neither it nor the printer was of the best quality. Besides, the shot had been taken from inside the supermarket and out through the glass doors. The light above the entrance helped, but the image was not clear enough to identify the person.
Wisting flicked through to a picture that showed the perpetrator arriving with a box under his arm. Just a grey shape, but the physique reminded him of Dan Roger Brodin. In the next picture he was even closer to the camera and it looked as if he was walking with his jacket open. The sweater underneath had an indistinct white pattern on it. Dan Roger had been wearing a black sw
eater with the drawing of a bird and the word Magic.
‘Did you attach these pictures to your complaint?’
‘It was a bit tricky to capture the right files from the computer, but I did write in the report that we had CCTV cameras.’
Wisting pondered this. ‘Is the clock at the right time?’ he asked. The time information in the top right-hand corner of the printout gave the date as 31.12, and the time was 20:09:09. Almost an hour after Elise Kittelsen was shot, which could not possibly be right.
‘Not quite,’ the manager said, peering at the computer screen. The digital clock top right showed 20:35:47. ‘It’s an hour out. We don’t adjust it for summer and winter time.’
‘But it’s right now, in the summer?’
‘Approximately, at least.’
Wisting took out his mobile phone. Linked to the Internet, it always showed the correct time. It was now 20:33. He waited with it in his hand until the numbers flipped over to 20:34. The time on the surveillance screen showed 20:36:11.
‘Two minutes and eleven seconds fast,’ he concluded, figuring out that if he made allowances for wintertime, the fireworks in the rubbish container had gone off at 19.07. Elise Kittelsen had been murdered at 19.21. The margins were tiny. It gave Brodin time and opportunity to be in both places, but made it more likely that he ran from the police because of the vandalism to the rubbish bin rather than the murder.
The shop manager sat back in his chair. ‘What’s this actually all about?’
Wisting did not want to go into any detail. ‘We’re charting a chain of events,’ he said. ‘Everything that we can place on a timeline is of interest.’
The manager seemed satisfied. ‘Just keep the printouts,’ he said, taking a business card from a pile under the computer screen. ‘Phone me if there’s anything else.’
60
The air in the conference room in police headquarters had cooled while they were out. Wisting took out the folder with the pictures taken of Dan Roger Brodin when he was arrested, and compared them with the CCTV image.
‘I see why he didn’t go to the bother of attaching these pictures to his complaint,’ Christine Thiis commented. ‘They’re completely unusable.’
‘It’s impossible to see who it is,’ Wisting agreed, ‘but the possibility that it is Brodin can’t be excluded. The height and frame match, and the clothes.’ He pointed at the white script on his sweater and moved his finger to the unclear surveillance photo. ‘There’s something white here too.’
She picked up the printout. ‘Isn’t it possible to work on this somehow to improve it?’
Wisting shook his head. ‘The original digital file’s been deleted, and even if we had an electronic version, we would never produce an image suitable for identification purposes.’
‘What do we do now?’
Wisting sat down. ‘We need to look at this with a fresh pair of eyes,’ he said, glancing at the case papers on the table.
‘I thought we were the fresh eyes,’ she remarked tersely.
‘Yes indeed, but until a few hours ago, we also thought that Brodin was the perpetrator. The theory assumes that Elise Kittelsen was a random victim in a robbery that went wrong. If he wasn’t the one who killed her, she might have been a specific target.’
‘Why would anyone want to kill her?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But that’s the point. The investigators have looked at Brodin in depth and drawn a picture of a violent habitual offender, but we know very little about Elise Kittelsen. She went to college and wanted to become a teacher, she worked in her parents’ shoe shop, was pretty and popular among her friends, that’s about it.’
He glanced through the door to the office on the other side of the corridor where Ivar Horne was sitting in front of a computer. ‘That’s the picture of the victim that Harald Ryttingen wants to take with him into the courtroom on Monday,’ he said. ‘If we scrape off that surface, some of the sympathy for the victim might disappear, but we might also find a motive.’
He sat back and viewed the investigation material. An introductory, crucial question in every murder enquiry was whether the victim had been killed because he or she was a specific person, or whether the victim could have been any other person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the New Year Murder case, it was assumed that Elise Kittelsen was a chance victim. That had shaped all the subsequent enquiries.
‘Her brother thought she was hanging out with the wrong crowd,’ Christine Thiis recalled, browsing through the ring binder of interviews with family and friends. ‘He didn’t like her boyfriend, among other things.’
‘He has an alibi,’ Wisting said. ‘He was already at the party Elise was going to.’ He got to his feet, moved round the table and stood behind her.
‘Here he is,’ she said. ‘Julian Broch.’
They read the interview together. Julian Broch dismissed the idea that he and Elise were a couple, but explained that they were good friends and had known each other for just over a year. He was nearly six years older than Elise and worked in a shipping office. He gave an account of his own movements and the plans he and Elise had for New Year’s Eve. The party they should have attended together was at the home of one of his friends, and the partygoers were mainly old friends of his.
‘These were the people her brother didn’t like,’ Christine Thiis explained. ‘Several of them were involved in drugs.’
‘Do we have her log of phone calls somewhere?’
Christine Thiis stood up and leaned over one of the boxes on the table. ‘I saw a report that had to do with the search for her phone,’ she said, and took out the document she was referring to.
Wisting had read the report earlier. It was included in the case papers to which he had obtained electronic access from his own office. The murderer had taken Elise Kittelsen’s mobile phone but had got rid of it, probably when he realised that it was traceable. The report concluded that the phone was no longer connected to the telephone network.
The report contained an overview of the people Elise Kittelsen had been in contact with via her phone on the actual day of the murder. There were text messages and brief calls to and from her girlfriends, and a longer conversation with her cousin in Lyngdal as well as some data traffic for use of the Internet. Immediately after seven o’clock, she had sent a text message to Julian Broch and received a reply. The messages had been discussed when her boyfriend had given a statement to the police. He had shown the text messages in which she had written Leaving home now. See you soon, and he had replied Fine. Looking forward to seeing you. Both messages were peppered with little smiley faces.
‘Maybe we should speak to him?’ Christine Thiis suggested.
‘Tomorrow. Now I think we’ll finish for today.’
He lifted a ring binder he had not yet looked at, to give himself something to work on in his hotel room.
Christine Thiis tidied the papers on the table a little before packing up her laptop and following him into the corridor. Ivar Horne swivelled his chair towards them and stretched his arms above his head, cracking his shoulder joints.
‘Are you any the wiser now?’ he asked, with a smile.
Wisting did not reply, but stood looking at the picture that filled the computer screen in front of Horne. A man in a suit was on his way into a car. His hair was cut short and he looked very fit. There was something familiar about him. ‘Who’s that?’
Ivar Horne followed his gaze to the screen.
‘That?’ he answered. ‘That’s Mister Nice Guy in person.’
‘Phillip Goldheim?’
‘Yep.’
Wisting had seen the photo in the criminal records, taken when Phillip Goldheim had been arrested more than fifteen years ago. At that time he had been heavier and had his hair in a ponytail. ‘Do you have any more photos of him?’
‘Hundreds,’ Horne replied, opening a folder of pictures.
Wisting leaned closer to the screen and studied the im
ages. They had been taken in a variety of situations and from various angles.
‘Can you enlarge that?’ Wisting requested, pointing at a picture of Goldheim with his back turned, talking to two younger men.
Horne did as he was asked. ‘Do you know them?’
Wisting did not answer that. ‘How long have you been tailing him?’ he asked instead.
‘We’ve been monitoring him for three weeks, but during the present phase we’re only following him from time to time.’
‘By monitoring, do you mean monitoring his communications?’
‘Tapping and tracing his phone, yes,’ Horne said.
‘Do you have an electronic trace on him for Wednesday last week?’
Ivar Horne turned towards another computer screen and grabbed the mouse. ‘May I ask what it’s to do with?’ he said, searching through the files.
‘I’ve seen that back before,’ Wisting explained, pointing at the surveillance photograph. ‘In a field at home in Larvik.’
Ivar Horne turned and gazed quizzically at him. Wisting told him about the potato cellar in the field behind the barn where Jens Hummel’s taxi had been located, and the twelve kilos of amphetamines that had been discovered there. ‘Someone was there to check whether we had found the consignment after Aron Heisel was arrested. It could have been Phillip Goldheim who ran away from us.’
Horne managed to find the right data file. ‘You could be right,’ he said, scrolling down the Excel document on the screen. The columns showed dates and times, who he had called or sent a text message to, who had contacted him and where he had been when the phone was used. They could see how he had travelled out of Kristiansand just after twelve o’clock, followed the E18 road northwards, passed Grimstad at half past twelve, Gjerstad an hour later and reached Larvik at 15.37.
‘Who did he speak to when he was in Larvik?’ Wisting asked.
‘His girlfriend,’ Horne answered. ‘She phones or sends a message about twenty times a day. Handy for us as we usually want to know where he is.’
‘What did he do afterwards?’ Christine Thiis asked.
Ordeal (William Wisting Series) Page 23
