The Katharina Code

by Jorn Lier Horst

  ‘No,’ the woman answered without consulting her keyboard. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Just a few questions about an old case,’ Wisting answered.

  ‘Then surely it can wait until the morning?’

  Wisting turned a deaf ear to this. ‘Do you have the number for someone in his department?’

  The keyboard sprang to life again and Wisting noted down two names and two phone numbers.

  ‘I can transfer you?’ the woman offered.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Then we’ll try Henry Dalberg.’

  After a lengthy silence, when Wisting was beginning to think something had gone wrong, he heard another ringtone. Henry Dalberg answered almost at once. His voice sounded gruff and he spoke with a northern accent. Wisting explained who he was and asked whether Dalberg worked with Martin Haugen.

  The man at the other end confirmed this. ‘Is something wrong?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m just trying to get hold of him,’ Wisting explained. ‘Have you spoken to him today?’

  ‘He’s ill,’ Dalberg said.

  Wisting drummed his pen on the notepad in front of him – perhaps he was in hospital after all.

  ‘Anything serious?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Dalberg answered. ‘He sent me a text message yesterday morning to say he wouldn’t be at work.’

  ‘What did he write?’

  ‘Just that he wasn’t feeling well and would be off for a few days. I’m not expecting to see him before Monday.’

  Wisting sat in silence.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Henry Dalberg asked.

  ‘I just haven’t been able to get hold of him,’ Wisting said again.

  He thanked Dalberg for the information and said goodbye before ringing the hospital. The woman who answered had a voice and accent similar to the woman Wisting had spoken to in the roads department. He introduced himself and informed her that it concerned the investigation of a crime.

  ‘Is Martin Haugen one of your patients?’ he asked, giving the date of birth as well.

  Once again he heard the sound of fingers typing on a keyboard. ‘No,’ was the swift reply.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Wisting insisted.

  ‘Has he been sent to Accident and Emergency?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wisting admitted.

  Renewed typing on the keyboard, but the same answer.

  ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ the woman asked.

  Wisting rounded off the conversation and made a note of the exact time. At some point or other he might have to write a report on the investigations he had conducted.

  Christine Thiis appeared at the door. She had brought him a cup of coffee and set it down on his desk.

  ‘Hammer was talking about a code,’ she said. ‘That I might be able to help you unravel.’

  Wisting drew the cup towards him and gave her a long look. Christine Thiis had been working in the police station for three and a half years. Probably not long enough to have heard of the Katharina case.

  ‘What did he say?’ Wisting asked her.

  ‘Not much. I asked where you were earlier today, and he explained that you were out on an old case, and there was a code you hadn’t managed to decipher. He asked me to have a word with you about it.’

  Wisting sipped his coffee. ‘It’s an old missing-persons case,’ he said. ‘It was years ago. Katharina Haugen.’ He reached out and pulled open one of the desk drawers. ‘She left a note on the kitchen table,’ he continued, taking out a copy. ‘It’s not certain that it has any significance,’ he said, handing it to her, ‘but it must have been one of the last things she did before she disappeared.’

  Christine Thiis picked up the piece of paper and studied it.

  ‘It looks like a financial statement,’ she commented. ‘With columns for debit and credit.’

  Wisting agreed. This thought had occurred to him too.

  Christine recited some of the numbers aloud. ‘Three hundred and sixty-two, three hundred and forty-four … CFB, CDD.’

  Wisting smiled, aware of what she was doing. Exchanging the numbers for letters of the alphabet.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said, sighing, after studying the paper for a while.

  ‘I think it meant something to the person who wrote it,’ Wisting replied.

  ‘You say that as if you’re not sure Katharina Haugen was the one who wrote it.’

  ‘Her fingerprints are on the sheet of paper, but there are also some unidentified prints.’

  ‘What about handwriting experts?’

  ‘They couldn’t come to a conclusion.’

  Christine Thiis stood looking at the sheet of paper. ‘It’s a simple code,’ she decided.

  Wisting took a gulp of the coffee. ‘It’s done the rounds of the Interpol system, and no one succeeded in interpreting it,’ he pointed out.

  ‘By simple I mean that there aren’t many characters. There are twelve numbers, and some are repeated. If every number has a meaning, then it can’t be a long message.’

  Wisting smiled. Christine Thiis’s comments expressed thoughts that had gone through his head a long time ago. ‘I wondered if it could be some kind of map,’ he suggested.

  ‘And that the cross marks a spot,’ Christine Thiis added. ‘Maybe a grave.’

  Wisting shrugged – this was as good an interpretation as any.

  ‘Do you think she’s buried there?’ Christine Thiis went on, pointing at the cross.

  ‘In that case, she might have marked her own grave.’

  ‘If she committed suicide, isn’t that a possibility?’ Wisting concurred.

  ‘Have you tried to get the numbers to match map references or coordinates or something of that nature?’

  ‘We’ve had a number of geographers look at it.’

  Christine Thiis turned the sheet over and studied it from various angles before handing it back. ‘What do you suppose happened to her?’ she asked.

  ‘I think somebody murdered her and hid the body,’ Wisting answered.

  ‘Her husband?’ Christine Thiis suggested.

  ‘He has an alibi: he was in Trøndelag. Anyway, he lacks a motive.’

  Christine Thiis sat down on the empty chair. ‘Are there any other suspects?’

  Wisting explained about Steinar Vassvik in the nearby house.

  ‘We also spent a lot of time on Martin Haugen’s ex-wife,’ he added.

  ‘Had he been married before?’

  ‘Inger Lise Ness,’ Wisting told her. ‘It didn’t last long. She was eight years older than him and quite an unusual character. She could seem both sympathetic and well meaning, but behind the façade she was manipulative and vengeful. He met Katharina while they were still married.’

  ‘What made you suspect her?’

  ‘She had found it difficult to let go of her husband and was hostile to Katharina.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She visited her, screaming that she was a whore and a witch, scratched her car, ordered goods in her name by mail order, spied on them, phoned at all hours of the day and night and stole things from their mailbox.’

  ‘I know the type,’ Christine Thiis said, glancing at the corridor and her own office, where case files were piled high.

  ‘She seemed totally reckless, and at times her behaviour was really intense,’ Wisting went on. ‘Then it calmed down and things were completely quiet for the six months or so before Katharina went missing.’

  ‘Was she checked out?’

  ‘Never completely, and she was difficult to challenge. Her behaviour was helpful and compassionate after Katharina disappeared, but behind the friendly façade her hostility continued.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Two months after Katharina’s disappearance, Martin Haugen began to receive porn magazines in the post. Someone had taken out subscriptions for various publications in his name. He suspected Inger Lise. We brought her in and searched her house, where w
e found a few of Katharina’s belongings.’

  Christine Thiis raised her eyebrows.

  ‘She had a separate drawer for them. Bills stolen from the mailbox, reminders and debt-collection notices, but also other bits and pieces. Underwear, a necklace, an earring, a book, perfume and a little teddy bear which had I Love You written on it. Martin Haugen had bought it for Katharina. It used to sit on a settee in their guest room.’

  ‘But …’ Christine Thiis began, without being able to formulate a question.

  ‘It all happened before Katharina disappeared,’ Wisting explained. ‘Martin Haugen recalled that around midsummer Katharina had complained that she couldn’t find a book she was reading. She insisted she had left it on the bedside table, but now it was gone. Later that summer she was upset because she had lost a necklace and an earring. All the items showed up in Inger Lise’s house.’

  ‘Had she been inside the house?’

  ‘She admitted it,’ Wisting said. ‘But this was several months before Katharina went missing. The verandah door had been left unlocked. She had sneaked in and on impulse taken things that belonged to Katharina.’

  ‘Did you check her fingerprints against the code letter?’ Wisting nodded.

  ‘We didn’t find any of her fingerprints in the house. Even though she denied it, she probably wore gloves and had most likely been in the house more than once.’

  ‘Does she have an alibi?’

  ‘At least for most of the day Katharina disappeared. She was working in a children’s nursery. On 10 October she was at work from seven o’clock in the morning until half past three in the afternoon. Some of her neighbours also confirmed they had seen her, but then we don’t know with any certainty what time Katharina disappeared.’

  The phone rang in Christine Thiis’s office. She excused herself and went to answer it.

  Wisting turned to his computer and logged out. Before he left, he glanced at the desk calendar. At nine o’clock the following day he had a meeting with Adrian Stiller from Kripos. If he did not succeed in making contact with Martin Haugen by that time, he would get the ball rolling on an official investigation.

  7

  He wanted to make one last attempt to see Martin so he drove along the narrow road to Kleiver. The wind had picked up and dead leaves came swirling through the rain, sticking on the car windows before being blown away.

  The tyres crunched on gravel and stones as he turned off from the asphalt road on to the track leading up to Martin Haugen’s house. Everything looked so different in darkness. The surrounding trees seemed taller and the house looked more desolate and inhospitable.

  He swung round into the yard and stopped in front of the house. The headlights shone through the kitchen window and lit up the empty room.

  Rain beat a tattoo on the car roof. Wisting remained seated behind the wheel, pondering whether to venture outside. If Martin Haugen were at home, he would probably come to the window and look out.

  He reversed a short distance, looking for fresh tyre tracks in the gravel in front of the garage, or any other sign that Martin Haugen had come home. The only change was that the cat was nowhere to be seen.

  Pulling on the handbrake, he put the car into neutral and left the engine running. As he opened the door, he noticed a movement to the left of the west-facing corner of the house. The car’s interior light had switched on, depriving him of his night vision, and he was unsure what he had actually seen. It could have been something plucked up by the wind, but he thought it was someone lying flat on the ground who had stood up, only twenty metres away.

  He threw open the door and scrambled from the car. Something was there. ‘Hey!’ he shouted, increasing his pace.

  Whoever or whatever he had seen moved like a shadow to slip between the trees.

  Wisting followed, sliding on the wet grass, and narrowly avoided falling. Twigs scraped his face and poked his side, but he swept them away and pressed on. After a hundred metres he stopped to listen, but all he could hear was the rain and the wind, and the panting of his own breath.

  It was useless to continue so he returned to his car, got in behind the wheel and manoeuvred the vehicle so that the headlights illuminated the area where he had spotted something. He stepped from the car again and examined the ground but all he could see were withered leaves and dead grass. Although it was difficult to say for certain, in one small patch it looked as if the grass had been flattened. If it had been an empty cardboard box or something similar that the wind had shifted, then it must have blown some distance away.

  He ran his hand through his wet hair as he headed for the front door, where he rang the doorbell. Without waiting for an answer, he tried the handle, but the door was locked. He skirted round the house to the verandah. The back door was still locked and there was no evidence of any attempted break-in.

  For a moment he stood in the glow cast by the exterior light, scanning the fringes of the forest, but all he could see was darkness. He glanced at the tiny camera lens on the inside of the glass before turning on his heel and making for his car.

  The vehicle jolted along the gravel track, and he turned right at the crossroads to investigate whether any cars were parked along the road. After only a kilometre he turned and drove back. The footpath that entered the woods behind Martin Haugen’s house eventually led to the E18 motorway. If anyone had really wanted to approach the house unseen, they could have had a car waiting there, but he would not manage to drive all the way round in time to check. Instead he drove home, took off his sodden clothes and changed into some dry ones.

  The two cardboard boxes filled with documents from the Katharina case still sat at the bottom of his wardrobe. He opened one of them and located the ring binder in which they had filed everything to do with Martin Haugen’s ex-wife. He brought it through to the living room and skimmed to the photos of the drawer in Inger Lise’s house. It contained several of Katharina’s personal possessions, including the book that had disappeared from her bedside table, The Honeymoon by Knut Faldbakken.

  He could not envisage Inger Lise Ness still sneaking around her ex-husband’s house. She must have put Martin Haugen behind her long ago. Other more dramatic events had taken place in her life since then. She had met a new man, for one thing. A relationship that had lasted only a few months before he extricated himself. A short time afterwards, he met another woman. Inger Lise Ness had encountered them at a pavement café, where a quarrel had ensued, and she had been thrown out after physically attacking his new girlfriend. But it had not ended there. When the café closed for the night, she had followed the couple home and loitered outside, watching through the windows as they undressed each other in the living room before moving into the bedroom. Then she set fire to the house.

  She had stacked cushions from the garden furniture against the wall, doused them with the lighter fuel she had found beside the barbecue, and set them alight.

  A passing taxi driver discovered both her and the blaze and managed to call the fire brigade. Both occupants were rescued, but the house was extensively damaged. Inger Lise Ness was arrested that same night and later found guilty of arson.

  Wisting flipped through to the specialist report provided following her psychiatric evaluation. Paranoid and psychopathic personality traits were identified, but the conclusion was that she was criminally liable and fit to plead. She had served a sentence of eighteen months.

  Laying aside the documents, he crossed to the kitchen and inserted a pod in the coffee machine. While it buzzed and brewed, he peered through the window and down the street to Line’s house, where a car was parked outside. The vehicle had not been there when he had driven into his own driveway earlier. It was a recent model, a BMW or perhaps an Audi – it was not so easy to distinguish different makes of modern cars. All the same, it was not a car he had ever seen on the street before and it was parked in a shadow which made it impossible to make out whether anyone sat inside.

  He picked up his phone and called her. ‘How
’s Amalie doing?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Line answered.

  Wisting made for the switch by the kitchen door and turned off the ceiling light. He picked up his coffee cup and moved back to the window.

  No one was sitting in the car, he could see that now, but he could not bring himself to ask Line if she had a visitor.

  ‘It was my pen,’ he said instead.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whose pen she chewed,’ Line told him. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘I’m really sorry about it.’

  ‘I know that,’ Line reassured him.

  Wisting took a gulp of coffee. ‘Do you have a visitor?’ he eventually asked.

  ‘No, why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m in my kitchen,’ he explained, ‘and I noticed a car parked outside your house. I wondered whether I was disturbing you.’

  ‘I’m watching a series on TV,’ Line told him.

  He heard her get up from the settee.

  ‘By the way, could you look after Amalie for a few hours on Saturday?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ he replied, delighted to be asked. ‘What are you planning?’

  ‘A meeting at work,’ she answered.

  ‘In Oslo? You’re still on leave, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but they’re keen for me to take part in a project on a freelance basis.’

  ‘That sounds interesting,’ Wisting said. ‘Do you know what it’s about?’

  ‘That’s what we’re going to discuss. I have to be there at noon. Would it be okay if I drop by with her at ten o’clock?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Wisting said, smiling. ‘Give her a goodnight hug from me.’

  He said his goodbyes, raised his cup to his mouth, and stood looking down at Line’s house. He had admitted his guilt in the business with the ballpoint pen and had concocted a plausible explanation for his query about a visitor. What he had really wondered was whether she had embarked on a new relationship, and whether this was her new man’s car parked there.

  He lowered his cup, deciding to return to the documents in the living room, but just at that moment he spotted a man striding down the street towards the parked car. It was difficult to say where he had come from. He was wearing a dark jacket with open lapels that flapped with every step he took.