The Katharina Code

by Jorn Lier Horst

‘We’re in Glimmerveien in Stridsklev in Porsgrunn,’ she said, imagining what it would be like to listen to the broadcast. ‘We, that is Daniel Leanger and me, Line Wisting,’ she explained. ‘We’re the ones making this podcast, and we’re here because this is where Nadia Krogh was seen for the very last time.’

  She paused for effect.

  ‘We’re sitting in the car, looking at the house thirty metres away from us where Liv Hovet lives. She also lived here twenty-six years ago. At that time she was the youngest daughter in the family: now she has taken over the house and stays here with her husband and children. On Friday 18 September 1987 she was alone at home and had invited a few friends to a party. One of them was her best friend, Nadia Krogh. We have come to talk to her about what actually happened that night.’ She lowered the microphone.

  ‘Good,’ Daniel commented. ‘You need to tell the listeners what it looks like here as well. That’s quite important. After all, this is the nearest we get to a crime scene.’

  Line raised the microphone again. ‘The house is situated on the outskirts of a residential area, close to the edge of the forest,’ she explained. ‘The trees are bare, and we can just make out the blue waters of the Eidanger Fjord, located barely a kilometre below us. Nadia left the party at about half past eleven that night. She said she was going home. Her most natural route would have been to walk towards us, where we are parked now. Then she would eventually have reached the main road, where she could either have walked the five kilometres home to Heistad, waited for a bus or tried to hitchhike. But nobody knows what became of her. That’s what we are going to try to find out.’

  Daniel Leanger nodded in satisfaction and drove up to the house. ‘Leave the recording device running,’ he told her.

  The branches of a massive fruit tree stretched out above the hedge into the street. Two birds pecking at a suet ball held in a net flew off and disappeared when the car doors slammed shut.

  Line could hear the faint rumble of traffic from the E18 that passed somewhere behind the forest. She thought this was something she should have mentioned in her podcast commentary, as part of her description of the surroundings, but shrugged off the idea.

  Daniel rang the doorbell. He was the one who had made the interview appointment. Line held the microphone discreetly in her right hand, to capture the sound of the doorbell and the initial meeting.

  Liv Hovet was pale, tall and slim with short, dark hair. She had prepared for the meeting and set a table in the living room. As expected, she was sceptical when she spotted the recording equipment, even though Daniel had already warned her of this when they had spoken on the phone.

  ‘We’re only going to use short extracts,’ he clarified. ‘It will be much the same as in a written interview in which we highlight what is said.’ He attached a microphone to her blouse and checked the sound with her before handing the interview over to Line.

  ‘Who was Nadia Krogh?’ Line began.

  The old friend rolled her eyes as if she had no idea where to start.

  ‘Nadia was Nadia,’ she answered. ‘She was always cheerful and interested but not particularly modest. She talked a lot and usually said exactly what she thought and felt. Sometimes it just kind of blurted out of her – if she thought someone was wearing a horrible sweater or something like that. She was brutally honest about everything.’

  Line nodded, reluctant to break in with any comments or questions.

  ‘And then she was smart,’ Liv Hovet continued. ‘She did well at school. Nadia talked of studying business law so that she could work in her father’s firm.’

  The description matched what Line had read in the police documents. Liv Hovet had also thought that Nadia was spoiled, jealous and a flirt, but Line didn’t want to include this in the first interview. Perhaps she would use it when summing up at the end.

  ‘And of course she was so pretty,’ her classmate rounded off. ‘But I’m sure you already know that. You’ll have seen the photographs.’

  Line agreed. ‘Can you tell me about the evening she went missing?’ she asked.

  The woman facing her rubbed her palms on the armrests of her chair. ‘My parents were going to our summer cottage,’ she began. ‘I was given permission to have some friends over. Ten or twelve people, but more than that turned up. Twenty-something.’

  Line knew there had been thirty-two partygoers, according to the case documents. The police had spoken to all of them.

  ‘Most of them were from our class, but there were also a few older boys. Including Robert.’

  Robert was Robert Gran, Nadia’s boyfriend. He was one year older than her and had a car and a driving licence.

  ‘Really, nothing in particular happened,’ Liv Hovet went on. ‘We chatted, danced and drank, just like every other party, but there was a bit of drama between Nadia and Robert.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Liv Hovet shrugged slightly. ‘Nadia came to me, on the verge of tears, and it wasn’t so easy to make out what she was saying. She was drunk and everything was sort of incoherent, but it was something about Robert and Eva. They’d gone out before, at junior high school, and now they were huddled together in the bathroom.’

  She turned her head and looked out into the hallway, where the bathroom was situated.

  ‘Nothing had happened in there; at least that was what they said afterwards. Nevertheless, Nadia stomped off. I don’t really know any more. A lot of people arrived, there was loud music and everything was a bit out of control. I should probably have tried to persuade her to stay or gone after her, but somebody had just broken a picture. I think it was Olav. He’d bumped into it and it had fallen off the wall. The glass and frame were smashed, and I was more concerned about that.’

  While she spoke, Liv Hovet had moved her hands from the armrests and placed them protectively on her knee. ‘I don’t really know anything more than that,’ she concluded. ‘The next day Nadia’s mother phoned, asking for her, and then there were lots of comings and goings. With the police and all that.’

  ‘Did you say any more to Robert about it?’ Line asked.

  Liv Hovet shook her head. ‘I spoke to him when Nadia left, and said he should really go after her, but after that I didn’t speak to him at all. I’ve hardly seen him since, and I’m not sure I’d even recognize him now.’

  ‘But he did go after her that night?’

  ‘I didn’t see him go,’ Liv Hovet explained. ‘And anyway, he didn’t leave right away, but the others said he did.’

  Line asked a few more questions to catch some of the atmosphere on that night and managed to conjure a picture of a teenage party most people would find familiar.

  ‘What do you think happened to Nadia?’ she probed.

  ‘At first we thought there had been an accident,’ she answered. ‘That she had walked through the forest and broken a leg or something, but then they didn’t find any trace of her there. So I wondered if she had hitchhiked, or if she had started to walk home and someone had stopped to offer her a lift.’ She sat for a moment pondering what she had said. ‘Anyway, I never believed what the police did in the beginning, that Robert had gone after her and killed her. And then the letters arrived. They had to mean that someone had followed her, that they had been standing waiting outside here, ready to kidnap her.’

  Line left her words hanging in the air.

  ‘Do you have any pictures of you and Nadia together?’ she asked after a lull. ‘A class photograph, for example?’

  She continued to wear the microphone as they followed her into a guest bedroom. Liv Hovet knelt down in front of a cupboard and took out an album. ‘Here she is,’ she said, after flicking through it for a moment or two.

  It was a picture of the leavers’ class at junior high school. Liv Hovet pointed at a girl in the second row. The photo had been taken more than two years before Nadia had gone missing, but she was easy to recognize.

  ‘Could we borrow it?’ Line asked.

  Liv Hovet agreed and removed
the picture from the album. ‘There should be a few more here,’ she said, leafing further through. ‘One where she’s with Robert as well.’

  ‘Can I take a picture of you?’ Line asked, as she searched through her bag.

  Liv Hovet looked up. ‘Of me?’

  ‘Yes, now, while you’re looking through the album.’

  She had already produced her camera from her bag, and Liv Hovet made no objection.

  In the end they left with five different photographs of Nadia Krogh. She was pictured with her boyfriend in one of them, and it looked as if they were both laughing at something, Nadia with her mouth open and her chin thrust forward. Something about the light may have been what made Robert’s eyes look extra dark and almost sombre, despite the smile on his lips.

  ‘Shall we get something to eat before we meet up with the guy from the Red Cross?’ Daniel suggested once they were back in the car again.

  Now hungry, Line agreed. They drove into Porsgrunn and found a restaurant open for lunch in Storgata. Line ordered a fish-and-seafood salad, while Daniel decided on a burger.

  ‘We’ll have to edit out the bit where she talks about Eva being with Robert in the bathroom,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve spoken to her, and she’s not willing to participate or be named.’

  ‘But we must include it some way or other,’ Line said. ‘I can read from her police interview and call her something else. She says nothing happened in the bathroom, anyway. They just talked.’

  ‘Robert Gran says the same,’ Daniel said.

  The food arrived at the table.

  ‘Maybe we should find another voice for the commentary too,’ Line suggested as she began to tuck in. ‘Someone distanced from the police investigation but who can say something authoritative about how the local community reacted.’

  Daniel agreed. ‘A clergyman or the mayor, or someone along those lines,’ he suggested, as he munched his burger. ‘Maybe we can find someone who was a local politician at the time but is still well known today. That would be good! Or some other celebrity. That hotel guy, for instance, Petter Stordalen? He’s from hereabouts and probably remembers the case.’

  ‘I don’t think we should drag in any celebrities,’ Line told him. ‘I was thinking more of a local journalist who covered the story at the time.’

  They discussed various angles and possibilities and agreed what was crucial in the initial coverage was a chronological review of the facts, though more questions came up than answers.

  Someone who could help to outline a picture of what had taken place in the period after Nadia went missing was Realf Tveten of the Red Cross. He met them in the organization’s local premises and had unearthed the log of the official search in 1987. In addition, there were several maps with areas gradually shaded in as the search progressed.

  ‘I was well aware of who her parents were,’ he said, ‘Joachim and Margareta Krogh. Of course, everyone knew who Joachim was, but I knew him from school. A great guy. Down to earth. Not at all arrogant or high and mighty, even though his family had money.’

  ‘When did you learn that Nadia was missing?’ Line asked, to bring the conversation back to the missing girl.

  ‘The police phoned about two o’clock on the Saturday,’ Realf Tveten replied. ‘By then they had already searched with police dogs, but they wanted to conduct a more systematic search. I set in motion an alert system to bring in the volunteers. Half an hour later I had established a control centre.’

  He referred to the log before continuing. ‘We concentrated on the neighbourhood, scoured gardens, under redcurrant bushes, in playhouses, sheds and garages. It’s happened before, that someone under the influence lies down somewhere to find shelter. At that time it wasn’t cold or bad weather, but she had been drinking and could have felt unwell. She could have lain down some place, thrown up and choked on her own vomit. That was a possibility.’

  Line glanced across at the recording equipment in Daniel’s hand and saw the LED strip move to the rhythm of Realf Tveten’s deep voice. The slightly vibrating tone was easy on the ear.

  ‘As soon as I had more feet on the ground, we extended the search to include the forest behind the house.’ He took out one of the maps and pointed. ‘It was hilly terrain, steep and stony. She could have fallen and knocked herself unconscious.’

  Line took out her camera and snapped a picture of the table in front of them. This would provide a striking image, with the maps and their shaded areas.

  Realf Tveten produced a larger rolled-up map. ‘The party was here,’ he explained, pointing. ‘But the Krogh family lives here. It was reasonable to assume she had decided to head for home. In reality there are three main routes. She could walk down to the old E18 and follow it all the way home to Heistad. Then she’d also have the possibility of jumping on a bus. Or else she could have gone along the new E18 that was under construction at the time, but it was dark and deserted. The shortest way would probably have been to walk through the residential area and come out at Lundedal, even though that meant she’d also have to use some of the forest paths.’

  The three routes were marked with red lines on the map.

  ‘We conducted searches along all three of these routes. Our thinking was she might have been knocked down by a car and left lying in a ditch, but that brought no results either. Nor was there anything to indicate there had been any such accident.’

  Daniel Leanger broke in. ‘So what do you think happened to her?’ he asked.

  Realf Tveten leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve taken part in countless searches,’ he said. ‘In the mountains, in the forest, at sea and in towns. Most people are found. Generally, they’re no longer alive, but they are found – whether they’ve met with an accident or committed suicide, or been killed by someone else for that matter, they’re eventually found. If we don’t find them, then a hunter or a hiker does. So I’ve always believed someone took her away in a car and drove off with her.’

  ‘The kidnappers,’ Line broke in.

  ‘The question is what happened afterwards,’ Realf Tveten said. ‘What happened to Nadia, and why did they never collect the ransom money?’

  Their conversation with the man from the Red Cross had taken longer than Line had estimated. As soon as they were back in the car, she phoned Thomas to ask how things were going.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Thomas reassured her. ‘I’m teaching her how to use the iPad.’

  ‘The iPad?’

  ‘I’ve bought her a few apps,’ Thomas explained. ‘She’s sitting on my knee, tapping the screen and laughing. She’s very enthusiastic, and is managing to do it. It’s educational.’

  Line had not allowed Amalie to play with her iPad, and it was not long since she had let her watch TV for the first time. Her feeling was that putting children in front of a screen provided artificial stimulus and was only an excuse to give the parents a break.

  ‘Has she eaten, though?’ she asked.

  ‘We’ve eaten and changed her nappy, so everything’s okay,’ her brother assured her before Amalie began to babble and demand attention.

  Line said goodbye to them both and said she thought she would be home in a couple of hours.

  Daniel had entered Vidar Arntzen’s address on his GPS. ‘The Grey Panther,’ he said, as he began to follow the onscreen instructions.

  ‘Does he live alone?’ Line asked.

  ‘In a collective,’ Daniel answered.

  ‘A collective?’ Line repeated in surprise.

  ‘A shared residential complex is probably the right description,’ Daniel said, grinning. ‘It’s one of the things he worked on when he was the Senior General,’ he explained. ‘He and a group of people the same age got together and built housing for seniors.’

  Line read through the police documents. Vidar Arntzen had recently retired, following a long career as an architect, when two police officers in civilian clothes stopped at his door one day and demanded to know if he had been involved in a plot to kidnap a seventeen-year-
old girl. She took note of the brief summary and thought she could read it out into the podcast later. It would provide an excellent introduction to the meeting with the old man.

  They passed a sign with directions to Henrik Ibsen’s childhood home before they turned off and drove up in front of a massive wooden building, idyllically situated with a river in the background. Wet, dead leaves from a huge farmyard tree blanketed most of the courtyard.

  Line splashed into a puddle when she stepped from the car. She quickly darted ahead but felt cold water squelching in her shoes.

  ‘Vidar Arntzen lived in Oslo at the time,’ Daniel told her. ‘This was probably an old family farm.’

  They walked into an entrance resembling a reception area with no staff and found a panel of doorbells. Vidar Arntzen must have seen them arrive because he appeared almost at once when they rang the bell. He was tall and thin with a wiry beard and carried a little document folder tucked under his arm. It seemed there was nothing wrong with either his mind or his hearing as he took them on a brief guided tour of the building and explained all about the facilities.

  ‘State of the art, every aspect of it,’ he told them. ‘This offers health and well-being for people getting on in years who don’t want to live in detached houses with big gardens. You should write about it in your newspaper. Politicians should consider how, from a statistical point of view, this kind of residential arrangement encourages the elderly to be independent.’

  He ushered them into a common room, where they sat down at one end of a long table.

  ‘Is there any news of the girl?’ he asked, as Daniel attached a microphone to him.

  ‘Nothing apart from the police are reopening the case,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll discover something now that didn’t come to light at the time.’

  ‘After so many years,’ the old man muttered, shaking his head. ‘They couldn’t have had many clues then anyway, since they came to me.’

  ‘Why did the police come to you?’ Line asked, once Daniel had checked that the sound was acceptable.

  ‘I don’t know how much I can tell you,’ Arntzen replied. ‘The police told me what we had discussed was a secret part of the investigation and I was bound by rules of confidentiality.’