The Katharina Code

by Jorn Lier Horst

  ‘I need to work,’ Line told him. ‘Drop in before you leave.’

  She waited until the door shut behind him before sitting in front of her laptop again. She took yet another minute to study the picture of Nadia and her little brother before picking up her phone to call Robert Gran.

  He answered at once.

  ‘There was just one thing I wondered whether I’d understood correctly,’ Line said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You said you’d been with Nadia and her little brother when the picture was taken.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I know it was a long time ago,’ Line said, ‘but do you remember anything more about it? It looks as if it was from a photo booth.’

  ‘Yes, it was at the railway station. They went behind one of those curtains.’

  ‘Can you remember how many pictures you took?’

  The line went quiet. Either he was thinking it over or else he was undecided.

  ‘Four,’ he replied. ‘But it was really only the first one that was any good. The flash lit up once, and they thought they were finished. They were on their way out of the booth when it flashed again, so they tried to clamber back in. The last picture wasn’t too bad either.’

  As Line’s eyes moved to the recorder, she regretted not connecting it to the phone to allow her to record the conversation. ‘What happened to the other pictures?’ she asked.

  ‘I think Malte got them. Nadia kept one and had it in her purse.’

  ‘And that was the first one on the strip?’

  ‘It was the best one.’

  ‘Did she cut it off?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How did she separate that one picture from the others? Did she use scissors?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. I think she did it at home. I’m not sure if I was there then.’

  Line thanked him and rushed to end the call before it entered Robert Gran’s head to ask her why she wanted to know.

  If there were two pictures of Nadia and her young brother, it opened a possibility that the picture in the ransom letter was not from her purse but was the last one on the strip. This would fit with something she would raise as a problem in the next article. Why had the kidnappers chosen to send the photograph, rather than her ID card or one of the other personal belongings from her handbag? Or even her necklace?

  She puffed out her cheeks and exhaled. Robert Gran’s explanation had punctured her argument. Nadia Krogh had kept the first, top picture in the strip, identical to the one in the police evidence material. Right-angled at the top, it was slightly skewed along the base. There was no reason to believe it had not come from Nadia’s purse. Nevertheless, the excitement she had felt was something she would describe in the next podcast.

  She played through the rest of her interview with Robert Gran. It stopped abruptly when the recorder ran out of power, but she decided to use it like that and provide an explanation to the listeners. It would provide extra authenticity.

  She jumped thirty seconds back and listened to the conclusion once again. She had asked Robert Gran what he thought had happened to Nadia.

  ‘I think somebody took her,’ he replied. ‘Somebody local. Somebody from around here.’

  At that point the recording ended.

  She repeated his words to herself and attempted to find other grounds for the perpetrator having a local connection.

  Somebody from around here meant someone from the same town. From Porsgrunn. The only thing, from a purely objective viewpoint, to support this theory was that the letters from the kidnappers bore local postmarks. In addition, Krogh’s address had been torn out of a local phone directory. The newspaper used to fashion the letter had national coverage but was of course sold and read locally.

  She sat pondering why the kidnappers had used that particular copy of VG from 27 August. The only reason for saving a newspaper was that it contained something you wanted to keep – something you were interested in, or about someone you knew.

  She logged in to the newspaper archive and located the edition the kidnappers had used before opening the search field and typing in one word. Porsgrunn.

  It produced one result. On page seventeen, there was an article of local interest.

  Before she clicked into it she automatically lifted her pen, as if she knew what she was about to see would be something she must not let slip through her fingers.

  The article was about the new motorway under construction at that time. A new type of asphalt would produce less airborne dust and noise. The word Porsgrunn was highlighted twice to show the search parameters. Line put her pen to her mouth as she studied the photograph: five roadworkers in front of a road-building machine, their names listed beneath the picture. One of them produced a spark of interest. She knew the man second from the left: it was Martin Haugen.

  64

  Stiller had driven his car as far out on the hard shoulder as possible and flicked on his emergency light. He had located the spot overnight. Now he had returned with Nils Hammer and they were standing with the Katharina code spread out on the bonnet. The solution seemed obvious. The columns on the sheet of paper formed two motorway lanes. The line across the foot of the columns was a local road that crossed the motorway on a bridge, more than a hundred metres behind them.

  ‘Sign 334,’ he said, pointing to the signs on both sides of the road prohibiting overtaking. ‘And 148,’ he went on, indicating the triangular sign warning of two-way traffic.

  Further ahead were two signs specifying the speed limit, one stating that this was a major road, another highlighting a lay-by coming up, and a yellow one drawing attention to exit road number 49. Everything matched.

  A lorry thundered past, fluttering the papers. Stiller turned his back and pointed to the earth bank beside the road.

  ‘The cross marks a spot in this area,’ he said.

  Nils Hammer had brought a road map with him. ‘Glimmerveien is straight up that hill,’ he said, raising his hand towards the trees behind where Katharina had marked a cross. ‘We’re only a few hundred metres from the place where Nadia Krogh was last seen.’

  Stiller took a few paces towards the ditch and climbed the embankment on the other side. Somewhere beneath his feet, Nadia Krogh lay buried. He thought he could feel her presence.

  ‘The motorway was under construction at that time,’ Hammer added.

  Stiller took out a Fisherman’s Friend and dropped it into his mouth. Martin Haugen had been involved in building this road. Logical connections began to materialize. He held up Katharina’s sketch and compared it with the terrain. ‘It’s a pretty imprecise blueprint, though,’ he said, chewing his lozenge. ‘We may have to dig up a fair amount of soil.’

  ‘We can try ground-penetrating radar first,’ Hammer suggested. ‘To investigate what it looks like under the slope.’

  Stiller shook his head.

  ‘I don’t want to wait,’ he said. ‘I want to do this now, while Martin Haugen is out of the way at the cabin, with no access to radio or TV.’

  ‘What about a cadaver dog?’ Hammer asked. ‘That would save time.’

  Stiller kicked up some turf with the toe of his shoe. They no longer had any true cadaver dogs in Norway, but there were sniffer dogs trained in molecular searches for human remains.

  ‘I’m afraid twenty-six years might be too long for that,’ he said. ‘But it’s worth a try.’

  One of the Public Roads Directorate’s yellow work vehicles drew up behind the unmarked police car. The driver switched on the warning light on the roof and came out to meet them.

  Stiller greeted him with a wave of his hand. This was probably the engineer he had asked to conduct a site inspection. His face looked creased and stern, as if he found the situation disagreeable.

  They exchanged brief pleasantries before the engineer’s eyes scanned the road verge. ‘You think she’s buried in there,’ he said thoughtfully.

  Stiller had already taken him into h
is confidence. There was no reason not to disclose in advance what this was about or why they were here.

  ‘We have a sketch,’ he said, showing the man from the roads authority the paper marked with the cross and explaining what the numbers represented.

  The man consulted the paper while alternately measuring and studying the topography.

  ‘What do you think?’ Stiller asked when the engineer made no comment.

  ‘I think she’ll be somewhere here,’ the man said, his hand making a circular motion in the area where Stiller had been standing.

  ‘It’s as good a place as any to start,’ Stiller agreed.

  The engineer handed back the sketch. ‘I was in charge of the project when we constructed the road here in the eighties,’ he said, waiting until a wide load with a tail of cars behind it had passed before continuing. ‘I live in Bamble, and when the road was finished I drove along here nearly every day, to and from work. A few months after the road had opened I noticed flowers lying on the verge here, as sometimes happens in places where someone has died in a road accident or something. It annoyed me, because the road was built to be safe for traffic, and we hadn’t had any accidents, so I drove back, stopped and got rid of them.’

  ‘Flowers?’ Stiller repeated, a note of surprise in his voice.

  ‘Red roses,’ the man told him. ‘Like on a grave.’

  ‘Where were they placed?’ Hammer asked.

  ‘It’s a long time ago, but they were somewhere around here.’ He pointed to the same area again. ‘Two months later, another bunch of flowers appeared,’ he went on. ‘I removed them too, but it continued. I don’t know how many bunches of flowers I disposed of before it stopped.’

  Stiller took out his packet of Fisherman’s Friends and took another lozenge, without offering them to the others.

  ‘When was it that this business with the flowers stopped?’ he asked. The engineer pulled a face, suggesting it was difficult to estimate.

  ‘It continued for a couple of years, anyway,’ he said.

  Stiller moved the lozenge around in his mouth.

  ‘Can you come back with digging equipment?’ he asked, his eyes fixed on the engineer.

  ‘Most of the machines and crew are tied up, but we’ll manage something. When were you proposing to do it?’

  ‘Now,’ Stiller replied.

  ‘Now?’ the engineer said, taken aback. ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘If we’re going to dig here, we have to close the road and redirect the traffic. It requires planning.’

  ‘You must already have a plan in place for that?’ Stiller asked. ‘It’s no different from what happens if there’s an accident, surely?’

  ‘This is work that demands planning,’ the engineer broke in. ‘We must wait at least until tonight to cause minimum disruption to road users.’

  ‘I can wait until tonight,’ Stiller told him. ‘Can you be here with the necessary equipment at ten o’clock?’

  ‘I’ll have to call people out on overtime,’ the engineer said.

  ‘It’ll come from our budget,’ Stiller reassured him. ‘Ten o’clock.’

  ‘Ten o’clock it is, then,’ the man from the roads authority agreed.

  Stiller felt his mobile phone vibrate in his pocket. When he took it out he saw it was from a saved number: Line Wisting.

  65

  It sounded as if Adrian Stiller was outdoors somewhere. When he introduced himself his name was drowned out by the rumble of a heavy lorry.

  Line shifted the phone to her other ear and checked the recorder was operating. ‘Do you have a few minutes?’ she asked.

  ‘Fire away,’ Stiller said.

  A car door slammed at the other end of the line and the background noise disappeared.

  ‘I’m working on the next article and a new podcast, and a name’s come up that I found interesting,’ Line said, spelling things out more explicitly than perhaps necessary. She hoped the recording of the conversation might be used.

  ‘I’ve searched through the old police documents, and it’s not mentioned there,’ she went on. ‘All the same, I was wondering if it was a name you’re familiar with.’

  Adrian Stiller seemed impatient. ‘What’s the name?’ he asked.

  ‘Martin Haugen.’

  Over the phone line she could hear the sound of a lozenge being crunched, followed by a lengthy silence.

  ‘Where did you pick that up?’ Stiller demanded.

  Line glanced at the recorder again. She did not want to mention her father to the listeners but could stop the recording here when editing. Stiller’s silence was revealing. She was definitely on to something.

  ‘It came up in a case Dad’s been working on with the police here in Larvik,’ Line explained. ‘Martin Haugen’s wife disappeared in 1989. She was never found. Haugen was working on the construction of the new motorway outside Porsgrunn when Nadia went missing.’

  The line was silent again. When she spoke the words aloud she heard for herself how far-fetched any connection between the two cases seemed. She would have liked to speak to her father about it before calling the Kripos investigator but he was not answering his phone.

  ‘I’m a bit busy right now,’ Stiller finally said. ‘I’ll have to ring you back.’ Then he hung up.

  66

  Five small trout were the final result of three hours at the lake. Before they built a bonfire to cook them, they changed the lures for hooks and worms. The fishing rods lay on aquatic weeds on the shore with their lines cast and red cork floats bobbing on the water.

  Martin had washed the fish. Now he sat beside the bonfire, sprinkling them with salt before packing each in tin foil with a generous portion of butter on the belly.

  Wisting produced his mobile phone and switched it on. Eight per cent charge. He wondered whether the start-up process used just as much power as when he simply kept it on standby. Regardless, he would run out of juice overnight.

  A message from Line with a full stop awaited him: Looks like the weather will stay fine all weekend.

  Yes, but the big fish hasn’t taken the bait yet, he wrote back, glancing across at Martin Haugen.

  The amateurish coded language was borderline comical, he thought. This was how they usually wrote messages to informants and sources. Only the sender and recipient understood the meaning from the context, but any third party would still find it suspicious.

  Forget about fish was the response. We’re going out digging tonight.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ Martin asked, as he shaped a hollow in the mound of embers.

  Wisting had almost forgotten his own lie about checking how Amalie was after her visit to the doctor’s. ‘Yes, fine, thanks,’ he said, smiling.

  Martin Haugen stashed the five packets of fish in the cavity and used a stick to rake embers over them. ‘They have to sit there for ten minutes or so,’ he said, looking at his watch.

  Wisting glanced across at his fishing rod; the water rippled in tiny waves around the cork. It looked like a nibble, but then the water settled again.

  The air was hot from the sun and the flames of the fire. Wisting took off his jacket and laid it between them, to let the microphone inside catch their voices more easily. Martin Haugen kept his jacket on, and it was impossible to see if he had a gun hidden underneath it.

  ‘It’s peaceful here,’ Wisting said, mostly for the sake of saying something.

  ‘My family set up home here in the eighteenth century,’ Martin told him. ‘They lived here for more than two hundred and fifty years, but now I’m the end of the line. After me, there’s nobody to carry on the family tradition.’

  Wisting’s thoughts turned to his grandchild and the joy of knowing that his life had left its mark.

  ‘I think I’d like my ashes to be scattered here,’ Martin continued. One of the pine logs crackled noisily on the fire. He used a stick to rake more embers over the packets of fish. ‘I wouldn’t like to lie on my own in a grave n
obody will ever tend, anyway,’ he said, getting to his feet. He walked over to the fishing rods, pulled up the line and checked the worm was still in place before casting again. The red float moved slightly as the worm sank and the line straightened out.

  Wisting said nothing. He had a plot in the churchyard waiting for him. On Ingrid’s gravestone an empty space below her name indicated where his own would one day be engraved.

  ‘Will you arrange it?’ Martin asked him as he sat down again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The business with the ashes?’

  Wisting smiled. ‘You should really write it down,’ he suggested. ‘Make a will.’

  On the other side of the lake a flock of crows took off. Wisting put his hand to his forehead to block the sun. It was obvious something had frightened them off. One of the crows held its wings close to its body and swooped down into the trees, while the others flew away.

  The solitary crow rose again, flapping its wings, and screeched loudly before launching another attack.

  ‘Why is it doing that, do you think?’ Martin asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wisting answered. ‘There’s clearly something in the forest over there.’

  ‘Yes, but why does one choose to attack, while the others fly off?’

  ‘Maybe it has something to protect or defend,’ Wisting suggested. ‘A nest with fledglings in it, or something.’

  Martin shook his head. ‘Crows nest in springtime,’ he said. ‘I think they’re just different. It’s a matter of contrasting instincts. A frightened horse usually runs away, but a dog adopts an attack position and bares its teeth. I think it’s the same with human beings too; we hold inherited primeval instincts that mean, when we’re threatened, some choose to attack while others decide to flee. We can’t consciously choose or control it.’

  Wisting tried to interpret what Martin said, in light of his suspicions. It might be understood as an attempt to justify what he had done.

  ‘Have you seen those funny home videos on TV?’ Martin went on. ‘When somebody hides in a dustbin or something and they jump out to scare a pal or a workmate?’