The Katharina Code

by Jorn Lier Horst

  By just after three o’clock the hole had been augmented by a channel three metres broad by three metres long and only a thirty-centimetre-thick layer of soil concealed the rest of the remains.

  On the road bridge more than a hundred metres to the north a crowd had gathered, mainly from media outlets. In the glow of the streetlamp Line could make out several glinting camera lenses. The police were busy setting up a huge work tent over the discovery site.

  Line kept close to Stiller, avoiding being questioned since people could see she was accompanying him, and moved with him behind the canvas.

  A large, coarse sieve had been installed down in the original hole, a rectangular wooden box with netting on the base. Every spadeful of earth from the area around the remains was placed in the box and sifted through the rough net in order to sort out larger objects.

  Something hit the net, causing the men in the pit to cluster around it. They withdrew a dark object from a lump of earth. Line lifted her camera when she realized what it was. A handbag.

  One of the technicians carried it across to a work table that had been set up to examine objects more closely in the light of a desk lamp.

  ‘It’s made of PVC,’ he said, explaining why it had survived more than twenty years in the ground.

  Line stood behind the investigators. From between the shoulders of Nils Hammer and Adrian Stiller she could see parts of the bag disintegrate when they began to inspect it. A metal buckle and a strap came loose.

  ‘Can I take a photo?’ she asked.

  The technician looked up. Probably unaware of the details of this old case, he would not know Nadia had kept her purse in her bag, with the picture of her and her little brother.

  Stiller nodded, giving her the go-ahead. The crime-scene technician held up the bag in his blue latex gloves. ‘Thanks,’ Line said, lowering the camera.

  The technician opened the bag carefully and began to remove the contents, which seemed well preserved: a key ring, lipstick and some little bits and pieces Line could not decipher. That was all. No purse.

  Line felt certain this was Nadia’s handbag. The description matched. She tried to imagine what might have happened at the time the body was dumped by the side of the road. Her purse had been removed before the handbag was hurled in after her, as in a common assault or robbery.

  ‘Maybe her purse is lying down there too,’ Stiller said, once work in the pit had resumed.

  Line followed every single turn of the spade. Never before had she been so closely involved in police work.

  The first bones were revealed. The earth around them was a bit darker than the rest. There were long thigh bones, kneecaps, small bones that must be fingers, and curved ribs. Spindly plant roots twisted and twined through them like a network of nerves. Finally, the skull was unearthed. It looked as if there were cracks in it, and on the right side a fragment seemed to be missing.

  The technicians stood deep in discussion, but Line could not catch what they were saying.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Stiller asked.

  The elder of the two glanced up. ‘A cranial fracture,’ he said, while the other documented the injury with his camera.

  ‘Cause of death?’ Stiller suggested.

  ‘We’ll have to take a closer look when we get everything back to the lab,’ the technician replied, refusing to draw any conclusions.

  They left the skull and moved on to the rest of the body. All the clothes must have rotted away. A dark belt with a rusty buckle was all that was left.

  The older crime-scene technician held up an object from the area of the hip bone and transferred it to a brown paper bag. Line wondered whether it could have been something in one of Nadia’s trouser pockets and had to zoom in to reveal it as the remnants of a zip fastener.

  They also took possession of an earring and a ring before embarking on collecting the bones. They seemed to be sorting them according to which body part they belonged to, starting with the hands. All the tiny bones forming part of the left hand were dropped into a bag that was marked and stored. Then the bones of the upper and lower arm were placed in the same box before a lid was attached. The left leg was then packed away in the same fashion.

  ‘I’ve got what I need now,’ Daniel said. ‘We won’t broadcast moving images of the remains, so there’s not much point in me hanging around any longer. I’ll go to the hotel and do some editing. What about you?’

  ‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ Line said.

  ‘It’ll be another long day tomorrow,’ Daniel went on. ‘We’ll have to transmit a new podcast.’

  Line took the recorder from her pocket and checked how much battery time was left. She would have to charge it soon.

  ‘I’ll have to speak to her boyfriend again,’ she said. ‘After all, the case takes on a different complexion now she’s been found.’ She followed him to his car and they arranged where to meet the following day.

  A police patrol car arrived with pots of coffee and buttered bread rolls. Adrian Stiller called her over and she filled a cardboard beaker before heading back into the tent again.

  The two technicians didn’t move. They were immersed in dialogue on the right-hand side of what remained of the skeleton.

  Adrian Stiller crouched down, squeezing through the tent flaps, with a bottle of water in his hand.

  ‘Coffee’s here,’ he told them, but all at once it struck him that something significant had captured the attention of the two technicians.

  ‘What is it?’ he queried.

  The older technician looked up. ‘She has compound fractures,’ he explained. ‘In her femur, tibia and arm.’

  ‘In addition to the fractured skull,’ his colleague added.

  ‘What do you make of that?’

  The older technician seemed almost unwilling to make any specific deduction. ‘These are injuries consistent with being hit by a moving vehicle,’ he said.

  ‘Hit by a vehicle?’ Stiller reiterated.

  ‘Of course, it’s a natural conclusion, since she’s lying here in a ditch.’

  ‘There was no road here at that time,’ Line broke in. ‘They were still building it.’

  The technician shrugged. ‘At any rate, I’ve only seen injuries like this in connection with road accidents,’ he said.

  Stiller glanced at Line. ‘You’ve not to make this public until I’ve given you the green light,’ he told her. Line readily agreed.

  After the coffee break, the rest of the bones were packed and labelled and hauled up. The two crime-scene technicians then began to fine-sieve the layer of earth on which the skeleton had been lying. They seemed to be concentrating on the head area, and Line assumed they were searching for the other earring. Now and again they stopped and plucked something out of the strainers they were using before throwing away stones too big to pass through the holes.

  The missing earring eventually turned up, but the technicians continued their fine-combing of the soil. Occasionally they came across something they kept hold of, but these were too small for Line to identify. It occurred to her that they might be teeth. She spooled back through the photographs she had taken and zoomed in on one of the skull. The jaw was intact and all the teeth seemed to be in place.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ she asked, succumbing to curiosity.

  The older technician made eye contact with Stiller, as if seeking permission to answer. ‘Glass fragments,’ he told her after getting a nod from him.

  Line understood. They were trying to support their theory that Nadia Krogh had been knocked down and killed and were searching for tiny slivers of broken glass retained in her hair or clothing.

  ‘Are you finding any?’ she asked.

  The technician merely nodded as he continued his work. It was now past six in the morning, and Line was feeling tired. All the tension had drained from her body. The excavation work had little more to offer, but she felt unable to leave the discovery site until the job was finished.

  She headed for her
car, where she sat behind the wheel and started the engine to heat the interior. Eventually she grew drowsy. Her eyelids slid shut and she fell asleep.

  She woke with a start when someone rapped on the side window. It was Adrian Stiller, and the dashboard clock showed 7.38.

  Fresh air billowed into the overheated interior when she lowered the window.

  ‘We’re finishing up here now,’ Stiller said. ‘The road will open again as soon as we’re all packed up.’

  Line glanced across at the tent where the work had taken place. A policeman was busy securing its perimeter with police tape.

  ‘The tent will stay put for a while longer, but to be honest there’s not much more to do here apart from fill in the hole,’ Stiller continued.

  ‘What are you all going to do now?’ Line asked.

  ‘We’re going to try to catch some sleep,’ Stiller told her.

  It certainly looked as if he needed some, Line thought, more than most of the others here, but she was not so sure he would actually take a break from the investigation.

  ‘And after that?’ she queried.

  ‘We’ll have an internal run-through to summarize the case,’ Stiller replied. ‘But nothing’s going to happen until your father gets home.’

  75

  Martin Haugen was first up. Wisting lay in bed listening to him lighting the stove.

  The bed creaked when he reached for his mobile phone in his jacket pocket on the chair. Still some power left – three per cent.

  A message from Line. popped up: We’ve found what we were looking for. He managed no more than reading that short message before a new text pushed the first one further down the screen: Looks like our friend was hit by a vehicle.

  These messages had been sent at 3.32 and 5.40 respectively. They had stopped writing about the weather, but the actual messages were in the same simple coded style that really would not fool anyone.

  He sent back a question mark to elicit more information. Nils Hammer was still awake. The response came swiftly: Fractures on arms, legs and skull. Technicians conclude road traffic accident.

  On the other side of the wall he heard Martin rattling the coffee pot.

  An accident, in other words, he thought. Was that what Martin had tried to tell him the previous evening, when they’d been talking about justice and receiving just punishment?

  What make of car did MH have at that time? he wrote, fully aware he had no need to give instructions to his colleagues at the police station about the next investigative steps. Speak to the neighbour, Steinar Vassvik, about possible damage to a vehicle, he added.

  Immediately after he pressed Send the display turned black. The phone had run out of power.

  Yanking his legs out of the sleeping bag, he sat up in the chilly room. He pulled on his trousers and shirt before pouring water into the basin by the window.

  Coffee was ready by the time he walked into the kitchen.

  ‘They’re not much good, these beds,’ Martin commented.

  Wisting rubbed his neck and rolled his head in an effort to get rid of a crick. ‘It’s okay for a night or two,’ he said, with a pained expression, as he helped himself to a cup.

  After breakfast they went outside and pulled up the nets. They could see Eikedokktoppen from the boat – a flat mountaintop, with steep slopes down to the lake.

  ‘We’ll have to climb up from the back,’ Martin explained. ‘The easiest thing is to pack and return to the pickup first, and then follow the path from there.’

  Their catch was slightly less than the previous day. They rinsed the fish and salted them down while the nets dried in the sun. Afterwards they packed their rucksacks, tidied and swept the floors before Martin locked the cabin door.

  Wisting was anxious to go home now. He had considered suggesting they forego the extra hike, but at the same time he had not accomplished what he wanted on the fishing trip. The walk to Eikedokktoppen would provide him with an extra opportunity to coax something out of Martin Haugen.

  The bucket of salted fish was heavy and cumbersome to carry through the forest. They took turns but, after a few hundred metres, Wisting set it down and found a branch to hang the bucket from. They hoisted the log on to their shoulders to enable them to carry it between them along the narrow path. Martin went first. Wisting’s eyes were fixed on the back of his neck. Within the next twenty-four hours he would be arrested, he thought. The fingerprints on the kidnap letters, together with the discovery of Nadia Krogh’s body, would be enough to charge him. A good defence counsel would point the finger at Katharina. She was the one who had left the directions about where the corpse was buried. A lawyer could also claim that Martin knew what she had done, but this was not the same as being an accomplice.

  These two days at the cabin had affected him. Working undercover was alien to him and had done something to his self-esteem. In all his years in the police he had endeavoured to be honest, direct and combative in encounters with both colleagues and criminals. His manipulations in regard to Martin troubled him and he was pleased the trip would soon be over.

  When they reached the pickup Martin shoved the bucket of fish under the tarpaulin on the flat cargo bed and used straps to tie it down and prevent it from toppling when they started driving.

  Wisting’s thoughts turned to Nadia Krogh. ‘Have you always driven a pickup?’ he asked.

  Martin flipped up the tailgate. ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘It’s really practical. You can carry all sorts of things. I had a couple of off-road motorbikes as a teenager that I used to race. It was great having them on the cargo bed instead of having to tow a trailer.’

  ‘Have you ever been in any accidents?’

  ‘That’s inevitable,’ Martin replied. ‘I drove off the track and broke my collarbone when I was twenty. After that I gave it up.’

  ‘I meant in your pickup,’ Wisting said, walking round to the side of the vehicle. ‘They seem pretty solid, if anything should happen.’

  ‘I’ve had one accident in the thirty-six years I’ve had a driving licence,’ Martin said, with a smile.

  ‘I’ve had two,’ Wisting said. ‘Once in a police car during an emergency callout and another time in a little Fiesta. It was a write-off. Since then I’ve only driven Volvos. They can certainly take a knock.’

  ‘These can too,’ Martin assured him.

  ‘It was my fault both times,’ Wisting went on, relating how he had crashed at a roundabout in the police patrol car and driven into the rear of another car in the little Fiesta.

  ‘It was the same with me,’ Martin said. ‘I drove into the back of a lorry.’

  ‘Was that a long time ago?’ Wisting asked him.

  Martin began walking. ‘Yes, it was before Katharina went missing,’ he replied.

  A thought crossed Wisting’s mind as he took the first steps towards the overgrown path. With every step he took, it grew into a completely self-evident prospect of explaining how Martin Haugen had obtained his alibi.

  He tried to reconstruct some of what was in the case documents as he carried on walking. The last phone conversation with Katharina was one of the components of Martin’s statement that did not add up. It had lasted for eight minutes and seventeen seconds, with Martin claiming the call was just general before they said good night. Eight minutes was a relatively lengthy phone call. Seen in the light of what they now knew, the conversation had probably been about how Katharina’s conscience had been eating away at her and that she intended to hand herself in to the police. It would have been a difficult conversation to have by phone, so Katharina might well have jumped on the motorbike and driven north. They could have met at an agreed spot, and maybe this was when Martin Haugen had reacted with what he had called ‘inherited primeval instincts’ that cannot be controlled. He had gone on the attack. Afterwards he could have concealed the body just as they had done earlier with Nadia, and stowed the motorbike on the cargo bed of the pickup so that he could trundle it into place in the garage when he arrived home.<
br />
  It was a simple but plausible explanation which, at present, only Wisting could see.

  He stumbled on a tree root hidden beneath the brown foliage but regained his footing. It was obvious the path was not much used. Vegetation grew in from both sides and they continually had to avoid bare overhanging branches. In some places they had to walk around fallen trees blocking the path. After a few kilometres they arrived at a fork. The path they took was even narrower and swept up through the landscape. Wisting felt his pulse rate increase and his back become clammy.

  Beside a massive oak tree a stream crossed the path. Martin stopped, filled his hand with water and took a drink. Wisting followed suit, and then they continued.

  The trip to the summit took an hour, as Martin had predicted. They walked to the edge, where the mountain plunged steeply downwards, to obtain the best view possible. Wisting struggled to find his bearings. The breeze tugged at his trouser legs as he looked out at the vista. He saw the lake where they had rowed and fished, and in the distance he could discern the sea as a darker blue stripe against the pale sky. Apart from that, the forest-clad landscape stretched out in every direction below them.

  ‘There you see Grenland Bridge,’ Martin said, pointing east.

  Wisting could see the two bridge towers projecting like spires. ‘Were you involved in building that?’ he asked.

  ‘Not the bridge, but the tunnel on the north side,’ Martin told him.

  Wisting picked up a stone and threw it over the edge, leaning forward slightly to see it land on the scree below.

  ‘It was my grandfather who brought me up here the first time,’ Martin said behind him.

  Wisting remained standing, with his back turned.

  ‘He said it was a site of historical significance,’ Martin went on. ‘The Vikings took their elderly up here, the ones who had become a burden on the community, so that they could sacrifice them. They also made people who had done irreparable harm and dishonoured their families throw themselves off.’