Closed for Winter (11 page)

The photographs of the man in the rowing boat were inserted into a dedicated folder in the electronic project room. Close-ups showed how extensive areas of his face had been ripped open by the seagulls’ beaks and claws. Despite these ravages, those who knew him when alive should still be able to recognise him. Around thirty years of age, he was slightly built. His small face had a low forehead, narrow jaw and square chin lightly dusted with stubble.

Wisting wondered what the missing eyes had gazed on not so long ago, and when they had last looked on the woman in the photograph. How often had the man laughed unwittingly as the seconds of his final hours and days ticked away? What had he seen when the truth, inescapably and irrevocably, dawned on him?

Closing the folder, he lifted the telephone and keyed in his daughter’s number.

‘Are you going to scold me?’ she asked.

‘Why on earth would I?’

‘Haven’t you read the online newspaper?’

Wisting clicked his way into the online edition of
VG
, where a photograph of the rowing boat on the beach illustrated the main headline. A number of uniformed police officers had arrived after Wisting left the discovery site, and the salvage vessel was in the process of taking the craft in tow. Line’s name was discreetly mentioned beneath the photo, though it had been tactfully omitted from the bye-line.

He often experienced the phenomenon of witnesses or others peripherally involved in crimes being tempted by money to be made from major newspapers. Line though, was simply doing her job. Not only that, she had given him a greater understanding of the importance of the police being open, honest and responsible in their dealings with the press, and that positive communication with the media was the best route to follow in order to reduce criticism of the force.

Many businesses and organisations worked assiduously to gain visibility in the media, but for the police it was a different story. They were the main suppliers of news material, giving them an exceptional opportunity to steer the information. They had to adhere to their duty of confidentiality and the data protection laws, but increasingly had to think of the media as partners.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

The newspaper gave an excellent summary of the case. Another corpse discovered in Larvik on Sunday morning had been connected to the masked murder victim found in a cottage belonging to the well-known TV celebrity Thomas Rønningen last Friday. The police did not know the identity of the new murder victim and were still bewildered as far as the first victim was concerned. Identification work had been considerably hampered after the hearse transporting the body to the Forensics Institute had been stolen and set ablaze.

‘I’m fine,’ his daughter assured him. ‘I don’t want you to worry about me.’

‘What was it like being interviewed?’

‘It’s not the first time that’s happened, of course.’

‘But it went well?’

‘Oh yes. He was very pleasant.’

‘Benjamin. Yes, he’s smart.’

‘I think he was a bit annoyed when I phoned the editorial team.’

‘I can understand that.’

‘Have you found out who he is? The man on board the boat?’

Wisting chortled. ‘I’ll send you a press release when we know anything further.’ He changed the subject. ‘Won’t you come home this afternoon and have dinner with Suzanne and me?’

‘Have you time for that?’

‘I’ll make the time.’

‘Okay, but I’m going to go back to the cottage afterwards.’ They arranged a time and drew the conversation to a close.

Benjamin Fjeld indicated his presence in the room by knocking on the open door. Wisting waved him in. The young policeman glanced at the computer screen and Line’s photograph of the discovery site. He seemed upset and Wisting wondered whether he should say something about his daughter’s role as a journalist. Instead he waited to hear what Benjamin wanted.

‘I think we’ve found the owner of the boat,’ he said, nodding towards the photo on the screen.

‘Tell me.’

‘I’ve just had a phone call from Ove Bakkerud.’ Wisting nodded. ‘He saw the online article and thinks it’s his. It was tied to a wooden jetty below the cottage. He hasn’t gone to see whether it’s missing, but thinks he recognises it all the same.’

Wisting placed one end of his ballpoint in his mouth and started to nibble. ‘That makes sense,’ he said, thinking how one of the men might have thrown himself aboard a fortuitous boat and fled into the darkness. The injuries he had already sustained later killed him.

‘The wind had been blowing in an easterly direction,’ Benjamin Fjeld replied, ‘which fits with the discovery site.’

Removing the pen from his mouth, Wisting jotted down a few keywords. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Are you going to follow this up?’

‘We’ve still got crime scene examiners out there. I’ll get them to check the jetty. Then I thought I should talk to the dog handlers about whether all this fits in with their findings.’ Benjamin Fjeld was already on his way out.

Wisting could now sit undisturbed with the case documents. Ten minutes later the telephone rang.

The caller introduced the conversation with a heavy sigh. ‘This is Anders Hoff-Hansen.’

Wisting recognised the name and the slightly brusque, pleasant voice of the pathologist at Forensics. ‘Have you completed the postmortem?’ he asked.

‘We have opened and closed the body,’ the other man confirmed. ‘But there’s something that doesn’t add up.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve studied the crime scene photographs and read the reports from your technician, and I can’t understand it other than that we’ve performed a postmortem on a different body from the one described.’

Wisting felt an icy sensation creep along his spine. ‘The body was totally incinerated of course, with charring on both skin and underlying tissue, but I’m not finding any outer lesions in the area of the abdomen as suggested by the crime scene photographs. On the other hand, there’s considerable tissue damage on the neck and throat. That’s where the cause of death is to be found. A projectile has pierced and penetrated the body.’

‘Shot through the neck?’

‘Precisely! I can find the entry wound, the projectile path and the exit wound, but it means this is a different corpse from the one described in your reports. The height and weight don’t tally either. The burnt corpse is a smaller person.’

‘How is that possible?’ was all Wisting managed to say, although the connection and explanation were already clear to him.

‘This is something you really should have considered earlier,’ the pathologist continued. ‘There’s obviously a possibility that this is the driver we’ve autopsied.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘That’s up to you, but we have secured tissue samples for DNA and taken X-rays of the teeth. It should be possible to obtain reference samples and dental records for the driver for comparison. Of course, it should be the ID group at
Kripos
that deals with all that kind of thing.’

The conversation wound up with the pathologist promising to send the preliminary postmortem report by telefax accompanied by a summary and conclusion. Wisting rushed to speak to Christine Thiis who was rounding off a telephone conversation as Wisting took a seat opposite.

‘I’m sorry about the footprints at the crime scene,’ she said. ‘That should never have been disclosed.’ Brushing this aside, Wisting described his conversation with the pathologist. ‘You’re saying that someone killed the driver and swapped the bodies? That means we’ve got three murders.’

Wisting nodded. He had never heard of such a thing, but could not see any other explanation. Obviously they were dealing with an unusually calculating and dangerous adversary, someone much like Rudi Muller. Wisting felt icy fingers crawling down his neck once more. It was imperative to make good use of time now. They must not lose their calm nor allow fear to gain the upper hand.

Leif Malm and William Wisting were about the same age. Malm, wearing a dark blazer and pastel-coloured shirt with a stiff collar, had a lithe physique and strong, heavyset features. Wisting had seen him speak on behalf of Oslo Police in television interviews as well as read about him in the newspapers. His impression of Leif Malm as a leader with authority was confirmed as soon as he opened his mouth.

The officer accompanying him, Petter Eikelid, was about thirty years old and short in stature for a policeman. He chewed gum, thankfully with his mouth closed, and greeted them with only a nod, dislodging a lock of dark hair. He did not look at Wisting, but glanced around the room instead.

‘For a while now we’ve been investigating a circle of people behind the importing into this country of relatively large quantities of cocaine,’ Malm said. ‘Given the size of their organisation they must have brought in almost a hundred kilos since May. The main man is called Rudi Muller.’

Petter Eikelid silently opened the folder in front of him to produce a surveillance photograph of a thickset man in his late thirties and of medium height, in a linen shirt opened sufficiently at the neck to reveal a thick gold chain. His smile only just lifted the corners of his mouth while the remainder of his face was immobile beneath thick black hair combed straight back. As he squinted in the sunlight, he brought to Wisting’s mind the thought of a sleepy panther wakened from its slumbers at the wrong time.

‘Sizeable business,’ Nils Hammer commented.

Leif Malm nodded. ‘Cocaine has a street value that varies according to its purity. Between two and four hundred kroner is the standard price of a gram.’

One hundred kilos meant a turnover of between twenty and forty million kroner.

‘The money is laundered in the entertainment industry and reinvested in restaurants and bars as well as land and property,’ Leif Malm said. ‘Three weeks ago, we acquired a source close to Rudi Muller, and he’s told us how the organisation functions and operates. Cocaine is only part of it. They bring in ten kilos every third week. The goods are delivered by contacts in southern Europe and transported here by boat over the Skagerrak from Denmark.’

‘That fits with our Spanish connection,’ Hammer noted, after explaining about the mobile phone found near the crime scene.

‘That’s our understanding of the operation too,’ Leif Malm said. ‘The arrangements are made in advance and, when the deliveries arrive, they give short messages via mobile phones which are impossible to trace. The cargo is shipped ashore and the cash payment transported out.’

Wisting recognised the smuggling
modus operandi
. This was how hash had come into the country when he started his police career almost thirty years before. At that time they had used fishing boats; nowadays, probably, large speedboats. ‘However, on Friday something went wrong,’ he remarked, bringing them back to the point.

Leif Malm nodded, tight-lipped. ‘Petter Eikelid had a meeting with his source this morning.’

The young policeman stopped chewing. ‘We don’t really know what went wrong,’ he said, his first contribution. ‘Only that the money and the drugs are gone, and two men died.’

Wisting glanced at Leif Malm. ‘You said that Rudi Muller lost one of his men.’

Petter Eikelid answered instead. ‘One man failed to return with the boat to Denmark. My source assumes that the guy found in the rowing boat early today is the missing Dane.’

‘I’m not quite following this,’ Christine Thiis admitted. ‘Are you saying that two men arrived in a boat from Denmark with ten kilos of cocaine, and two men came from Oslo with money to receive the drugs? Then it went wrong: shots were fired, we find two bodies, and both the money and the drugs have disappeared.’

Leif Malm smiled at her indulgently. ‘Both we and Rudi Muller believe that a robbery took place when someone learned about the plan. They went off with both the money and the drugs.’

Nils Hammer rose from the table to fetch the pot of coffee. ‘How much money?’ he asked.

‘Two million kroner, but Rudi is being held responsible for the drugs as well.’

‘How come?’

‘The goods have been delivered, but the European backers haven’t been paid.’

‘Have we any notion who was behind the robbery?’

Producing a packet of chewing gum from his pocket, Petter Eikelid pressed out a tab and placed it in his mouth. ‘No,’ was his succinct response.

Hammer returned to his seat. ‘Rudi Muller must have some idea where the leak sprung?’

‘He’s leaving no stone unturned.’

Wisting looked up from his notes. ‘Do you know who came here to collect the drugs?’

‘We think we know who was killed.’

Petter Eikelid placed a photo of a round-eyed young man whose pale face was marred by acne. ‘This is Trond Holmberg,’ he said. ‘He’s the younger brother of Rudi’s lady friend and hasn’t been seen since Friday morning when he was with Rudi in the bar at
Shazam Station
.’

A knot twisted in Wisting’s stomach. He took a drink from his glass of water.

‘
Shazam Station
?’ Christine Thiis asked.

‘One of the restaurants Rudi Muller part-owns,’ Petter Eikelid explained. ‘If Holmberg is identified as the charred body in the hearse, we’ll have made good progress.’

Wisting felt a blockage in his throat, only worsened by his attempts to clear it. ‘It isn’t Holmberg,’ he said. Swallowing, he explained what he had learned from the postmortem. The corpse in the hearse was probably the driver.

Taking deep breaths, Wisting struggled to control his thoughts beneath the blur of his colleagues’ discussion. Rudi Muller was a part-owner of
Shazam Station
, of which the man who had been living with his daughter was part-owner.

He swore inwardly. Where had his head been these past few years? He had distanced himself from his daughter’s relationship with this Dane, the same age as herself, mostly because he knew about his past and his criminal convictions. He had remained silent until he saw how the relationship developed and, after it became well established, had remained silent. He had been too resistant to involvement.

He had to concentrate furiously to appear unruffled. He had lived long enough to know that his intuition was worth listening to – it had guided him through serious cases, but now it concerned his own daughter, the most important person in his life. For fear of losing her he had kept to himself what he actually thought about Tommy. He had allowed her to live her own life, and now was turned inside out with anxiety.

During the first period they had been together, he had more than once searched for Tommy’s name in criminal records. Eventually he began to understand the qualities that Line appreciated. Tommy could be attentive and considerate, a good conversationalist who listened and was reflective, but Wisting had been naïve and he cursed his weakness. He should be the first to understand that criminals can have attractive characteristics. Now Tommy Kvanter was bathed in an altogether new and uglier light. Youthful petty criminal behaviour was one thing; involvement with one of Europe’s worst criminals was another. The thought of Line with such people made him feel ill.

He forced himself to participate in the conversation again.

‘So, we have a rational explanation,’ he said, putting into words the hypothesis that had taken shape in parallel with his own concerns. ‘Rudi Muller knows how the police operate. He knew that if the body was identified as Trond Holmberg we would connect him to the case, but we announced that the murder victim was masked and that we had to await the post mortem report before we could say anything about his identity. The television even showed pictures of the hearse leaving the crime scene. We wrote the story for him.’

‘All the same, it was an enormous risk to take,’ Christine Thiis said.

‘Typical of Rudi Muller,’ Petter Eikelid said.

‘What about the other man who was with him on the journey?’ Nils Hammer enquired. ‘Does the source know anything about him?’

‘Not yet, but he is meeting Rudi Muller this evening. We might find out more after that.’

‘Why did they bring the drugs ashore in our patch?’ Hammer asked.

‘It’s possibly an established route that Rudi Muller took over, but we also know he has connections here.’

‘What connections?’

‘It’s not on record, but he was collaborating with Werner Roos, now doing time, and he operates in the same network.’

Wisting nodded. Werner Roos was a property investor who had built up his business through narcotics.
Økokrim
, the financial crime department, led the investigation that put him away for eight years, but his outfit was still in operation.

Leif Malm held forth again. ‘Our informant says that Rudi Muller is under pressure to pay. A deadline has been laid down and the pressure will increase now one of the suppliers is dead.’

Christine Thiis turned to a fresh page. ‘How much of this can we use?’

‘All of it is classified. If any of it leaks our source’s life will be in danger. You’ll have to take it from there.’

Trond Holmberg’s arrest photograph lay in the middle of the table. Wisting pulled it towards him. ‘Does he feature in the DNA register?’

‘No, only photo and fingerprints.’

Christine Thiis seemed discouraged. ‘So we have a crime scene possibly covered in his blood, but can’t confirm.’

Wisting replaced the photo. ‘If Trond Holmberg is reported missing we have a way in,’ he said. ‘It would be reasonable to take reference samples from the family and compare them with unidentified bodies and profiles in other ongoing cases.’

‘With the exception of his sister, he’s not somebody who keeps much contact with his family,’ Leif Malm said. ‘But we can start a missing person report. We could draft a summons and look up his parents.’

‘Where is Rudi Muller now?’ Hammer asked.

‘We have surveillance on him. When we came into the meeting he was at his flat in Majorstua.’

‘What about monitoring his telephone?’

‘We expect to have all communications covered from early tomorrow,’ Malm confirmed. ‘The challenge is that we can’t control what number he uses.’

‘The most important thing now is to control the source,’ Wisting said, making eye contact with Petter Eikelid.

Eikelid looked away.

‘We need to know three things,’ Wisting continued. ‘Where is Trond Holmberg’s body? Who was the other man he was with? What is Rudi Muller’s next move?’

Leif Malm agreed.

Glancing through his notes, Wisting saw unanswered questions for himself as well. If it was true that Line had been living with a criminal for more than two years, with his silent approval, then he had many sleepless nights ahead. However, he would have to cope with that on his own.

‘As the case now stands, we’re looking for unknown robbers,’ he said. ‘But is there any chance that this wasn’t what took place?’

‘You’re thinking of a plain and simple showdown between the supplier and the recipient?’

‘Either that, or that this is all about something else entirely. Something we’re not seeing.’

No one had an answer.