Closed for Winter (22 page)

The woman who appeared in the door opening was in her mid-twenties, with a round face and blonde curls. Her eyes, more grey than blue, were red around the edges. She wore a buttoned brown coat with sleeves that were too short. Wisting recognised her instantly as the woman whose photograph Darius Plater had been carrying.

‘This is Anna,’ Teodor Milosz explained.

Wisting rose to his feet. ‘You’re Darius’ girlfriend,’ he said, introducing himself as a police detective from Norway. ‘My condolences.’

‘Thanks,’ the woman whispered.

‘Anna has been listening to our conversation,’ Teodor Milosz said. ‘But she wanted to meet you.’

‘I don’t want you to think of Darius as a thief,’ she said. ‘He loved Norway. He talked about all his experiences there. He had seen mountains and waterfalls along the roadsides, and described all the buildings that were both practical and beautiful. Norwegians were clever at making beautiful things, he told me.’

‘You speak good English,’ Wisting said.

‘Anna’s a university student,’ Milosz explained.

They sat down again, and Wisting listened to the woman. She had a great deal to tell him.

‘We have the same sun and the same moon in Norway and Lithuania,’ she said. ‘We live on the same earth, but our world is split in two. We are poor. You are rich.’

Wisting could not do other than agree.

‘Darius did not dream of being rich, but he did dream of a good life. For himself, for me and for the child we talked about creating. When people from poor countries like ours come to work or steal in your country, it’s not to become rich, but to gain enough money to stand on our own two feet. Of course it’s wrong, but poor people must always think of themselves. At one time, you Norwegians were poor as well. I think you have forgotten that, but you are so proud of your Vikings that you build museums for them. They were a hundred times worse than the Lithuanian people. They plundered, raped and killed, but now everyone thinks of them as heroes.’

‘Why did you go to Norway?’ Wisting asked, glancing across at Teodor Milosz. ‘Why not travel to Germany, or stop in Sweden?’

‘When you are going to do things that are wrong, it’s important that what you do is as little wrong as possible,’ Milosz said. ‘It’s better to steal from Norway, because it’s a wealthy country, than a poor country where people don’t have so much. Norway doesn’t notice if a person steals a hundred thousand kroner.’

‘What would you do if someone stole from you?’ Wisting countered.

‘I would be angry,’ was the reply. ‘But eventually I would think that the person who did it was desperate and needed money. People who have their belongings stolen must not take it personally. It’s only chance that it happens to them.’

Wisting looked at the three pale men in turn. In the annual reports about trends and tendencies in crime developments they were described as cynical members of organised gangs of burglars from the east. There probably were such people, but from what these men had told him and what Wisting himself had witnessed in this country, they represented a type of criminality that arose from necessity rather than immorality. It was easy to understand where criminality came from, but it was not a justification.

After Wisting embarked on his career in the police, the Norwegian economy had grown enormously. With the development of the welfare state, there were fewer poor people in Norway but, at the same time, crime had increased dramatically. The causes of criminality were considerably more complex, with elements other than poverty and need. However, the crime statistics in Norway would certainly look very different if the economy of Eastern Europe showed improvement.

‘When is he coming home?’ the slightly built woman asked, rousing him from his thoughts.

‘Sometime next week.’

Silence descended on the room once again. Teodor Milosz coughed. ‘We’ll drive you back,’ he said, giving instructions in Lithuanian.

Algirdas handed Wisting’s mobile phone, passport and wallet back to him.

‘I can take a taxi,’ Wisting said, as he stood up.

‘There are no taxis out here. We’ll take you back to your hotel.’

‘Wait,’ pleaded the woman who had been Darius Plater’s girlfriend. Wisting waited for the difficult question. ‘Will you get him?’ Will you catch the man who killed Darius?’

‘That’s my job.’

The breakfast room was filled with the smells of newly baked bread and percolated coffee. Martin Ahlberg sat at a table by the window and had almost finished eating. Wisting helped himself to orange juice and a large portion of bacon, egg and toast before sitting opposite his colleague.

‘I’m going home today,’ he said. ‘There’s a SAS flight via Copenhagen as early as eleven o’clock.’

Ahlberg set his cup down on the table but, before he managed to say anything, Wisting continued: ‘Teodor Milosz, Valdas Muravjev and Algirdas Skvernlis will come to the police station at twelve to provide formal statements. They’ll bring the stolen goods that haven’t already been sold.’

Prodding a rasher of bacon with his fork, he raised it to his mouth before explaining what had happened overnight.

Martin Ahlberg shook his head disapprovingly. ‘You’ve no idea what kind of people they are,’ he said.

Even when he left the hotel the previous evening, Wisting had been prepared for Ahlberg’s criticism. If the outcome had been different, it would have been justified. ‘I know now.’

Ahlberg sighed in resignation. ‘Do you believe them?’

Wisting saw no reason not to believe the Lithuanians’ version, although it did not provide a complete picture. They still knew only fragments of the story, with the most important parts missing. Before they left the breakfast table, they discussed some practical details about Ahlberg’s continuing work on the case. Wisting then collected his suitcase and checked out of the hotel.

Ahlberg accompanied him to the queue of waiting taxis. ‘It’s been a pleasure,’ he said, holding out his hand.

‘Thanks, same to you,’ Wisting replied.

He had come to know his colleague as a competent investigator. Methodical and thorough, but had to admit that they were very different in outlook.

He thought of Martin Ahlberg as a tired policeman, someone who had encountered too many people who had suffered from criminality, too many people whose security had been stolen. His everyday working life among East European criminals had rubbed away the nuances. You would think that the opposite would happen but, if you became weary enough, you lost the strength to absorb the complexities of the world. Then it was easier to see criminals and victims in black and white although, deep inside, you knew fine well that it wasn’t always easy to decide where the moral blame lay.

The legal blame was, as a rule, easy to allocate, but everyone who worked with criminality knew that morality was considerably more complicated.

An hour later he sat on seat number 18F watching the city diminish below him until it vanished in the grey carpet of clouds. Momentarily he ruminated on the arbitrariness of having been born in Norway in peacetime, and whether any kind of justice truly existed. The plane broke through the clouds to reveal blue skies all around.

Darkness descended as Wisting approached Larvik. The sky was clear, a deep shade of blue and the opalescent moon, full and round, was wreathed in quivering light.

The phone rang as he swung the car off the motorway. ‘Where are you?’ Nils Hammer asked.

‘Why are you asking?’

‘I’m at Gusland,’ Hammer explained. ‘You should probably come straight here and see for yourself. You were right. There’s another body.’

The conversation ended with no new information. Curling his fingers around the steering wheel, he took the road leading to Helgeroa. Ten minutes later he stopped at the parking area at the outer edge of the cluster of cottages that had been in the glare of media focus for the past week. The voluntary searchers were in the process of packing up, and the first journalist had arrived on the scene.

Some way along the path, he encountered a uniformed police officer who provided him with a flashlight and pointed him in the right direction. He followed a trail of broken branches. Ahead of him he heard the noise of generators and voices, and eventually took his bearings from the light shed by the newly erected floodlights.

Seven policemen huddled together on the discovery site, frosty mist swirling between them in the heat from the huge lamps. Hammer turned to meet Wisting as he crouched under the last branches and emerged onto the plateau. ‘Welcome back.’

Wisting thanked him, staring into the distance. Only then did he notice that policemen were standing on either side of a crevice that divided the hillside in two. Espen Mortensen hauled himself out as Wisting strode past.

‘He’s been lying here for a week,’ Mortensen said, adjusting his headlamp.

Wisting peered into the cleft, not at first understanding what he saw. It was a human body, lying approximately two metres below him. The head was positioned at an odd angle in relation to the neck, the mouth open and the eye sockets empty. On the right shoulder, a splinter of bone jutted from a decomposing wound, but there was something else down there too, that sent shivers through his body.

Around and across the dead body lay dead birds of different kinds, protected from foxes and other scavengers by the precipitous hillside. There were blackbirds, starlings, a couple of crows and several birds whose names Wisting did not know, enough to fill a sack.

‘We’re most probably dealing with an accident,’ Mortensen said. ‘He leapt right into the jaws of death.’

Rubbing his hand across his forehead, Wisting saw for himself what had happened after the unknown man Valdas Muravjev had met on the path stormed into the woodland. The drop had not been sheer, but in the darkness it must have been sudden and savage.

The corpse lay entangled in the branches of a birch tree, the roots of which protruded from the boulders at the foot of the chasm. Beside the dead birds lay the bag that Muravjev had told him about, its side ripped open and the contents spilled out.

Wisting jumped to the other side of the fissure. From this angle, it was easier to see. A number of brick-sized packages were scattered across the rocks, sealed in plastic and thick, brown tape. One of them had burst open, and the white powder packed inside had turned into a glutinous mass.

‘Cocaine?’

Nils Hammer nodded. ‘We think his name is Malte Ancher,’ he said, opening a folder he carried under his arm. ‘We received information from the Danish Police this morning. He was reported missing on Tuesday by his girlfriend in Aalborg.’

Wisting accepted the papers, but continued to listen.

‘He served a sentence at the same time as Klaus Bang in a prison in Horsens in 2006. It seems they’ve hung out together quite a lot since. Two years ago they were caught in a car with five thousand blue Valium tablets on the border between Germany and Denmark.’

‘Professional narcotics couriers?’

‘It’s not exactly professional to put two men in a car full of smuggled drugs, but it does at least seem as though they’re involved in that line of business. Klaus Bang was interviewed in connection with the missing person report. He says he was at home with a sore stomach all weekend and didn’t have any contact with anyone. He didn’t say a word about a boat trip.’

‘Have the Danes confronted him with our photographs?’

‘No.’

Wisting nodded in satisfaction. That gave them an excellent starting point for the investigation to follow. The photographs of the boat and the discovery in the rock crevice would be enough for a charge of aggravated importation of drugs. Klaus Bang risked more than ten years jail for that. The simplest course of action would be to put all the blame onto his dead friend. If he was smart enough, or managed to obtain a good defence lawyer, he could strengthen his credibility by giving the police details of their lines of connection with Norway. He could give them Rudi Muller.

As a light, cold mist began to settle over the landscape, Wisting pushed his hands into his pockets and drew his head down between his shoulders. ‘How are you planning to get him up?’

‘There’s equipment coming,’ Mortensen said. ‘We’ll rig up a tripod crane with a hand winch over the crevice, pull the body onto a canvas sheet and haul him out. That’s the plan.’

‘When can we have the ID verified?’

‘I’ve already been down to secure fingerprints. I’ll scan them as soon as I get back. Malte Ancher is on record in Denmark, but it’s not certain we’ll get an answer from them until their offices open in the morning.’

Wisting nodded in acknowledgement. Before leaving the discovery scene, he positioned himself so that he could look to the east. Now that most of the foliage was gone, the plateau made an excellent lookout point. A fine veil of mist drifted in the air, but he could make out the illumination from the lighthouse out at Tvistein and an island that must be Jomfruland. Further inland, he could distinguish the scattered outdoor lights of the cottages, closed for winter. Here and there, windows were illuminated.

The contours of what must be Thomas Rønningen’s holiday cottage were outlined against the backdrop of the sea and, to his left, lights were on in the cottage belonging to Jostein Hammersnes. He tried to pinpoint the cottage where Line was staying, but by now the mist was thickening and eventually he had to desist, turning his back on the panorama.

Recognising that he needed rest, Wisting drove home without calling at the police station. He called Leif Malm from his car. The leader of the intelligence section in Oslo answered at once, and Wisting gave a brief account of the discovery of the third body.

‘I’ll see what I can find out about him through our channels,’ Malm said. ‘I don’t know his name from our intelligence files, but there must be some connection to Rudi Muller.’

‘Any news about the planned robbery?’

‘It’s probably fairly imminent.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Days. We’ve informed the management of the cash service company, but as long as we don’t know anything about where or when, there’s little we can do. For the moment, they’re withholding the information from their staff. The probability of them getting information from the inside is high, and we can’t risk any leaks. The surveillance on Muller is tight, and we’ll have warning when things start to move.’

Wisting restrained himself before picking up the thread of the conversation they’d had at the scene of the fire. ‘At some point we need to interview Tommy Kvanter,’ he said, telling him about the results of his visit to Lithuania. ‘The Lithuanians confirm that the car he used that night was at the crime scene.’

There was such a long silence at the other end that Wisting wondered whether the connection had been broken. When he was about to ask if Malm was still there, he received his answer: ‘I think it would be unwise to do that now. It would reveal how closely we’re breathing down their necks. Before you do anything like that, we need to have Trond Holmberg’s DNA confirmed. That would link him directly to your crime scene.’

Wisting had to agree with this tactical assessment. If they played their cards in the right order, they should also detain Klaus Bang before exposing themselves to the circle surrounding Rudi Muller. All the same, he could not wait to pass on the information to his investigation group, and he would do that at the meeting tomorrow morning.

He rounded off their discussion as he swung the car in front of his house in Herman Wildenveys gate. The huge birch tree in the garden had dropped many more leaves since Suzanne had raked away a wheelbarrow-load earlier in the week. He carried his suitcase inside, to be met by glowing candles and a warm embrace.

‘Good to have you home again,’ Suzanne said.

‘Great to be back,’ he said, smiling.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘No, I grabbed a bite at a petrol station.’

They sat in the living room. Suzanne turned down the volume on the television and demanded to know how his trip had gone.

He recollected Lithuania as grey and grim, but Vilnius as a city of contrasts. After the fall of the Soviet dictatorship, a great deal of freedom had been returned to the people and, with that, a greater opportunity to influence their own lives. The economy of the country was making visible progress, but the poverty still remaining had made the strongest impression on him.

‘I’ve brought something for you,’ he said, standing up.

He stepped out to the hallway, where he opened his suitcase to produce the amber necklace. It dawned on him that this was the first time he had bought her a present.

Unwrapping it, she said, ‘It’s beautiful. You must put it on me.’ She returned it to him and pulled her hair up.

‘You don’t need to wear it all the time,’ he said, looking at the heart-shaped pendant. ‘I bought it mostly as a charitable gesture.’ He told her about the boy who had sold it to him in an alleyway in Vilnius.

Suzanne placed her hand on it. ‘That just makes it even more beautiful. It says so much about you.’

‘I have something else.’ He took out the knitted doll he had bought for a hundred litas, thinking of the little girl’s hopeful eyes, dirty hands and broad smile.

‘What’s that?’ Suzanne asked, pointing towards the suitcase.

Wisting picked up the glass ornament. The reflection from the candles on the table made it almost incandescent. ‘It’s a dreamcatcher,’ he said, handing it to her, ‘to hold all your thoughts about the future. You should have been given something like this.’

‘Who does it belong to?’

Wisting explained how the little glass figure was one of the most cherished objects that had been stolen from Jostein Hammersnes’ cottage, and how he had found it in a secluded storeroom in Lithuania.

‘He’ll be pleased to get it back,’ Suzanne said.

Wisting smiled, looking forward to delivering the glass pendant to the man who felt he had lost everything. ‘Have you spoken to Line today?’

‘I put together some food and had a leisurely lunch with her,’ Suzanne replied, handing him back the glass ornament. ‘She’s writing a book.’

‘A book?’

‘A crime novel, and I think she’ll manage to do it. She’s smart. If there’s something she wants to do, she usually manages to accomplish it.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘She didn’t say.’

‘Did you discuss Tommy?’

‘Not much. I think she worries about what he’s doing when he’s not with her.’

‘Like what?’

‘I didn’t like to ask, but she knows that some of the people he’s working with are involved in shady dealings. That was one of the reasons she finished with him.’

‘So it is all over?’

‘I think she became even surer of that after his visit.’

Wisting nodded in satisfaction.

A familiar face appeared on the television screen, and Suzanne turned up the volume to listen to Thomas Rønningen’s trailer for the next day’s programme. Among the guests were a couple of actors who both appeared naked in a new film, a politician who felt naked and exposed, and a celebrity from the world of finance who wanted his guests to swim in the nude at his spa hotel.

That’s what everything is about when push comes to shove, Wisting mused: money, power and sex.