Dregs (13 page)

He scrutinised the faces: women with children in their arms, men with bare chests and large bellies, a couple of young boys on bicycles. There was nothing in particular to notice. Neither was there anything to suggest that whoever was behind all this could know the fourth foot would be washed up exactly here, exactly now.

‘What the hell is happening?’ Hammer groaned, bringing Wisting back. ‘What are we talking about? Someone who kills and dismembers, and who throws the left feet into the sea?’ Wisting did not reply, but acknowledged that it was beyond his comprehension. ‘Why are we not finding the remainder of these people?’ Hammer continued. ‘We’ve had people searching the beaches and rocky shores for days, but nothing has turned up.’

‘If this is her foot …’ Wisting began. Loud voices from the press corps fifty metres behind them interrupted him. The journalists were drowning each other out and the photographers pressing their triggers.

Audun Vetti forced his way through, presented himself inside the barrier and raised his hands. ‘I shall have a discussion with my investigators, and then return with a statement,’ Wisting heard him announce.

‘
My
investigators,’ Hammer chuckled.

The Assistant Chief of Police descended with purposeful steps. He stopped to stare at the foot on the powdery shells. ‘A left foot,’ he declared. Wisting saw no reason to disagree. ‘It appears … fresh,’ Vetti continued.

‘That was our impression too,’ Wisting conceded.

‘Is it hers? The missing nurse?’

‘It’s too early to say.’

The Assistant Chief of Police peered over his shoulder. ‘But what shall I say to that bunch up there?’

‘As I said, it’s too early to say anything at all.’

‘We must confirm the discovery at least?’

‘Must we?’

Vetti remained standing. ‘Do we know anything more?’ he asked. ‘Is there anything more we can talk about?’

‘The less we say, the less there is to retract if it turns out to be wrong.’

Vetti nodded, smoothed his hair over the bald crown, turned and approached the waiting crowd.

‘What if it is hers?’ Mortensen asked, preparing to remove the foot. ‘You were about to say something when Vetti arrived. Some kind of deduction.’

‘Nothing, really, but Vetti is right, naturally. If it is Camilla Thaulow’s foot, it confirms that there is a connection.’ He turned round, staring across the shining sea. ‘It means that we are only three days behind the culprit. We are about to catch up with him.’

CHAPTER 24

William Wisting parked at one of the visitors’ spaces at the Rodberggrenda housing co-operative, and looked around.

He should have come here earlier. As soon as it became clear they were facing something more than a straightforward missing persons case he should have sent investigators for new interviews with the relatives. It was several years since he had realised that his greatest weakness as a leader was that he couldn’t bear to entrust important investigation tasks to others. It was both a wish and necessity for him to have a close involvement with the assignments he thought most essential. It was not enough to read a report, a statement or a record of an interview since he could not reach through reading the sort of intuitive impression that might emerge in a conversation, and that might expand into a chink in the mystery.

Looked at this way, his worst enemy as an investigator was time. Not that he considered it a growing advantage for the perpetrator, whom he knew he would catch eventually, but it was a challenge to get time for everything. He had taught himself to be sure to have time enough for the most important things. As a rule it didn’t involve making a choice, only approaching tasks in the correct order. He didn’t like any sense of losing control. At the same time, he had to take time to allocate tasks to others when it was often just as easy to do the job himself. Nevertheless, it demanded that he prioritise his different duties and this was very challenging in itself.

The car door slammed behind him. At one time, in the 1970s, the Rodberggrenda housing co-operative had represented the new way of thinking about housing. With its playgrounds and common outdoor areas the intention was that the residents should feel as if they were living in a village. Now the decline was obvious. Vandals had put their various signatures in a row on the garages. The grass on the small lawn between the parking area and the row of houses was scorched and filled with clover and withered dandelions. The fence around the playground had fallen in places, rubbish bins were overflowing, and children of varying ages played around a rusty climbing frame. Both the game and the conversation were conducted in a foreign language.

Kristin and Mathias Lauritzen lived in the middle of a row of seven flats. They were both in their mid-fifties. She was Otto Saga’s daughter, and he was the youngest son of Torkel Lauritzen, who had disappeared from the nursing home within three days of each other. It was this ‘coincidence’ that had placed their names high on the list of people he wanted to speak to.

A background check on them had already been carried out. Mathias Lauritzen had been receiving disability benefit, and his wife Kristin worked as a cleaner in a children’s nursery. A number of payment defaults had been noted in their credit records, enough to check their alibis against the possibility that something criminal had taken place. Money was always a possible motive for a criminal act. Since they didn’t have an exact time of day for when the old men had vanished, it was difficult to come to any conclusion. Their alibis were not watertight for all the hours involved, but appeared credible.

Before he entered, Wisting had already formed an impression of the married couple that he could not have obtained from simply reading about them. A lawnmower was standing in the middle of the little lawn in front of the house after someone had left the job half-finished. On the staircase, there were three tied plastic bags filled with stinking rubbish. An overflowing ashtray was balanced on the banister. The nameplate on the door also displayed the names of the sons who had left home long before. All this spoke of the people who lived here.

It was Kristin Lauritzen who opened the door. She was plump and her face was puffy. Her curly hair was dishevelled, as though she had been lying sleeping.

‘I phoned earlier today,’ Wisting said after introducing himself.

The woman responded with a nod, showing him in. The air was stuffy and warm. The architects for the housing co-operative had laid out the flat in traditional fashion with the kitchen and bathroom to the left of the entrance door, a corridor that led to an L-shaped living room with tall windows on to a small balcony and flimsy doors that divided two adjacent bedrooms from the living room. Most of the internal furnishings looked as if they had been there since the flat was new.

Mathias Lauritzen was sitting in a deep armchair. He was a large, stocky man, and stared at Wisting with blue, watery eyes. He did not get up, but moved a weekly magazine from his lap as the policeman entered.

‘Is there any news?’ he asked.

Wisting sat down. ‘We’ve received answers from the tests that the forensic experts have carried out on the feet,’ he began. ‘They confirm that the first shoe that was found belongs to your father.’

Mathias Lauritzen said nothing. It didn’t seem as though the information affected him at all.

‘What about the others?’ his wife asked.

Wisting shook his head. ‘We haven’t had it confirmed that any of them belongs to your father.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No DNA relationship has been established between yourself and any of the finds,’ Wisting elaborated. ‘The forensics experts are carrying out another analysis of the samples, but there is nothing to suggest that the result will be different.’

Mathias Lauritzen got up, flinging the magazine onto the coffee table. ‘Fuck,’ he swore, taking several steps out of the room before turning, coming back and sitting down again. ‘I’d hoped we could soon be finished with all this.’

‘We won’t be finished until we know what happened,’ said his wife cautiously. ‘It’s not certain that we’ll ever be finished with it.’

‘But it would’ve helped if we could get them declared dead, so that we could move on and put it all behind us.’

Wisting took out his notepad. Until just a few days before, they had all thought that the disappearance cases involved their fathers having an accident of some kind. The discovery of the severed feet suggested something more. ‘What do you think has happened?’ he asked. Neither of them could give an answer. Wisting straightened up, asking the direct question: ‘Do you know of anyone who might wish for this to happen?’

‘Are you asking if the old man had any enemies?’ Mathias Lauritzen enquired.

‘Did he?’

‘Enemies …’ The man in the deep leather chair seemed to relish the word. ‘Not any longer. For the past forty years, the enemies have existed only in his own head.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Soviet invaders,’ Mathias Lauritzen explained. ‘The communists were his enemies. They were Kristin’s father’s enemies too,’ he went on, nodding in the direction of his wife, ‘Our fathers were members of a military group sitting in readiness for an occupation.’

Wisting raised one eyebrow. ‘Readiness for an occupation?’

‘The cold war,’ Mathias Lauritzen explained. ‘They were afraid that Stalin would invade Norway and were active in the intelligence network.’ He held up his hand. ‘You mustn’t ask because I don’t know much more. The whole network was exposed in the media at the end of the 1970s, I don’t know any more than that. The old man never talked about it, at least not to me who’s never been in the military.’

Wisting had difficulty shaping his thoughts, but it was as though something had opened up. He felt he might be close to something important, something they had previously overlooked.

‘Otto was the leader,’ Mathias Lauritzen continued, referring to his father-in-law. ‘Of course he worked in the Air Force, and got to study a lot of things in the newspapers. I think he was the one who recruited the others.’

‘Who were the others in this group?’

‘Head teacher Lund was involved in any case,’ Mathias Lauritzen said. The expression on his face changed as soon as he had said this, as though he had made a discovery. ‘But for fuck’s sake,’ he exclaimed, getting up once more. ‘He’s away too of course. What’s happening, really?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’

‘Have you found a foot belonging to him?’ Kristin Lauritzen asked tentatively. ‘Head teacher Lund’s?’

Wisting shook his head. ‘How many were in this group?’ he asked.

Mathias Lauritzen shrugged his shoulders. ‘A couple more, at least,’ he replied. ‘Four or five altogether, I think.’

‘A group of five?’ Wisting suggested. The man did not react to the suggestion. ‘Was Christian Hauge a member of the group?’ he went on.

‘Liv’s father? I don’t know, but it could well be. Dad and he had a lot of contact, but I don’t think they had much to say to each other after what his grandson did. He shot a policeman. You know about it?’

Wisting nodded and rose abruptly from his chair. ‘I’ve got something I want to show you,’ he said. ‘I’ll just nip out to the car.’

He walked towards the door, without either of the two residents bothering to accompany him. He went over to his car, got out the old photograph and returned directly to the living room.

‘Do you know anyone in this picture?’ he asked, placing it in front of them.

They both leaned over. ‘That’s Dad,’ Kristin Lauritzen said, pointing to the man on the right of the middle step on the stairway. ‘That’s Mathias’ father sitting beside him. Where did you get this?’

‘I got it at the nursing home,’ Wisting said. ‘Do you recognise anybody else?’

Kristin Lauritzen frowned, concentrating on the picture. ‘Is that Lund, the head teacher?’ she asked, pointing to the man at the very back on the right. ‘We had him at school, though he wasn’t head teacher then.’

Wisting confirmed this. ‘Do you know who this might be?’ he asked, indicating the man with the pipe on the front step.

They both scrutinised the picture, but finally shook their heads.

CHAPTER 25

Wisting studied the photo of the shoe and foot that had washed ashore at Blokkebukta cove. The wing-shaped Nike-logo was blurred by dried salt water. The picture made him think of Gary Gilmore. On the 19th July 1976, he had robbed a petrol station on the west coast of the USA and killed the man behind the counter. The next day, he did the same thing again at a motel. He was sentenced to death and, six months later, shot by a firing squad in the American state of Utah. With that he became the first person to be executed after the reintroduction of the death penalty in the United States by the Supreme Court earlier that year.

Gary Gilmore asked to die. He refrained from all opportunities to appeal, and attempted to kill himself before the authorities did it. Since that time, over a thousand people had been shot, gassed, hanged, poisoned or killed in the electric chair in the USA. In the course of the same period, more than a hundred innocent people condemned to death had been released from death row. Among other things, new DNA evidence had demonstrated their innocence and rescued them from execution. How many innocent people were in their graves no one knew.

Wisting saw before him the headlines that were spread out over the kitchen table at home where Line was working. A thousand executed criminals in just over thirty years was around the same number of people who had been sentenced for murder in Norway in the same period. History had taught them that, in Norway too, people had been wrongly convicted of murder. The difference was that in Norway none of the criminals convicted of murder had been executed. Eventually they were released into society again.

A few years before, he had read a book about Gary Gilmore. For his last meal, he had eaten a hamburger, hard boiled eggs and baked potato. He ended the meal with coffee and three glasses of whisky. Then he got up, saying,
‘Let’s do it!’

Wisting traced the line of the curved Nike-logo on the picture with his finger. It was part of the Gary Gilmore legend that his last words had led to the advertising people at Nike coming up with the advertising campaign
Just Do It
. The three syllables became a slogan that not only persuaded people all over the world to exercise more and become healthier, but also women to leave their rotten husbands, and young boys to pluck up the courage to ask girls out on a date.