Dregs (16 page)

Wisting bowed his head, thinking of the telephone conversation he had ahead of him with Mrs. Lund, and started to walk to his car, but didn’t manage to leave the beach without answering questions from the reporters. He stood facing them and nodded to indicate that he was ready. A few of the photographers circled him to avoid shooting too directly into the sun. The light on the television camera glowed red.

‘Can you confirm that yet another foot has been found?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, expressing himself formally. ‘The police received a report just before twelve o’clock that a shoe had been found floating in the sea outside Solplassen. It contains probable human remains. We have taken charge of it and will be conducting further investigations.’

‘This is the fifth,’ one of the reporters ascertained. ‘Are they from five different people?’

Wisting swallowed. He would need to take upon himself the task of correcting the misapprehension.

‘This is the fourth shoe,’ he explained, listening to how his voice remained steady and calm. ‘There was an announcement of a similar find at Blokkebukta cove yesterday, but closer examination of that shoe has confirmed that the contents were not human.’

The group in front of him drowned each other out with their voices. He didn’t catch any questions, but understood that he must elaborate further. The simplest way was be to completely open.

‘The shoe contained slaughtered pig,’ he stated. ‘We think that it is a crude joke.’

‘What’s your opinion of it?’

‘It is blameworthy and lacking in respect.’

‘Has it ruined the investigation?’

‘It has hindered us, and that is unfortunate, but it has not exactly wrecked the investigation.’

‘Are you any closer to a solution?’

‘We are working in our customary fashion with a number of different theories.’

Wisting saw that the journalists were going to form a critical follow-up question about the lack of results from the work of the police, so he moved his eye to the female journalist who was standing beside the man with the television camera.

‘How can you know that the foot you have now found today is a real one?’ she asked.

Wisting noticed that some children were jumping up and down behind him, trying to get into the recording. The cameraman moved to avoid them.

‘Both the shoe and contents show signs of being in the water for a long time,’ Wisting elaborated, turning towards the camera. ‘The find appears to be all too real.’

‘But can you confirm whether it involves a fourth victim, or if it is a body part that can be connected with the earlier discoveries?’

‘It is a fourth victim,’ Wisting confirmed, deciding that that would be enough. ‘There will be a written statement in the course of the afternoon.’

There were a few more questions, but Wisting excused himself with a quick nod of the head. He glanced over to the shore before returning to his car. Then he stopped abruptly and turned to the people who were still standing in small groups chatting about the discovery and suddenly remembered where he had seen the war historian Daniel Meyer earlier: he had been one of the spectators when the counterfeit foot had been found out by Blokkebukta cove.

CHAPTER 30

Ebbe Slettaker had connected his computer to the projector that was suspended from the ceiling in the conference room, but had not yet switched the projector on. The oceanographer alternated between glancing over his thick glasses at the computer screen, and at the investigators who gathered round the table. The Chief Superintendent and Assistant Chief of Police were present also.

Wisting made use of the time while the oceanographer was getting his presentation ready. Four feet in total had been found. One of them had been confirmed as belonging to Torkel Lauritzen who disappeared from Stavern nursing home on 1st September the previous year. Another could be said, with a strong degree of certainty, to belong to the psychiatric patient, Hanne Richter, who had been reported missing on 10th September, but who had probably disappeared several days prior to that. It was reasonable to suppose that the foot found less than two hours earlier belonged to the retired head teacher Sverre Lund, who had failed to return home on Monday 8th September. The fourth foot was a mystery. The DNA profile had excluded the possibility that it belonged to the fourth missing person, Otto Saga, and no other people had been reported missing in the surrounding area.

‘Why are we finding only feet?’ Hammer asked, reaching for the coffeepot.

The oceanographer stole a glance at them over his spectacles.

‘Different body parts float in different ways,’ he said. ‘Wind and tide divide them up.’

‘Are you ready yet?’ Wisting asked, looking at his computer screen. It showed rows and columns with numbers in different coloured areas.

‘Shortly.’

Wisting continued to give an account of the missing men’s membership of the five-man group and the secret alert force. The investigators leaned forwards and began to take a deeper interest. All the same, there was little they could get to grips with or take direction from.

‘Perhaps we ought to bring in one of those profilers?’ the Chief Superintendent suggested, using an American accent to pronounce a word that did not have a good Norwegian equivalent. ‘An expert who can say something about the personal characteristics of the person we’re looking for.’

Wisting thought he could see the Assistant Chief of Police light up at the thought of releasing such novel news at the next press conference.

‘Surely we’re not as desperate as that?’ Hammer said.

‘Would it not give us a pointer about whether we’re searching for a man or a woman, how old he is, what kind of background he has? Education, profession, family, motive? Whatever?’

‘All we have is four feet.’ Mortensen reminded them. ‘We haven’t got a crime scene or a murder weapon. That’s not much of a basis on which to build a profile. It would be simply interpretation and guesswork. All we would end up with would be a conclusion based on theories without any proof, a hypothesis. We can’t base an investigation on that.’

‘I can tell you what kind of person we’re looking for,’ Hammer interjected, drinking from his coffee cup. ‘A madman.’

No one had any objections to that.

‘I believe,’ Torunn Borg said, speaking for the first time, ‘that the solution might lie far back in time. That someone has dug up something or other in their mutual past, such as these secret military operations, for example.’

‘Hanne Richter breaks that pattern,’ the Chief Superintendent protested. ‘The same applies to Camilla Thaulow, who disappeared on Tuesday.’

‘But there is a connection,’ Torunn Borg continued. ‘Hanne Richter was living in Christian Hauge’s house.’

‘Besides, she was mad,’ Hammer went one, ‘and most likely knew a lot of other mad people.’

‘Christian Hauge died of natural causes,’ Audun Vetti reminded them. ‘He is not a part of the investigation.’

‘He was a part of the five-man group,’ Torunn Borg said. ‘If nothing else, that puts him in a peripheral role.’

Wisting nodded. He thought they had got an interesting discussion going - that was the way that most thoughts and ideas emerged.

‘What about Camilla Thaulow?’ he asked. ‘How does she fit in?’

‘She worked at the nursing home where Christian Hauge, Otto Saga and Torkel Lauritzen all lived. She might have come across the same secret that cost the others their lives.’

The Assistant Chief of Police clearly did not think that this discussion was going to be productive.

‘What kind of secret would that be?’ he asked, shaking his head.

No one could give him an answer.

‘Something or other must have happened in September of last year,’ Hammer said. ‘That was when they disappeared.’

The discussion round the table went on to deal with what had dominated the news nine months previously, the presidential election in the USA and various consequences of the international financial crisis.

Wisting closed his eyes, feeling how tired he was as the others talked. Probably they were looking for an event that had never reached the newspaper pages. When he thought of all the documents he had read in the past few days, there was all the same some kind of September connection. Seventeen years earlier, Ken Ronny Hauge for unknown reasons had shot and killed a police officer, an event that had cracked open the close solidarity within the five-man group. In August of last year, Christian Hauge was the first member of the group to die. Shortly afterwards three others disappeared.

He thought he could just about make out the contours of something, that he might be close to something he would soon be able to grasp, but for the moment he chose to keep it to himself. It was too flimsy - just a fleeting thought.

He opened his eyes again, jotting down a keyword.

Following the discussion among the investigators the oceanographer leaned back. Although his assignment was confined to calculating possible trajectories of drift for the feet he had signed a declaration of confidentiality and been granted full access to the investigation material. That meant they didn’t need to take care when they were discussing the case in his presence.

‘Are you ready?’ Wisting asked again.

Ebbe Slettaker nodded, starting up the projector with the remote. A map of the archipelago outside Stavern came up on screen.

‘I have taken a long time to program in data about tides, wind and the topographical formation of the shore area,’ he explained. ‘I have constructed a model of the actual sea area covering 400 square kilometers and containing about 25 billion cubic centimetres of water by volume.’

Wisting peered at the map. It stretched from Malmoya island, east of Larviksfjorden, down to Langesundsbukta in the west. To the south it disappeared in the Skagerrak with Tvistein lighthouse as the most outlying landmark.

‘The strongest tides in the inner part of the Skagerrak consist of tidal water that raises and lowers the water surface by 0.24 centimetres in a period of six hours,’ expanded the hired expert. ‘That means a flow of around 3 billion cc of water. On the bottom and at depths of more than 90-100 metres, the speed of the flow of tidal water will be relatively little, while on the surface it will be greater.’

The listeners nodded. Although the amount of background knowledge they had was insignificant it was the result that was important.

‘The last foot that was found today, confirms and strengthens my theory,’ Ebbe Slettaker continued.

Wisting leaned back in his chair. The man with the thick glasses spoke with a professional gravity - he liked what he was hearing.

‘I would nevertheless remind you that we are discussing the forces of nature,’ the oceanographer went on. ‘I give no guarantees about these results, the middle value of a mathematical calculation.’

Ebbe Slettaker finished his introduction and bent over his computer. He pressed a key and a blue cross appeared as a marker for the first discovery on the southern peninsula of Stavernsoya island.

‘The first shoe was found at 58 degrees, 59 minutes, 12.24 seconds north and 10 degrees, 3 minutes and 9.58 seconds east.’

Wisting could feel the beginnings of impatience.

‘I have calculated the following trajectory of drift,’ Slettaker elaborated, pressing on the keyboard.

The map on the wall came to life, almost like an animated weather warning on the internet. A clock up in the right corner gave the time. Minutes and seconds moved backwards at the same time as a blue line grew. It was drawn in a faint arc towards Svenner before it stretched towards Rakkebaene, passed Tvistein lighthouse and disappeared out into the Skagerrak.

‘Illustrative,’ Espen Mortensen commented in recognition of the work Ebbe Slettaker had undertaken.

‘The next foot was found here,’ continued the oceanographer as a red cross appeared up in Corntinbukta outside the shipyard area. He refrained from giving the longitude and latitude degrees and set the animation going instead. A red line drew itself from the little cove, moving outside Rakkebaene and touching the blue line before going off the map.

Wisting leaned forwards. The picture that was, literally speaking, drawing itself in front of them, was interesting.

A green cross marked the discovery site in Skravika. The line drawn from the third find stretched out in the same direction as the others, crossed the red line and disappeared out in Langesundsfjorden.

The discovery of the fourth foot was marked in a deep yellow. All of the crosses lay within a kilometre of each other.

The yellow line stretched from the beach at Solplassen, and followed the same arc as the others towards Svenner before it passed the area with deep banks and shoals outside Rakke and travelled south of the lighthouse at Tvistein. Right at the outer edge of the map it crossed the three other lines.

‘A tangent point,’ Nils Hammer remarked pertinently.

‘Do you mean that the rest of the bodies are lying out there?’ the Assistant Chief of Police wanted to know.

The oceanographer got up, walking across to the screen.

‘The newspapers are writing that the bodies have possibly been butchered after being murdered,’ he said, looking round at their faces. ‘I have understood that that is a theory you have, too. That the bodies have been cut up and dumped in the sea, but that the feet have escaped from their packaging, while larger body parts may still be on the bottom of the sea.’

Wisting nodded. Ebbe Slettaker had put into words what they had each thought but not properly formulated.

‘The estimated drift trajectories can point to this area,’ he pointed to where all four lines joined, ‘being the probable starting point for an undersea search. It’s here that you will possibly find the dregs.’

He walked back to his computer and remained standing, leaning over it.

‘Moreover,’ he expanded, looking at them over his glasses, ‘we can combine the calculations with logic and healthy common sense.’

He clicked on the keyboard once more, and a row of small numbers appeared on the screen.

‘This area is the deepest part of the actual waters,’ he elaborated, pointing to an area southeast of Tvistein lighthouse. One of the numbers he rested his finger on showed a depth of 357 metres. ‘If I wanted to drop something in the sea in the hope that it would never come to the surface again, that is where I would do it.’