Dregs (17 page)

CHAPTER 31

Wisting stood at the office window watching a fully rigged ship as it sailed out over the fjord with the sun shining on its sails. His neck and shoulders were stiff, and his muscles were tense.

Assistant Chief of Police Audun Vetti and Chief Superintendent Eskild Anvik were sitting in the visitors’ chairs behind him. Nils Hammer leaned against the filing cabinet.

Wisting had never had problems with motivation. An internal engine drove his work forward. Not particularly concerned about praise, social status or the avoidance of criticism, seeking out answers was motivation enough. The pursuit of a solution drove him on, the search for justice, the feeling of righting a wrong, creating balance, and in the end the satisfaction of achieving the goal. And of course, the more distant the goal seemed to be, the more motivated he became.

He heard the others eagerly discussing the case among themselves, but all he could feel was a sense of emptiness, an emptiness that held him back and made it impossible to get started properly.

He knew that motivation was a fundamental wellspring for all good police work. If he could not manage to keep up the motivation of the investigation group, then they would lose their power to act.

At the point they had reached in the investigation he would normally be in the kind of mental state where he was deeply focused and filled with a sense of being on top of things. He was not there at the moment. Instead he felt exhausted, and found himself thinking about how good it would be to go to bed that night.

‘Although we have some crosses on a map, it will be like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ he heard the Chief Superintendent say. ‘How many billion cubic metres of water was it the oceanographer was talking about? It’s nine months since the corpses were dumped. What can we expect to find out there?’

Wisting turned to face them. Although he did not feel up to it he had decided that he would not show that to the others. He had to avoid them focusing on the obstacles they might encounter. To motivate his team he would have to look for reasons that they would be successful, not point out all the pitfalls.

He was about to speak when Espen Mortensen appeared with a pad full of notes.

‘They have a remote controlled mini submarine at the diving centre in Stavern,’ the crime technician explained. ‘It has an operative depth of 700 metres.’

Wisting walked round the table and sat down. Technological developments had made undersea searching far more practical than only a few years previously.

‘Great,’ he commented, moving the large package wrapped in grey paper that had been delivered by messenger earlier that day, and prepared to take notes.

‘It’s equipped with two video cameras, a still camera, a grabber, floodlights and sonar.’

‘When can they be ready to operate?’ Wisting wanted to know.

‘They’re in more or less constant readiness for search and rescue, and can be there in an hour.’

The Chief Superintendent held up his hand.

‘What does it cost?’

‘There’s an hourly charge of 3,450 kroner. That includes someone to drive it and a boat with a skipper. The pictures can be relayed over the internet so that we can sit here and watch.’

‘Good lord … a search like this can go on for days, weeks, without any guarantee of a result.’

Mortensen checked the notes on his pad.

‘The mini submarine has a breadth of field of 4-8 metres, depending on the visibility conditions in the water, and must have an overlap of 1-2 metres in order to retain a high percentage of certainty for the area being searched. It travels at a speed of 2.5 knots maximum. The area that Ebbe Slettaker has marked on the map is about one square kilometre. It will take one week to search through it all.’

‘A week?’

‘Forty hours.’

Wisting did a mental calculation and saw that the Chief Superintendent, who was responsible for the budget, did the same.

‘We are talking about five possible murders altogether,’ he said before the Chief Superintendent reached his answer. ‘We have budget entries for extraordinary expenses. I want them to get cracking in an hour’s time.’

CHAPTER 32

Line raised the camera, capturing Age Reinholdt’s workman’s hands in her lens. He was sitting with a crab pot between his legs, working on the ropes at the opening. His movements were quick and experienced, his hands firm and tanned. Hands that had taken the lives of two women.

She had bought a used digital
Hasselblad
a year before. Although it had one previous owner, she had paid over a hundred thousand kroner for it, and thirty thousand more for two lenses. She had always wanted a camera like this. No other camera could capture natural colours and nuances in the same way, not least when it came to skin and skin tones. It had been a
Hasselblad
camera that photographed the first men on the moon. The pictures had gone around the world, so immediate and real they made people feel that something had changed forever.

She would not have been able to afford it if it hadn’t been for the fact that, four years earlier, she had ended up in a situation in which she took a series of photographs during the arrest of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. The hateful face of the defeated man had been splashed on front pages all over the world. The moment was preserved for posterity in 1/250 of a second, but still it notched up royalties every time it was printed. That infinitesimal fraction of time had paid for the deposit on her flat in Oslo, and was also most certainly, when all was said and done, the reason that she now worked for the biggest newspaper in the country. Afterwards, she had thought of it as an example of synchronicity, a number of accidental occurrences that added up to a meaningful coincidence. Perhaps it had been the same for the man sitting in front of her. That the mysterious game of chance had turned him into a double murderer.

She pushed the thought away. Whatever random events could lead to, life still meant making the right choices. Although everything that happened had a connection to something else, people had free will and the ability to affect both their own life and the lives of others.

The first impression she had formed was that Age Reinholdt was a reserved man who lacked self-confidence. His handshake limp and lethargic, the accompanying facial expression vapid. No smile or friendly nod.

He had got up when she arrived, but sat quickly back down on the straight-backed chair beside the faded wall of the house without inviting her to sit.

She had read somewhere that people are biologically programmed to make lightning decisions. The brain does not take unnecessary time to think through what has to be done in a critical situation and the same function comes into force when meeting new people. It takes only seconds to make up your mind about the person to whom you are saying hello. In meetings with interview subjects, Line regarded it as a moment of truth.

Age Reinholdt seemed almost uninterested in her presence. He looked down at his work, or fixed his eyes on a point over on the edge of the woods. She had difficulty in deciding whether it was shyness or arrogance that made him like that.

He finished working on the pot, got up, placed a stone sinker inside it and put it in the back of a pickup truck together with a pile of others. The table in front of them was used as a workbench. Battens of suitable length lay ready together with lengths of cord to fit.

‘Do you sell them, or do you fish yourself?’ Line asked.

‘I fish myself,’ Age Reinholdt explained, beginning on a new pot. ‘I’m up and pulling them at four o’clock every morning. The first pan is on the boil at half past seven. When the shop down at Sondersrod opens, I’ve got between 100 and 150 crabs for them.’

‘As many as that?’

‘It varies, of course, but the secret lies in the bait.’

‘What do you use?’

‘That’s what the secret is.’ He put his work down and smiled at her with a row of teeth that spoke well of the dentistry service in Norwegian prisons. ‘Crabs can smell underneath the water,’ he claimed.

Line returned his smile and remembered how she had fished for shore crabs when she was little. It never took many minutes from the time she had fastened a mussel onto the line and cast it out until the first crabs appeared. She had never thought about it, but it had almost been as though they could smell the bait.

‘They smell with their antennae,’ he explained, wiggling with his fingers on his forehead. ‘They can smell a tasty morsel up to a kilometre away.’

‘What kind of tasty morsels do you lure them with?’

The man facing her had taken on a different energy now, a kind of involvement.

‘I get out of date meat products down in the shop,’ he said, ‘packets of sandwich toppings, chops, tenderloin, and juicy steaks. The more perished and bloody, the better.’

‘Do you make a living from it?’

Age Reinholdt shook his head.

‘I’ve received disability benefit from the day I was released. The money from the crabs is more like holiday money.’ He leaned back, staring straight ahead. ‘That was the life I dreamed about. My grandfather fished with pots, and that was the way I always thought my life would be. It took a few wrong turnings, but now I’m here.’

‘Where did you go wrong?’ Line asked, feeling her way with words so as not to cross him in any way. ‘What was it that led to the wrong turning?’

Age Reinholdt remained sitting, not uttering a word.

‘My mother died when I was eight,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve never understood what she died of. It was as though she just withered away. One Sunday morning she didn’t get up. In the evening they came and carried her away.’

Age Reinholdt took hold of the tobacco pouch that lay on the deal table in front of them. Line nodded, as an encouragement for him to continue.

‘Afterwards I sometimes thought that it might have been best that way. She escaped.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He hit her,’ he said by way of explanation, dividing the tobacco in the paper. ‘Hurt and tormented her. I don’t remember much of it, just that I crawled onto Mum’s lap when his eyes darkened. I thought that he wouldn’t strike out while I was sitting with her. I remember the smell of her and the fast heartbeats before she lifted me down and told me to go into the living room and turn on the radio.’

He put the rolled cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a lighter. Then he took a deep breath, took out the cigarette and spat.

‘That’s a part of the story, but I don’t know if it has anything to do with what happened later. With what I did.’

Line held on to the eye contact she had with him and cocked her head to the side.

‘We lived in a flat in Sagene. Dad worked in different workshops along the Akerselva river. In the evenings he and his pals sat at our house drinking. Maybe I was unmanageable. He did everything to make me pay attention, hit me, burned me with cigarette butts, shut me in or threw me out. It was all the same. I began to drink to escape.’

The dry tobacco crackled when he inhaled.

‘I’ve had plenty of time to think about these things,’ he continued. ‘Talked to people who are experts. Psychologists and that. They think I’m transferring and repeating the violence on to others, but I don’t believe that keeping me locked up has made me less violent.’

Line leaned forwards. The conversation was going in the right direction.

‘Yes? What effect has prison had on you?’ she asked.

Age Reinholdt leaned across the table, pulled an overflowing ashtray towards him and tapped the ash off his cigarette.

‘It’s made me mad,’ he said, spitting once more. ‘You need to go mad when you are left to your own devices and to your thoughts, confined in a space of six square metres for most of the hours of the day. I remember the anxiety that got hold of me when I had scratched five lines on the edge of the table and realised that this was the way I was going to spend the next ten years. It sat like a lump in my belly. Do you know how many lines there’s room for along the edge of a table that measures one and a half metres?’

Line shook her head.

‘757. Two years and 27 days. I continued on the ends, and turned the table round a year later. Then I still had another 2000 lines to go, but there was no room for any more. It didn’t matter anyway. By then I had lost any overview a long time before. The days and weeks ran into each other. The only way I could register that a week had gone past, was that the food was served at different times at the weekends. It was something you looked forward to. That dinner was at three o’clock instead of five.’

‘All the same you ended up in jail again,’ Line said cautiously. ‘Ten years after you had been released.’

‘Madness,’ Age Reinholdt asserted with a nod. ‘It won’t happen again.’

‘What did you do for all these days? All those hours?’

‘When I served the first sentence, in the seventies, there was no TV in the cells, so the solution for me was books. The prison had a good library, and I tried to escape reality by immersing myself in books. I didn’t read a single other book after I was released.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and let his hand rest around an empty coffee cup.

‘The second sentence was actually worse, although there was cable TV in the cells and various leisure options. In the course of the first six months I realised that I might as well not exist at all. I meant nothing to anyone. I had no one to use my phone time on, and no visitors. I was just there, exactly like a potted plant. I became depressed and self-destructive and began to slash myself with knives, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I really existed.’

Line scrutinised his arms and saw the scars she hadn’t noticed before. Some of them ran lengthwise and were deeper than what would be called slashes. She wanted to take photos of them, but considered that it would be inappropriate to lift her camera while the man in front of her was still talking. Instead she jotted down some keywords: depression, psychological difficulties, suicide attempts. Age Reinholdt shed light on aspects of imprisonment that other interview subjects had not opened up on.