Dregs (31 page)

‘The five-man group was shut down in 1990,’ Wisting reminded him, rubbing his eyes. ‘And although they were in good physical condition, I can’t quite see it. Grandfathers working together, with one of their grandchildren, on what would be described as the coup of the times.’

They remained sitting for a while, throwing theories back and forth, without any result other than the conviction that they were close to something significant. They still didn’t quite manage to grasp what was in the knowledge they possessed.

Wisting leaned his head against the window again. The sound of the wheels on the wet asphalt made him sleepy, but the feeling that there were small, significant details still overlooked prevented him from dropping off.

The police station was empty when they arrived. It was almost nine o’clock and most of the investigators had done more work than he could impose on them. He himself had been awake since Torkel Lauritzen’s body had been found beneath Bondebrygga quay at Nalum eighteen hours before.

He made a quick visit to his office to look through his messages, without finding anything of interest, before going home.

It had stopped raining. The water was lying in puddles on the uneven surface of the yard in front of his house in Herman Wildenveysgate. Dry branches had broken off the tall birch tree beside the driveway and were strewn across the stone slabs.

Heavy clouds darkened the summer evening. He let himself in and switched on the light and the radio to break the silence. Then he suddenly felt hungry. There were still a few cartons of yogurt in the refrigerator. He ate one at the kitchen worktop, then helped himself to another and brought it with him into the living room. The bundle of documents dealing with the police murder was lying on the coffee table. Without quite knowing what he was looking for, he sat down and began to leaf through them.

It didn’t take him long to find it.

In the hunt for possible accomplices, the social circle round Ken Ronny Hauge had been interviewed and had to account for their movements on the night the murder took place. The person who was regarded as having the best alibi was Daniel Meyer. Wisting remembered reading that before. Daniel Meyer was a weekly commuter and lived in workers’ accommodation in Oslo. A colleague picked him up from his home at 05.30 on the morning of Monday 23rd September, and they had driven together to the city.

The interesting thing was where in Oslo Daniel Meyer was living and working. At interview it had been logged that he worked for a contractor who was building a large office block on the site of the old match factory at Helsfyr. Wisting could envisage the red brick buildings in the east end where underpaid factory workers had laboured under life-threatening conditions. At the beginning of the 90s, that had been Daniel Meyer’s place of work. Almost wall to wall with the bank that had been the scene of one of the most spectacular robberies of the time. Through long working days Daniel Meyer had been able to study how customers had come and gone, what the work routines were, and how the bank was constructed.

Wisting swallowed as something fell into place, a sense of how the police murder and the safety deposit box raid were connected.

He turned the pages to find Daniel Meyer’s colleague who had given him a lift. He confirmed the alibi but had nothing to mention, apart from Daniel Meyer being, as usual, very tired. He dozed in the car all the way to the capital city.

The distance from the scene of the murder at Eikeren to his home in Stavern was not more than a hundred kilometers. Even though the roads then were worse than now, it was possible to drive it in an hour and a quarter. The policeman had been killed between 04.00 and 04.15. It would have been possible for Daniel Meyer to get back to Stavern in time to be picked up by his work colleague. It could have been part of an already planned alibi for the bank raid.

Wisting hugged the papers he was holding to his chest and laid his head back in the chair.

They were getting there, was the last thought he managed before he fell asleep.

CHAPTER 57

It was still raining when Wisting awoke. At some time during the night he had moved from the chair in which he had fallen asleep to the settee.

The roof of his mouth and his lips were dry after sleeping with his mouth open. He licked his lips, grunted and sat up. The clock showed that he should have been at the office half an hour earlier. He had slept for almost ten hours, but did not feel rested.

He thought about lying down again, but remained seated, trying to collect the thoughts he had fallen asleep with. They seemed even more vague than on the previous evening, but nevertheless he managed to assemble them so that they emerged in a logical way. It was Ken Ronny Hauge and Daniel Meyer who had committed the bank robbery almost twenty years previously. Probably Daniel Meyer had planned it, inspired by his grandfather’s tales of heroic exploits during the post-war period. The opportunity must have presented itself as he became familiar with the bank’s routines and saw how he could enter from his work on the scaffolding at the building site.

However, although Wisting now had an understanding of the factual circumstances surrounding the police murder, he had difficulty comprehending its direct connection to the case he was now investigating.

His starting point had to be that the money the three old men had exchanged was part of the proceeds of the robbery. It had lain hidden somewhere or other until the passage of time meant that it had to be exchanged if the entire booty was not to be lost. The fifty-kroner notes had already become too old and were simply dumped in the sea, together with the murder weapon. What he did not understand was why the old men had to pay with their lives. And what parts were played by the mentally ill woman Hanna Richter and the carer Camilla Thaulow? As though these questions were not enough there was also the fact that the feet of the murder victims had been chopped off. What could the meaning of that be?

He sighed heavily before gathering up the papers from the police murder into a bundle and going through to the kitchen. He took the last yogurt carton from the fridge and decided to phone Line in the course of the day to see how she was getting on. He went through to the bathroom, undressed and had a shower. The water heated up quickly. He closed his eyes and leaned back into the jets of water. They still didn’t have anything tangible, he decided. They still needed to find proof.

After his shower he made a plan for his working day, put on clean clothes and left in his car. Instead of driving directly to the police station, he swung off the road at Agnes and drove down to Daniel Meyer’s house by the sea.

The pretext for talking to him was the same as the last time he had driven down the gravel path. He wanted to ask about the pistol that his grandfather had entrusted to him. It would be the start of a conversation that might move the investigation forward.

There were no other cars in the yard in front of the house. Perhaps Daniel Meyer had put his own car into the garage, or else he was not at home again.

Wisting parked, got out and slammed the car door behind him. He scrutinised the windows as he walked to the door, but there was nothing to indicate that anyone had heard him arrive.

The pennant on the flagpole was flapping in the wind. A seagull took off from a rocky outcrop and struggled upwards with its wings against the wind. The doorbell did not produce any response.

Wisting went round the house and peeped in through the verandah window. On the inside, everything seemed untouched since his last visit. Books and notes lay across the coffee table in the same way. The single wall light shone on the wall behind the settee. That meant that Daniel Meyer had not been home for twenty-four hours.

Cold rain was driving obliquely in from the iron-grey sky. Wisting pushed his hands deep into his trouser pockets, strode across the small patch of lawn behind the house and up onto the sloping rock that divided the property from the sea. The waves below him churned up murky sand and gravel on the beach. He stood watching the waters before straightening up against the wind and taking out his phone. He called the operator and asked to be connected to Daniel Meyer’s mobile phone. He went back to the front of the house while the phone was ringing and tried the door handle. Locked. The phone rang out, and no one answered. He turned and went up to the post box that was situated on the driveway. He picked up two newspapers and glanced at them - today’s and yesterday’s editions, and the local. The case he was working on dominated the headlines. The day before, the money trail was the most important news, while today the headlines read
Two new corpses discovered
. Those were the body at Bondebrygga quay the night before and the other that had been found at Rovika. The photograph was credited to the landscape photographer who had reported the discovery.

The newspapers were getting wet in the rain, and he replaced them in the post box. Then he went down to the rear of the house again and up onto the verandah. He tried the door. It was locked too, but he pulled on it a couple of times and felt how ramshackle it actually was.

It was an old-fashioned lift and push door that was locked at the frame with a simple hook-type latch. Weather and wind had caused movement in the woodwork, and an attempt had been made to fill the gap between the door and the frame with a rubber strip.

Wisting looked about and caught sight of a barbecue utensil hanging on a hook beside the gas barbecue. He took the fish slice, pressed it under the door and lifted it up. It was easier than he had thought. With a little jerk he jacked the hooked latch up and out of its keeper, and then the door was open.

‘Hello?’ he shouted into the house as he took his first step inside.

He received no answer.

‘Hello,’ he repeated, calling out that he was from the police before going from room to room, just to confirm that they were empty.

He stood facing the coffee table that Daniel Meyer used as a home office. In the main, there were copies from various reference works and printouts of old newspaper articles that had been stored on microfilm. Working notes looked as though they were connected to his book project. It appeared, however, that the work had been pushed aside. Several articles about the case he was investigating were lying in the middle of the table. On top were printouts of internet reports about the money trail and how the missing men from the five-man group had exchanged large sums of cash. Wisting leafed through the collection of articles and also found an account of the old fifty-kroner notes that the boys at Lydhusstranda beach had found. Right at the bottom were much older newspaper cuttings on which the paper was yellowed and the date 1st July 1999 was noted in ballpoint pen.

Washhouse burned to the ground
was the headline. The photograph that illustrated the piece had been given a larger space than the actual text. It showed the black, burned out shell and a chimneystack that were left after the intense blaze, and a couple of firemen coiling up hoses. Wisting skimmed through the text. It had to do with an abandoned, small farmstead out at Brunlanes. He had to look back and forth between the description of the place and the picture before he understood that it concerned the place where Ken Ronny Hauge had gone to live after being released from prison. Now he recognised the ruins from the fire in the picture as well. Parts of the chimney were still there by the sea.

Wisting put the cutting back into place with the others. He did not know what it might mean, but Daniel Meyer must obviously have seen it in connection with the new clippings.

He looked around and discovered that he had left wet footprints on the floor. He didn’t quite know what he had expected to find, but for one moment imagined that Daniel Meyer was lying dead in one of the rooms.

He thought about whether he should look for the pistol since he was in the house, but decided instead to leave. He had no legal grounds for going in. The man who lived here might be suspected of having participated in the murder of a policeman almost twenty years previously, but the case had not yet expired under the statute of limitations. He had no right to ransack his house.

He went out the way he had entered. The sliding door was more difficult to lock than to work open, but he managed. Wet prints on the parquet were all that gave away the fact that someone had been inside, and they would soon dry up and disappear.

CHAPTER 58

The corridor in the investigations department was strangely empty. Wisting went down the corridor with its open doors and vacant offices. Computers had been left without anyone having logged out, and at several of the desks there were half-empty coffee cups, as though the investigators had abandoned their posts in a hurry. Not even the girls in the criminal proceedings office were sitting in their usual places.

Further down the corridor he heard excited voices coming from Espen Mortensen’s crime technician room.

Silence descended when Wisting entered. Everyone turned to look at him, before turning their eyes again to the computer screen that was broadcasting pictures from the bottom of the sea outside Tvistein lighthouse.

A woman was standing on one leg, her arms to the side and her head inclined backwards as she moved her body slowly and rhythmically. The picture on the screen reminded Wisting of a ballet performance.

The woman was Camilla Thalow. Her body rocked backwards and forwards in the light from the powerful lamps of the mini submarine. She was dressed as described in the police bulletin that had gone out a week before: long dark trousers, a white blouse that was swaying in the water, and a pair of white training shoes.

Round the ankle of one leg there was fastened a steel wire that stretched down to the grey sea floor. At the other end, it was tied to something that resembled the axle of a car that functioned as a weight.

The mini submarine manouevred in a circle round the dead woman. Little fishes were frightened and rushed off, but came back again right away to nibble small pieces of flesh from her face and wherever the skin was bare.