The Caveman (18 page)

The woman’s name was Irene Skisaker. Line accompanied her to
Jensens Conditori,
a run-down café nearby, and found a table where they could sit by themselves. She went to the counter and returned with cream cakes and coffee for them both. ‘There weren’t many people today,’ she said.

‘I thought I would be the only one.’ Irene curled her hand round the coffee cup, stretching slack, almost transparent skin across her knuckles.

‘The man who came was Eivind Aske. An old school friend of Viggo’s.’

Irene Skisaker smiled. ‘Was it you who bought the flowers?’

‘On behalf of the neighbours,’ Line said.

‘But you were the only one who came?’

‘I’m a journalist with
VG
,’ Line said, going on to describe the article she was working on. ‘It’s been difficult to find anyone who knew him. Someone who can tell me what he was like.’

Irene Skisaker sank slightly into her seat. ‘Why do you actually want to know?’

Line considered the question for a moment. ‘Because I think it’s so unfair that no one paid him any attention. It seems he never amounted to anything or meant anything to anyone. I thought he could come to mean something now, in a newspaper article, to remind us that we must take care of one another in the time we have together.’

‘He meant something to me,’ the woman said softly.

‘How did you get to know him?’

‘We were in the same hospital at one time. That was twenty years ago.’

Line gave the woman time to continue, but she did not add anything. ‘What hospital was that?’ Line asked.

‘Granli.’ The hospital at Granli outside Tønsberg was a district psychiatric unit for long-term treatment of patients with mental conditions. ‘I went through a period when I needed help, and that was where we met. You become fond of one another easily in a place like that. It’s as if you reach into the depths of someone’s soul all at once, and seeing the dark side makes it easier. It’s good to have friends who have gone through hard times and know what life’s all about. You don’t feel so alone.’

‘Why was Viggo Hansen admitted?’

‘He was suffering from delusions, but he was signed out long before me. After that, he came and visited, first at the hospital and later at home in Horten.’

‘You kept in touch?’

Irene Skisaker ran the palm of her hand over her hair. ‘For a while, at least,’ she said. ‘It was strange. When we were both ill, it seemed as if we could talk about everything, but outside the hospital we became more like strangers. We met less and less often, and then our contact petered out.’

‘How did you know about the funeral?’

‘My mother saw the announcement, in the nursing home at Søbakken. She’ll be ninety soon, but she likes to read the death notices. I’ve often thought I should pay Viggo a visit when I’m in the area anyway, visiting her. Once I even did that, but he wasn’t at home. At least, he didn’t answer the door.’

‘These delusions of his,’ Line said, treading carefully, ‘what were they about?’

‘He didn’t talk about it. He knew that the less he said about them, the quicker he would get out of hospital. It was to do with being possessed by evil spirits or something along those lines.’

‘Evil spirits?’

‘He didn’t call them that, but he got it into his head that someone had taken up residence in someone else’s body. At least, he was convinced that someone he knew was not the person he pretended to be.’

‘Who would that be? He didn’t know so many people.’

The woman shrugged. ‘As I said, he didn’t say very much about it.’

‘How long ago is it since you spoke to him?’

‘It was sometime in the mid-nineties, but then I received a letter last summer.’

Line straightened. ‘A letter? What did he write?’

The woman shook her head. ‘It was slightly disjointed and the handwriting was difficult to read, but he wanted to meet me. He wrote that he had been right all along, that he had never been ill, but all the same he wasn’t angry or bitter about being committed because, without that, he wouldn’t have met me, and now he wanted to see me again.’

‘Did anything come of it?’

‘I didn’t hear any more from him.’

‘But you replied?’

‘I wrote back, but it was probably already too late. In the death announcement it said he died in August, around the same time as the letter.’

Line had searched through the house and not found any letter from Irene Skisaker. One of the police reports had listed the contents of the mailbox outside, and that had not contained any personal letters either.

‘What had happened?’ she asked. ‘Why did he suddenly make contact after so many years?’

‘It was to do with him not being mad after all,’ Irene Skisaker explained. ‘That he had not been imagining things twenty years before. To me, it just looked as if he had become ill again. I wondered whether I should call the hospital and tell them but, you know how it is, people don’t like to get involved, so I let it drop. And then it was too late.’

‘I’ve come to know Viggo Hansen as a very lonely person,’ Line said, keeping eye contact with Irene Skisaker. ‘What you’ve told me about the two of you; does that mean he did experience love in his life?’

The woman opposite blushed.

The windows of the car were opaque with frost. Wisting started the engine and turned the heating on full before looking for the ice scraper. Exhaust fumes drifted around the vehicle as he worked with rapid, regular movements, tendrils of white frost curling from the windows in thin strips.

He sat behind the wheel with his arm stretched along the passenger seat behind Donald Baker and reversed along the snow-covered track.

‘What do we do now?’ Baker asked.

‘Concentrate on finding Robert Godwin,’ Wisting said, ‘not chasing his ghosts. If Bob Crabb found him there must be some clue in his apartment in Minneapolis to say what put him on the trail.’

The sun shone through the frosty trees on both sides of the track. Donald Baker leaned forward and peered up into the blue sky. ‘In that case, he must have taken it with him. Our guys have gone through every centimetre of that place. Every single document has been analysed and studied.’

They were back on the main road when Wisting’s mobile phone rang:
Morten P, VG
. Wisting ignored the call. Placing his phone on the centre console, he flipped down the sun visor and drove south-west. On the far side of the road, a man was travelling at a snail’s pace on a moped with panniers.

‘Where are we going?’ Baker asked.

‘Following the ancestral trail. Robert Godwin’s great-great-grandfather immigrated into America in 1889. He came from one of the farms out here. Godwin returned in his footsteps when he went on the run. I think Bob Crabb did the same and that was how he found him.’

‘Have you put anyone on this?’

Wisting nodded. ‘Torunn Borg is charting all the descendants of factory worker Niels Gustavsen. The farm he came from is on the other side of the hill.’

His mobile phone rang again, an Oslo number not stored in his contacts. He let it ring out.

They drove on in silence, passing a patchwork of frozen fields and deserted farms until Wisting dropped his speed and parked at the verge. Two brown horses stood on the frozen ground in a paddock, motionless, their heads leaning into each other.

‘Over there,’ Wisting said, pointing at a farm building beneath a forested ridge. A fine white ribbon of smoke rose from a chimney.

‘Who lives there now?’

‘A young couple.’ Wisting took out his notebook and read from it. ‘They’re not from this area, but they’ve been living here for a couple of years.’

‘We ought to speak to them.’

Wisting nodded. Bob Crabb might have sought them out in his search for Godwin.

One of the horses reared its neck and whinnied, as if something had suddenly unsettled it. Wisting put the car in gear, turned into the narrow farm track and drove to the farmyard. ‘I’ll be ten minutes,’ he said.

A lean and sallow woman in her late twenties appeared at the door before he reached the steps. A cat sneaked through her legs. According to the paperwork, her name should be Ada Alsaker. She had dark hair in a long ponytail that reached down her back.

Wisting greeted her with a nod. ‘I’m from the police,’ he said, showing his ID. ‘There’s nothing wrong, but I have a few questions regarding a case from last summer.’

The woman was flimsily dressed. She made no move to invite him in.

‘Do you have time?’ Wisting asked, nodding in the direction of the hallway.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. She crouched down and lifted the cat. ‘Come in.’

They sat at the kitchen table. ‘Are you alone?’ Wisting asked.

‘My husband’s in town. What did you say this was about?’

‘We wondered if you had any visitors last summer. An American?’

The woman lowered her head and raised it again in very thoughtful confirmation. ‘His family had lived on the farm here in the 1800s. Before the son of the house sailed to America.’

‘Do you remember his name?’

She shook her head. Wisting took out the photograph of the university professor, Bob Crabb. ‘Was that him?’

Ada Alsaker smiled when she recognised the face. ‘Yes, that’s him.’

Crabb had passed himself off as Godwin, Wisting realised. ‘When was he here?’

‘The day before my husband Eirik’s birthday, 15th July.’

The day after his arrival in Norway, Wisting thought. ‘What did he want?’

‘Just to look around, I think. He was interested in whether we knew anything about his family, whether we knew any descendants of the people who lived here in the nineteenth century.’

‘Did you?’

‘No. The people who owned the place before us lived here for ten years. I think it’s a long time since anyone from his family was here.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘No, but he took lots of pictures.’

Wisting took out the photos of the two unidentified wells, first showing the one with the pyramid-shaped cover. ‘Do you know where this is?’

The woman leaned forward and studied the photograph carefully. She shook her head: ‘No.’

‘What about this?’ Wisting asked, showing the one that was probably a soil irrigation tank.

She took it and held it up to the light. ‘This looks like over at Skaret.’

‘Where’s that?’

She stood up and crossed to the kitchen window, Wisting following. Donald Baker was still in the car with the engine running.

‘On the other side of the road,’ the woman said, pointing.

Cold grey mist lay like a pall over the landscape, but on the opposite side of the road Wisting could see a flat field and, where it met the edge of the forest, a broad track between two low hills.

‘I usually go riding there,’ she said. ‘I’m quite sure this is the old track through Skaret.’

Wisting thanked her and took back the picture. ‘Is it correct there’s a concrete tank there?’

‘Yes, it’s what’s left of the old soil irrigation system, but it’s no longer in use.’

Line drove out of Stavern, taking the main road past Tanum church to Brunlanesveien. A flat landscape with snow-covered fields and drooping spruce trees stretched out on either side. Buildings were scattered, and the houses numbered to a distance principle, with addresses allocated street numbers according to how far they were from the town, given to the nearest whole hundred metres. Brunlanesveien 550 was located 5.5 kilometres from the centre of Larvik.

The number was painted in black letters on a white plaque fastened to a telephone pole at a turning into a narrow side road. The house was situated under a snowy ridge several hundred metres from the road, a typical two-storeyed house from the seventies, with panorama windows and an entrance into the basement. The mailbox was marked ‘Linge’.

The spruce forest had encroached all the way to the walls, branches weighed down with snow and, as she drew closer, she saw that the place was in need of maintenance. Both paintwork and plaster were peeling, and the timber was rotting. Three satellite dishes pointed in different directions on the roof, one badly stained with rust.

There were no other buildings in the vicinity, but when you were stuck with the nickname ‘German Ole’, more than sixty years after the war, perhaps this was the sort of place you would want to live. She parked behind an old Mercedes.

Ole Linge greeted her without showing how he felt about her visit, no fleeting smile, welcoming look or brief nod. Only the pinched, stiff expression of someone accustomed to keeping his feelings to himself. ‘Come in,’ he said.

She took her boots off in the hallway and followed him upstairs. Everything in the house seemed old: laminated furniture, shagpile carpets, striped wallpaper and fringed lampshades. A television stood on a crammed bookcase.

He invited her to sit in one of two brown leather chairs beside a circular table in front of the window. A car towing a horsebox passed on the main road. Ole Linge must have waited for her here, watching her approach. ‘Thanks for letting me come,’ she said with a smile.

Ole Linge responded with a nod.

‘It was Annie Nyhus who told me you knew Viggo Hansen.’

‘Can’t really claim that,’ Ole Linge said, as he took his seat. ‘Must be twenty years since I spoke to him. Maybe longer.’

He picked up a remote control and turned down the sound on the TV.

‘You live on your own as well,’ Line remarked, thinking it could as easily have been Ole Linge dead in the chair.

‘That’s how things turned out,’ he said slowly, choosing his words carefully. ‘Have you talked to anyone else, other than Annie?’

‘I’ve spoken to Odd Werner Ellefsen and Eivind Aske.’

‘What did they tell you?’

‘Not much. They hadn’t had any contact with him for a long time either.’

‘Did they say anything about me?’

‘No.’

‘Who else are you going to talk to?’

‘I’m trying to track down Frank Iversen. Do you remember him?’

Ole Linge looked through the panorama windows.

‘He was the ship pilot’s son,’ Line said. ‘Do you have any idea what happened to him?’

‘He must have moved away. I haven’t seen him in years.’

Line drew out her notepad, although she felt the man facing her would not have much to contribute. ‘What I’m looking for is someone who can tell me about Viggo, as they remember him.’

‘I’m not so good at stories,’ Ole Linge warned her. ‘I’ve no wish to appear in the newspaper either. That’s not for me.’

‘Although you’re a few years older, I understand you spent a lot of time together when you were growing up. Do you recall any incidents?’

Ole Linge shook his head. ‘Viggo wasn’t very self-assured. The way I remember him, he usually stood on the sidelines, just watching.’ Line jotted some notes. ‘And then he was kind. Kind and helpful. There was never any nonsense with him.’

‘Did you visit him at home?’

‘Never went inside.’

‘Did you talk to his parents?’

‘Not much. They were like Viggo. Didn’t say much.’

Line stayed for another half hour. Ole Linge’s words were slow and measured, and although he did not say much about Viggo Hansen, he said something she could use in her article.

Loneliness is not being alone, but not having anyone to miss.