The Caveman (24 page)

The sound of the shower woke Line. She propped herself up, rocking slightly on the unfamiliar soft mattress before letting her head fall back on the pillow. Waking in a strange hotel room was something she was unused to, but it felt neither wrong nor embarrassing.

John emerged from the bathroom, hair dripping, with a towel round his waist. ‘Awake?’ he asked with a smile.

Line sat up, wrapping herself in the quilt with a modesty that was several hours too late. He leaned over the bed and kissed her. ‘I have to go to a meeting. Is that okay?’

She smiled in response. Not having any clothes other than the ones she arrived in, she would really prefer to be alone while she dressed.

‘It might be a long day, but I hope we can meet again this evening. Maybe you could show me some more of this town of yours?’

‘I have to work too,’ she said, ‘but text me if you decide on something.’

He disappeared into the bathroom again, appearing five minutes later in a white shirt, dark suit and tie. He kissed her again, this time tasting of toothpaste, picked up the
Do not disturb
sign and crossed to the door. ‘Stay for as long as you like,’ he said.

Line threw back the quilt and sat on the edge of the bed as soon as he closed the door. They had not shut the curtains before going to bed, and she could see it had started to snow again. Dense white flakes whirled through the air, covering the skies with a semi-transparent, hazy veil.

Retrieving her underwear from the floor, she made for the bathroom and the shower. The water was exactly the right temperature. She soaped herself, closing her eyes and turning her face into the warm spray, letting the water wash over her as she rested her back on the shiny white tiles. For a long time she thought over the previous evening and night, and found she regretted none of it. Her mind turned to Viggo Hansen.

She turned off the water, picked up a towel and began to dry herself, pulled on her underpants and leaned over the wash basin to wipe the condensation from the mirror and examine the smile on her own face.

John Bantam’s toilet bag sat beside the basin with an ID card caught between a toothpaste tube and a deodorant stick. It bore the photograph of the man she had spent the night with, but that was not what drew her attention. It was the letters FBI. She lifted it out and studied it more closely.

Special Agent John Bantam of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice
.

She took a step back, clutching it in her hand. She felt her blood run cold.

He said he was an analyst, she recalled, that his work consisted of gathering information for public authorities and looking at things in context. Her thoughts churned inside her head. John Bantam worked for the FBI. What on earth was he doing in Norway? What sort of assignment was he on?

A number of small details suddenly fell into place, details that gathered into a single mass of great enormity. The case her father would not talk about. Sandersen who had phoned from the news section and the forensic scientists who were ordered to work overtime. The team of crime scene technicians from
Kripos
who were on standby. All of it centred on a man found dead among the Christmas trees at Halle farm. She had no idea what was going on, but knew now it was something really major.

The case had brought an FBI special agent to Norway. That must be how it all fitted together. Line felt her heart sink. She felt dizzy and confused.

She left the bathroom, located her bag and took out her phone to find it had run out of juice overnight. Anyway, she did not know who to call, her father or Sandersen at the news desk. Obviously there was a story here, a massive story. She could not remember the last time the FBI had assisted or cooperated with Norwegian police. The paintings The Scream and Madonna had ended up on the FBI’s top ten list of the world’s most wanted stolen works of art when they were swiped from the Munch museum in Oslo, but she could not recollect the FBI being involved in an investigation in Norway.

Her hair was still damp when she departed through the hotel’s front entrance and swept a fresh layer of snow from the windscreen. Lobbing her bag onto the front passenger seat she sat behind the wheel. She heard slipping and grinding noises from under the bonnet before the motor fired up and stabilised into a regular rhythm. The heating system blasted cold air through the interior and she dipped her head to peer through the opening in the layer of condensation at the bottom of the windscreen.

After a few hundred metres, the engine began to misfire, jerking and spluttering worse than ever and the speedometer dial dropped from sixty to fifty. She tried the old trick of pumping the accelerator, and for a few minutes the engine ran as normal, the dial crept from forty to forty-five, but then the rattling began again. She pressed the accelerator to the floor, but this time it had no effect. Instead the engine began to knock, and she was thrown forward in fits and starts. The warning lights on the dashboard flashed, the car was reduced to a crawl, and traffic started to pile up behind her. She used the remaining forward momentum to turn into a bus stop. When she lifted her foot to brake, the car shuddered one last time before coming to a complete standstill.

She turned the key in the ignition. The starter motor cranked slowly, but there were only a few grunts from the engine. She moved the ignition key backwards and forwards, took it out and inserted it again several times while pressing the accelerator. The wipers slid halfway across the windscreen and stopped. Beads of perspiration broke out on her forehead.

‘Come on!’ she shouted, turning the ignition yet again as she pumped the accelerator pedal, but to no avail. She remained seated with her hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. Heavy grey snowflakes were falling, already blanketing the windscreen.

As she was not suitably dressed for walking, she rooted around in the glove compartment and centre console to see if she had a mobile phone charger. In the pocket on the driver’s door she found a bright yellow reflective waistcoat, still packed in transparent plastic. She felt idiotic, but pulled it on and stepped into the snowy landscape. If luck was on her side, it would not take long until some acquaintance happened along and gave her a lift.

She skirted to the back of her vehicle, opened the boot and removed the warning triangle. As she had never needed to use it before, she struggled to set it up. When she turned to place it on the road verge, a car pulled into the bus stop and drove right up to her before stopping. The driver got out and asked, ‘Do you need help?’

At first she was pleased to see a familiar face. Then she noticed the darkness in his eyes and realised that something was very wrong.

The National Bureau of Investigation detective was called Ingemar Bergquist and he was a
kriminalkommissarie
, a detective superintendent, one of the highest ranks attainable without a law degree in the Swedish police hierarchy. A serious man of around fifty, Wisting suspected his wavy black hair was really a
toupee
. He carried five thick case files that he stacked on the table.

In addition to Wisting, six others were seated: Leif Malm from Kripos seated beside his Swedish colleague, Christine Thiis, Espen Mortensen, Donald Baker and John Bantam, who had just arrived, breathless, in the conference room.

Wisting would have liked to have Nils Hammer with him, but had sent him to Halle farm to locate the well, apparently situated about fifty metres from where Bob Crabb’s body had been found. He asked Donald Baker to give an account of the FBI’s investigation twenty years earlier, before summarising their own case in broad brushstrokes.

First the dead body among the Christmas trees, followed by the brochure with Robert Godwin’s fingerprints, the strands of female hair in Bob Crabb’s fist and the list of missing women.

‘A woman’s hair?’ the Swedish police officer queried. ‘Are you quite sure of that?’

‘We’ve conducted two independent tests,’ Espen Mortensen said. ‘The conclusion is absolutely unambiguous.’

Ingemar Bergquist shook his head uncomprehendingly. The stiff hairs on his
toupee
moved unnaturally. ‘How do you explain that?’

‘A wig,’ Wisting said. The word emerged just as the idea entered his head. ‘Robert Godwin has in all likelihood changed his appearance. That also applies to his hair. He is probably using hair extensions, a wig or
toupee
. They use real hair when they make them. Poor women in eastern Europe and India sell their hair to wig-makers.’

Espen Mortensen stared at him open-mouthed, before closing it and nodding in agreement. ‘That could certainly be an explanation,’ he said.

Wisting gave Donald Baker leave to speak again, to report on Robert Godwin’s origins, and explain their theory that he had decided to go on the run to Scandinavia, and how he now lived, having assumed another man’s identity.

‘A caveman,’ the Swedish policeman said. ‘Interesting.’

‘We are attempting to close in on him in two ways,’ Wisting continued. ‘Firstly by trying to find the alias he is now living under. Secondly, we believe he has chosen to hide in our area because this is where his family originated. This is the same trail that Bob Crabb spent years tracking and that brought him here last summer. We believe Godwin may have come back to his roots and are investigating the branch of his family that remained in Norway.’

The Swedish police officer made notes while Wisting was speaking. Now it was his turn.

‘On 27th July 1996, Agneta Gunnarson disappeared,’ he said, placing a picture of a young woman on the table. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail tied with a fur-fabric elastic band. ‘She took a bus to Torp shopping centre, seven kilometres outside Uddevalla town centre. All trace of her ends with an image from a CCTV camera outside the H & M department store at 15.23.’

He took out another photograph. Another young blond woman. ‘Sonia Thuv was last seen at the Daftö campsite outside Strömstad. She had a summer job at the kiosk there, but never arrived home after it closed on the evening of 4th August in 1999.’

The third woman’s name was Lisbeth Larsson from Gothenburg. ‘She intended to hitch a lift to Kungsbacka on the evening of 11th June 2002. The last sighting we have was at an intersection near Mölndal, just south of Gothenburg.’

‘We have a hitchhiker too,’ Espen Mortensen interjected.

‘Several of the victims in Minnesota were too,’ Donald Baker said.

‘Anja Lundgren also tried to hitch a lift,’ Bergquist told them, placing an image from a CCTV camera dated 28th June 2008. ‘The last witness observation was from a Q8 petrol station at Hisings Backa, north of Gothenburg.’

The Swedish detective arranged the four photos already lying side by side on the table and added a missing person poster showing a short-haired girl in her late teens with big blue eyes and freckles on her nose. ‘Last summer Kikki Lindén went missing. They found her bike behind a bus shelter at the exit road north of Trollhättan.’

Wisting picked up the photo. ‘When last summer?’

‘18th July.’

‘Four days after Bob Crabb came to Norway,’ Mortensen said.

‘What made you think these cases are connected?’

‘A stubborn old mule of a policeman. The detective at Trollhättan police station assigned to the Kikke Lindén case simply did not give up. When they ran out of clues he searched for similar disappearances and found these five. All young, blond women, who went missing within a limited area. Not mentally ill or suicidal, we have no reason to believe they were victims of an accident or disappeared of their own free will. They distinguish themselves in another way too. They do not belong to the type of women we sometimes receive reports about. They were not married to violent husbands, did not frequent an environment where drugs and prostitution were prevalent, and had no criminal associations. They were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

Wisting nodded. This summary would cover the women on their own list.

‘Have you any clues?’ Christine Thiis asked.

‘Nothing,’ Ingemar Bergquist said. ‘Five cases with no specific clues.’ He gathered up his photographs. ‘What do you have?’

Christine Thiis left Wisting to answer.

‘We have ten cases. At least ten cases, all with no trace.’ He went on to reiterate how they had two lines of enquiry. One involved circling in on Robert Godwin, the other searching for bodies he may have hidden.

‘At what stage is your enquiry now?’ Bergquist asked.

‘We are in the process of opening the fourth well.’

‘And this American serial killer?’

‘We don’t know if we’re closing in, and there is of course a danger that we push him away.’

‘That can be an effective method of pursuit,’ the Swede said. ‘Frightening the prey in order to pounce when he tries to flee.’

‘It’s one thing finding him,’ Wisting said, ‘but that’s when our work really begins. We also have to link him to every single victim.’

‘The geographic spread gives us an advantage,’ the Swede suggested. ‘We need to chart his movements and draw that timeline over the victims to see if they coincide in time and place.’

Wisting agreed. His Swedish colleague envisaged the same tactical approach. However, connecting Robert Godwin to crime scenes years and decades back could prove an impossible task.

The last Swedish case of the girl from Trollhättan, however, gave them hope. Four months was a relatively recent case in terms of the timescales involved. If they succeeded in linking him to one case, the
modus operandi
would connect him to others and the cases would collapse like dominoes.

‘If we’re lucky, he’ll have placed all his eggs in one basket,’ the Swede continued. ‘Shall we head out and see what we can find in the fourth well?’

Donald Baker and Ingemar Bergquist drove to Halle farm in Wisting’s car. Behind them, Espen Mortensen followed with Leif Malm and John Bantam.

The snow again created chaos on the roads. A bus had stopped in the middle of the lane in front of Wisting to let a passenger dismount. A snowed-in car was parked at the bus stop, with a warning triangle on its roof. They took double the usual time for the journey to Halle farm where the sale of Christmas trees was operational again, but it would not open for another four hours.

Wisting parked in the open area in front of the sales booth. A new track had been cleared between the trees, and a tractor with an orange warning light blinking on its roof was parked at the far end. A group of men was busy working with a chain.

‘In Stockholm, the sun is shining,’ Ingemar Bergquist said as he opened the car door.

Wisting pulled on a hat before leaving the car. ‘Bob Crabb was found over there,’ he said, pointing into the dense forest of fir trees.

‘Why wasn’t he put into the well, if there’s a well here?’

Wisting did not answer. He pulled his jacket tight and walked along the cleared track, the other investigators following in silence. Nils Hammer came to meet them, his hair dotted with snowflakes.

‘The well is old and deep,’ he said, shielding his eyes from the swirling snow. ‘It hasn’t been used since the sixties. Previously there was only a cover on it, but last spring the farmer placed a large boulder on the opening. We’re working on removing that.’

‘Ah yes,’ the Swede said, answering his own question about why Bob Crabb’s body had not been thrown into the well. That was probably where Robert Godwin had been taking him but, since the last time he had been here, the old well cover had been topped with an immovable rock.

The chain was attached, and one of the men gave a sign to Per Halle at the wheel of the tractor. Thick black smoke poured from the side pipe and the huge stone crunched against the edge of the well. It shifted and was hauled a couple of metres across the snow. Hammer signalled for him to stop.

Wisting and the other investigators trudged to the edge and peered less than half a metre down at an old washing machine. Underneath he could see a bicycle and other pieces of scrap metal.

Per Halle leapt from the driver’s cabin and approached. ‘We filled it with a number of things I had stored in the barn,’ he said apologetically.

‘What’s under all the scrap?’

‘Water! Why do you ask? I still don’t understand what you’re going to . . .’

‘We want to get to the bottom,’ Hammer said.

‘I have a crane on the lorry,’ Per Halle said. ‘I can have it ready in fifteen minutes.’ He did not wait for an answer, but jumped back onto the tractor and drove off.

Before he returned, Hammer’s crew erected a work tent and hung tarpaulins to block prying eyes. The snow-covered landscape was transformed into a military operation buzzing with activity. Mobile generators were switched on and floodlights set up.

Per Halle returned and prepared his lorry for action, manoeuvring the arm of the crane above the well while a policeman climbed down with cargo straps that he fastened underneath the washing machine. It was then hoisted slowly and set on the ground. The bike and other smaller objects were passed up to the policemen. Larger items, such as a moped frame and cast iron stove, had to be hauled out. As they reached the ice layer in the well, a heap of rubbish accumulated at its side.

Parts of a car axle projected from the ice. They tied the cargo strap round it and, when they hoisted, the ice accompanied it like a lid.

The bilge pump was lowered and eventually, as the water level fell, more scrap appeared. One of the specially trained men from the Emergency Squad dropped down in an abseil harness with the cargo straps. After a while, they reached such a depth that the arm of the crane was no longer capable of lifting and they set up a winch in its place.

Wisting stood beside Leif Malm, Ingmar Bergquist and the two FBI agents in the work tent. The side facing the well was open to allow them to watch the work in progress. Wisting had brought a thermos flask; he passed around some disposable beakers and poured them all coffee.

Nils Hammer joined them. ‘The first journalists have turned up,’ he said. ‘Two guys from
VG
. We’ve sealed off the forest behind us, to prevent them approaching from that side.’

Wisting nodded approvingly. As long as the reporters did not have a direct view it would look as if they were extending their investigation of Bob Crabb’s death. He bit the edge of his paper beaker as he glanced at the leaden sky. If it had not been for the snowfall, hired helicopters would have been circling above them by now. Regardless, if the well contained what they feared, Robert Godwin would understand what they were doing. In all likelihood they had only twenty-four hours before he was driven away.

A shout came from the edge of the well and Wisting threw down his beaker. A coil of rusty barbed wire was hoisted out with an object hanging from it: a handbag. The coil was towed over the edge and remained hanging from the arm of the crane, dripping with water. It was a small brown bag with a shoulder-strap.

Mortensen loosened it from the barbed wire and brought it into the tent. It looked like leather but was actually plastic.

We’re here, was what went through Wisting’s head. This is the right place. He pictured the missing person photo of Charlotte Pedersen who vanished in 2009, captured by the CCTV camera at a
Statoil
service station outside Porsgrunn. She had bought cigarettes and chewing gum and had placed them both in a small brown bag.

Mortensen laid the bag, covered in a layer of slick waxy mud, on a table, and opened it. Most of the contents had turned into a lump of mud, but it was possible to make out a lipstick and a little bottle of perfume. He transferred it to a plastic basin, marked it and recorded the find in a notebook.

The brown water pumped from the well hollowed out furrows in the newly-fallen snow. A penetrating heavy rotten stench followed the muddy water. ‘Stop!’ shouted the man supervising the pump.

The pump motor was cut and the flow of water stalled.

Wisting approached the edge. In the floodlight beam, a shapeless bundle came into view in the dark water. One of the men lowered himself down and tugged at it gingerly before attaching a cargo strap.

Slowly, a waterlogged sack was lifted out of the well. The sound of dripping water amplified, echoing around the walls of the well. When it was hauled over the edge, Wisting could see it was a sleeping bag. At the open end, where the cargo strap was fastened, it was tied with a shredded length of rope.

The bag swayed from side to side as the water seeped out. Espen Mortensen prepared a tarpaulin on the ground while Nils Hammer took hold, pulled the bag to one side, signalled for it to be lowered, and the men huddled in a semi-circle.

Hilde Jansen
, Wisting thought, who hitchhiked from Risør in the summer of 2005 with a rucksack and sleeping bag, heading for the music festival in Kristiansand.

Hammer removed the cargo strap and left Espen Mortensen to get two of the men to stretch the sleeping bag fabric while he made a metre-long incision with a scalpel. A rotten smell billowed out and those standing nearest drew back.

Wisting covered his nose and mouth with his arm as he stepped closer. Spindly bones protruded from the fragments of clothes inside the sleeping bag.

Mortensen lengthened the incision and folded the sodden material to one side. The remains were lying head down at the foot end of the sleeping bag. A grimy face with open mouth. As well as the corpse, there were a few stones to keep it on the bottom.

In silence, Mortensen covered the opening and lifted the bag with assistance into a white plastic body bag. Snow fell softly, blanketing the corpse.

The bilge pump was switched on again but after a few minutes the order was made for it to stop. Another bundle had come into sight at the bottom of the well. It looked as if it had been lying for longer, and they did not risk hauling it up in its present condition. Instead, a stretcher was lowered and pushed underneath so that they could hoist it like an injured mountaineer rescued from a rocky mountainside.

A rough woollen travel rug was bound with rope tied around a large flat stone. The rug was disintegrating like the decomposing bandages encasing a mummy. They lifted this bundle directly into another body bag without examining it more closely.

The bilge pump sucked up more of the thick liquid silt. The men responsible for securing the extracted objects dropped small brown bones into transparent bags. These looked like detached bones from a hand.

Wisting walked to the edge of the well again. It was, so to speak, empty of water now, and measured approximately seven metres to the bottom. The man in the abseil harness looked up. Perspiration left grubby tracks down his cheeks. Underneath him lay a pile of bones and unrecognisable fragments. Two yellowed skulls lay forehead to forehead as if engaged in intimate conversation.

Wisting turned towards Leif Malm. ‘I think you should ask that team of yours to come,’ he said.

‘They’re already on their way,’ Malm replied.