The Caveman (25 page)

Leif Malm, Ingmar Bergquist and the two FBI agents piled into Wisting’s car for the return journey to the police station. They had seen what they needed to see, and there was no longer any use for them at the discovery site.

The press contingent outside the crime scene tape swelled in number when Wisting drove off. Experienced journalists sat in their vehicles along the main road. Their doors were flung open and they stepped out of their cars when the police drove past. They still did not know what was going on, Wisting realised, but when the story broke, the crowd would grow like a virus spreading at record speed.

‘He’s going to slip through our fingers,’ Donald Baker said, turning to avoid a camera lens. ‘In only a few hours, he’ll be out of the country.’

‘All the same, we’re closer now than you’ve been in twenty years,’ Wisting said.

His phone began ringing as soon as they passed the huddled press pack. He took it out and checked the display.
Morten P, VG.
He stepped on the gas when he arrived at the dual carriageway as a passing lorry whipped up a cloud of snow. ‘We have the lists of names,’ he said, braking. ‘We can block their transit out of the country. If any of them turn up on airline or ferry tickets, we’ll pick it up.’ He had already keyed in Torunn Borg’s number to ask her to send the names to the Customs Service.

‘We don’t even know if his name is on that list,’ Leif Malm said.

At the station, Wisting was met by the communications adviser for the district. It was 13.00. They had a quick meeting in Christine Thiis’ office, where Wisting provided them with a brief status report.

‘We’ll have to send out a press statement and call a press conference,’ was the information adviser’s immediate reaction. ‘When can you meet the press?’

Wisting was already on his way out the door. ‘When Robert Godwin’s been arrested,’ he said. ‘Until then, we’ve something else on our minds.’

For the next hour they felt as if they were treading water. Their efforts and movements did not lead them in any particular direction. They aimed to keep their heads above water, and all they could do was let themselves be carried along by events.

They had received a handful of approaches from the public after
VG
published Bob Crabb’s photograph. Copies of the tip-offs had been left on his desk. Two neighbours in Stavern had contacted the police even though they did not have any fresh information to offer, and a pensioner couple thought they had seen him on board a ferry to Denmark when they had been on their summer holidays. A passenger who arrived on the same plane as him thought he should let them know, but he had not noticed him on board the flight. Three others thought they had seen a man resembling the man in the photograph in Stavern last summer, but could not pin the time down and had not noticed anything else.

From that perspective this case did not distinguish itself from any other. Investigation was a business with countless blind alleys and colossal amounts of wasted time and effort.

They used the firing range in the police station basement as a collection area, and the first car of remains arrived at quarter to two. Wisting went down to see how the team of technicians from
Kripos
organised their work.

The coppery stench from the stagnant well water met them inside, masking the smell of gunpowder and lead that permeated the walls. The firing range was not only the location affording most space but also had its own ventilation system with air exchange to avoid the accumulation of dangerous airborne pollutants and noxious gases.

Thick plastic cloth was rolled over the floor. Men in white suits made notes and collected papers in folders, took photographs, sorted and recorded. One of them was Jon Berge, the crime scene technician who had participated in the video broadcast post-mortem. He greeted Wisting with a nod of the head before returning to his note-taking.

The corpse wrapped in a woollen travel rug lay nearest the door under the floodlight from the large ceiling lamps. A crime scene technician took a close-up photograph of the tight knot before the rope was cut. The ragged travel rug was unwrapped to reveal a waxy shape with the external contours of a body. Wisting had seen similar transmutations on cadavers recovered from the sea and corpses that had lain for a considerable time in damp surroundings. The adipose tissue of the body had been transformed into a white, brittle, swollen mass that resembled solidified stearin.

The macabre remains would make the task of identification simpler than only bones would have. Tissue samples would provide them with a DNA profile but even now a faded red leather belt with rusty buckle told them that this was Silje from Vinstra, transported more than four hundred kilometres before being dumped in the well.

Wisting tried to envisage what she had gone through before the woollen rug was wrapped round her and the knots tightened. Before Godwin began to cover his tracks in the USA, his victims had been dumped in ditches along the Interstate Highway and so the crime scene technicians and forensic scientists had more to work with. It emerged that some of the victims had been kept alive for up to seventy-two hours before they were killed. During that time they had been raped repeatedly.

‘The bodies have been subject to different degrees of decomposition,’ Jon Berge said, ‘depending on how long they have been in the well and what they have been wrapped in. We probably can’t expect to find any more than bones from the oldest remains.’

Wisting followed him to the corpse in the sleeping bag. Among the crumbling clothes lay black bones, still with fragments of organic material, not completely decomposed.

‘It’s absolutely incredible that he has been able to continue like this,’ Berge added, ‘for more than twenty years, without anyone having spotted a pattern or suspected anyone in any way whatsoever.’

Wisting did not answer.

‘But it is possible, of course,’ Berge went on. ‘If you do it in the right way and don’t become over-eager. A young girl disappears every other year, one in Western Norway, one in the east, and another in the south. It reminds me of the guy who designed the first computer system for the savings banks. He wrote into the program that all financial transactions should be rounded down to the nearest whole ten øre. The few øre rounded off were transferred to his own account. No one noticed the loss of a few øre here or there, but it amounted to a great deal of money in the long run.’

Wisting was about to mention that he had been caught and sentenced to three years for fraud, but was interrupted by his mobile phone. He answered with his name, but heard nothing but scraping sounds. The concrete walls in the firing range were affecting the signal. He walked to the door. ‘Hello?’ he tried again, emerging into the corridor.

‘Hello?’ answered the voice at the other end.

‘Sorry, poor signal,’ Wisting said. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Steinar Brunvall,’ the man said. ‘We’re almost next door neighbours.’

‘You’re Tor and Marianne’s son,’ Wisting said as he walked towards the stairs. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No. I was actually trying to phone Line. She called in yesterday in connection with a story she’s writing about Viggo Hansen. I told her then about a man who visited him last summer.’

‘A man?’

‘Yes, and today there’s a picture of him in the newspaper.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve tried to call Line several times, but she’s not answering her phone. Then Ida said I should phone you instead. After all, it’s the police who are looking for information about him.’

‘What are you telling me?’ Wisting asked, his chest tightening.

‘Line was curious about a man who visited Viggo Hansen last summer. He never normally had visitors, and then we saw the picture in today’s paper. It fits that he was driving a hired car as well, Bob Crabb from the USA. The professor who was found dead beside the Christmas trees last week.’

It felt as though a secret door had opened.

Line woke in a cold, cramped space that was pitch dark and with no wiggle room. She had a thumping headache and no inkling of how long she had been unconscious. Her hands and feet were tied together behind her back, her mouth was taped shut and she was covered with some sort of woollen blanket. Tossing her head, she managed to uncover her face, and lay breathing heavily through her nose. The air was stuffy, and she began to feel queasy. If she threw up, the consequences could be fatal. Feeling the material beneath her spring as she twisted about, she realised she was in the boot of a car.

She listened intently, straining to hear with breath held, but the silence was total. The car must be parked in some deserted spot, and there could not be anyone else inside or she would be aware, either by movement or sound. With her hands and feet tied behind her she was unable to hit or kick the boot lid.

Despite her extremely limited opportunity to move, she began to feel about behind her back until her fingers closed on something, an empty plastic bottle. There was a newspaper and things that felt like paintbrushes. Then her fingers grasped something different, a thin metal plate with a handle. A putty knife, she thought. She had used one like it while redecorating her flat. The edge might be sharp enough to file through the rope.

She pulled it towards her, fumbling for a secure grip, and succeeded in positioning it to file the rope. As droplets of perspiration formed on her top lip, she blew them away and kept rubbing the putty knife to and fro, fearing at every second that the boot lid would be flung open. While she worked, her thoughts strayed to how she had arrived in this situation.

She remembered her car breaking down, and how pleased she was when another car stopped and she recognised the driver, but then came the damp cloth pressed over her nose and mouth, and the smell reminding her of glue or varnish, burning her lips and nostrils until everything went black. With no idea how much time had passed, she wondered whether she should have anticipated something like this, whether she should have realised she had come too close to something, too near the truth about Viggo Hansen.

The rope snapped suddenly and her legs shot forward to strike the side of the boot compartment. She dropped the putty knife and lay considering her next step, contemplating whether she should try to attract attention and, if she succeeded, whether anyone other than the man who had shut her in would hear.

Her hands and feet were still bound, but she could wriggle into a position from which she could kick the boot lid. She tried to shout from behind the tape, managed a few feeble sounds and lay listening. Nothing. No footsteps. No cars in the distance. She would freeze to death if she stayed here, she thought. No matter what, she had to get out before he came back.

She twisted round, placing her feet against the back of the rear seats separating the boot from the car interior. When she felt it give a little, she drew her knees to her chest and pushed with her feet. The whole vehicle rocked, and the back of the seat creaked. She kicked again, and a chink of grey light appeared. It was still daylight outside.

She pressed her back against the wall of the compartment and her feet against the rear seat until she almost passed out and the chink of light grew in size, giving her renewed strength before the partition gave way with a crash.

Wisting tried to reach Line three times both on her mobile and the land line at home on his way upstairs to his office. Her mobile phone must be either switched off or in an area with no signal.

There was a link between the Viggo Hansen story she was working on and his own investigation. The trail was already four months old, but new to them. Strands were interlinked, and he needed to ascertain what she knew.

The FBI agents had been critical of his statement to
VG
, but a witness had now turned up with information, justifying his decision. He called both FBI agents and his own people into the conference room.

‘Go to the witness’ house,’ he said, pointing his pen at Benjamin Fjeld. ‘Get him to tell you everything he remembers about that visit last summer.’

The young detective left at once.

‘Who is this Viggo Hansen?’ Donald Baker asked.

‘He actually lived in my own neighbourhood,’ Wisting said, explaining how the dead man had sat undiscovered in his own living room.

‘And this man was visited by Bob Crabb in July?’

‘That’s what our new witness says.’

‘Have you any background on him?’

Wisting gave an account of what he recollected from the case documents. As he spoke, it dawned on him that Viggo Hansen would be the perfect shell for Robert Godwin to hide behind. The same thought struck all the others in the room.

‘Do you have his fingerprints?’ Donald Baker asked.

Wisting shook his head. They had been unable to secure fingerprints from the desiccated corpse. ‘Only DNA.’

‘When can we have it?’

Leif Malm took out his phone. ‘I’ll get the records section to send it to the same place we sent Bob Crabb’s profile. How soon can we have the comparison done?’

‘As soon as we receive the DNA,’ Baker answered, lifting his own phone.

Christine Thiis leafed through her papers. ‘Why is this Viggo Hansen not listed among the possible candidates?’

Torunn Borg leaned back. ‘We were only searching for living people.’

The police lawyer nodded as she grabbed a pen and took notes.

Wisting ran his hand through his hair. They could not be detained by this single possibility. ‘Where are we otherwise?’ he asked.

‘The Customs barrier is in place,’ Torunn Borg said. ‘We’ve made a few house calls and were able to delete some names from our list. Several officers recruited from neighbouring areas are still out in the field.’

‘Have you spoken to Line?’ Christine Thiis asked.

‘Not yet. She didn’t come home last night.’

‘Do you know where she is?’

He shook his head, unable to recall the last time Line had not been accessible by phone. ‘I’m going to nip home. She’s probably sitting there immersed in work.’

He pulled on his jacket and headed for his car in the backyard, more troubled than he was willing to admit. Line was a fearless journalist, not only in swimming against the current or writing about controversial matters, but also in her unconventional methods. She might have crossed a dangerous boundary.

Thick snow was falling: huge snowflakes swirled from a leaden sky. His windscreen wipers struggled to work, and the roads were slippery.

New-fallen snow lay like down on his tyre tracks from earlier that day; there were no others. Line could not have been home, but he decided to go inside anyway. She had gathered notes and cuttings in Ingrid’s old workroom. He did not like the thought of snooping among her papers, but something lying there might shine a light on Bob Crabb.

His phone rang as he stepped from the car. Leif Malm asked, ‘How’s it going?’

Wisting fumbled for his house key and let himself in. ‘She’s not at home.’

‘There’s something you ought to know.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Your daughter spent last night at the
Farris Bad
.’

Wisting paused in the hallway. ‘At the hotel? What do you mean?’

‘It’s not really anything to do with either of us,’ Leif Malm said, ‘but she spent the night in John Bantam’s room.’

‘I don’t understand . . .’

‘Donald Baker came to tell me. They met in the bar there a couple of nights ago. Last night she stayed over.’

‘How could he . . . She’s a journalist, for God’s sake.’

‘He didn’t know she was your daughter until our last meeting.’

‘It’s all the same whose daughter she is. It was bloody unprofessional.’

‘Above all else, she’s become an interesting witness. We need to find out what she knows about the connection between Bob Crabb and this Viggo Hansen.’

Wisting glanced at the clock: almost half past three. ‘Could she still be there?’ he asked, walking inside, still wearing his snow-covered shoes.

‘They’re checking that now. No one’s answering the phone in the room, but Bantam has gone there to find out.’

Wisting was climbing the stairs. ‘Let me know if she’s there,’ he said, not believing she would be. More likely she had been re-assigned and transferred to the Bob Crabb case.

Opening the door to what had been Ingrid’s workroom he noted the tidy desk and shut-down computer. Documents and printouts were stacked in bundles. She was like her father, preferring the papers in front of her instead of browsing through electronic documents.

On the expansive pinboard, pictures and notes were placed to form a chronological overview of Viggo Hansen’s life. It was really impressive how she had managed to sketch a portrait of this solitary man, who seemed to have led a sad life. A father who had worked in construction and been absent for most of his son’s upbringing, and later spent almost four years in jail. His mother admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

1969,
he read, moving his finger along the timeline.
Father hangs himself in basement. Viggo finds him
.

1974 – Mother dies
.

1989 – admitted to psychiatric unit
.

She had also drawn up a relationship chart. Inside a circle at the centre of a large sheet of paper, she had written the name Viggo Hansen, surrounding this with the names of the people who in some way and at some time had been in his social circle. Some of the names were familiar: neighbours and parents, the artist Eivind Aske. Wisting recalled her saying he had been Viggo Hansen’s schoolmate. He recollected another name without knowing why.

Odd Werner Ellefsen.

He spoke the name aloud in the hope of triggering information he had absorbed but not yet properly processed. His eyes flitted over the other notices, stopping at an old class photograph on which the name appeared again. Odd Werner Ellefsen was the boy on Viggo Hansen’s right, but there was nothing familiar about the face from almost fifty years ago.

He took the relationship chart from the pinboard and folded it. Then it dawned on him. Odd Werner Ellefsen was one of the forty-six names on Torunn Borg’s list of possible cavemen.