The Last Pilgrim (16 page)

Bergmann muttered as he stared at the preliminary profile of the perp that Reuter had requested from Kripo: “MO suggests psychosis, rage, excessive violence.”

“This isn’t just some coincidence,” he said, looking up at Reuter. “I think you may be onto something.”

“Get me Krogh’s phone records from the last three weeks. I want every single person he called to be thoroughly checked out,” Reuter demanded.

What if the killer is back?
thought Bergmann.
What if he really is back?

CHAPTER 24

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Bygdøy

Oslo, Norway

Back when Tommy Bergmann was attending the police academy, he thought the term “tactical investigation” sounded impressive. Sixteen years later, he wasn’t so convinced. In reality it was simply a matter of making basic observations, at least on paper. Reuter had taught him that a tactical investigation usually involved no more than two circles of suspects. It was rare for someone to be killed by a complete stranger. So the starting point in cases involving an unknown perpetrator and absolutely zero witnesses was often simply a question of identifying all the individuals who’d had any sort of relationship with the victim, specifically close family members and friends. If the killer—most often a man—couldn’t be found among that circle, then it was necessary to draw up a new one comprised of distant relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances.

For an eighty-five-year-old man, there weren’t many people to include in either circle. With the exception of children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, most of them were dead.

Carl Oscar Krogh had two children. His son lived in the United States, and Bergmann had talked to him twice. He had at least been able to confirm what he’d suspected. Krogh had no friends left, or at least none that the son knew about. And Krogh’s wife had died a year ago.

He was now talking to the daughter, Bente Bull-Krogh, but she hadn’t been able to tell him much more than he already knew. The conversation wasn’t going well. She had stopped to cry and stare off into space several times. Now he was sitting on her terrace, waiting for her to collect herself enough to go on speaking. He’d called her on Sunday afternoon, but hadn’t been able to reach her until close to midnight. In addition to this enormous house in Bygdøy and a couple of other properties in Norway, she and her husband owned a vineyard and horse ranch outside Ronda, Spain, where she spent long periods every year. It was no doubt a beautiful place, but the cellular coverage down there was clearly nothing to brag about.

Bergmann shifted his gaze from the woman to the terrace door, where the Filipino maid was standing. She motioned discreetly toward the glass on the teak table in front of Bergmann. He shook his head. He’d had enough iced tea.

“Please forgive me,” said Bente. “It’s just so . . . unbelievable.”

Normally Bergmann didn’t have much sympathy for people who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths. But right now he felt genuinely sorry for Bente Bull-Krogh. He didn’t envy anyone having to identify a father who had been so horribly mutilated.

“No apologies necessary,” he said.

Bente looked at him as she wiped her mascara-streaked cheeks, which made her look older than she actually was. She fumbled for her designer sunglasses on the table.

They’d already gone over everything, but Bergmann was not a man given to carelessness. An eighty-five-year-old was bound to have secrets, dark rooms that no one but he might know about, or at least spaces that he didn’t want others to find.

“So he never had anyone else?” asked Bergmann. “Your father?”

“What do you mean?” she asked in a low voice.

“I know this may seem inappropriate right now, but are you sure that he never had a relationship with another woman?”

Bente put on her sunglasses and turned her face away.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“The murder . . .” said Bergmann. “It’s the sort of killing we often see in cases of extreme jealousy.”

She shook her head.

“Good Lord. Father was eighty-five. To be honest—”

“He wasn’t always eighty-five,” said Bergmann. “And he seemed to be quite a handsome man in his day. Or am I mistaken?”

A wan smile appeared on Bente’s face. It quickly vanished, and then she started crying again.

Bergmann waited. He studied the house and the grounds, trying to guess how much the place was worth. Every time he found himself in such places, he felt an almost insurmountable chasm between himself and the people sitting across from him. It was probably normal to cough up fifteen to twenty million kroner for a house in this part of town. But where he came from—in Tveita, one of the city’s biggest housing projects—a thousand kroner was still a lot of money. He’d had the only bedroom in his family’s apartment. He was proud of where he came from and thought that the people who lived there were generally happy. But at moments like this, he realized it was people like Bente Bull-Krogh and her husband who held all the cards in Norway and that the wealth was ending up in fewer and fewer hands.

“It’s strange you should mention it,” said Bente. “No, I’m sure it’s nothing . . .” Again she gave him a sad smile. Then she uttered a laugh that she tried to hide behind her hand.

“What do you mean?” asked Bergmann.

“You asked whether my father ever had anyone else.”

Bergmann sat up straight.

“I remember now that my mother once thought he was having an affair. Father was up in the mountains, hunting for grouse, and . . . the phone rang, and my mother answered, but no one said anything. She could just hear somebody breathing.”

“What did she think?” he asked quietly. “Did she feel threatened?”

Bente shook her head.

“No. I’m not sure. Mother simply hung up. I wasn’t home that night, but in the morning she told me at breakfast that she thought a woman had tried to call my father. She asked me if I thought Father was the type of man to have a mistress.”

“A woman?” asked Bergmann.

“It was just a feeling that Mother had. The two of us were very close. Oh God. This would have destroyed her, to have Father killed this way . . .”

Bente took off her sunglasses and buried her face in her hands.

Bergmann looked down at his notes. “An affair?” he wrote in big letters, followed by “his mistress’s husband?”

“Do you remember when this happened?”

“It was during exam week of my senior year in high school,” she replied at once. This was clearly something she’d thought about over the years.

“So that must have been in . . . 1964?” said Bergmann. He recalled that she’d been born in December of 1945.

She shook her head.

“No, 1963. I graduated the year before.”

“So your mother thought it was a woman on the phone?”

“She said she could tell it was a woman by the way she was breathing. That’s what I remember her saying. It’s something another woman would know.”

“Okay,” said Bergmann.

“But what does this have to do with my father? I mean, this isn’t the basis of your investigation, is it?”

“No,” he said. “But did this happen more than once?”

“No.”

Bente took a deep breath as she tried to compose herself. She quickly put her sunglasses back on.

“I think you’re lying,” said Bergmann.

“About what?”

“About the phone calls.”

Bente looked away. “It went on for years,” she said. Her voice was so low that it was almost drowned out by the motorboats on the fjord.

“Always at the same time? A woman, most likely, who phoned your home at the same time for several years?”

“Always when he was away hunting grouse.”

“And when did he do that?”

“In September,” said Bente.

September,
thought Bergmann.
The two women and the little girl were killed in September.

“Always on the same day?”

“What are you getting at? No, no, I don’t remember . . .”

“Was it in early or late September?”

She sighed in resignation. “I think it was late in the month.”

“So how long did this go on?”

“Several years, I think. Father stopped going off to hunt grouse. But it was never discussed.”

“I see,” said Bergmann.

“Mother didn’t want to talk about it. As I said . . . She thought he had another woman, somebody who might have been a little crazy or jealous, or something. I didn’t want to think about it. So, why would this be important?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say,” replied Bergmann. The truth was that he had no concrete idea why it might be significant. Except for the time of year, which could just be coincidental. He nonetheless drew a circle around the word “September” with his ballpoint pen.

“So do you have any leads in the investigation, or . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence.

“I can tell you in confidence that we are fairly certain his death has something to do with the war, though I wouldn’t rule out other possibilities. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” she said.

“Do you recall hearing about the three skeletons that were found in Nordmarka? Three females, the youngest of whom was only a child, who were killed in 1942. Did you read about it in the papers?”

Bente nodded. She turned to look out at the fjord, as if seeking solace from the shimmering blue water.

“Did your father ever mention anything about this to you? About them being killed during the war?”

She shook her head and pushed her sunglasses back in place.

“Why are you asking me about that?” she said. “Does it have something to do with Father?”

“I don’t know,” said Bergmann. “But he was a very prominent figure in the Resistance, and he may have known what happened back then.”

“I see.”

“Do you know when they were killed?” he asked.

Bente shook her head.

“In September.”

She stared out at the fjord from behind her sunglasses for what seemed like a long time.

“I think the person who knows the most about Father and the war is that man at the university, you know . . .”

“Moberg,” said Bergmann. “Torgeir Moberg.”

She nodded.

“He probably knows more about Father than my brother or I or even my mother ever knew.”

“Which of the old Resistance fighters was he most involved with?”

“I think only one of them is still alive. I know that Father visited him in the nursing home recently. I remember him talking about it . . .” Again Bente buried her face in her hands.

Bingo,
thought Bergmann.

“Do you recall his name?”

She lowered her hands.

“Kolstad. Marius Kolstad.”

“Do you know which nursing home?”

Bente reached for her glass. Bergmann stared at the golden liquid and her red lips.

“Somewhere on the east side of town.”

She set down her glass.

“Okay,” he said. “Where exactly on the east side?”

He studied the gold chain around her wrist, thinking that the woman sitting across from him had probably never set foot on the east side.

“I don’t remember. Is it important? Do you think Kolstad might know something?”

“I don’t know. But it’s worth finding out. Drabantby or farther east?”

Bente sighed heavily.

“I don’t . . . I’m not very familiar with that part of town, but it wasn’t downtown, I’m positive about that.”

Bergmann closed his eyes for a moment, trying to recall the hospitals he knew. But it didn’t really matter. At least he had a name. It wouldn’t be hard to find out where Marius Kolstad lived.

“Langerud?” suggested Bergmann.

“That’s a handball team,” said Bente. “I remember that from the old days, from the seventies.”

“Oppsal?” said Bergmann. “Does he live in Oppsal?”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice. “That’s what I remember Father saying. Oppsal.”

Bergmann glanced at his watch. He had the overwhelming and unmistakable feeling that he’d found a lead he should follow.

This was exactly what he’d been hoping for.

CHAPTER 25

Wednesday, September 6, 1939

Majorstua

Oslo, Norway

The sound of the ship’s planks being ripped apart sliced through her head, growing so loud that soon she could hear nothing else. Before Agnes Gerner could even scream, she was floating in the water beneath the massive ship, her long white nightgown swirling around her body. She watched as the ship slowly disappeared into the distance, even though the huge propeller had stopped. Below she heard a muted thudding. Agnes turned over in the water, noting that she had barely enough oxygen in her lungs, and looked down into a swarm of tube-shaped U-boats gliding along the sea bottom, illuminated by a glaring light from above. To her left she saw a person sinking down through the water. It was the Jewish girl from the cabin. As she slid naked toward the bottom, Agnes tried to grab the girl’s chalk-white hand, but she couldn’t even lift her own arm. The girl’s black hair danced in the water until she disappeared.

Agnes opened her eyes. She saw only a white ceiling above her, no water. The room told her nothing. She had no idea where in the world she was.

For several seconds she drifted in and out of the dream, swimming down through the water, but finding nothing. Then she awoke to the sound of children playing nearby. After a few minutes she got up and closed the bedroom door. The alarm clock on the white-painted nightstand showed that she had less than an hour until her appointment at the hair salon.

She walked through the apartment, which was as unfamiliar to her as her own mother. The bathroom floor felt cold, so she placed a towel under her feet before brushing her shoulder-length hair.
I could definitely use a haircut,
she thought and smiled. Back in the bedroom she took out one of the cyanide capsules from the false bottom in her suitcase, wrapped it in toilet paper, and then stuck it in her purse. It seemed improbable that she’d ever have to use it, so improbable that she didn’t even consider it a real possibility. As long as Norway remained neutral, she probably wouldn’t have to risk her life for this job. Yet she nonetheless chose to follow her own rule—or rather, Christopher Bratchard’s rule—to carry a capsule with her wherever she went.
He must have indoctrinated me very thoroughly,
she thought.