Dregs (2011) Read online

  ‘He was a pain in the neck,’ Henning Mork said dismissively. ‘The other children in the street were afraid of him. He bullied them. Beat them up and stole from them, forced the younger children to eat worms and beetles. He sneaked into neighbouring houses and stole money. That was how he ended up at our place. If I hadn’t stopped him, nobody knows what kind of person he would have become, but the prognosis wasn’t good. His mother had already given up on him.’

  Henning Mork leaned forward over the table, excited, his eyes gleaming triumphantly, as though he was convinced that, by killing a child, he had freed the world of a true sadist.

  ‘But all the same …’ Line continued.

  ‘Wait!’ Henning Mork held up his hand. ‘The problem isn’t resolved. Exactly nine months after I was convicted, the boy’s mother gave birth to a girl. A new child to replace the boy I took from her. She would never have been born, if it hadn’t been for me. What about her life? She’s 14 years old now. You might well have seen her. She was in one of those talent shows on TV. Played and sang music she had composed herself. Beautiful and clever, neither she nor her mother would have experienced that if her brother hadn’t been killed.’

  Line did not know what books of philosophy the man in front of her had read while he was inside, but he had an unpleasant viewpoint on life and death. She nodded, as if in agreement, and started to gather her belongings.

  ‘As a journalist, you ought to adopt an impartial attitude,’ Henning Mork went on. ‘If you’re to be successful with these interviews, you’ll have to try to stop seeing events from the murderer’s perspective, from the victim’s perspective, or from anyone’s perspective at all. You must consider all interests to be equally valid and look at the case from the perspective of eternity.’

  Line shook her head, but let her reporter’s notebook lie. Henning Mork’s thoughts and opinions were going to make it easier for the project to hit the front page. It was going to raise the whole profile.

  ‘I don’t understand how you can defend killing a child in order to hide your infidelity,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Do you understand why the opponents of abortion in the USA think that it’s right to kill the doctors who carry them out? Or why Muslim philosophers are against suicide, but nevertheless consider that people should sacrifice their lives in a holy war? In some countries it’s legal to help the old and sick to end their lives, but in other countries you’re punished for doing the same thing. Certain societies allow the head of the family to kill family members who have offended unspoken rules of conduct, while others reject that. Some individuals allow the killing and eating of animals, whereas others profess vegetarianism. Some permit the killing of enemies in battle, while others are against that too.’

  Line nodded acknowledgement. People did uphold one morality in one area and a completely different one in another. Her facial expression, however, left no doubt about what she felt about using the double standards of the world to support your own actions.

  ‘What about your father?’ enquired Henning Mork abruptly. ‘Chief Inspector William Wisting.’

  Line straightened up. She was obviously not the only one who had made preliminary enquiries. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Is he not also a killer?’

  A sudden feeling of nastiness made her feel sick. She stood up to indicate that the interview was over.

  Seven years earlier a murder case on which her father was working had ended in armed action. A man who had bestially tortured and murdered a pensioner created a hostage situation in which her father had shot and killed him. SEFO’s investigation had absolved Wisting of all blame.

  Line had always felt that she could talk to her father about everything, but this case had never been a topic. It was not a secret, but they had never discussed it. She didn’t think that he had talked to anyone about it, not even her mother.

  Henning Mork was grinning at her. ‘A life is obviously not sacred if you can kill to save your own and go free.’

  CHAPTER 5

  The elm trees encircling the terrace stirred only slightly in the afternoon breeze. Sounds from the town floated up to them, muted at this distance. Suzanne had set the table outside. ‘What did the doctor say?’ she asked.

  Wisting chewed slowly, postponing the discussion for a while longer.

  ‘Hm?’ she prompted.

  Recently he had felt listless, tired and devoid of energy. He experienced mood swings, and became irritable without any good reason. He had problems concentrating, had lost interest in his work and lacked sufficient initiative even to consult the doctor. It had been Suzanne who finally made the appointment for him.

  ‘The menopause,’ he answered briefly and helped himself once again to the salad with pasta and ham.

  Suzanne’s eyes opened wide. ‘The menopause,’ she repeated, grinning.

  ‘The doctor wasn’t sure, but thought it could be that. It happens to men too. Apparently we produce less testosterone as we grow old.’

  She spiked a piece of tomato and winked at him. ‘I haven’t noticed anything like that.’

  Wisting returned her smile. ‘In any case, it wasn’t diabetes.’

  ‘Did you get something to take?’

  ‘I’ll get the results of the blood tests in a few days, perhaps next week. Then I have to go back for a check-up in a fortnight. There are hormone supplements.’

  ‘I can enquire at the health-food shop,’ Suzanne suggested. ‘They’ll certainly have something there.’

  Wisting shrugged his shoulders. ‘Line is coming tomorrow,’ he said, mainly to change the subject. ‘I’ll go home after work.’

  ‘Very nice. Is she staying long?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s on holiday from next week, but is working on a series of interviews for Verdens Gang. Among other things, she’s meeting a man who lives in Helgeroa. She’ll be staying for a couple of days anyway. Tommy’s coming home from sea on Thursday.’

  ‘Perhaps we can go out for a meal one evening?’

  Wisting reached for a slice of garlic bread. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, cutting it in two. ‘I’m going to be fairly busy at work.’

  ‘A new case?’

  He nodded. ‘We’ve found another foot.’

  She glanced enquiringly at him.

  ‘From another person,’ he continued, sitting down again. ‘I’m going to put together a team early tomorrow morning. A murder investigation team.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Inspectors Nils Hammer and Torunn Borg and crime technician Espen Mortensen gathered round the conference table with Assistant Chief of Police Audun Vetti and Eskild Anvik, the Chief Superintendent. Most of the chairs were empty. There were no other people. The atmosphere was uneasy as the investigators leafed through their papers. A kind of tension was in the air, like the feeling that thunder and threatening clouds were on their way.

  The Assistant Chief of Police was sitting with the local newspaper open in front of him. The discovery of a new body part was only mentioned in a couple of columns at the bottom of page five, illustrated by a picture of the beach and an archive photo of Audun Vetti himself. Wisting reckoned that he would cut it out when the meeting was over, and keep it in a drawer in his office.

  The information that the case now concerned feet from two different people had been held back. The way the newspaper referred to the discovery of the previous day and the follow-up search suggested that none of the editorial staff suspected anything criminal. The find was linked to the disappearances of the previous year, and Audun Vetti was hoping that forensic examinations would confirm that this theory was correct. For once he had kept to what they had agreed should be released at this stage.

  The purpose of the meeting was to share information, so that everyone who was going to continue on the case knew exactly where they stood. They had to agree on a plan and a goal. Their eyes turned to Wisting when he spoke.

  ‘Something is going on here that we don’t exactly grasp the consequences of rig
ht now,’ he began. ‘For the moment our starting point must be that the feet belong to two of the missing persons. This can’t be down to coincidence. The next stage of the investigation should be set up on the basis of a worst case scenario.’ A worst case scenario implied that they were embarking on a murder investigation. The others round the table nodded. ‘It will be important to achieve three things over the next few days: identify the victims, find the rest of the bodies and determine the cause, or causes, of death.’

  ‘When can identities be established?’ the Chief Superintendent asked.

  Wisting passed the question to Espen Mortensen.

  ‘The samples were handed in to the forensics laboratory yesterday afternoon,’ the crime technician explained. He pushed a copy of the request form across to Wisting, elaborating to the others how he had obtained reference samples for DNA matching from the relatives. ‘We’ll get an answer by tomorrow lunchtime. In addition we’ll have a preliminary report from the pathologist by the end of the day.’

  A ray of sunshine crept through the blinds and caught Wisting in the eyes. He went over to the window and adjusted them.

  ‘What will we do about finding the rest of the bodies?’ the Chief Superintendent asked as he sat down again.

  ‘The beach searches are continuing today,’ Torunn Borg explained. ‘I’ve also got an appointment with a researcher from the Meteorological Institute.’ She leafed through her papers. ‘An Ebbe Slettaker. He’s a specialist in floating objects.’

  ‘You get specialists in that?’ Hammer asked.

  ‘They calculate the likely direction of drift for oil spillages, life rafts, cargoes, or people who have fallen into the sea. Slettaker is on holiday in Kragero, but when he heard what it was about, he agreed to come.’

  ‘When will he arrive?’ Wisting enquired.

  ‘I’ve made an appointment with him for twelve o’clock.’

  Wisting nodded and made a note before leafing back a page. ‘I’ve gone through the files of the three missing men,’ he said. ‘Originally we simply assumed that these were old folks who had got lost and involved in an accident. It will be necessary to do the rounds again with the close family. We’ll require a thorough overview of their circles of acquaintances and to chart their last movements.’

  Torunn Borg nodded and made a note. It was a task well suited to her ability to order and classify information.

  ‘What about electronic traces?’ Vetti asked.

  ‘None of the missing persons had mobile phones,’ Torunn Borg explained. ‘Telecoms data from the fixed line network hasn’t been collected, but is probably with the operators.’

  ‘Strictly speaking we should inform the media too,’ Audun Vetti said. He swept his hand over the newspaper page in front of him. ‘We depend on tips and information from the public.’

  ‘Let’s gain some breathing space first,’ Wisting suggested, gripping his coffee cup slightly more tightly. ‘The feet have certainly been floating about for months. I propose that we hold back for one more day, so that we can obtain a better overview.’

  The Assistant Chief of Police frowned his disagreement. ‘We should consider going out in time to catch tonight’s evening news,’ he argued. ‘You should in any case write a note concerning what we want information and details about.’

  ‘We still lack an overview,’ Wisting explained, setting his cup down abruptly. He could hear the irritation in his own voice. ‘Let’s see how the day develops,’ he went on diplomatically, turning over a fresh page in his notebook. ‘There’s something unusual I’ve noticed in the case files. Several people mention that Camilla Thaulow, one of the carers at the nursing home, had good relationships with the old folk, but she hasn’t been interviewed in connection with the missing persons reports.’

  ‘Shall I take that?’ Torunn Borg offered.

  Wisting shook his head. ‘I want to speak to her myself.’

  Chief Superintendent Eskild Anvik reached for the picture of Otto Saga that was sticking out from among Wisting’s papers and held it up.‘Old men,’ he commented. ‘Who kills old men?’

  No one could give him an answer. Wisting fixed his eyes on the man with thick, white hair in the photo. The eyes were almost black, beneath thick eyebrows, the face dark skinned and full of deep wrinkles and tired furrows. He had lived a long life, with plenty of space for the hiding of many secrets.

  CHAPTER 7

  The waves rolled in on the white shore and glided slowly out again. The man at Wisting’s side had researched the movements of seawater for more than twenty years. His eyes narrowed behind thick glasses, biting hard on his bottom lip, he seemed to be concentrating and speculating.

  A fine mist blurred the air in front of them, and further on, the sea and sky merged together as though the horizon was a hallucination. A tent had been set up to shelter the search coordinators. Inside, two men stooped over a map, studying the shaded areas indicating the parts of the archipelago that had already been searched.

  Wisting took a step back to avoid an approaching wave that was bigger than the others. The man by his side remained standing, following with his eyes how the sea drew it back again. ‘One of the feet was found here?’ he asked, directing his question to Torunn Borg.

  ‘Six days after the first one,’ she confirmed, pointing towards Stavernsoya island where a team of people in orange waistcoats were searching in a chain formation.

  ‘There’s a gentle current on the surface,’ the oceanographer explained, ‘but the speed of the underwater currents will vary greatly. The local underwater topography makes it difficult to calculate the tidal currents.’ He pulled up the laptop bag that hung over his shoulder. ‘I need to find co-efficients for turbulence exchange and bottom friction,’ he continued. ‘They will vary with tidal and sea bottom conditions but are, at the same time, characteristics of the movement itself.’

  Wisting did not know what he was talking about. ‘How accurately will you be able to determine where the feet came from?’ he asked.

  ‘It depends on the accuracy of the data I put into the model,’ the oceanographer elaborated, patting his shoulder bag. ‘I need as much information as possible about the shoes as well: weight, buoyancy, and shape.’

  Wisting nodded at crime scene reports in Torunn Borg’s hand.

  ‘Water is not a homogenous mass,’ the oceanographer continued, taking the papers. ‘So there will be no guarantee that my results can be relied on.’

  ‘Will the fact that the feet have been in the sea for nine months make the calculations more difficult?’

  ‘Nine months?’ The oceanographer raised his eyebrows. ‘That certainly complicates matters.’ He looked out to sea again. ‘But when you come to think of it, in 1992 a storm washed several containers off the decks of a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean. One of the containers opened up. It was packed with 28,000 bath toys, among them thousands of yellow plastic ducks. Ten months after the storm, lots of yellow plastic ducks popped up on the shores of Alaska. I used a dynamic, two-dimensional, depth-integrated numerical model to calculate the wave propulsion. In the data simulation, the bath ducks ended up on Knight Island far into the Gulf of Alaska, the same place that most of the ducks were found in reality.’

  ‘Impressive,’ Wisting said.

  ‘It’s reassuring to have theories confirmed by facts. We usually use buoys equipped with radio signals to study tidal flows, but they are expensive and have a tendency to disappear. Some of the ducks chose to continue their journey, floating very far north. Most were probably caught in Arctic pack ice. Some went in other directions. Six years ago, a yellow duck appeared on a beach in Scotland, and last year a couple more were found in England. It seems the pack ice carried them down the east coast of Canada to be captured by the Gulf Stream and carried to England. It’s quite fascinating.’

  ‘Have you found any in Norway?’

  ‘No, but it’s an absolute probability that they have reached here. If they’ve managed to travel on the Gulf Stream
to Scotland, then there’s nothing to stop them from drifting to the Norwegian coast.’

  ‘Then the feet that were washed ashore here could therefore have come from completely different parts of the world?’

  The oceanographer shrugged his shoulders. ‘In theory, yes. They could come from a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean, a shipwreck in the North Sea - or the tsunami in Asia for that matter.’

  Wisting was going to say something aloud about how discouraging this information was for the investigation, but was interrupted when the policeman who was leading the search party approached them.

  ‘A find has been reported,’ he stated, lifting his police radio as though to explain how he had obtained the information. ‘In Skravika bay.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked the oceanographer.

  ‘On the other side of the peninsula,’ Wisting explained, pointing westwards.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dark pine trees with crooked, dense branches surrounded the great stretches of flat land above the small, cleft-shaped inlet. Twisted roots crept over the hillside and down towards the edge of the sea. From as far back as the 1950s, the area had been used for open-air concerts and, in a few weeks’ time, stages would be set up once more for a festival which thousands of people would attend and would transform the idyllic place.

  Wisting slammed the car door with a feeling of dejection and impotence. Normally a case like this would fire him up. He would be focused and concentrated. This time he didn’t know how he was going to lead the team through the extensive work that lay ahead, he felt so tired and lacking in motivation. On his way to the station he stopped at a health-food shop to buy dietary supplements.

  The beach had once been popular with bathers because of its fine-grained sand. However, when the sea decided to fill it with large, round boulders, people who liked to swim chose other places. The Red Cross volunteers sat in the shade of the trees. A thin, brown dog lay panting in the heat with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. Wisting ran two fingers around the inside of his collar. His hairline was becoming sweaty.