Dregs (2011) Read online

  He had last been here seven years before. Three men had disappeared out of the inlet in a boat together with the 17 million kroner proceeds of a robbery and an important witness was brutally done away with before he could contact the police. Since that time Wisting had asked himself more and more often what was actually going on in the country. The annual number of crimes had more than tripled since he started in the police force and were frequently characterised by senseless violence.

  On the boulder-strewn beach two uniformed officers stood in discussion with Nils Hammer. Wisting walked over to them with Torunn Borg and the researcher from the Meteorological Institute, noting the odour of salt sea and rotting seaweed. One of the police officers stopped in the middle of a sentence when Wisting caught his eye, taking a few steps to the side to reveal what the sea had washed ashore.

  Wisting stopped. ‘Bloody hell,’ he cursed.

  ‘Yes,’ Hammer said, moving a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘Exactly. Bloody hell.’

  In front of them lay another foot.

  Driftwood, empty plastic bottles and pieces of rope lay along the water’s edge and, tangled in a cluster of bladder wrack, lay a training shoe. Seaweed had covered and almost completely hidden it. At first sight the shoe did not look different from any other flotsam. Wisting sat on his hunkers and swallowed some phlegm. He had seen the same thing before: grey strings and shreds of skin hanging out of the shoe, fibres of flesh and severed tendons, but this was slightly different. It was a different type of shoe. This one was white, with the three black Adidas stripes along the side. At the same time, it seemed smaller than the two others.

  Wisting cocked his head, studying it from slightly different angles to be sure. This, too, was a left shoe. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said once more and moved away. A nerve at his temple began to pound and he realised it would give him a headache if he didn’t do something. He turned irritably towards the Red Cross team. ‘What are you sitting there for?’ he demanded.

  ‘They’ve been working since seven o’clock,’ Hammer explained. ‘They need a break.’

  Wisting regretted being so abrupt, but did not say anything further.

  Ebbe Slettaker, the oceanographer, produced a little pocket camera.

  ‘Is it okay?’ he asked, holding it up in front of Wisting.

  ‘Just don’t let the photographs go astray,’ he replied. ‘Has Mortensen been alerted?’

  ‘He’s on his way,’ Hammer confirmed.

  The oceanographer first took a couple of landscape photographs, in which he captured the inlet and the sea beyond, before venturing nearer the water to take a close-up of the shoe.

  ‘That’s good,’ he commented, making a note in a book. ‘That makes my job easier.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It creates more work, of course, but with more finds it becomes easier to reach a qualified conclusion. It’s like taking a cross-reference bearing. The more reference points, the more accurate the answer will be.’

  These comments made Wisting feel more favourably disposed to the world. In principle the oceanographer was right. The same applied to investigation work. Three murders were easier to clear up than two, with more chance that the perpetrator had left traces and clues. Tiny details connected to each individual discovery told a different part of a single story.

  ‘Of course, I don’t know if I can be of help,’ the oceanographer went on, adjusting his glasses. ‘Obviously I’ll do my best, but the most logical explanation is probably that, somewhere out at sea, there’s a bag of severed body parts that someone has dumped from a boat. The first parts have worked themselves loose but, in all likelihood, more will be washed ashore in the next few days. I’ll have to be kept informed.’

  Wisting turned to the group of Red Cross volunteers again, watching everything that the policemen on the shore were doing, but the search was not going to start again until they had finished their business. The thought of severed body parts floating around in the sea made Wisting feel unwell. It was 23rd June, St. John’s Eve. The fjord would be filled with boats this evening. People would be gathering in lively company on all of the little islands and skerries, ready to light bonfires and celebrate midsummer. At the weekend, the trades holiday fortnight would begin. Summer cottage folk and camping tourists would double the population.

  Espen Mortensen’s crime scene vehicle swung onto the grassy area above them. The Assistant Chief of Police was first out, trotting down towards them, balancing on the round boulders, to stop about a metre from the severed foot. It looked as if he had difficulty controlling his facial expression. ‘Another one?’ he said finally, taking a grip round his own neck.

  ‘I think the meteorologist is right,’ Hammer said, nodding towards the marine researcher.

  ‘I’m not a meteorologist,’ Ebbe Slettaker corrected him, adjusting his glasses once more. ‘I’m an oceanographer.’

  ‘It’s all the same to me,’ Hammer smiled, spitting out a splinter of wood from his toothpick. ‘But I think you’re right.’ He turned to face the sea. ‘Somewhere or other out there there’s a bin-bag full of body parts.’

  The Assistant Chief of Police stood with an astonished expression on his bony face. Then he turned towards Wisting. ‘I have raised the matter with the Public Prosecutor,’ he said. ‘There will be a press conference this afternoon. We have to release information about all this. Only by doing that will we get the responses we need.’

  Wisting moved back a few steps to let Mortensen through with his equipment case. Right now he was not sure whether they had many more stones to unturn among the earlier investigative work, but he was not in disagreement. This case could well turn on an unknown someone coming forward.

  CHAPTER 9

  Line parked on the stone-covered courtyard in front of the house in Herman Wildenveysgate.

  She still thought of it as coming home, even though she had not lived here for almost six years. Moving to Oslo when she was twenty, she had begun studying media and communications but, after a year, had become fed up with schoolbooks and the curriculum. She wanted to gain practical experience and took a temporary job on her local newspaper back home. Finding a bed-sit in the town, she quickly realised that writing was what she really wanted to do.

  The temporary post at Ostlandsposten was like a door opening, just a crack, and she did not take long to step through. The profession of journalism suited her inquisitiveness and critical faculties. She got good responses to her work, her headlines increased in number and size, and quite soon she moved to another temporary post at Verdens Gang newspaper in Oslo. Her contract had been extended three times and, although newspapers throughout the country were cutting back, she hoped in time to win a permanent appointment. Someone, after all, would have to replace the sly old foxes when they eventually retired. She had already achieved one of VG‘s ‘golden pen’ awards and, the year previously, she had been awarded the national SKUP prize for investigative journalism for her exposure of an international drugs network that used under-age asylum seekers for smuggling throughout Europe.

  By taking a one-year course of study on the internet, she had acquired a formal qualification, and after Easter had added to the sixty study points with a further course in features journalism. This aspect of the profession attracted her increasingly, not just the reporting of news but the telling of a story. Her talent for giving the material a personal voice had taken her into the features department.

  She got out of the car and took out a bunch of keys on which she still had her old key. It always gave her a pang of homesickness to look at the brown-stained house with white window-frames. The garden had not been well looked after since her mother’s death, but it was still growing, ivy still climbed the walls around the entrance, framing the front door.

  When she was in her hometown she usually stayed at Tommy Kvanter’s flat in the centre. They had been in the same class at times during primary and junior high school, but had not seen each other for te
n years until they met again the previous autumn while Line was covering a murder case. Since then they had spent a lot of time together, but the relationship had not blossomed sufficiently to feel they were a couple. Work and studies meant she had to push such thoughts aside. Perhaps she also had to admit that they did not really suit each other so well. Tommy was impulsive and went his own way. He lived without worries and sometimes showed an unpredictable spontaneity, with a lifestyle that brought him into social circles that scared her. He had two prison sentences behind him, the longer of which was a year and a half for importing five kilos of hashish. In all likelihood, this was the real reason that she did not see a long future together.

  His spontaneity was attractive and frightening at the same time. She envied his ability to live in the moment, and when they were together, many of her worries about the future disappeared.

  Tommy worked as a chef on a Danish factory trawler that fished for prawns around Greenland. He was out for two weeks at a time. She had her own key to his flat, but she didn’t like to stay when he was not at home. Neither of them was particularly happy about the commuting job that meant long spells apart. More often these days, Tommy talked about coming ashore and moving in with her in Oslo, where he could get a job in a restaurant. She didn’t know if she really liked the suggestion.

  Unlocking the door of the house she continued to think of as home she kicked off her shoes in the hallway. Her father had not installed a burglar alarm as most of his neighbours had done and she had mentioned it to him a couple of times. Last winter, she had worked on a series of articles about migrant criminals from Eastern Europe who broke into houses and helped themselves to everything of value. Next day they could be in a completely different part of the country, the stolen goods already far, far away. Her father’s house was in a beautiful situation on the hillside above Stavern, and would probably interest that kind of criminal. Furthermore, it lay empty for most hours of the day and night. He spent a lot of time at work, and she knew that he also spent evenings and holidays with Suzanne Bjerke, whom he had met at the same time that she herself had met Tommy Kvanter.

  It was clean and tidy inside the house, smelling just as she remembered. Her father had most likely spent a few hours the evening before tidying up, knowing she was coming.

  She carried her bag containing a change of clothes up to her old room on the first floor and then went down to the kitchen. She got a glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water from the tap. Tap water here tasted cleaner and fresher than in Oslo, but then it was the water from the Farris spring. She cleared away a coffee cup her father had left lying and took out her portable computer and research file, as usual using the big kitchen table as a work area.

  Her next interview subject was called Ken Ronny Hauge. It really was a typical name for a villain, she thought. In many of the criminal cases she worked on, the culprit had a double-barrelled name - for one reason or another, the phonetics made her associate it with criminals. There was Ken Arvid, Roy Tore, Jim Raymond, and Tom Roger. Tommy was also a name that she had often come across in forensic reports, when she thought about it.

  Ken Ronny Hauge was the most fascinating person on her list of interview subjects. On the night of 23rd September 1991, he had shot and killed a policeman. The case was one of Line’s earliest recollections. Her father had bought all of the Oslo newspapers while the case was on the front pages and both parents followed the reports on television and radio.

  The murdered policeman was called Edgar Bisjord and had been the same age as her father. They had gone on a few in-service courses together. Edgar Bisjord had worked at the district sheriff’s office in Ovre Eiker. He was called out from home because of a traffic accident on the main route 35 south of Vestfossen, but the actual accident was a routine matter. He helped the two parties to fill out the claim report form and left the scene as soon as the damaged vehicles were towed away, but never arrived home. The following day his police car was found at a turning area at the end of a little side road near Eikeren and Edgar Bisjord lay three metres away with three bullet holes in his chest.

  Line had been eight years old at the time and frightened that something similar might happen to her father. She screamed when he went to work and, all these years later, could still remember the clammy feeling of anxiety. Her feelings didn’t improve when she learned that the perpetrator was from Helgeroa, only ten minutes away. His escape route could have been through Stavern and past the house where Line had been lying asleep.

  Ken Ronny Hauge was captured that same evening, and it was sixteen years before he was a free man again. By then he had served more than the legally required two-thirds of his sentence. When Line looked him up she discovered that he had chosen to move back to his hometown, although many people would remember who he was. That surprised her, but almost a generation had gone by since the murder. Moreover, the world had experienced worse and more brutal cases in subsequent years.

  When she had phoned him three weeks before, he listened with interest as she explained that the aim of her series was to illuminate the negative aspects of punishment by imprisonment. The often pointless activities and the slow, hard road back into society. She rather hoped that the matter might become an issue in the election campaign that autumn.

  Ken Ronny Hauge’s had been the last name on her list. Prior to him, seven people had said no thanks, but she had learned how to express herself and what she should emphasise to persuade them. He had agreed to an interview, but made it a condition that he remain anonymous. That was not a problem. Two of the other ex-convicts had supplied names and photographs. It just made the feature more dramatic if she could illustrate it with another kind of picture, something like nicotine-yellow fingers round a coffee cup, a pair of clenched fists, a bowed neck with grey hair, or a close-up of a prison tattoo.

  She took a picture of Ken Ronny Hauge from the folder, an old one from VG‘s picture library. The day after his arrest it had been appeared on the front page beneath the headline POLICE MURDERER. In considerably smaller print, there was another line stating: Believed to be, so the editor could defend the label. It was this label that made her doubt whether Ken Ronny would agree to the interview. Several of those who had declined had claimed that the newspaper had condemned them in advance and had a one-sided view of their cases.

  The picture looked like a school photograph, probably from his final year at Larvik technical college where he had trained as a car mechanic. She well knew how the newspaper worked. They had probably looked up someone who had been in his class at school and bought the photo for one or two thousand kroner. She didn’t see anything unethical about it. Newspapers and news bureaux bought pictures all the time. Nevertheless, she was pleased that she was not the person who had to take responsibility for putting such pictures into print. The justification was nothing other than sensationalist, and caused unnecessary stress for the subject’s family.

  He was handsome, she decided. That was also perhaps the reason that the picture had been printed on the front page. There was a great contrast between the young man’s appearance and the gruesome crime he had committed. His hair was dark, smooth and cut short. He had an intelligent face with dark eyes that suggested he was not completely of Norwegian extraction. From other papers in the folder, Line knew that his mother was called Liv, but his father’s name had not been given.

  Ken Ronny was the older of two sons. His younger brother was now 35 years old and, as far as Line could discover, had never been involved in any criminal activity. He ran a company that supplied machinery to the stone industry, was married and had two daughters.

  Ken Ronny’s mother had been found dead in the harbour almost exactly a year after he had been arrested. The death was described as a drowning accident. Line wondered if the journalist who had splashed the picture of Ken Ronny over the front page had been aware of the incident. It was probably a final way out that she had chosen after failing to drink away her sorrow and despair.

  T
here were several aspects of the police murder that made it unusual, the most disquieting being that Ken Ronny Hauge had never admitted guilt or given any explanation about what happened that dark September night in 1991. Not once during the trial had he offered any explanation.

  Line was to interview him on Friday and was excited about what he might have to say, but met his gaze from the photograph with a slight sense of dread. She thought of all the evenings she had lain in bed as a little girl without being able to fall asleep, praying to God that the Police Murderer would not take her father too. Interviewing him would be like going to meet a danger from the past.

  CHAPTER 10

  Afternoon sunshine trickled through the venetian blinds, throwing stripes of light across the overflowing desk in Wisting’s office.

  He unscrewed the cap on a container of tablets for which he had paid almost four hundred kroner in the health-food shop, and examined the contents. The expensive pills contained roseroot (rhodiola rosea) and other herbs. According to the product description, the pale capsules would increase his tolerance of stress, stimulate physical and psychological performance, and produce higher levels of energy and vigour. In addition, they would improve concentration and memory, at the same time having a positive effect on mood and motivation.

  Everything he needed.

  He shook two capsules onto his palm and swallowed them without water while reading through the press release he had written. It was too late to change it. The information had already been sent to a dozen or so editorial offices, and would be disseminated via the news bureaux to all the newspapers in the country.

  The text briefly summed up the facts of the case, describing the finding of the three severed feet, giving time and place and confirming that the most likely scenario involved body parts from three different people. In the next paragraph it explained about the four people who had gone missing in the area, and that the discoveries were being checked against these. There was nevertheless still a possibility that the body parts had come from far away. He had also added the stock phrase about the police keeping all possibilities open, but did not exclude the possibility of a criminal act and had initiated appropriate lines of enquiry.