‘Why is that?’
‘Gjersjø lake is almost three square kilometres in size and more than sixty metres at its deepest point. It’s full of perch, pike, crayfish and eels, but it’s far from certain that the solution lies in there.’
Standing up, he crossed to a worktop and returned to the table with a coffee pot and cups. ‘It’s always the greatest weakness in unsolved cases,’ he went on, ‘tying yourself to one specific theory far too early in the investigation.’
Line regretted not having brought her recording equipment with her. Adrian Stiller’s thoughts on the old missing-person case would have been well suited to a podcast. Instead, she took out her notepad and jotted them down. ‘So you don’t believe Simon Meier drowned?’ she asked.
‘It’s not within an investigator’s scope to believe anything,’ Stiller answered, pouring coffee into the cups. ‘But there’s actually nothing in the investigation to suggest that.’
‘He had gone fishing, though?’ Line reminded him.
‘Wrong,’ Adrian Stiller said. ‘He was on his way home after going fishing.’
He drew the case files towards him, removed the elastic band and took out a map. The local place name was Eistern, and a track led to an open space beside a disused pump station. From there a footpath ran through the forest to a headland. Fishing spot was written on the map. In addition, two photos were glued on, one of a bike locked on to a drainpipe at the old pump station and the other of fishing gear lying on the path. Arrows showed their location on the map.
‘It’s twenty metres from here to the lake,’ Stiller said, pointing at the path to the fishing spot. ‘He can’t have just fallen in. Something else must have happened.’
The map was pinned to photographs that were glued to sheets of stiff cardboard, just like in an old family album. The first pages were close-ups of the police discoveries on the path. The three fish he had caught were held in a plastic bag. Gashes and holes indicated that birds or other animals had helped themselves to these. It looked as if the bag had originally been inside the rucksack, together with hooks and lures, but had been tugged out with some of the other contents. The fishing rod lay on the grass, almost parallel with the path.
‘It seems as if he’s put his belongings down carefully,’ Line said, ‘but the photos give the impression of something different.’
Stiller raised his cup to his mouth as Line pointed at the rucksack and the contents strewn about.
‘It looks as if he’s just laid them down, but animals have subsequently come along, dragged out the contents and scattered them all over the place.’
‘You’ve got good eyes,’ Stiller said over the rim of his cup.
Line leafed further through the files. The gravel patch in front of the disused pump house seemed larger on the map than in the photographs. ‘What about any technical evidence?’ she asked.
‘A few items were gathered in,’ Stiller told her. ‘Cigarette ends, empty cans and used condoms. They tell you something about what the place was used for.’
‘He might have seen something he shouldn’t have,’ Line said.
‘If you’re going to write about this, it’s important to me that we agree on what I say officially and what is off the record,’ Stiller said. ‘Unofficially, it’s a far likelier hypothesis that Simon Meier witnessed a clandestine affair rather than that he drowned.’
‘Have DNA analyses been undertaken?’ Line asked, lifting some of the documents from the bundle.
‘Some things were analysed at a late stage in the 2003 investigation,’ Stiller said. ‘We’re talking about three condoms, all from the same man. Pubic hair was also found on one of them that gave the profile of a partner. XY-chromosomes.’
Line gave him a look to let him know she did not understand what he meant.
‘Both samples had male sex chromosomes,’ Stiller explained. ‘We’re dealing with a homosexual couple.’
Line made a few notes but, as far as she was concerned, this was really of little interest. Simon Meier had probably witnessed something entirely different.
‘Do you have DNA from Simon Meier?’ she asked.
‘The investigators were far-sighted enough to collect some,’ Stiller told her. ‘Obtained from an electric shaver at his home.’
The Kripos investigator got to his feet. ‘What makes the case of interest to you?’ he asked.
‘Much the same as for you,’ Line answered. ‘It’s unsolved. What’s more, I don’t believe he fell into the lake and drowned either. That means there’s an answer somewhere. Someone must know something.’
‘And what do you think happened?’
‘Someone took him.’
‘Do you have information from anyone apart from the police?’ he asked, gazing in the direction of the bundle of files.
‘At the moment all I have to go on are media reports from the time mentioning the people who gave statements.’
‘So you haven’t received a tip-off or found a source to set you on the trail of something?’
Line was uncertain how she should respond. ‘My experience is that something always crops up once you start digging,’ she replied. ‘At the moment I’m just looking to see if it might be possible to make something more out of this case.’
Stiller walked towards the door. ‘As I said on the phone, I can’t hand over the case files, but you can sit here and go through them at your leisure,’ he said, his hand on the doorknob. ‘But if you end up writing about this, you must let me know if you turn up anything of significance for the investigation.’
He stood looking at her as if desperate to discover whether something had already cropped up. ‘There’s coffee in the pot,’ he said, before he went out, leaving her on her own.
17
The prison walls were high, thick and imposing, and the rain had given the concrete a darker tinge of grey than usual.
Pressing the button at the gate, Wisting held up his police ID to the CCTV camera, but it took a while for anyone to answer. He explained that he needed to speak to a prisoner in connection with an ongoing case and was told to wait until someone arrived to collect him.
It crossed his mind that investigation was a fluid process. Fresh information bubbled to the surface all the time, and it was a matter of following the case wherever it led.
A prison officer appeared to escort him through the pneumatic doors and on into the main building, where he had to leave his mobile phone before he was allowed to proceed any further.
Finn Petter Jahrmann was waiting at a table in the visitors’ room. He had adopted a straggly beard, but apart from that was identical to his photograph. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.
Wisting sat down and took some time to explain who he was. The eyes of the man on the opposite side of the table darted about, as if he had any number of assaults on his conscience in addition to the ones he was serving time for and was afraid that Wisting had come to tell him that his past had finally caught up with him.
‘We don’t know each other,’ Wisting continued. ‘I know why you’re here, but that’s not the reason for my visit.’
The man shifted in his seat, seemingly anxious to find a more comfortable position. Wisting had learned early in his career that the most important qualities in an investigator was the ability to communicate and to regard each person as an individual. Police work gave him no right to be judgemental. On the contrary – he had to attempt to be open-minded, even though his own opinions on various forms of criminality might be damning.
‘I wondered whether you could tell me how you came to know Bernhard Clausen,’ he said.
‘The politician?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ Jahrmann asked. ‘I saw it on TV.’
‘He had a heart attack,’ Wisting said.
‘But what has that got to do with me?’
‘Nothing,’ Wisting replied. ‘Did you know him?’
‘Not really.’
‘What does that m
ean?’
‘We’re from the same place, but I didn’t have anything to do with him. I just saw him at the shop a few times, nothing more than that. Everybody knows who he is.’
‘What about his son? You’re about the same age.’
‘We were in the same year at school,’ Jahrmann confirmed. ‘He’s dead too.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Everybody knew Lennart, but we didn’t hang out together.’
‘Who did he hang out with?’
‘Guys who had the same interests as him.’
‘A gang?’
‘Not exactly a gang, but they were into motorbikes and that sort of thing.’
‘If I wanted to speak to the person who knew Lennart Clausen best, who should I talk to, then?’ Wisting asked.
Jahrmann answered without hesitation. ‘Rita Salvesen. She had a child with him, even though it was born after he was killed.’
Wisting nodded. Her name was already on his notepad. ‘Did you have any contact with him or his father around that time?’
Jahrmann shook his head. ‘Lennart and his pals spent their time in Oslo,’ he explained. ‘We didn’t see much of them in Kolbotn.’
Wisting spent the next ten minutes persuading Jahrmann to talk about the circle around Lennart Clausen. Some names seemed more important than others. Tommy, Roger and Aksel.
‘Was there someone called Daniel?’ Wisting asked.
Jahrmann repeated the name but eventually shook his head. Wisting was about to lose all hope of learning anything from this conversation. An old colleague had said that investigation was a matter of finding the right key for a particular lock. He could not recollect who had said it but, as Wisting gained more experience, he tended to disagree. In reality there were several locks and several keys, and no single key was enough to open something that was completely deadlocked.
‘Did you know Simon Meier?’ he asked, trying a different angle.
‘The fisherman?’
Wisting nodded, assuming this was a nickname in popular use.
‘This conversation is getting a bit weird,’ Jahrmann said. ‘You’re coming out with lots of questions about people who are dead.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Just in the same way that I knew Lennart Clausen – we’re from the same place, went to the same school.’
‘Did Lennart and Simon know each other?’
‘They almost certainly knew each other.’
‘What about Bernhard and Simon?’
Jahrmann flung out his arms. ‘I’ve answered all your questions,’ he said. ‘What’s all this really about?’
Wisting pressed the intercom button and announced that they were finished. The simplest thing would be to ask Jahrmann directly how his fingerprints had come to be on the two cardboard boxes.
‘It’s to do with Bernhard Clausen,’ he said as he stood up. ‘Have you been out at his summer cabin?’
Finn Petter Jahrmann shook his head and began to laugh. ‘What would I be doing there? I’d no idea he even had a cabin.’
Footsteps sounded outside in the corridor. The rattling of keys.
One key, one lock.
Something fell into place.
‘You said you’d met Bernhard Clausen at the shop?’ Wisting asked.
Jahrmann nodded as the door opened. The prison officer hovered in the doorway. ‘Finished?’ he asked.
‘Almost,’ Wisting said, turning to face Jahrmann again. ‘Which shop?’
‘Co-op Mega.’
‘Because you shopped there, or because you worked there?’
‘I worked there. Clausen sometimes shopped there.’
Wisting was unsure how to express himself. ‘Can you remember whether there was a particular time you met at the shop when he did something other than shopping?’
‘Something other than shopping? What on earth would that be?’
‘Sometimes people ask for empty cardboard boxes, for instance,’ Wisting suggested.
‘It’s more than ten years since I worked there,’ Jahrmann protested. ‘I can’t remember …’ He broke off. ‘His wife had died,’ he suddenly recollected. ‘He came in asking for some cardboard boxes. That’s right. He probably wanted them to pack up her belongings.’
‘And you were the one who gave them to him?’
‘Yes.’
Wisting smiled as he turned to the prison officer again. ‘Then we’re through,’ he said. The prison officer nodded and told Jahrmann to wait while he ushered Wisting out.
The keys rattled again, but it now struck Wisting that the perfect metaphor for an investigation was a jigsaw puzzle. It was just that sometimes you had too many pieces and some of them belonged to a different puzzle.
18
Ulf Lande had been the chief investigator. Line noted the name and also the police lawyer responsible before wading through the introductory papers. It had been Simon Meier’s brother who had reported him missing after he had started searching on his own initiative and had found his bicycle and fishing gear at Gjersjø lake.
The report was dated 31 May 2003. Line used her mobile phone to snap a photo of it instead of making notes. This was mainly for her own use, but the layout on the form listing the height, weight, skin colour, hair length and other personal details of the missing man could also be used as a striking illustration for her article.
The search had concentrated on the lake, with divers, surface exploration and inspections all along the water’s edge, but patrols had also scoured the forest. Eventually, the character of the case had changed from being a search to a criminal investigation.
Line was used to perusing old crime files. There was a special subfolder for everything relating to Simon Meier as a person: from this it emerged that he had been a loner who lacked friends and, reading between the lines, it suggested that he had been a victim of bullying. His family background was troubled, his parents’ marriage volatile and his mother suffered from anxiety. Another folder contained the specifics of the crime scene and everything connected with the technical examinations, and there was yet another folder for all the interviews that were carried out. Everyone who had provided a statement was listed separately with reference to a document number, but Bernhard Clausen’s name was not listed.
It seemed as if the interviews had been divided among three police officers and were based on what they called ‘voluntary statements’. That is to say, people provided their accounts without interruption. The focus was on anything deemed conspicuous, such as a stranger or a vehicle that did not belong in the area. Near the end of the statements, the investigators interjected with specific questions to help build the bigger picture; one interview built on another. When one witness had noticed a man with a dog, a jogger or an unusual car, subsequent witnesses were asked if they had made the same observation.
Nowhere was Bernhard Clausen alluded to, but Line wondered whether it would have been a different matter if any of the witnesses had been asked if they had seen him.
The most significant item seemed to have been a black car, spotted as it drove down the track to the pump house, but the woman who had reported this could not say what kind of car it was and she was also unsure of the exact day and time. An all-points bulletin had been issued for the car driver but he had never been located.
At the bottom of the bundle she came across a separate folder with the handwritten title Tip-offs. Each tip-off was dated and numbered, but apart from that there did not seem to be any system involved.
Line worked methodically through them. Most had come in by phone in the first week and had been jotted down on separate forms. She recognized some of the names from the interviews.
At the very back of the tip-off folder, she also found printouts of class lists from the school where Simon Meier had been a pupil. These were dated ten years prior to his disappearance, and there was no accompanying note to say why the list was included in the investigation material. It could have been used to survey people of
the same age who might know something. In addition to Simon’s own class, other classes in the same year group and school leavers from the year before and year after were recorded. Line took a photo of them before moving on to the bundle of tip-offs.
Several reports were from people who had seen Simon before he went missing. Others related to cars and hikers that had been noticed. A jogger, and a man with a small dog, were mentioned by a number of people, and some thought they had spotted Meier alive and kicking in different places throughout the country. There were even a few conspiracy theories to do with drinking water, as well as a long, handwritten letter from a clairvoyant woman who insisted that Simon Meier was buried in gravel somewhere. The anonymous letter naming Bernhard Clausen was not included.
Line began to flip through the bundle of case files one more time, just to be absolutely certain she hadn’t missed it. She stopped at a report about the letter from the clairvoyant. It had prompted a police search with sniffer dogs in three nearby gravel pits, demonstrating how little the investigators had had to go on. She took a picture of the letter and the report describing the search with the dogs. Clairvoyants were always popular with readers.
Both the jogger and the dog walker were identified and interviewed. The dog owner described where he had walked, but otherwise had nothing to contribute. Nevertheless, Line noted his name. This could be an alternative angle to any eventual article. Maybe the dog would even still be alive, she thought as she pictured in her mind’s eye how that could provide a useful illustration of the passage of time.
Adrian Stiller returned after an hour. ‘Are you any the wiser?’ he inquired.
Line shook her head. ‘Is everything here?’ she queried.
‘Everything we’ve received, anyway,’ Stiller replied. ‘Why do you ask? Are you missing something?’
‘I’d just thought there might be more tip-offs at least.’
Stiller sat down. ‘Sometimes that’s a problem with old cases,’ he said. ‘Tip-offs are left lying here and there and not all of them are gathered up when the case files are packed away. Some tip-offs are checked out but not documented, while others are regarded as of no interest by whoever receives them and never get forwarded.’
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