The Cabin

by Jorn Lier Horst

  ‘Kjell,’ Line said.

  Ulf Lande looked as if he had no idea what she meant.

  ‘His brother’s name is Kjell,’ Line clarified. ‘I’m meeting him later.’

  ‘Yes, I remember now, he was our contact person in the family,’ Lande said, nodding. ‘But I haven’t spoken to him in ages.’

  Another train passed outside, in the opposite direction this time, and Line waited until the noise had subsided. ‘Is it OK for me to record our conversation?’ she queried.

  Ulf Lande nodded and Line switched on the recorder. Strictly speaking, it belonged to VG. This was equipment she had been given in connection with the podcast series she had done for them previously.

  ‘What do you think happened to Simon?’ she asked.

  ‘An accident,’ Lande replied. ‘I think he’s lying in the depths of the lake, buried in the mud at the bottom of Gjersjø.’

  ‘His belongings were found a good distance from the water, though,’ Line pointed out.

  ‘That’s easily explained,’ Lande told her. ‘He might have put down his things on the path to run back for something he’d left behind on the shore.’

  ‘What might that have been?’ Line probed. ‘Nothing was found at the spot where he’d been fishing.’

  Ulf Lande shrugged. ‘Some fishing gear he might have put in his pocket, or maybe a fishing knife that he slipped back inside its sheath. I think that was why the accident occurred. He went back to look for something and fell in the water.’

  ‘But didn’t divers conduct a thorough search?’

  ‘The conditions were hopeless for diving,’ Lande explained. ‘The bottom of the lake is covered with more than half a metre of clay and mud, and when the divers were moving about, it all swirled up and impaired their visibility.’

  ‘But wouldn’t he have floated to the surface eventually?’

  ‘That was what we hoped would happen,’ Lande said. ‘But he may well have got snagged on something or swallowed up by the soft clay at the bottom. Most likely he lay there until the water turned him into clay as well.’

  Line noted that she would have to speak to someone who had been down to the bottom of the lake. ‘Who dived there looking for him, then?’ she asked.

  ‘The divers from the fire service,’ Lande said. ‘The local diving club made an attempt, too.’

  Line thumbed through her notes. ‘So that was your theory?’ she summed up. ‘A drowning accident?’

  ‘“Hypothesis” is what we call it these days,’ Lande said, casting a glance around the modern surroundings in which they were seated.

  ‘Did you try out any other hypotheses?’ Line asked.

  ‘We kept all our options open, but nothing stood out, really. It’s difficult to imagine a motive for any kind of crime.’

  ‘What if he saw something he shouldn’t have?’ Line probed.

  Ulf Lande smiled. ‘You’re thinking of the condoms?’

  Actually she was not. All the same, she said: ‘For example.’

  ‘We found them when we did a fingertip search of the parking space and the area around it. What we were looking for was something that might indicate a crime scene, but we found nothing. No broken branches, no traces of blood. Nothing.’

  ‘Were all the tip-offs you received followed up?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lande assured her. ‘We even went up to a gravel pit because a clairvoyant woman had “seen” him there.’

  ‘Did you get any tip-offs about specific people?’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  She had Bernhard Clausen in mind. ‘Tip-offs from anyone naming a possible suspect,’ she said.

  Ulf Lande shook his head. ‘As I told you, the most likely explanation is a drowning accident.’

  ‘How many tip-offs did you get altogether?’ Line asked, even though she knew the answer.

  ‘Around fifty,’ the investigator replied. ‘Most of them were from people who thought they’d spotted him in Oslo after he disappeared.’

  ‘Adrian Stiller at Kripos told me that it’s easy for some tip-offs to slip through the net,’ Line said. ‘Especially in cases where you think you already know what’s happened. Then information that points in a different direction can seem insignificant.’

  She saw from his expression that he disliked her insinuation that the case had not been very well handled.

  ‘Well, of course that’s a problem for anyone in charge of an inquiry,’ he said. ‘Lots of messages end up at the police districts around Oslo and not all of them are forwarded on. But I choose to believe that I’d have been told if anything crucial had turned up.’

  ‘What do you think about the Cold Cases Group re-examining the files?’

  ‘We just have to be grateful for that,’ Lande told her. ‘We don’t have the resources to do anything like that ourselves. But I can’t really see what else can be done. I’m not entirely sure what you think you’re going to achieve either.’

  With a smile, Line reached out for the recorder and switched it off. In fact, she had thought she might find Simon Meier, but she did not say that aloud.

  28

  ‘The first message was received on the emergency phone line at 14.40,’ Audun Thule explained, without having to refer to his notes. ‘The robbers struck on the runway in front of the terminal building, just as the money was being unloaded from the aircraft and on to an armoured security vehicle. We had the first patrol car on the scene at 14.46, but they had difficulty locating the crime scene in the vast airport. It was the airport police who got there first, but by then the robbers had already made themselves scarce.’

  Amalie listened to him wide-eyed as she chewed a slice of bread.

  ‘Two robbers were actively involved,’ Thule continued. ‘Wearing dark overalls and balaclavas, and carrying machine pistols. They drove a black Grand Voyager and made their way on to the runway by cutting a padlock on one of the gates in the wire netting to the north of the airport.’

  Wisting nodded. Everything Thule told him was familiar from the media coverage.

  ‘Initially, we concentrated on establishing checkpoints on all the roads in the vicinity,’ Thule went on. ‘At 15.07 a message was received about a vehicle ablaze on the E16 east of Kløfta. A Grand Voyager, to be more precise. That gave grounds for believing that the thieves had fled eastwards, towards Sweden. The officers were sent in that direction and roadblocks were set up on the border. That turned out to be a diversionary manoeuvre. The right vehicle, the one actually used in the raid, wasn’t found until a week later, burning in a disused welding workshop in Sand, a small village ten minutes south of the airport. The workshop was usually deserted, but we found a burnt-out Grand Voyager and a dirt bike in the ruins. The car had been stolen from Hauketo six months earlier and the plates taken from a similar vehicle in Bjerkebanen. The car used in the diversionary tactic had been stolen from the car park behind the old Østbanehallen railway depot in Oslo.’

  Thule opened his notebook for the first time. ‘We concentrated the investigation on trying to find an inside man,’ he said. ‘Someone employed at Gardermoen, in the security company or the airline, must have tipped the robbers the wink about routines and arrivals.’

  ‘Did you find anyone?’

  ‘No. The work was extensive and time-consuming and we ended up with a few candidates, but nothing concrete.’

  ‘What information do you have?’

  ‘The raid was well planned, prepared far in advance and implemented with military precision,’ Thule said. ‘There are only a handful of people among Norway’s criminals who would be capable of carrying out such a plan. We used our informants in various camps, and one name emerged from that: Aleksander Kvamme.’

  Wisting knew the name. For many years, Kvamme had been the kingpin in organized crime circles around the Østland area, with contacts in the Yugoslavian mafia, which was already so well established in Sweden. He had also been accused of an execution-style killing but was never convicted.

&n
bsp; ‘We ran some sham attacks on him,’ Thule went on. ‘Including getting him charged in a narcotics case so that we could see what he was up to, but all that came out of it was an alibi. At the time of the robbery, he was sitting in a tattoo parlour having an eagle etched on his upper arm.’

  ‘Watertight?’

  ‘If we’re to believe the tattooist and his next customer. We also found a receipt with the time and date. Cases like that usually start to crack once the money starts circulating, but that never happened. Our theory was that the money was either taken straight out of the country or that it was frozen.’

  ‘Frozen?’

  ‘Hidden in a secure place in the expectation that the police would scale down the investigation,’ Thule clarified.

  ‘What do you think now you know the cash may have been found in Bernhard Clausen’s possession?’ Wisting asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea what to think,’ Thule answered. ‘I’ll have to go through the whole case again with that as the starting point, but I really can’t imagine Clausen having any connection to the airport robbery.’

  Wisting filled him in on Clausen’s son and what he knew about the circles in which he mixed.

  ‘Sounds like a totally different level from someone capable of carrying out a stunt like this, though.’

  ‘There’s one further point,’ Wisting continued.

  Thule sat up straight, his interest piqued.

  ‘On the same day as the raid at the airport a twenty-two-year-old lad from Kolbotn went missing,’ Wisting said. ‘Simon Meier. An incident the media called the Gjersjø case.’

  ‘Means nothing to me,’ Thule said.

  Wisting picked up the iPad from the settee, where Amalie had now fallen asleep again and opened the folder of pictures.

  ‘A week or so after the boy disappeared, the Director General received an anonymous tip-off.’

  He showed Thule the letter with the short message: Check Health Minister Bernhard Clausen re: the Gjersjø case.

  ‘So there’s a possible tie-up here,’ Wisting said, using his finger to draw lines of connection in the air, ‘linking the raid, the disappearance and Bernhard Clausen.’

  Amalie woke and reached out for the iPad. Wisting let her have it and once again propped her up among the cushions on the settee. Audun Thule headed out to his car and Mortensen helped him to carry in the cardboard boxes filled with the airport robbery case files. In the meantime, Wisting made a phone call to the Director General.

  ‘Any news?’ Lyngh asked.

  ‘We have a suspicion about where the money came from,’ Wisting answered. ‘The raid at Gardermoen airport in 2003.’

  There was silence at the other end.

  ‘The time frame and the amount of cash match up,’ Wisting continued.

  ‘That’s certainly one hypothesis,’ the Director General replied. ‘But surely it doesn’t make any sense for Clausen to be connected to it?’

  ‘The robbery took place on the same day that Simon Meier went missing,’ Wisting added.

  ‘Do you see a connection, then?’

  ‘Not yet, but I need you to pull a few strings for me.’

  ‘OK, how?’

  ‘I’d like you to talk to the Police Chief in Romerike and have Audun Thule released from his duties and allocated to me.’

  29

  Branches scraped across the roof and sides of the car as Line turned on to the overgrown gravel track. She had had difficulty finding it, but this had to be the same track along which Simon Meier had cycled with his fishing gear in 2003.

  She drove slowly. After a hundred metres or so, the old pump house appeared. Cracks in the masonry and walls were covered in moss. Stinging nettles grew tall along the foundations and several of the tiny panes of glass in the single window were smashed. The drainpipe to which Simon Meier had locked his bike was missing.

  Driving around the pump house, Line parked and took out her camera. She lingered for a while, soaking up her surroundings. The forest had grown in recent years, reducing the size of the area, and from where she stood she could not catch as much as a glimpse of Gjersjø lake.

  She located the footpath leading down to the fishing spot. It still seemed well trodden, with smooth pine roots lying on top of the hard-packed earth. Either animals frequented it or people still came down here to fish. Maybe even both.

  Very soon the terrain opened out into a promontory beside the water and a gentle breeze ruffled the surface of the lake.

  The edge of the mountain sloping down to the water was ragged, and the waves splashed in, making the mountainside wet and slick. She could see that there was a real chance of losing your footing and hitting your head on the rocks then ending up unconscious in the water. The offshore wind, as now, could also force a body out into deeper water, where it could become submerged.

  Traces of fish blood had been found in several places on the promontory, but nothing to support the theory that Simon Meier might have fallen and knocked himself out. No hairs or human blood. However, such traces might have been difficult to find after two days.

  A duck, its wings flapping rapidly, took off from the rushes on her left and flew low across the lake. Behind her, she thought she heard a car.

  Again retracing her steps for some distance along the path, she raised her camera as the sunlight fell obliquely through the foliage above her head. She directed the lens at the headland where Simon Meier had once stood, focusing on one of the twisted roots on the path and adjusting the depth of field before she took a few sample photographs. The scene would add drama to any articles she might publish.

  She took some more photos before walking back to the pump house. A car door slammed and a man with a fishing rod emerged from the other side of the building.

  Line exchanged a smile and a nod with the driver, a man of East European appearance, and took a chance. ‘Are you going fishing?’ she asked. Answering in broken Norwegian, the man told her he was going to catch something for dinner, before vanishing into the trees along the path.

  Line skirted around the pump house, where the man had parked in the shade. She had intended to replicate the photo the police had taken of the bicycle in the case folder, but the man’s car was in the way.

  However, it was the door and pump-house entrance that provided the most evocative shot. The obvious decay suggested that something sinister could easily have happened there. She worked a little on the light until she felt satisfied with the picture and then approached the door. Brown streaks of rust ran down the panels.

  Although the door was locked, it showed signs of an attempted break-in and the doorframe was now reinforced with steel casing. The window was too high on the wall for her to see inside, but an old pallet was propped against it, acting as a ladder. She climbed on it and peered through one of the small panes where the glass was missing. The floor inside was a metre below ground level and in the centre of the room stood an enormous generator, with pipes snaking out in all directions. There were a few cabinets on the wall, an ancient control panel and an open door leading into another room. Through that doorway she could just make out the outlines of a hatch in the floor.

  She stood for a while before jumping down, finding her phone and calling Ulf Lande’s number. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said, ‘but I’m taking a look at the old pump station and just had to ask: did you examine the old pump house when you were searching for Simon?’

  ‘Of course,’ the chief investigator answered. ‘The search party broke in there.’

  Line cast a glance at the door. ‘What about the hatch in the floor?’ she asked.

  ‘I was in there myself and looked down into it,’ Lande replied.

  Line thanked him and apologized once again for disturbing him. When she rang off, she felt embarrassed. Of course the police would have investigated that possibility.

  It was almost 1 p.m. now. She wondered whether she should phone her father to remind him that Amalie would need some food but shook off the idea. Instead she s
ettled behind the wheel and keyed Kjell Meier’s address into her GPS.

  The car bumped along the narrow track as she followed the directions to Langhus, finishing up at the end of a row of grey-painted terraced houses.

  Simon Meier’s brother welcomed her and showed her through to the kitchen, where an open ring binder lay on the table, filled with newspaper cuttings and other information from the missing-person case.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me,’ Line said. ‘Especially at such short notice.’

  ‘No trouble,’ he said.

  He was different from how she had imagined. Kjell Meier was short and plump, whereas Simon had been tall and skinny.

  ‘I spoke to Adrian Stiller yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘Was he able to tell you anything?’ Kjell Meier asked. ‘Was there any news?’

  ‘I think it was still too early,’ Line answered. ‘I paid a visit to Ulf Lande today and he told me there had been another journalist looking at the case a few years ago.’

  ‘Yes, she was certainly persistent and enthusiastic,’ Kjell Meier told her. ‘Her research went on for a long time and she uncovered some mistakes that the police had made, but nothing was ever published.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The newspaper she worked for went bust. I don’t think she got paid either, even though she spent hours on the story. She went through everything and made fresh inquiries. Things that the police should really have done.’

  ‘Do you remember the journalist’s name?’

  ‘Henriette something or other,’ Kjell Meier said, starting to browse through the ring binders on the table. ‘I can find out for you.’

  ‘I thought it might be worth speaking to her,’ Line said.

  He found what he was looking for in the first few pages. ‘Henriette Koppang,’ he said, sliding the open page towards Line. ‘She was very well informed. Do you know her?’ he asked.

  Line shook her head as she scribbled down the phone number. She vaguely recognized the name and wondered if she had worked for the online newspaper Nettavisen, but she knew nothing more about her.