‘Why are we finding only feet?’ Hammer asked, reaching for the coffeepot.
The oceanographer stole a glance at them over his spectacles.
‘Different body parts float in different ways,’ he said. ‘Wind and tide divide them up.’
‘Are you ready yet?’ Wisting asked, looking at his computer screen. It showed rows and columns with numbers in different coloured areas.
‘Shortly.’
Wisting continued to give an account of the missing men’s membership of the five-man group and the secret alert force. The investigators leaned forwards and began to take a deeper interest. All the same, there was little they could get to grips with or take direction from.
‘Perhaps we ought to bring in one of those profilers?’ the Chief Superintendent suggested, using an American accent to pronounce a word that did not have a good Norwegian equivalent. ‘An expert who can say something about the personal characteristics of the person we’re looking for.’
Wisting thought he could see the Assistant Chief of Police light up at the thought of releasing such novel news at the next press conference.
‘Surely we’re not as desperate as that?’ Hammer said.
‘Would it not give us a pointer about whether we’re searching for a man or a woman, how old he is, what kind of background he has? Education, profession, family, motive? Whatever?’
‘All we have is four feet.’ Mortensen reminded them. ‘We haven’t got a crime scene or a murder weapon. That’s not much of a basis on which to build a profile. It would be simply interpretation and guesswork. All we would end up with would be a conclusion based on theories without any proof, a hypothesis. We can’t base an investigation on that.’
‘I can tell you what kind of person we’re looking for,’ Hammer interjected, drinking from his coffee cup. ‘A madman.’
No one had any objections to that.
‘I believe,’ Torunn Borg said, speaking for the first time, ‘that the solution might lie far back in time. That someone has dug up something or other in their mutual past, such as these secret military operations, for example.’
‘Hanne Richter breaks that pattern,’ the Chief Superintendent protested. ‘The same applies to Camilla Thaulow, who disappeared on Tuesday.’
‘But there is a connection,’ Torunn Borg continued. ‘Hanne Richter was living in Christian Hauge’s house.’
‘Besides, she was mad,’ Hammer went one, ‘and most likely knew a lot of other mad people.’
‘Christian Hauge died of natural causes,’ Audun Vetti reminded them. ‘He is not a part of the investigation.’
‘He was a part of the five-man group,’ Torunn Borg said. ‘If nothing else, that puts him in a peripheral role.’
Wisting nodded. He thought they had got an interesting discussion going - that was the way that most thoughts and ideas emerged.
‘What about Camilla Thaulow?’ he asked. ‘How does she fit in?’
‘She worked at the nursing home where Christian Hauge, Otto Saga and Torkel Lauritzen all lived. She might have come across the same secret that cost the others their lives.’
The Assistant Chief of Police clearly did not think that this discussion was going to be productive.
‘What kind of secret would that be?’ he asked, shaking his head.
No one could give him an answer.
‘Something or other must have happened in September of last year,’ Hammer said. ‘That was when they disappeared.’
The discussion round the table went on to deal with what had dominated the news nine months previously, the presidential election in the USA and various consequences of the international financial crisis.
Wisting closed his eyes, feeling how tired he was as the others talked. Probably they were looking for an event that had never reached the newspaper pages. When he thought of all the documents he had read in the past few days, there was all the same some kind of September connection. Seventeen years earlier, Ken Ronny Hauge for unknown reasons had shot and killed a police officer, an event that had cracked open the close solidarity within the five-man group. In August of last year, Christian Hauge was the first member of the group to die. Shortly afterwards three others disappeared.
He thought he could just about make out the contours of something, that he might be close to something he would soon be able to grasp, but for the moment he chose to keep it to himself. It was too flimsy - just a fleeting thought.
He opened his eyes again, jotting down a keyword.
Following the discussion among the investigators the oceanographer leaned back. Although his assignment was confined to calculating possible trajectories of drift for the feet he had signed a declaration of confidentiality and been granted full access to the investigation material. That meant they didn’t need to take care when they were discussing the case in his presence.
‘Are you ready?’ Wisting asked again.
Ebbe Slettaker nodded, starting up the projector with the remote. A map of the archipelago outside Stavern came up on screen.
‘I have taken a long time to program in data about tides, wind and the topographical formation of the shore area,’ he explained. ‘I have constructed a model of the actual sea area covering 400 square kilometers and containing about 25 billion cubic centimetres of water by volume.’
Wisting peered at the map. It stretched from Malmoya island, east of Larviksfjorden, down to Langesundsbukta in the west. To the south it disappeared in the Skagerrak with Tvistein lighthouse as the most outlying landmark.
‘The strongest tides in the inner part of the Skagerrak consist of tidal water that raises and lowers the water surface by 0.24 centimetres in a period of six hours,’ expanded the hired expert. ‘That means a flow of around 3 billion cc of water. On the bottom and at depths of more than 90-100 metres, the speed of the flow of tidal water will be relatively little, while on the surface it will be greater.’
The listeners nodded. Although the amount of background knowledge they had was insignificant it was the result that was important.
‘The last foot that was found today, confirms and strengthens my theory,’ Ebbe Slettaker continued.
Wisting leaned back in his chair. The man with the thick glasses spoke with a professional gravity - he liked what he was hearing.
‘I would nevertheless remind you that we are discussing the forces of nature,’ the oceanographer went on. ‘I give no guarantees about these results, the middle value of a mathematical calculation.’
Ebbe Slettaker finished his introduction and bent over his computer. He pressed a key and a blue cross appeared as a marker for the first discovery on the southern peninsula of Stavernsoya island.
‘The first shoe was found at 58 degrees, 59 minutes, 12.24 seconds north and 10 degrees, 3 minutes and 9.58 seconds east.’
Wisting could feel the beginnings of impatience.
‘I have calculated the following trajectory of drift,’ Slettaker elaborated, pressing on the keyboard.
The map on the wall came to life, almost like an animated weather warning on the internet. A clock up in the right corner gave the time. Minutes and seconds moved backwards at the same time as a blue line grew. It was drawn in a faint arc towards Svenner before it stretched towards Rakkebaene, passed Tvistein lighthouse and disappeared out into the Skagerrak.
‘Illustrative,’ Espen Mortensen commented in recognition of the work Ebbe Slettaker had undertaken.
‘The next foot was found here,’ continued the oceanographer as a red cross appeared up in Corntinbukta outside the shipyard area. He refrained from giving the longitude and latitude degrees and set the animation going instead. A red line drew itself from the little cove, moving outside Rakkebaene and touching the blue line before going off the map.
Wisting leaned forwards. The picture that was, literally speaking, drawing itself in front of them, was interesting.
A green cross marked the discovery site in Skravika. The line drawn from the third find stretched out in the
same direction as the others, crossed the red line and disappeared out in Langesundsfjorden.
The discovery of the fourth foot was marked in a deep yellow. All of the crosses lay within a kilometre of each other.
The yellow line stretched from the beach at Solplassen, and followed the same arc as the others towards Svenner before it passed the area with deep banks and shoals outside Rakke and travelled south of the lighthouse at Tvistein. Right at the outer edge of the map it crossed the three other lines.
‘A tangent point,’ Nils Hammer remarked pertinently.
‘Do you mean that the rest of the bodies are lying out there?’ the Assistant Chief of Police wanted to know.
The oceanographer got up, walking across to the screen.
‘The newspapers are writing that the bodies have possibly been butchered after being murdered,’ he said, looking round at their faces. ‘I have understood that that is a theory you have, too. That the bodies have been cut up and dumped in the sea, but that the feet have escaped from their packaging, while larger body parts may still be on the bottom of the sea.’
Wisting nodded. Ebbe Slettaker had put into words what they had each thought but not properly formulated.
‘The estimated drift trajectories can point to this area,’ he pointed to where all four lines joined, ‘being the probable starting point for an undersea search. It’s here that you will possibly find the dregs.’
He walked back to his computer and remained standing, leaning over it.
‘Moreover,’ he expanded, looking at them over his glasses, ‘we can combine the calculations with logic and healthy common sense.’
He clicked on the keyboard once more, and a row of small numbers appeared on the screen.
‘This area is the deepest part of the actual waters,’ he elaborated, pointing to an area southeast of Tvistein lighthouse. One of the numbers he rested his finger on showed a depth of 357 metres. ‘If I wanted to drop something in the sea in the hope that it would never come to the surface again, that is where I would do it.’
CHAPTER 31
Wisting stood at the office window watching a fully rigged ship as it sailed out over the fjord with the sun shining on its sails. His neck and shoulders were stiff, and his muscles were tense.
Assistant Chief of Police Audun Vetti and Chief Superintendent Eskild Anvik were sitting in the visitors’ chairs behind him. Nils Hammer leaned against the filing cabinet.
Wisting had never had problems with motivation. An internal engine drove his work forward. Not particularly concerned about praise, social status or the avoidance of criticism, seeking out answers was motivation enough. The pursuit of a solution drove him on, the search for justice, the feeling of righting a wrong, creating balance, and in the end the satisfaction of achieving the goal. And of course, the more distant the goal seemed to be, the more motivated he became.
He heard the others eagerly discussing the case among themselves, but all he could feel was a sense of emptiness, an emptiness that held him back and made it impossible to get started properly.
He knew that motivation was a fundamental wellspring for all good police work. If he could not manage to keep up the motivation of the investigation group, then they would lose their power to act.
At the point they had reached in the investigation he would normally be in the kind of mental state where he was deeply focused and filled with a sense of being on top of things. He was not there at the moment. Instead he felt exhausted, and found himself thinking about how good it would be to go to bed that night.
‘Although we have some crosses on a map, it will be like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ he heard the Chief Superintendent say. ‘How many billion cubic metres of water was it the oceanographer was talking about? It’s nine months since the corpses were dumped. What can we expect to find out there?’
Wisting turned to face them. Although he did not feel up to it he had decided that he would not show that to the others. He had to avoid them focusing on the obstacles they might encounter. To motivate his team he would have to look for reasons that they would be successful, not point out all the pitfalls.
He was about to speak when Espen Mortensen appeared with a pad full of notes.
‘They have a remote controlled mini submarine at the diving centre in Stavern,’ the crime technician explained. ‘It has an operative depth of 700 metres.’
Wisting walked round the table and sat down. Technological developments had made undersea searching far more practical than only a few years previously.
‘Great,’ he commented, moving the large package wrapped in grey paper that had been delivered by messenger earlier that day, and prepared to take notes.
‘It’s equipped with two video cameras, a still camera, a grabber, floodlights and sonar.’
‘When can they be ready to operate?’ Wisting wanted to know.
‘They’re in more or less constant readiness for search and rescue, and can be there in an hour.’
The Chief Superintendent held up his hand.
‘What does it cost?’
‘There’s an hourly charge of 3,450 kroner. That includes someone to drive it and a boat with a skipper. The pictures can be relayed over the internet so that we can sit here and watch.’
‘Good lord … a search like this can go on for days, weeks, without any guarantee of a result.’
Mortensen checked the notes on his pad.
‘The mini submarine has a breadth of field of 4-8 metres, depending on the visibility conditions in the water, and must have an overlap of 1-2 metres in order to retain a high percentage of certainty for the area being searched. It travels at a speed of 2.5 knots maximum. The area that Ebbe Slettaker has marked on the map is about one square kilometre. It will take one week to search through it all.’
‘A week?’
‘Forty hours.’
Wisting did a mental calculation and saw that the Chief Superintendent, who was responsible for the budget, did the same.
‘We are talking about five possible murders altogether,’ he said before the Chief Superintendent reached his answer. ‘We have budget entries for extraordinary expenses. I want them to get cracking in an hour’s time.’
CHAPTER 32
Line raised the camera, capturing Age Reinholdt’s workman’s hands in her lens. He was sitting with a crab pot between his legs, working on the ropes at the opening. His movements were quick and experienced, his hands firm and tanned. Hands that had taken the lives of two women.
She had bought a used digital Hasselblad a year before. Although it had one previous owner, she had paid over a hundred thousand kroner for it, and thirty thousand more for two lenses. She had always wanted a camera like this. No other camera could capture natural colours and nuances in the same way, not least when it came to skin and skin tones. It had been a Hasselblad camera that photographed the first men on the moon. The pictures had gone around the world, so immediate and real they made people feel that something had changed forever.
She would not have been able to afford it if it hadn’t been for the fact that, four years earlier, she had ended up in a situation in which she took a series of photographs during the arrest of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. The hateful face of the defeated man had been splashed on front pages all over the world. The moment was preserved for posterity in 1/250 of a second, but still it notched up royalties every time it was printed. That infinitesimal fraction of time had paid for the deposit on her flat in Oslo, and was also most certainly, when all was said and done, the reason that she now worked for the biggest newspaper in the country. Afterwards, she had thought of it as an example of synchronicity, a number of accidental occurrences that added up to a meaningful coincidence. Perhaps it had been the same for the man sitting in front of her. That the mysterious game of chance had turned him into a double murderer.
She pushed the thought away. Whatever random events could lead to, life still meant making the right choices. Although everything that
happened had a connection to something else, people had free will and the ability to affect both their own life and the lives of others.
The first impression she had formed was that Age Reinholdt was a reserved man who lacked self-confidence. His handshake limp and lethargic, the accompanying facial expression vapid. No smile or friendly nod.
He had got up when she arrived, but sat quickly back down on the straight-backed chair beside the faded wall of the house without inviting her to sit.
She had read somewhere that people are biologically programmed to make lightning decisions. The brain does not take unnecessary time to think through what has to be done in a critical situation and the same function comes into force when meeting new people. It takes only seconds to make up your mind about the person to whom you are saying hello. In meetings with interview subjects, Line regarded it as a moment of truth.
Age Reinholdt seemed almost uninterested in her presence. He looked down at his work, or fixed his eyes on a point over on the edge of the woods. She had difficulty in deciding whether it was shyness or arrogance that made him like that.
He finished working on the pot, got up, placed a stone sinker inside it and put it in the back of a pickup truck together with a pile of others. The table in front of them was used as a workbench. Battens of suitable length lay ready together with lengths of cord to fit.
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