‘What about the underwater search that’s taking place?’ another journalist wanted to know. ‘Has that brought any results?’
Wisting pretended to look for the face of the person who had asked the question while he searched for an answer that neither disclosed anything about the discovery of the weapon, nor said anything that could cause him to be accused later of lying.
‘There haven’t been any finds that we can link directly to the case,’ he replied, fixing his gaze on the man, whom he recognised as a reporter for Aftenposten.
‘What have you found?’
‘For the most part, different kinds of rubbish. There may be instances of breaching the laws on pollution. We have also found the wreck of a boat that was reported stolen last summer and are going to be following up the connection with a possible insurance fraud.’
‘Is it possible to release some of the underwater images?’
‘That can be arranged, but I don’t know if it’s something we can make a priority.’
A red-haired, female reporter by the window spoke up, introducing herself as a representative of NTB, Norway’s largest news agency. Wisting didn’t catch her name.
‘Where did the money come from?’ she enquired.
‘We have a main focus on that,’ Wisting replied. ‘But for the moment, we do not know.’
‘Could it be the proceeds from a criminal act?’
‘As I said, we don’t know.’
The female journalist was about the same age as Line. She made a face that Wisting interpreted to mean she did not like the way he had warded off her question.
‘How long have you known about the financial evidence?’ she asked.
‘It was discovered at the weekend.’
‘Do you mean to say that there were considerable financial movements in the accounts of the missing persons without the police checking this out earlier? That sort of information must have been accessible through bank statements and so on, surely?’
Wisting closed his eyes for a short spell and put on a patient expression. It was always like this. The first questions were fairly respectful, but eventually the tone became sharper and more aggressive. He was prepared for the question and explained how the investigators had monitored the bank accounts of the missing persons as a matter of routine, but that the history had not been examined until now.
The journalist did not let go: ‘Should you not have done that earlier?’
‘It is easy to come to that conclusion with the benefit of hindsight.’
‘So you admit that you’ve made a mistake, then?
Wisting realised that he was being backed into a corner and concentrated on not sounding irritated.
‘We regard the discovery as a major step forward.’
‘But in reality you don’t have any clues?’
The journalist tried her best to put words in his mouth. He heard Audun Vetti, in the seat beside him, clear his throat as a sign that they should finish up.
‘I’d prefer to say that we are facing one of the most challenging cases we have ever worked on,’ Wisting said, giving the woman a smile.
The redhead did not seem satisfied with his answer, but gave him a nod and said no more.
Individual journalists had new questions, but finally they seemed most eager to contact their editors, and Vetti declared the meeting closed. Wisting got up, leaving individual interviews to the Assistant Chief of Police.
CHAPTER 47
It took exactly twenty-three minutes for the first interesting phone call to arrive. Wisting stood by the window, having hung his uniform back in the cupboard, his thoughts tossing like a sailing boat suddenly struck by squalls.
He answered brusquely, and stood listening to the man at the other end. His brow furrowed. What he heard confused him further, but it was something he wanted to know more about. They made an appointment and, thirty-two minutes later, the man was sitting in the visitor’s chair in Wisting’s office.
Karl Edvin Malmstrom was in his mid-forties, tall and thin, his ash blond, slightly wavy hair combed forward. He wore sandals, khaki trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt.
‘We’re staying in a caravan at Gon,’ he explained. ‘We’ve done that every summer for the past fifteen years.’
Wisting nodded. The man was one of many who spent their holidays in the area. He worked as an adviser and customer service assistant at Bien savings bank in the centre of Oslo.
‘I remember both of them, as I said,’ he went on, stroking the armrest of the chair with his hand. ‘Both Otto Saga and Sverre Lund. It might be that Torkel Lauritzen came to us as well, but was served by another adviser.’
Wisting stopped him and phoned for Nils Hammer. He was the one with responsibility for the money trail, and he wanted him present.
‘I’d thought about making contact earlier,’ Karl Edvin Malmstrom continued while they waited for the other investigator. ‘I recognised them from pictures in the newspapers, but it was only when I heard you talking about the other transactions that I realised it could be important.’
Hammer appeared before half a minute had passed. He closed the door behind him, said hello to the bank assistant and sat down on the spare visitor’s chair.
Wisting gave a quick explanation of the purpose of the interview, and then asked Karl Edvin Malmstrom to continue.
The bank assistant took a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket and unfolded it.
‘Sverre Lund visited us on Wednesday 3rd September at 11.33,’ he explained. ‘I got a work colleague to check it before I came here. The exact amount was 345,000 kroner. Otto Saga came in on Friday 29th August at 12.42. He made a deposit of 340,000 kroner.’
Nils Hammer nodded. It agreed with the survey he had carried out.
“There’s a deposit in your bank for Torkel Lauritzen’s account also,’ he added. ‘On Wednesday 27th August.’
‘Every second Wednesday I have a study day.’ The bank assistant folded up the sheet of paper again. ‘It must have been another adviser who dealt with it. I can find out who it was.’
‘So it was they themselves who deposited the money then?’ Wisting wanted to confirm.
‘It’s not anything unusual,’ Karl Edvin Malmstrom felt. ‘Most cash deposits over the counter are to people’s own accounts.’
‘But it’s unusual that old people travel miles to do that, just to take the money out again a few days later.’
‘It was a question of discontinued banknotes, as I recall. That could be the explanation.’
‘Discontinued?’
‘I think that both of them had about 150,000 of the old Camilla Collett notes. In a few days’ time, they wouldn’t have been able to exchange them.’
Wisting sensed that some kind of understanding was on its way, something that would seem logical and give meaning to the whole thing, but he couldn’t quite manage to put it into words.
‘On the 5th September the old hundred-kroner notes with the portrait of Camilla Collett became invalid,’ the bank assistant explained. ‘She was replaced by Kirsten Flagstad in 1997. You could use the old banknote for one year longer, but after that it had to be exchanged in the bank. After ten years it would become invalid. We had lots of deposits like that around that time. There was a lot of discussion about it in the media. We had many pensioners and others who emptied their mattresses and came to us with their savings, but not with as much money as Sverre Lund or Otto Saga.’
‘Do you mean that the money would have been worthless if they had come a few days’ later?’
‘Not necessarily. They could have applied to have them exchanged, but then they would have had to bring them personally to Norges Bank in Oslo, accompanied by a written declaration of where they came from and why the money had not been changed previously.’
‘Old men with old money,’ Wisting said to no one in particular.
‘Were there only out of date banknotes?’ Nils Hammer asked.
The bank assistant nodded.
&n
bsp; ‘It included two bundles of the old thousand-kroner note with Christian Magnus Falsen, that were still wrapped in Norges Bank tape. It looked as though they had never been in circulation.’
Wisting tried to envision the old thousand-kroner banknote with the portrait of the Father of the Norwegian Constitution, but could not remember what it looked like.
‘When does that become completely invalid?’ he enquired.
‘The thousand-kroner note goes out of date in 2012,’ the man facing him explained. ‘The 500-kroner note with the portrait of Edvard Grieg becomes invalid in 2011, the 50-kroner note with Aasmund Olavsson Vinje went out of date in January last year. I think I read somewhere that there’s still a million of them in circulation.’
‘What about the 200-kroner note?’
‘That entered the series of notes in 1994 and has not been discontinued yet, but a new, more secure version was introduced in 2002, with a broad metal strip at the side of the portrait. I don’t think there are any plans to discontinue that one.’
‘Did they say anything about where the money came from?’ Wisting asked.
The man thought carefully.
‘Not directly. It was more a suggestion.’
‘What was the suggestion?’
‘That it was savings. Sverre Lund said he should have come long before. That it was safer to have the money in the bank, and the kind of things that old people say when they decide to come to us with their money. His hearing was bad, so it was difficult to have a proper conversation. The same applied to Otto Saga. Hearing is one of the first things to go in old people.’
Wisting and Hammer glanced at each other. It was the same excuse they had used when the money was withdrawn.
‘Can you remember anything else?’
‘One of them talked about the tax authorities and inheritance tax, but I didn’t understand the connection. At least, I don’t remember it now. Normally I would have asked where the money came from and made a note about it for the person responsible for money laundering at the bank, but it wasn’t done. It was obvious that we were talking about old savings, of course. Moreover, he wasn’t one of our customers.’
‘Did you ask about it? Why he came to you and not to his own bank?’
‘No. We’re a small, independent savings bank offering personal service in the middle of Oslo city centre. A lot of people make use of us without being account holders.’
‘Did they come on their own?’
‘I can’t say that I noticed anything else. We try to be vigilant when old people come in to take out a lot of money, but in this case we were talking about a deposit.’
‘Can you remember what they brought the money in?’
‘Envelopes. Sverre Lund had them in a little rucksack, but Otto Saga I think just came into the bank with the envelope in his hand.’
‘Where is the money now?’
Karl Edvin Malmstrom seemed perplexed.
‘You explained at the press conference, didn’t you, that it was taken out of their accounts again a few days’ later?’
‘I mean the actual banknotes,’ Wisting elaborated. There were always fingerprints on banknotes, and if they were talking about money that had been out of circulation for a long time, it might be easier to discover a print that would tell them where they came from.
‘What has physically happened to them?’ he added.
‘I expect that they’ve been destroyed at Norges Bank.’
‘All of them?’
‘Some of the notes, as I said, were of extremely high quality and still had their original gloss. Several of them appeared to be perfectly preserved. Not mistreated by the printer, a bank employee, or anyone else. The paper was clean and tight, with no discolouration. The corners were sharp and at the correct angle, with no sign of being rounded off.’
‘Are you a collector?’
‘Yes. My father travelled a great deal, and I had uncles in the shipping industry. When I was still a young boy I had a large collection of banknotes from all over the world, but I have become a specialist in Norwegian notes.’
‘So what did you do with the best banknotes?’
The bank assistant squirmed in his chair.
‘I purchased them. It would have been a shame for the notes to be destroyed. Many of them were replacement notes.’
‘Replacement notes?’
‘When a banknote is spoiled during the printing process, it’s replaced by a replacement note,’ Malmstrom explained. ‘There’s no difference between them and the originals, apart from that the replacement notes are given their own serial numbers. That makes them desirable to collectors.’
‘How much might such an uncirculated hundred-kroner note actually be worth?’
‘That also depends on what year it was printed. The hundred-kroner note with Camilla Collett, for example, was issued from 1979, but was printed with dates from 1977 onwards. A perfect example from the first year of printing could be worth up to ten times the original value.’
‘A thousand kroner?’
‘It depends of course on the market and the demand. A rare banknote of a type that few people are collecting will not have a particularly high value, while a less rare example of good quality of a type that is popular to collect can quickly become very expensive.’
Nils Hammer appeared impatient.
‘How many banknotes did you transfer to yourself?’
‘I bought just over forty thousand.’
Hammer rolled his eyes.
‘The first time,’ Malmstrom added. ‘In fact when Sverre Lund came five days later, I sold a few blocks of shares in order to redeem some more notes.’
‘Do you still have all the banknotes?’
‘Not all of them. I have, naturally, helped others to complete their collections.’
‘How much have you earned from that?’
‘I don’t know … I haven’t added it up, but none of the banknotes were sold for less than three times their face value.’
Nils Hammer rose abruptly.
‘We need those notes,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’
‘At home in the safe, but I don’t understand what you want with them?’
‘We believe that the money may be the direct reason for at least three murders,’ Hammer explained. ‘Where they come from will be crucial for our further investigations. A fingerprint examination might well help.’
‘But will that kind of examination not spoil the notes? With fingerprint powder and suchlike?’
‘Oh yes.’ Hammer went over to the door. ‘Shall we go and get them right away?’
CHAPTER 48
An hour and a quarter later Wisting was driving over the Gamlebrua bridge in Kongsberg. The water level was low and the waterfall not at its most intense, but still an impressive sight. Some people were playing about, paddling in the rapids. One of them got caught in an eddy and was struggling to get out. It was an appropriate picture of how the investigation was progressing, he thought. It seemed as though everything was still swirling uselessly and meaninglessly round and round.
He parked in the same place as the last time he had visited Carsten Meyer, taking a few minutes to gather his thoughts before getting out. The air felt different from down by the coast. It was humid and still, almost oppressive.
Some time elapsed between his ring on the doorbell and the door opening as far as the heavy door chain allowed. Carsten Meyer stared through the gap.
‘Is that you?’ he asked, glancing up at the street behind Wisting. ‘I thought it might be the home help come early.’
‘It’s me,’ Wisting smiled. ‘I was hoping we could have a chat.’
‘Of course,’ the old man nodded. ‘Just a moment.’
There was a clanking sound as he released the chain and the door opened wide. Carsten Meyer trudged back towards the living room, supporting himself with a crutch.
Wisting sat down in the same place as before. A new crossword puzzle lay open on the table facing Meyer’s chai
r with only a few of the squares filled in.
‘They say it’s going to rain,’ Carsten Meyer said, looking warily out of the window to the mountain.
‘We certainly need it,’ Wisting nodded. He hadn’t listened to the weather forecast for many days.
‘But you haven’t come here to talk about the weather, have you?’ The old man seemed ill at ease as he moved a cup and a ballpoint pen on the table beside him. He grasped his pipe that was lying in the dish beside the crossword. ‘I heard that you’ve found Sverre.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Wisting confirmed. ‘There’s no longer any doubt that this concerns a crime.’
Carsten Meyer filled his pipe with slow movements, looking at him from underneath his bushy eyebrows.
‘How were the five-man group and the rest of the alert organisation financed?’ Wisting asked.
Carsten Meyer frowned. His loose and almost transparent skin tightened over his hand as he worked on his pipe.
‘We were issued with funds from confidential items in the defence budget,’ he explained. ‘But it was never money that motivated or spurred us on. It was idealism and personal conviction. We did, of course, have our actual expenses covered.’
‘Did the group have any other income?’
The old man facing him struck a match with a clumsy motion and lit his pipe.
‘That’s something you can read about in Daniel’s book,’ he replied when he had lit up. ‘You would think that most things had been written and talked about concerning the war and the post war period, but there are still lots of secrets to reveal.’
Wisting leaned back in the chair to encourage the old man to talk.
‘The contributions from the budget financed only a small part of what we required in order to build an effective organisation in readiness for invasion,’ Meyer continued. ‘The most important supplementary funds came to us from actions taken to recapture war proceeds and compensation for war profits.’
He took the pipe out of his mouth and let it rest in his hand.
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