He leafed through to the story Line was covering in Fredrikstad and a large picture of Jonas Ravneberg’s house. His name had been released. A smaller photo showed the crime scene with the contours of his body visible underneath a blanket. The most dramatic aspect of the image was his dog sitting with big dark eyes at the foot of the stretcher.
The break-in at his home was described as ‘mysterious’. The break-in at the Linde family’s country estate had been too. Mysterious. Again, nothing had been stolen.
He read the remainder of the story before folding away the newspaper. Line wrote well, he thought, uncomfortable that she was close to something so dangerous.
From Haber’s box he took out the picture of Rudolf Haglund stripped to the waist at the hospital. Unsullied was the first word that had come to him in Haber’s workroom. Again the word seemed appropriate. He could not imagine how to interpret it but knew of psychological tests with ink stains where patients were invited to say the first word that entered their head.
On the wall at the other side of the room there was an old framed maritime map of the Oslo fjord. He unhooked it and pushed Rudolf Haglund’s picture onto the nail, piercing his taut ribcage, and taped Cecilia’s picture beside it.
Seductive was the first word that came to mind. Several other pictures followed: alluring, teasing, was probably the desired effect. Danny Flom had said she was brilliant in front of the camera. This image had been used in an advertising campaign for that sweater. Her breasts lifted the letters of the word, Canes.
Canes was the fashion collection and each garment was given a supplementary name. The sweater in the picture was called Venatici. Canes Venatici.
Wisting said the words aloud, Canes Venatici the constellation known as the Hunting Dogs. Johannes Linde had pointed it out to him one evening at his estate, an almost insignificant group of stars situated below the Plough.
He turned his mind to Rudolf Haglund. ‘The Hunting Dogs,’ he said, into empty space.
That was what they had been, he and his colleagues. A pack of dogs pursuing a murderer. Rudolf Haglund was the man they had caught but, like any other hunting dogs, they had followed the warmest scent without further thought.
In Haber’s box, behind the divider marked Reconstruction 20/7, he found several photos of the Gumserød reconstruction, with the investigators gathered out at the intersection, not in a huddle, as in the newspaper, but spread out. Frank Robekk still stood alone with a cigarette in his mouth, peering over his glasses at the others. Audun Vetti and Nils Hammer seemed to be discussing something. Wisting selected one to hang on the wall.
He stared at the three photographs with the curious feeling that something he had seen or read recently was significant, and struggled to reconstruct his actions of that day in his mind. Footsteps on the verandah fronting the cottage brought him back. Light steps, almost inaudible, stopping outside the door. Journalists, he thought, his heart beating faster as the door creaked open. He grabbed a log of firewood to use as a weapon.
‘Hello?’ It was Line, greeting him with a broad smile. ‘Lovely to see you.’
‘You too.’
‘It’s cold in here,’ she said.
‘I was just about to light the fire.’ He threw the log in the open hearth and stacked kindling around it.
‘I’ve tried to phone you,’ Line said, examining the three photographs.
‘It’s on silent. I keep forgetting to check.’
‘Is that him?’ she asked, pointing at Haglund’s photograph.
‘Yes.’
‘Why is his chest bare?’
The fire caught the dry firewood and the flames cast a reddish-gold glow across the room. ‘It was taken at the hospital. He was being examined for wounds possibly inflicted by Cecilia when he abducted her or smothered her.’
Line leaned closer to the picture. ‘Did you find any?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t that rather odd? I’d have done all I could to get free. Kicked and scratched.’
‘We’re all different,’ Wisting said. ‘Many rapists don’t sustain any injuries.’
‘Was she raped?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t that rather odd too? I mean, why else would he take her?’
It struck Wisting how acute Line was, but asking questions was her job.
She carried her shopping bags to the kitchen worktop. ‘I brought some food.’ Ten minutes later, they were sitting on opposite sides of the coffee table, eating freshly buttered bread rolls. ‘What are you looking for?’
Wisting hardly knew himself. ‘Inconsistencies,’ he said. ‘Insignificant snags or exceptions that I didn’t notice seventeen years ago, or that I thought had nothing to do with the case.’
Line picked up one of the police reports. ‘Can I help you? I’m good at that kind of thing.’
Wisting by now understood the task was too extensive for one man. Line would be an asset. As a journalist, she had an inbuilt mistrust of everything in public reports. She was accustomed to attacking the establishment. ‘You can’t use any of it in the newspaper,’ he said.
‘I’m not here as a journalist. I’m here because you’re my father.’
He cleared the dishes before explaining the case and how the documents were organised: the lists, the projects and the fresh analysis, the break-in at the Linde estate, the footprint, and Haber’s offer to take the blame, the encounter with Danny Flom, and the appointment he had with Rudolf Haglund at the lawyer’s office the next day. It had grown to quite a list.
‘What are you actually looking for?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you looking for the colleague who planted the DNA evidence, or something to support your belief that you arrested the right man?’
‘Both,’ he said. ‘I think they’ll both be found here.’
Line got up and examined the three photographs, looking at them for some time. ‘So you think a policeman planted the DNA evidence to make sure the murderer didn’t go free?’
‘Yes.’
‘What if that wasn’t what happened at all?’ she asked.
‘What then?’
‘What if a policeman abducted her and planted evidence to give somebody else the blame?’
42
Wisting was minded to dismiss Line’s theory, but then he looked at the picture of the investigators again. In all probability, one of them had falsified the evidence. Possibly the same officer had committed other crimes. He had to admit that Line’s suggestion was plausible. More than anything else, it reassured him that Line was the right person to go through the case documents. If he had overlooked anything, she would home in on it.
He added a couple more logs to the fire. ‘I need to do something,’ he said, lifting his jacket.
Line was engrossed in the first ring binder. ‘What’s that?’
‘Pay Frank Robekk a visit. Frank fielded the tip-offs in the Cecilia case.’
‘The witness who was never heard! The phone call was probably transferred to him rather than you.’
Wisting tucked the newspaper under his arm. ‘I didn’t have any direct contact with callers of that kind. Will you lock the door behind me?’
‘Switch on your mobile, then,’ she said. ‘So I can get hold of you.’
She stood up and went out with him. The leaden sky was heavy with low, scudding rain clouds, and a bitterly cold wind came sweeping in from the southwest.
His mobile rang before he sat in the car. An unknown number, it was not already listed in unanswered calls. The voice sounded officious, introducing itself as Chief Inspector Terje Nordbo of the Bureau for the Investigation of Police Affairs.
‘This concerns your handling of the Cecilia Linde murder,’ he said. ‘Acting Chief Constable Audun Vetti has sent the documentation received from the defence lawyer, Sigurd Henden, with regard to possible irregularities in the collection of evidence. We have decided to initiate an investigation and would like to conduct a prelim
inary interview with you.’
Wisting opened the car door. ‘Is this an investigation of me directly?’
‘Your status is that of a suspect. We are treating the case as gross negligence of duty. That gives you the right to be accompanied by a defence lawyer.’
‘When were you thinking of?’ Wisting settled into the driving seat.
‘As soon as possible. Preferably as early as tomorrow.’
‘Where?’
‘We’re based in Hamar, but also have offices in Oslo.’
Wisting started the car. ‘What time tomorrow?’
‘Shall we say twelve o’clock?’
‘I’ve another appointment then. It’ll have to be two.’
Wisting thought about what he would say as he drove. A great deal would be dependent on what Rudolf Haglund said in his lawyer’s office.
He would have preferred the meeting after he had made further inroads, but perhaps it was just as well to endure it and get it done with.
When they had both embarked on a career in the police, Frank Robekk had lived on a smallholding in Kleppaker with his parents. Now they were both dead, he lived there on his own.
Wisting parked in the yard at the end of a long avenue of birch trees. Comprising twelve acres of cultivated land and a similar area of grazing, the place provided Frank with a good rental income in addition to his modest disability pension, as he had once confided to Wisting.
His elder brother Alf lived on the other side of the fields, in a house built on a separate, hived off plot where Ellen Robekk vanished the summer before Cecilia’s disappearance.
The breeze carried the scent of a bonfire, and a plume of smoke rose behind the old barn. Taking the newspaper with him, Wisting found Frank Robekk leaning on a stick, smoking and gazing into flames that leapt from a rusty oil drum. Tiny flecks of ash hung in the air.
Wisting was beside Robekk before the man noticed him, startled, as if he had been lost in his own thoughts.
‘On your own?’ Robekk poked the stick into the drum to revive the flames. Sparks shot a metre into the air. ‘What brings you here?’ he asked, flicking his cigarette end into the blaze.
‘I’m looking for answers.’
Robekk produced a paper bag from his jacket pocket and popped a couple of lozenges into his mouth to cover the smell of cigarette smoke, as he had always done. ‘Who isn’t?’
‘Have you read the newspapers?’ Wisting asked, holding up that day’s edition of VG.
‘Not today, but I’ve caught what they’re saying about Rudolf Haglund’s DNA profile.’
‘Did you hear anything about it at the time?’ Did anyone mention doing something like that?’
‘Never, and I don’t believe any of it. I don’t think any of the boys would have done that.’
‘It had to be someone.’
‘Some other explanation? What if one of the cigarette butts out at Gumserød really belonged to Haglund, and the other two had been dropped there earlier?’
‘Tiedemann’s Gold was the brand he used.’
‘I do too, but if they’re sold out I’ll take another.’
Everything could be explained and dismissed, Wisting thought, if you did not wish to believe anyone on the force had tampered with the evidence.
‘It could have been done more convincingly, don’t you think?’ Robekk said. ‘To be certain, you could have planted a more decisive piece of evidence, a strand of Cecilia’s hair, for example, a more direct connection between victim and killer.’
The smoke gusted at them and they moved to the other side of the blaze. No matter where they stood, the smoke found them. Robekk removed his thick glasses to rub his eyes. He had worn the same frames for as long as Wisting could remember; without them he became a stranger.
Wisting handed him the newspaper. ‘Pages eight and nine.’
Frank Robekk took the paper and put his glasses back on. ‘A witness says he phoned in a tip-off that would have provided Rudolf Haglund with an alibi.’
‘That’s me,’ Frank said, pointing at the archive photo the newspaper had used.
‘Have you heard about this before?’ Wisting asked. ‘That somebody phoned and said they had seen Haglund on a fishing trip?’
Frank read the whole article before shaking his head. ‘I would have remembered that. Besides, all the tip-offs were recorded and allocated a number. They were passed on to you.’ He handed the paper back. ‘Have you checked him out? To see if he’s some guy Haglund met in jail that he’s persuaded to fool you?’
‘That’s up to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to discover,’ Wisting said. Silence settled round them. The flames in the oil drum crackled. ‘I went to the Linde family’s estate today. They haven’t been back there since. It looks completely abandoned.’
‘I know. I was out there this summer.’
‘Why did you go?’
‘Just a whim. I’ve been there a few times. Walked the paths Cecilia used when she was out running.’
‘You were there before the kidnapping too,’ Wisting said. ‘Remember the burglary?’
Robekk pushed the stick into the drum again, rooting around in the embers. ‘Did you ever see Cecilia alive?’ Wisting asked.
‘She was there.’
‘You spoke to her?’
Robekk shook his head. ‘No. She returned from a run just as I left. A fortnight after that, she disappeared.’
Neither spoke for some time. The fire in the drum was dwindling, a cold wind sweeping over the agricultural landscape. Wisting drew his jacket more tightly round his neck.
Robekk leaned the stick against the wall of the barn. ‘If you’ve come to talk about the old days,’ he said, ‘we could just as well go inside and have a cup of coffee?’
43
Line had been immersed in the investigation material, but now stood up, crossed to the fireplace and placed the last log from the firewood basket on the embers.
She was astonished to see how painstakingly the work had been accomplished. How meticulously the investigation machinery had operated. The documents were organised in such a way that manoeuvring through the information was straightforward, aided by the alphabetical list.
A total of 792 interviews were conducted. All the witnesses explained where they had been, what they had done, described their own appearance and clothing, retold their stories. Each and every movement was charted, with the most crucial information plotted on a map. Line unfolded it and carried it to the wall where the pictures of Cecilia Linde, Rudolf Haglund and the detectives were displayed. She hung it up and stood back, proud that her father had led this demanding effort.
She continued reading, soon realising that those who came forward had to do so on their own initiative. Others may have had something to hide. Several had seen a red car on a side road, a highly polished sports car. One thought it was a Toyota MR2. Some witnesses had seen the car there previously, though it had no connection to the nearby cottages. Accounts varied on whether there had been one or two persons inside the vehicle. The driver was described as tall and dark, but Line could not find him among the people who had come forward.
She thought she remembered something about a red sports car in the text archive, and logged on to her computer. The search word produced two results linked to the Cecilia case. It was obvious that the red car had raised her father’s interest. It had been mentioned at the press conference.
In an article two days later, there was simply a brief mention that the red sports car had been ruled out of the case.
Line did not discover the explanation until half an hour had passed. A woman on a camping holiday with her family at Blokkebukta cove had made contact. She explained that the car belonged to a married man from Bærum who was staying in a neighbouring caravan. They had met each other repeatedly in the grove of trees where the car had been observed for what was described as ‘intimate relations’.
Everyday secrets put spokes in the investigators’ wheels and stole their time.
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A motorcyclist dressed in black had halted at a bus stop and entered the woods. The witness who had seen him thought he was carrying something while another witness had not noticed that. A methodical search with sniffer dogs had been conducted and a drugs drop discovered. So, the biker was explained if not identified.
So far, Line had noted three people not included on the chart. A number of witnesses had seen a man with a camera in various places along the coastal path. It looked as though he had been on the route Cecilia had chosen for her run. Until now, she had not found any witnesses who fitted that description. There was also a man in a black singlet who was mentioned in several accounts and a silver goods van at Gumserød farm around the time Cecilia had set out.
The flames in the hearth had consumed the last log, and only a bed of embers was left. She carried the firewood basket outside. Reading so much had made her sluggish, and it was invigorating to breathe fresh air. A few chinks of light appeared in the cloud cover above and, for the first time in days, she could make out a hint of blue sky.
In the woodshed she filled the basket and was carrying it out again when a text arrived. It was from Tommy, wanting to spend more time with her. She replied that she had appreciated his visit to Fredrikstad but did not know what else to say.
Looking at her phone she remembered the unregistered number that had called Jonas Ravneberg only a few hours before his death, prompting him to make contact with a lawyer. She tried it at regular intervals but had never received an answer. Once again it rang without anyone picking up.
Inside, she placed a couple of logs on the fire and resumed her seat to check the online newspapers and her emails. An email had come in from one of the researchers in the fact-checking department. The subject was Jonas Ravneberg: a short list of key points with no information other than exactly what she had requested.
They had found the house at W. Blakstads gate 78 in Fredrikstad in the deeds registry, registered to Jonas Ravneberg, as well as a property in Larvik that was simply listed with a farm registration number and a title number. The historic overview of previous addresses showed he had lived at the unregistered address for many years before staying at Minnehallveien 28 in Stavern for about two years. After that, he had moved to Fredrikstad.
The Hunting Dogs Page 15