The Hunting Dogs

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Ten minutes later Rudolf Haglund appeared at the door, dressed as her father had described, as well as a black leather jacket. ‘He’s coming out,’ she said, describing the jacket.

  ‘Okay,’ Morten P acknowledged.

  Haglund took a packet of cigarettes from his inside pocket, his eyes darting up and down the street. He tapped one a couple of times on the lid and placed it in his mouth. He used a lighter from his back pocket and lingeringly exhaled, checked the time and set out.

  ‘Møllergata direction,’ Line said. ‘I’ll follow on foot.’

  Connecting the phone to earplugs, she stepped out of the car. There was rain in the air; she could pull the hood of her windcheater up without drawing attention. Rudolf Haglund crossed the street ten metres ahead. He did not turn round.

  ‘He’s heading towards Karl Johans gate,’ she said softly.

  ‘I’m on foot as well,’ Harald said. ‘Walking parallel along Torggata.’

  Her other phone rang in her pocket. When she saw it was a call from the VG building she switched off and put it back.

  Rudolf Haglund walked past the restaurant of the Stortorvets Gjestgiveri, crossed the street at Grensen, and continued eastwards. Line passed on this information in short keywords so the others could position themselves. When he arrived at Karl Johans gate, he took a right turn.

  ‘Up Karl Johans gate,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll catch him at Egertorget,’ said Tommy.

  Haglund was thirty metres in front of Line. He stopped outside The Scotsman pub, stubbing out his cigarette in an ashtray on an outdoor table before entering.

  ‘Into The Scotsman,’ Line reported, positioning herself at a clothes shop on the opposite side of the street.

  ‘I’m coming from the bottom of the street,’ said Harald. ‘I’ll wait at the 7-Eleven shop in case he comes this way later.’

  ‘Get a hotdog?’ Morten P asked.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  Line stood at a table with stacks of college sweaters on special offer. A young assistant who was folding T-shirts at a nearby table smiled. The music playing was so loud she had to push the earplugs further into her ears.

  ‘Where are you, Morten?’

  ‘Parked illegally in Stortorvet.’

  Her other mobile phone rang again, from the same number. She tugged out an earplug and answered. It was one of the researchers from the fact-checking department but the music drowned out everything else.

  She emerged onto Karl Johans gate just as Rudolf Haglund came out of the pub and sat at one of the tables under a patio heater. He had brought a coffee and a newspaper with him. Line turned her back and watched his reflection in the shop window.

  ‘He’s bought a coffee,’ she said. The mannequin in the window wore a casual shirt that would have suited Tommy.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked the woman at the newspaper office.

  ‘Sorry,’ Line said, covering the conference microphone with her hand, ‘what was that?’

  ‘You wanted the address history for Minnehallveien 28 in Stavern.’

  Line fished her notepad from her shoulder bag.

  ‘Jonas Ravneberg lived there with Maud Torell. She is actually Swedish, but moved to Norway at the end of the eighties. Ten years ago, she moved back. She has changed her name to Svedberg and now lives in Ystad, at the very south.’

  ‘Maud Svedberg?’

  ‘I called because I understand this is important. You can have the address and phone number right away, or I can send them by email.’

  ‘Send me an email, please.’

  Behind her, Haglund finished his coffee and pushed the cup across the table to make room for the newspaper.

  A couple of years earlier, Line had tackled a series of interviews in which she had profiled murderers whose prison sentences amounted to a total of one hundred years. The subject was: what jail had done to them and how it had affected their lives subsequently. In the main, she had encountered broken individuals who, after a long spell in prison, had nothing to offer society but fresh problems.

  Haglund leafed his way to another page without reading. He was really watching people in the busy pedestrian thoroughfare. Occasionally he fixed his gaze on a particular person and watched until they were lost in the crowd.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Morten P asked.

  ‘He’s just sitting watching people,’ Line said but, at that moment, it dawned on her he was not simply looking. He was selecting individuals and studying them in detail. All of them young women.

  57

  The wind had picked up and rain clouds hung low in the sky. Wisting found a coffee bar beside the courthouse with almost an hour to kill before his meeting at the Bureau for the Investigation of Police Affairs. He bought a bread roll and a cup of the ‘coffee of the day’. This was an expression he had not come across before, but this coffee was said to be from Burundi and taste of honey, lemon and nuts.

  He located a corner table inside the room, where he could sit with his back to the other customers. His thoughts were in a whirl, and he felt as giddy as if he was on a slow carousel. He thought he understood Rudolf Haglund’s media strategy. He was being driven to find the evidence that would not only clear himself, but also overturn Haglund’s conviction.

  Very likely the old folder of signed forms from the remand cells was still stored somewhere. Bjørg Karin Joakimsen had worked at the criminal proceedings office for almost forty years, and was responsible for the archives. She was the kind of person who seldom or never threw things away. It struck him that his coffee didn’t taste of anything other than coffee. Slightly weaker than he was used to, but with no hint of lemon or nuts.

  He had probably been sitting in the vicinity of the document when he logged onto the police computer the previous night, but paying the police station another secret visit did not seem like a good idea. No problem finding items filed in modern times, but documents stashed away in the course of the past twenty-five years simply because they ‘might come in handy’, were another story. Only Bjørg Karin was likely to know where they were.

  He tapped in her office number and she answered in a professional and obliging manner. Most enquiries were from people who wanted to make some kind of complaint. As a rule, they were passed to her so she could ascertain the right person to help. Most often it was not even necessary to transfer the call, as she would deal with it herself.

  ‘So good to hear your voice,’ she said, and bombarded Wisting with questions about his suspension.

  ‘I think I can find a way through all this,’ Wisting said, ‘but I need some help.’ He explained what he was looking for.

  ‘Those folders are stored in the historical archive,’ Bjørg Karin said. ‘I know I haven’t thrown them away.’

  58

  They followed Rudolf Haglund to a restaurant in Rådhusgata, overlooking Akershus Fortress. A chilly, raw wind blew in from the fjord and, when the first raindrops fell, Line sought shelter under the eaves of a department store.

  ‘How long has he been there?’ Morten P asked in her ear.

  ‘Nearly ten minutes.’

  ‘One of us should go in. Maybe he’s arranged a meeting or something.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Harald said. ‘I need a piss anyway.’ Harald disappeared through the restaurant door. The rain was pouring down now, and strong gusts of wind were blasting sheets of rain diagonally across the streets. Two minutes later, he re-emerged. ‘He’s sitting with Hulkvist.’

  ‘Gjermund Hulkvist?’ Morten P asked. ‘That should’ve been our call. He owes us that. He said he wasn’t interested in giving an interview.’

  Gjermund Hulkvist, an experienced crime reporter on Dagbladet, had covered the country’s major crime stories for years and was known for his wide network of sources.

  ‘Now they’re eating lunch,’ Harald said.

  ‘That gives us some time,’ Line said. ‘I’ll go and pick up my car.’

  The rain had soaked her through. She started the eng
ine and switched on the heater to clear the windscreen while she wriggled out of her jacket and sweater. She changed into dry clothes from the bag on the rear seat before setting off to find a vacant parking space in a side street. This allowed for several options, depending on which route Rudolf Haglund chose when the interview was over.

  She decided to call the police officer who had interviewed her in Fredrikstad to ask if there were any developments in the murder enquiry, but first she would try the unregistered number again.

  She detached the microphone and keyed in the number. To her astonishment, a young girl said hello immediately. Someone was laughing in the background. She checked she had called the right number as she introduced herself, ‘Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘Who are you calling?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I’m responding to an unanswered call.’

  ‘You’ve reached a phone box,’ the girl said.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Outside the railway station in Fredrikstad.’

  That was logical, Line thought. The person behind the murder had called from a phone box. It also explained why no one had answered. ‘Is there a camera there?’

  ‘Camera?’

  ‘CCTV, at the railway station?’

  The girl hung up.

  Line wiped a streak in the condensation on the windscreen with the back of her hand. The rain had chased everyone off the street. She reviewed the course of events in advance of Jonas Ravneberg’s murder. At 14.17, he had received a phone call that had caused him to contact a lawyer’s office and arrange a meeting. Seven hours later he was dead. There must be a connection. She still had no idea who had phoned, but the conversation had originated from a public phone box.

  She called Erik Fjeld who answered at once. His voice sounded hollow; he too was sitting in a car. ‘I need a photo­graph,’ she said.

  ‘Are you still on the story?’

  ‘I’m just pulling together some loose threads.’ She explained about the phone box outside the railway station. ‘Could you take a photo of it?’

  ‘I’m half an hour away.’

  ‘Excellent. I need to know whether there is any CCTV.’

  Erik Fjeld hesitated before replying. ‘Okay,’ he said, and she thought she could hear his car accelerate. He obviously understood the assignment was not just about an empty phone box.

  59

  The Norwegian Bureau for the Investigation of Police Affairs led an anonymous life in the city centre, situated in the back yard of Kirkegata number 1. The building also housed a company that dealt in telephone sales, several accounting firms and others with no need for advertising placards and window displays.

  Two women stood at the vehicle entrance, smoking and sheltering from the rain. Wisting felt their eyes boring into the back of his skull as he walked towards the door. He studied the list on the entry system and rang the button marked with the bureau’s title, gave his name and said he had an appointment at two o’clock.

  The door opened with a buzz. ‘First floor.’

  He glanced over his shoulder. On the other side of the courtyard, a man stood with his camera raised. Another hung from his shoulder, and raindrops dripped from the brim of his cap. Reporter, Wisting thought, as he hurried inside. Someone must have tipped him off.

  Chief Inspector Terje Nordbo met him at the door and they shook hands. Wisting had searched for his name on the internet without finding any results other than a listing fairly far down the list of competitors in the Birkebeiner ski race. The chief inspector opened the door into a spacious room and ushered him inside.

  The walls were grey, cold and bare, with only a ticking clock and a narrow window. The desk had a computer monitor, keyboard and mouse, in addition to a pile of blank sheets of paper, a ballpoint pen and a small digital recording device; the same type his investigators used.

  Terje Nordbo hung his jacket on the back of his chair before sitting. He drew the keyboard closer and rolled up his sleeves. Wisting felt strange to be across the desk from a police investigator. Slim and with cropped hair, Nordbo wore rimless glasses and a tightly knotted tie, and was probably ten years younger than Wisting.

  Wisting must have several thousand hours more experience, but nevertheless felt subordinate. An internal enquiry was always unpleasant. Everything the investigators discovered would be relayed and further scrutinised by the best criminal lawyers in the country, and people who sat behind massive desks on top floors would always find something to criticise if they wanted to.

  ‘I’m going to record our interview,’ Terje Nordbo said, starting the recorder. ‘Later I’ll draft a resumé that you’ll be given to read through and accept.’

  Now I’m on the other side, Wisting thought, where many men and women had been before, where he had placed hundreds, thousands of suspects. Before the law, they were innocent until the opposite had been proven. As far as the investigators were concerned though, it was the opposite. The starting point for them was that the person in the chair was guilty. To solve a case, it was crucial to believe that, to have a firm belief that the person facing you had done what he was charged with. That was how Wisting had felt when he interviewed Rudolf Haglund seventeen years before. In the interview room he had told himself that he was now sitting beside Cecilia’s killer. It was like a sports contest. If you did not believe, and believe that the game was worth winning, you lost.

  ‘You are charged with breaking paragraphs 168 and 169, second sub-section, of the Criminal Code.’

  Wisting was unprepared. He had spent days going through the Cecilia case, meaning to find who had planted the evidence, but had spent most of that time searching for an alternative killer. He was too ill prepared to face the charges against himself.

  He grasped the edge of the table and felt the rough metal border. Breach of the Criminal Code paragraph 168 was as he had expected: false accusations. Usually cited against those who gave false reports, it was also applied to those who obtained false evidence. He did not know paragraph 169.

  ‘Paragraph 169 sets a minimum punishment of one year’s imprisonment,’ the investigator said, as though he could read Wisting’s mind. ‘When an innocent party has served more than five years, the guilty person can be sentenced to a maximum term of twenty-one years. This becomes time-barred after twenty-five years.’

  Suddenly the case became far more serious, the consequences more wide-ranging than he had appreciated. If he did not succeed in clearing his name he would do time.

  ‘The background has emerged with the application made by Henden, the lawyer, to reopen the case against Rudolf Haglund,’ the investigator continued. ‘As the accused, you are not compelled to give a statement and, of course, you have the right to defence counsel at any stage.’

  Rainwater poured down the windowpane in even, fast-flowing streams and the air in the room already felt clammy.

  ‘Have you understood the charges and your rights?’

  Wisting nodded.

  ‘You have to answer out loud.’

  ‘Yes.’

  60

  The dashboard clock showed 14.37. Rudolf Haglund had spent almost an hour in the company of the Dagbladet journalist. The rain grew heavier, and water cascaded along the pavement gutters.

  Line had the red ring binder from the Cecilia case on her lap in the car. It was marked Suspect and contained the statements given by Rudolf Haglund and all their other information on him. She would use it to familiarise herself with him and as a reference book depending upon who he visited and what he got up to.

  No DNA, fingerprints or other traces of Cecilia had been found at Haglund’s home. Forensics had come to the conclusion that she had never been inside. The house was typical of the seventies: large living room, kitchen, bathroom, toilet, utility room, two storerooms and three bedrooms. A number of photographs had been taken in the course of the search. Each room pictured from a variety of angles, followed by close-ups of the pornographic magazines discovered in a suitcase in one of th
e storerooms. Every single magazine was photographed. The intention of the folder had obviously been to illustrate Haglund’s sexual preferences and support a sexual motive.

  She flicked back to the living room: drab hessian wallpaper on the walls, brown cord carpet on the floor, blue velvet settee and two matching armchairs, glass-topped coffee table, television set and video player on a wheeled console.

  Evidence of a sad and lonely life, Line thought. About to close the folder, she was halted by something apparently insignificant. Three shelves were built on the wall behind the television and on each shelf was a line of model cars.

  She switched on the interior light. Yes, it was a collection of model cars.

  She had not read anywhere that Rudolf Haglund collected model cars. The closest she had come was the witness statement that Haglund had arranged contact between Jonas Ravneberg and one of the employees in the furniture shop who had inherited a box of model cars. Neither Haglund nor Ravneberg was easy to know. Perhaps this was how they had met in the first place, through a shared interest.

  She checked the email on her phone and downloaded a message from the fact-checking department. Maud Svedberg lived in Lilla Norregatan in Ystad. She had adopted the name Svedberg when she married twelve years previously, but was listed as separated with no children. If she did not follow the news in the Norwegian press she might not know her former partner had been murdered. If so, Line would have to break the news. She felt she was riding two horses saddled together, Jonas Ravneberg and Rudolf Haglund.

  She tapped in the number and was answered by a husky female voice. ‘I’m working on a murder case and believe you knew the victim,’ she said.

  ‘A murder case?’

  ‘A murder report. The murder victim was called Jonas Ravneberg, and I think you knew him.’

  ‘Jonas?’

  ‘You lived together in Norway seventeen years ago?’