Outside, the cold was biting, and she buttoned her jacket. A man had stopped on the pavement to show respect for the mourners. He loitered for a moment, looking through the church door, but plodded on when he saw there were no more people in the funeral group.
The petite woman with the rose remained standing. Her nose was red, and Line assumed she was either suffering from a cold or had been crying. She was rummaging in her bag, but glanced up when Line approached her, asking: ‘Irene?’
The woman’s eyes fluttered, and she gave a brief nod.
Line introduced herself as an old neighbour of Viggo Hansen’s. ‘Do you have time for a cup of coffee?’
A shudder ran through the woman. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but clamped it shut again. Then she nodded shyly.
45
One of the specialist officers from the Emergency Squad put on a head torch and jumped on the wall. He tucked an ice axe into his belt to keep his hands free, positioned himself with his back to the opening and tugged on the rope a couple of times to check the anchor. Leaning backwards he abseiled down. It was apparent that only one man at a time could fit inside the well.
Wisting followed his downward progress as he found his footholds in fissures and tiny projections, on stones displaced by frost action. At the bottom, he put one foot gingerly on the ice. It held his weight.
Remaining in the abseil harness, he made some initial, tentative swings with the ice axe. Splinters of ice sprayed around him. The walls of the well echoed, sending a harsh clanging noise up to the watchers and a bucket was lowered so that broken ice could be hoisted up.
‘The newspapers have started probing,’ Wisting said to Donald Baker.
‘Into this?’
‘Not this exactly, but Bob Crabb,’ Wisting said.
‘What are you doing about it?’
‘Keeping them at a distance.’
Wisting hung over the edge, thinking about the people who had cleared the forest here, built the house and dug the well over a century ago. Someone had dug and dug, first in hope after the dowsing rod had bent at this exact spot, then perhaps in anger when the water did not appear, finally in defiant determination until they found the aquifer. Buckets of earth, clay and gravel were hauled up as the well grew deeper. When they finally found water, down in the depths, the walls were lined with slate to keep it clean.
‘I’m through!’ the officer shouted up. ‘The ice is about twenty centimetres thick.’
He continued hacking for another quarter of an hour before climbing up to let one of his colleagues take over. The new man set to work with even greater enthusiasm and smashed increasingly larger fragments of ice that were, again, hauled up.
‘Can you check the water depth?’ Nils Hammer called down, lowering a rope, knotted at half-metre intervals and with a weight at the end. The officer lowered the weight into the water until it touched bottom. When he pulled it up Wisting counted four knots. A depth of two metres.
‘Even if we find anything here,’ Donald Baker said, ‘and even if we succeed in locating Robert Godwin, it might still be difficult to link him to the homicides.’
Wisting had realised that some time ago. The most recent name on the list of possible victims had been reported two and a half years earlier. He had no expectations of finding forensic or biological evidence that could connect the perpetrator to the crime. It would be an enormous challenge simply to identify the dead women.
‘We can charge him,’ Baker continued. ‘We have an arrest warrant ready for him. We can fly him home as soon as we locate him and make certain he never sees the light of day again.’
‘That’s a discussion for the lawyers and politicians,’ Wisting said, ‘when or if that time comes, but he has to answer for what he has done here in Norway before we can hand him over.’
The man in the well broke through the last chunk of ice before clambering up again.
‘We’ll see,’ Donald Baker said, but there was something obstinate about the expression on his face. Something that made Wisting guess the FBI agent had an assignment above and beyond helping the Norwegian police.
A portable generator starting up interrupted them. Nils Hammer dropped a bilge pump into the well. It gurgled as it hit the surface and sludgy water started flooding out, topside, from the hose. Espen Mortensen had rigged up a wooden box with a fine-mesh base plate for the water to filter through. If the pump sucked up any objects, they would be retained on the wire mesh.
‘It will take around half an hour to empty the well,’ Hammer said, holding a stack of paper beakers in one hand and a thermos flask in the other.
Wisting thanked him and removed the glove from his right hand to take hold of the beaker. He stood sipping the coffee as he warmed his fingers.
The water pouring from the pump hose was pale brown but took on an increasingly darker colour. A number of twigs and tiny stones were left lying on the netting. Suddenly, the hose began to flail about until a rusty, bent length of metal was spat out. Mortensen picked it up and studied it closely. It looked like part of a bucket handle. He dropped it back on the grid.
The generator provided enough current for a floodlight as well. Nils Hammer placed it on a stand at the edge of the well and tilted the powerful light so that the beam was trained directly on the bottom.
Wisting leaned over the edge and peered down. A rotten stench drifted up from the stagnant water.
Two police officers took up position beside him. And then another. Soon all the police officers were gathered around the well opening. None of them uttered a word, but watched in silence as the water level dropped centimetre by centimetre. In the end the bilge pump was left on the bottom of the well, guzzling up the last of the muddy water from the foundation stones.
Wisting sighed heavily. There was nothing after all. The well was empty.
46
The woman’s name was Irene Skisaker. Line accompanied her to Jensens Conditori, a run-down café nearby, and found a table where they could sit by themselves. She went to the counter and returned with cream cakes and coffee for them both. ‘There weren’t many people today,’ she said.
‘I thought I would be the only one.’ Irene curled her hand round the coffee cup, stretching slack, almost transparent skin across her knuckles.
‘The man who came was Eivind Aske. An old school friend of Viggo’s.’
Irene Skisaker smiled. ‘Was it you who bought the flowers?’
‘On behalf of the neighbours,’ Line said.
‘But you were the only one who came?’
‘I’m a journalist with VG,’ Line said, going on to describe the article she was working on. ‘It’s been difficult to find anyone who knew him. Someone who can tell me what he was like.’
Irene Skisaker sank slightly into her seat. ‘Why do you actually want to know?’
Line considered the question for a moment. ‘Because I think it’s so unfair that no one paid him any attention. It seems he never amounted to anything or meant anything to anyone. I thought he could come to mean something now, in a newspaper article, to remind us that we must take care of one another in the time we have together.’
‘He meant something to me,’ the woman said softly.
‘How did you get to know him?’
‘We were in the same hospital at one time. That was twenty years ago.’
Line gave the woman time to continue, but she did not add anything. ‘What hospital was that?’ Line asked.
‘Granli.’ The hospital at Granli outside Tønsberg was a district psychiatric unit for long-term treatment of patients with mental conditions. ‘I went through a period when I needed help, and that was where we met. You become fond of one another easily in a place like that. It’s as if you reach into the depths of someone’s soul all at once, and seeing the dark side makes it easier. It’s good to have friends who have gone through hard times and know what life’s all about. You don’t feel so alone.’
‘Why was Viggo Hansen admitted?’
‘He was suffering from delusions, but he was signed out long before me. After that, he came and visited, first at the hospital and later at home in Horten.’
‘You kept in touch?’
Irene Skisaker ran the palm of her hand over her hair. ‘For a while, at least,’ she said. ‘It was strange. When we were both ill, it seemed as if we could talk about everything, but outside the hospital we became more like strangers. We met less and less often, and then our contact petered out.’
‘How did you know about the funeral?’
‘My mother saw the announcement, in the nursing home at Søbakken. She’ll be ninety soon, but she likes to read the death notices. I’ve often thought I should pay Viggo a visit when I’m in the area anyway, visiting her. Once I even did that, but he wasn’t at home. At least, he didn’t answer the door.’
‘These delusions of his,’ Line said, treading carefully, ‘what were they about?’
‘He didn’t talk about it. He knew that the less he said about them, the quicker he would get out of hospital. It was to do with being possessed by evil spirits or something along those lines.’
‘Evil spirits?’
‘He didn’t call them that, but he got it into his head that someone had taken up residence in someone else’s body. At least, he was convinced that someone he knew was not the person he pretended to be.’
‘Who would that be? He didn’t know so many people.’
The woman shrugged. ‘As I said, he didn’t say very much about it.’
‘How long ago is it since you spoke to him?’
‘It was sometime in the mid-nineties, but then I received a letter last summer.’
Line straightened. ‘A letter? What did he write?’
The woman shook her head. ‘It was slightly disjointed and the handwriting was difficult to read, but he wanted to meet me. He wrote that he had been right all along, that he had never been ill, but all the same he wasn’t angry or bitter about being committed because, without that, he wouldn’t have met me, and now he wanted to see me again.’
‘Did anything come of it?’
‘I didn’t hear any more from him.’
‘But you replied?’
‘I wrote back, but it was probably already too late. In the death announcement it said he died in August, around the same time as the letter.’
Line had searched through the house and not found any letter from Irene Skisaker. One of the police reports had listed the contents of the mailbox outside, and that had not contained any personal letters either.
‘What had happened?’ she asked. ‘Why did he suddenly make contact after so many years?’
‘It was to do with him not being mad after all,’ Irene Skisaker explained. ‘That he had not been imagining things twenty years before. To me, it just looked as if he had become ill again. I wondered whether I should call the hospital and tell them but, you know how it is, people don’t like to get involved, so I let it drop. And then it was too late.’
‘I’ve come to know Viggo Hansen as a very lonely person,’ Line said, keeping eye contact with Irene Skisaker. ‘What you’ve told me about the two of you; does that mean he did experience love in his life?’
The woman opposite blushed.
47
The windows of the car were opaque with frost. Wisting started the engine and turned the heating on full before looking for the ice scraper. Exhaust fumes drifted around the vehicle as he worked with rapid, regular movements, tendrils of white frost curling from the windows in thin strips.
He sat behind the wheel with his arm stretched along the passenger seat behind Donald Baker and reversed along the snow-covered track.
‘What do we do now?’ Baker asked.
‘Concentrate on finding Robert Godwin,’ Wisting said, ‘not chasing his ghosts. If Bob Crabb found him there must be some clue in his apartment in Minneapolis to say what put him on the trail.’
The sun shone through the frosty trees on both sides of the track. Donald Baker leaned forward and peered up into the blue sky. ‘In that case, he must have taken it with him. Our guys have gone through every centimetre of that place. Every single document has been analysed and studied.’
They were back on the main road when Wisting’s mobile phone rang: Morten P, VG. Wisting ignored the call. Placing his phone on the centre console, he flipped down the sun visor and drove south-west. On the far side of the road, a man was travelling at a snail’s pace on a moped with panniers.
‘Where are we going?’ Baker asked.
‘Following the ancestral trail. Robert Godwin’s great-great-grandfather immigrated into America in 1889. He came from one of the farms out here. Godwin returned in his footsteps when he went on the run. I think Bob Crabb did the same and that was how he found him.’
‘Have you put anyone on this?’
Wisting nodded. ‘Torunn Borg is charting all the descendants of factory worker Niels Gustavsen. The farm he came from is on the other side of the hill.’
His mobile phone rang again, an Oslo number not stored in his contacts. He let it ring out.
They drove on in silence, passing a patchwork of frozen fields and deserted farms until Wisting dropped his speed and parked at the verge. Two brown horses stood on the frozen ground in a paddock, motionless, their heads leaning into each other.
‘Over there,’ Wisting said, pointing at a farm building beneath a forested ridge. A fine white ribbon of smoke rose from a chimney.
‘Who lives there now?’
‘A young couple.’ Wisting took out his notebook and read from it. ‘They’re not from this area, but they’ve been living here for a couple of years.’
‘We ought to speak to them.’
Wisting nodded. Bob Crabb might have sought them out in his search for Godwin.
One of the horses reared its neck and whinnied, as if something had suddenly unsettled it. Wisting put the car in gear, turned into the narrow farm track and drove to the farmyard. ‘I’ll be ten minutes,’ he said.
A lean and sallow woman in her late twenties appeared at the door before he reached the steps. A cat sneaked through her legs. According to the paperwork, her name should be Ada Alsaker. She had dark hair in a long ponytail that reached down her back.
Wisting greeted her with a nod. ‘I’m from the police,’ he said, showing his ID. ‘There’s nothing wrong, but I have a few questions regarding a case from last summer.’
The woman was flimsily dressed. She made no move to invite him in.
‘Do you have time?’ Wisting asked, nodding in the direction of the hallway.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. She crouched down and lifted the cat. ‘Come in.’
They sat at the kitchen table. ‘Are you alone?’ Wisting asked.
‘My husband’s in town. What did you say this was about?’
‘We wondered if you had any visitors last summer. An American?’
The woman lowered her head and raised it again in very thoughtful confirmation. ‘His family had lived on the farm here in the 1800s. Before the son of the house sailed to America.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
She shook her head. Wisting took out the photograph of the university professor, Bob Crabb. ‘Was that him?’
Ada Alsaker smiled when she recognised the face. ‘Yes, that’s him.’
Crabb had passed himself off as Godwin, Wisting realised. ‘When was he here?’
‘The day before my husband Eirik’s birthday, 15th July.’
The day after his arrival in Norway, Wisting thought. ‘What did he want?’
‘Just to look around, I think. He was interested in whether we knew anything about his family, whether we knew any descendants of the people who lived here in the nineteenth century.’
‘Did you?’
‘No. The people who owned the place before us lived here for ten years. I think it’s a long time since anyone from his family was here.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
Wisting took out the photos of the two unidentified wells, first showing the one with the pyramid-shaped cover. ‘Do you know where this is?’
The woman leaned forward and studied the photograph carefully. She shook her head: ‘No.’
‘What about this?’ Wisting asked, showing the one that was probably a soil irrigation tank.
She took it and held it up to the light. ‘This looks like over at Skaret.’
‘Where’s that?’
She stood up and crossed to the kitchen window, Wisting following. Donald Baker was still in the car with the engine running.
‘On the other side of the road,’ the woman said, pointing.
Cold grey mist lay like a pall over the landscape, but on the opposite side of the road Wisting could see a flat field and, where it met the edge of the forest, a broad track between two low hills.
‘I usually go riding there,’ she said. ‘I’m quite sure this is the old track through Skaret.’
Wisting thanked her and took back the picture. ‘Is it correct there’s a concrete tank there?’
‘Yes, it’s what’s left of the old soil irrigation system, but it’s no longer in use.’
48
Line drove out of Stavern, taking the main road past Tanum church to Brunlanesveien. A flat landscape with snow-covered fields and drooping spruce trees stretched out on either side. Buildings were scattered, and the houses numbered to a distance principle, with addresses allocated street numbers according to how far they were from the town, given to the nearest whole hundred metres. Brunlanesveien 550 was located 5.5 kilometres from the centre of Larvik.
The number was painted in black letters on a white plaque fastened to a telephone pole at a turning into a narrow side road. The house was situated under a snowy ridge several hundred metres from the road, a typical two-storeyed house from the seventies, with panorama windows and an entrance into the basement. The mailbox was marked ‘Linge’.
The Caveman Page 17