The Caveman

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Line leaned back in the chair. ‘If anyone was to visit Viggo Hansen at his house . . .’ she said, inviting Jonas Utklev to join in her thinking aloud, ‘who do you think it might have been?’

  ‘Who would it be? No one from the old days, anyway.’

  There was a noise at the front door and Mrs. Utklev entered the living room, still wearing her coat. The cold had made her red in the face. Jonas Utklev stood and introduced the two women. ‘We’re sitting here talking about Viggo Hansen,’ he said. ‘You should really tell her about when you saw him last summer.’

  His wife puckered her lips.

  ‘Maren works at the local library,’ her husband said.

  ‘Did you talk to him last summer?’ Line asked.

  Maren Utklev unbuttoned her coat. ‘He came into the library. I didn’t actually recognise him.’

  Jonas Utklev continued, ‘Maren was a year below us at school.’

  She stepped into the hallway to hang her coat and returned to the living room, where she stood in the kitchen doorway. ‘I don’t think he remembered me either,’ she said. ‘He had never been before, and didn’t have a library card.’

  ‘He didn’t borrow anything,’ Jonas Utklev said. ‘He just wanted to browse through a few books.’

  ‘What sort of books?’

  ‘He sat for hours reading different books in the local history collection. Memories of Stavern and that kind of thing.’

  ‘That’s a book with photographs and small short texts about Stavern that was published ten or fifteen years ago,’ Jonas Utklev said. ‘We had a copy in our bookcase when we had our house but, when we moved, we couldn’t bring all the books with us. We didn’t have room and, of course, we had read them all anyway. Some of them more than once, so we handed them over to a second-hand book shop.’

  ‘What was it he was looking for?’

  ‘That’s not so easy to say,’ Maren Utklev commented, pursing her mouth again.

  ‘He tore out a couple of pages,’ Jonas Utklev told Line. ‘Just tore them out and took them with him.’

  ‘I didn’t discover that until after he’d gone,’ Maren Utklev explained. ‘The book had been returned to the wrong place, and when I went to move it back I noticed.’

  ‘What pages had he torn out?’

  ‘It must have been something he was interested in. Maybe a photograph he was in himself. I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Can we find out?’ Line asked. ‘Which pages are missing?’

  ‘We don’t have that book any longer,’ Maren Utklev replied. ‘We had to throw it away. Fortunately they had several copies at the main library, so we were able to replace it.’

  ‘Did you not take it up with him?’ Line asked. ‘Charge for damages or suchlike?’

  ‘I couldn’t be completely certain it was him. It could have been someone who borrowed the book before him. I wasn’t entirely sure it was even Viggo Hansen. It was Gunvor in the bank who told me who he was.’

  Line waited for the woman to explain.

  ‘You see, Gunvor was in the library at the same time. When Viggo Hansen left and I discovered the pages missing I asked her if she knew who he was. She knew him from the bank. As for me, I hadn’t seen him since our schooldays.’

  Somewhere in the house, a clock struck three.

  ‘How long is the library open?’ Line asked.

  ‘Today’s Wednesday,’ Jonas Utklev answered. ‘It’s open till four o’clock.’

  59

  Line had forgotten she had not brought her car. She had to walk home before she could drive to the library in the centre of Stavern.

  Walking against the wind she stared down at her own footsteps, snow whirling up to hammer her face like nails. It could not have been by chance that Viggo Hansen had paid a visit to the library. It must have been something in particular he was looking for, and had found.

  The car was cold and difficult to start but, at the third attempt, spluttered into life. She let the engine run while she scraped a thin layer of ice from the windows and kept her gloves on when she sat behind the wheel, her breath forming a gossamer-light white vapour that left dewdrops on the inside of the windscreen.

  There was one space left in front of the building. She parked and climbed the well-worn stairs to the little branch library on the first floor. The woman behind the counter smiled as she peered over her glasses.

  ‘Hi,’ Line greeted her. ‘I’m looking for a book called Memories of Stavern.’

  ‘There are three of them,’ the librarian replied. ‘That is to say, it comes in three volumes.’

  Line sighed. That would make it even more difficult to find out what Viggo Hansen was searching for. ‘Then I’d like to borrow all three.’

  ‘They’re not for lending, I’m afraid. They belong to the local history collection and they’re only for reference.’

  ‘Okay. Can I have a look at them?’

  The librarian disappeared and returned right away with three books with colourful dustcovers.

  People’s own photographs, was the subtitle.

  Line took them to a sitting area and began to leaf through. Many of the pictures were from the war years although some were older and showed how the town and seaside had looked a century ago, but there were also more recent photographs: Norway’s National Day, 17th May, summer parties and Midsummer celebrations, dances, flea markets, football matches and gymnastics performances. She was not actually sure what she was looking for, but hoped it would dawn on her when she saw it.

  She found pictures of the prawn factory, the canning factory and Stavern school, but the text under the photographs told her nothing of interest.

  Her mobile phone vibrated. She took it out of her bag and opened a text message sent in English. This evening? Same time? Same place? John. She sat looking at the brief invitation. She did not know him, and for that very reason it felt much simpler to say yes. It would be totally non-committal. Totally uncomplicated. OK, she keyed in, but then deleted it and wrote, Yes please.

  The librarian came across. ‘We’ll be closing in five minutes,’ she said.

  Line continued to leaf through the book, then stopped and leafed backwards. A colour photo from 1967 showed four teenage boys in front of a familiar building.

  The quick-witted efforts of four boys who happened to be passing by in the autumn of 1967 saved the Reimes prawn factory from being destroyed by fire, she read in the text underneath the photograph. From the left: Frank Iversen, Odd Werner Ellefsen, Cato Tangen and Viggo Hansen.

  Behind them was a fire engine and a man in uniform rolling up a hosepipe.

  The boy who was standing third from the left seemed slightly older than the others. Cato Tangen was leaning over the handlebars of a moped. His face was narrow, and his long hair hung down on either side.

  At the counter the librarian was rattling the keys. Line produced her camera and snapped a photograph of the page before the ceiling lights were switched off. She did not know if this was one of the pictures Viggo Hansen had torn out, but it was the only one she had found so far.

  60

  Darkness had fallen when Line left the library. A man with a black dog loitered in the cone of light under a streetlamp, but otherwise the street was deserted.

  When she turned into Herman Wildenveys gate, she was detained behind a pewter-coloured estate car with a ski box on the roof as it struggled to climb the slight incline to where the road flattened out beside the old reservoir. She let it move some distance ahead and watched it turn into the Brunvall property, across the street from Viggo Hansen’s. She drove past her own driveway and watched Steinar Brunvall get out of the car.

  She had postponed calling without being entirely sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with him being married and having children, while she herself had not found a real foothold in life.

  According to the police report, neither he nor his wife had had anything to do with Viggo Hansen, and she had decided there was no need to speak to them. However, the sit
uation was different now. She was no longer simply examining a solitary life, but also searching for something to support the theory she was formulating.

  She parked behind the dark-grey estate car. Steinar Brunvall peered at her windscreen, but was blinded by her headlights. Even when she had switched off the ignition, he still had difficulty seeing who sat behind the wheel. She stepped out and spoke his name.

  ‘Line?’ he said with a smile. ‘It’s been a long time. Are you home for Christmas, then?’

  She started to explain why she was at home but, before she reached halfway, he interrupted and invited her inside.

  The smell of cooking greeted them. Line followed Steinar Brunvall into the kitchen where he introduced her to Ida, who was standing at the cooker stirring a pot. Children were playing in the living room.

  ‘I won’t stay long,’ she said, and finished her explanation about why she was here.

  ‘Nobody deserves to die like that,’ Ida said, lifting the wooden spoon from the pot. ‘It’s shameful that the people around him could be so indifferent, and that applies to us too.’

  Her husband agreed. ‘We all should have been more concerned.’

  ‘But that’s the way our society has developed,’ his wife continued. ‘We don’t have time for anyone but ourselves. In a small town like Stavern you would think that everyone would be visible, but Viggo Hansen never drew attention to himself.’

  Steinar Brunvall nodded. ‘He never had any visitors, no one at all. And if, now and again, someone came selling raffle tickets or something like that, then he didn’t open his door.’

  ‘There was that one time last summer, though,’ his wife reminded him.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. There was a guy there. I was out in the garden and was a bit surprised to see a car in the street outside his house.’

  ‘There are never any cars there, you see,’ Ida Brunvall added.

  ‘It was a hired car,’ Steinar continued. ‘A grey Audi. It had an Avis sticker in the back window. It was so unusual to see a car there that I went over to the hedge to take a look. Then a man came out of the house.’

  ‘What had he been doing there?’ Line asked.

  ‘I don’t know but he was carrying a thick envelope when he left. He put it on the back seat before driving off.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Probably at the end of July. That’s the only person I’ve seen there in many a year.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Slightly older than Viggo Hansen, and heavier built. He had a beard and glasses.’

  The description did not fit anyone Line had talked to.

  ‘Children!’ Ida Brunvall shouted. ‘Dinner in five minutes!’ She turned to face Line. ‘We’ll never know what he died of. Perhaps it was his heart? He was a good age, wasn’t he? Although we may have a guilty conscience about him sitting dead for four months, it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have died anyway.’

  61

  Instead of transporting all the bone fragments to the Institute of Anatomy at Oslo University, they arranged for a professor, a specialist in biological anthropology, to travel to Larvik to examine and classify their discoveries and draw provisional conclusions.

  On the workbench in the crime technology lab at the police station, Mortensen rolled out a sheet of grey paper, arranging the bones from the bottom of the well in such a way that they formed a skeleton. From what Wisting could see, nothing was missing.

  On an adjacent bench, the fabric scraps were placed so that the striped material took the shape of a shirt, while some thicker remnants of fabric had been patched together to make a pair of shorts. What was left of a pair of sandals lay at the end of the bench.

  Julie from Arendal was listed as wearing sandals, but her shoe size was thirty-eight, and Janne from Sarpsborg had been wearing summer shoes in size forty-one when she went missing. ‘Summer shoes’ could well have been sandals. Everything else they had found was arrayed on a stainless steel drying table beside the work benches. The silt had been brought in large plastic containers and filtered to rinse off all the mud and soil but retain larger objects, just like panning for gold.

  The most interesting item found was a five kroner coin bearing the date 1985. In addition, they found a few rusty screws and nails, most probably from when the well was built, a button and something that looked like part of a ballpoint pen.

  The professor’s name was Mons Holgersen, and he had thick grey hair, an irregular nose, bushy eyebrows and glasses hanging from a cord around his neck. ‘Here we have him, then,’ he said, putting on his glasses before stooping over the bones.

  ‘Him?’ Wisting asked.

  ‘Oh yes, no doubt about it. This is a man.’

  Holgersen took a pen from his breast pocket and pointed to the skeleton’s abdominal area. ‘The pelvis is a distinct gender indicator, the female being broader and more capacious than the male. The side-walls here, as you will see, are cone-shaped, but on a woman the pelvic cavity is almost cylindrical. The opening is larger and rounder, and the angle adapted to allow a baby to pass through the pelvic canal during childbirth.’

  Three investigators were huddled round the workbench: Wisting, Nils Hammer and Espen Mortensen. They all looked dubious at the professor’s absolute certainty.

  ‘Both the inlet and outlet are wider in the female,’ he continued, circling his pen round the opening in the pelvic bone. ‘The anterior pelvic wall is shallower, and the distance between the ischial spines greater. The sacrum is somewhat broader, shorter and less curved.’

  ‘So you’re quite sure?’ Wisting asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ the professor answered, moving on to the ribcage. ‘There are also gender differences in the ribcage. Women have a rounder shape and the bands of soft cartilage in front of the breastbone remain intact until old age. In men, ossification begins earlier.’

  They let the grey-haired professor examine the skeleton without posing any more questions: picking up individual bones, holding them up to the light before setting them down again, moving a few vertebrae, squinting over his glasses as he studied the skull from various angles.

  ‘Can you say how old he was?’ Wisting asked. ‘Or how long since he died?’

  Taking a step back, Mons Holgersen removed his glasses and gazed down at the bones. ‘It’s an adult male, anyway,’ he concluded. ‘A man in mid-life.’

  ‘Aged forty?’

  ‘Plus or minus ten years, but I’ll have to run a number of radiographic tests before I can say anything further about the maturity of the skeleton.’

  ‘Time of death?’

  ‘That’s even more difficult to determine. Chronometric dating will not produce an exact answer. You have the coin. If that was in the victim’s pocket he must have arrived there after 1985. The deterioration of the bones indicates they have lain for at least fifteen years. So after 1985, but probably before . . . let’s say the year 2000.’

  ‘Can you tell us anything more? Weight and height?’

  The professor lifted the glasses hanging round his neck and began to chew one of the arms. ‘Nothing other than that he was normal, meaning of normal height. His weight is rather more difficult to assess.’

  Espen Mortensen summarised. ‘So we have a man of about five feet eleven tall, aged between thirty and fifty when he went in the well, and he’s been lying there for between fifteen and twenty-five years?’

  ‘Fairly fluid parameters,’ the professor admitted, ‘but at the moment that’s the best science has to offer.’ He double-clicked the pen and returned it to his shirt pocket. ‘The cause of death is easier to explain.’

  ‘What caused his death?’

  Professor Holgersen put his glasses on again and lifted the skull, turned it round and showed them a spider’s web-shaped fracture on the back of the cranium. ‘This is a fracture with no bone growth, no sign of bone repair, meaning that this injury occurred at the time of death.’

  ‘Could it be from the fall down the well?’ Ha
mmer asked.

  The professor replaced the skull face down. ‘If it was empty of water,’ he replied, tugging off his latex gloves, ‘but the thick lines on the fracture suggest that great force was used with an extremely hard object. Perhaps an iron bar or something of that nature.’ His eyes shifted from one detective to the other. ‘Do you have any idea who this is?’

  Wisting shook his head.

  The professor produced his pen again. ‘Here’s something that may help with identification.’ He pointed along the bone on the lower left arm. ‘This is possibly an old fracture, which X-rays will confirm.’

  Wisting ran his hand through his hair. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Thanks very much.’

  The professor peered at him over his glasses. ‘Something tells me that what I’ve told you wasn’t what you expected to hear.’

  62

  After the skeleton had been packed into crates and driven off for closer inspection, the investigators assembled in the conference room. Maggie Griffin had gone back to the USA, but the two male operatives remained. John Bantam hung up his black jacket and rolled up his sleeves. ‘A man?’ he asked, picking up one of the photographs.

  ‘A man,’ Wisting confirmed. Lifting the lid of the pizza box, he helped himself to a slice of cold pizza topped with something resembling bacon. ‘Maybe we’ll have to rethink this totally. We have a list of missing women, but they’re obviously not linked to this case. What we already had is Bob Crabb with the fingerprint of an American serial killer in his inside pocket and strands of hair from a woman in his fist. In addition we now also have the body of an approximately forty-year-old man who was murdered about twenty years ago.’

  ‘Looks like you’ve found the Caveman,’ Donald Baker said. ‘Or at least the person he’s now hiding behind.’

  Wisting let the FBI agent explain.

  ‘This is probably Robert Godwin’s first victim in Norway. A painstakingly selected victim, with no family, friends, work colleagues or any kind of social circle who would miss him or notice that another person had taken his place and was living the same solitary life.’