Wisting picked up the photo. ‘When last summer?’
‘18th July.’
‘Four days after Bob Crabb came to Norway,’ Mortensen said.
‘What made you think these cases are connected?’
‘A stubborn old mule of a policeman. The detective at Trollhättan police station assigned to the Kikke Lindén case simply did not give up. When they ran out of clues he searched for similar disappearances and found these five. All young, blond women, who went missing within a limited area. Not mentally ill or suicidal, we have no reason to believe they were victims of an accident or disappeared of their own free will. They distinguish themselves in another way too. They do not belong to the type of women we sometimes receive reports about. They were not married to violent husbands, did not frequent an environment where drugs and prostitution were prevalent, and had no criminal associations. They were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
Wisting nodded. This summary would cover the women on their own list.
‘Have you any clues?’ Christine Thiis asked.
‘Nothing,’ Ingemar Bergquist said. ‘Five cases with no specific clues.’ He gathered up his photographs. ‘What do you have?’
Christine Thiis left Wisting to answer.
‘We have ten cases. At least ten cases, all with no trace.’ He went on to reiterate how they had two lines of enquiry. One involved circling in on Robert Godwin, the other searching for bodies he may have hidden.
‘At what stage is your enquiry now?’ Bergquist asked.
‘We are in the process of opening the fourth well.’
‘And this American serial killer?’
‘We don’t know if we’re closing in, and there is of course a danger that we push him away.’
‘That can be an effective method of pursuit,’ the Swede said. ‘Frightening the prey in order to pounce when he tries to flee.’
‘It’s one thing finding him,’ Wisting said, ‘but that’s when our work really begins. We also have to link him to every single victim.’
‘The geographic spread gives us an advantage,’ the Swede suggested. ‘We need to chart his movements and draw that timeline over the victims to see if they coincide in time and place.’
Wisting agreed. His Swedish colleague envisaged the same tactical approach. However, connecting Robert Godwin to crime scenes years and decades back could prove an impossible task.
The last Swedish case of the girl from Trollhättan, however, gave them hope. Four months was a relatively recent case in terms of the timescales involved. If they succeeded in linking him to one case, the modus operandi would connect him to others and the cases would collapse like dominoes.
‘If we’re lucky, he’ll have placed all his eggs in one basket,’ the Swede continued. ‘Shall we head out and see what we can find in the fourth well?’
69
Donald Baker and Ingemar Bergquist drove to Halle farm in Wisting’s car. Behind them, Espen Mortensen followed with Leif Malm and John Bantam.
The snow again created chaos on the roads. A bus had stopped in the middle of the lane in front of Wisting to let a passenger dismount. A snowed-in car was parked at the bus stop, with a warning triangle on its roof. They took double the usual time for the journey to Halle farm where the sale of Christmas trees was operational again, but it would not open for another four hours.
Wisting parked in the open area in front of the sales booth. A new track had been cleared between the trees, and a tractor with an orange warning light blinking on its roof was parked at the far end. A group of men was busy working with a chain.
‘In Stockholm, the sun is shining,’ Ingemar Bergquist said as he opened the car door.
Wisting pulled on a hat before leaving the car. ‘Bob Crabb was found over there,’ he said, pointing into the dense forest of fir trees.
‘Why wasn’t he put into the well, if there’s a well here?’
Wisting did not answer. He pulled his jacket tight and walked along the cleared track, the other investigators following in silence. Nils Hammer came to meet them, his hair dotted with snowflakes.
‘The well is old and deep,’ he said, shielding his eyes from the swirling snow. ‘It hasn’t been used since the sixties. Previously there was only a cover on it, but last spring the farmer placed a large boulder on the opening. We’re working on removing that.’
‘Ah yes,’ the Swede said, answering his own question about why Bob Crabb’s body had not been thrown into the well. That was probably where Robert Godwin had been taking him but, since the last time he had been here, the old well cover had been topped with an immovable rock.
The chain was attached, and one of the men gave a sign to Per Halle at the wheel of the tractor. Thick black smoke poured from the side pipe and the huge stone crunched against the edge of the well. It shifted and was hauled a couple of metres across the snow. Hammer signalled for him to stop.
Wisting and the other investigators trudged to the edge and peered less than half a metre down at an old washing machine. Underneath he could see a bicycle and other pieces of scrap metal.
Per Halle leapt from the driver’s cabin and approached. ‘We filled it with a number of things I had stored in the barn,’ he said apologetically.
‘What’s under all the scrap?’
‘Water! Why do you ask? I still don’t understand what you’re going to . . .’
‘We want to get to the bottom,’ Hammer said.
‘I have a crane on the lorry,’ Per Halle said. ‘I can have it ready in fifteen minutes.’ He did not wait for an answer, but jumped back onto the tractor and drove off.
Before he returned, Hammer’s crew erected a work tent and hung tarpaulins to block prying eyes. The snow-covered landscape was transformed into a military operation buzzing with activity. Mobile generators were switched on and floodlights set up.
Per Halle returned and prepared his lorry for action, manoeuvring the arm of the crane above the well while a policeman climbed down with cargo straps that he fastened underneath the washing machine. It was then hoisted slowly and set on the ground. The bike and other smaller objects were passed up to the policemen. Larger items, such as a moped frame and cast iron stove, had to be hauled out. As they reached the ice layer in the well, a heap of rubbish accumulated at its side.
Parts of a car axle projected from the ice. They tied the cargo strap round it and, when they hoisted, the ice accompanied it like a lid.
The bilge pump was lowered and eventually, as the water level fell, more scrap appeared. One of the specially trained men from the Emergency Squad dropped down in an abseil harness with the cargo straps. After a while, they reached such a depth that the arm of the crane was no longer capable of lifting and they set up a winch in its place.
Wisting stood beside Leif Malm, Ingmar Bergquist and the two FBI agents in the work tent. The side facing the well was open to allow them to watch the work in progress. Wisting had brought a thermos flask; he passed around some disposable beakers and poured them all coffee.
Nils Hammer joined them. ‘The first journalists have turned up,’ he said. ‘Two guys from VG. We’ve sealed off the forest behind us, to prevent them approaching from that side.’
Wisting nodded approvingly. As long as the reporters did not have a direct view it would look as if they were extending their investigation of Bob Crabb’s death. He bit the edge of his paper beaker as he glanced at the leaden sky. If it had not been for the snowfall, hired helicopters would have been circling above them by now. Regardless, if the well contained what they feared, Robert Godwin would understand what they were doing. In all likelihood they had only twenty-four hours before he was driven away.
A shout came from the edge of the well and Wisting threw down his beaker. A coil of rusty barbed wire was hoisted out with an object hanging from it: a handbag. The coil was towed over the edge and remained hanging from the arm of the crane, dripping with water. It was a small brown bag with a shoulder-strap.
; Mortensen loosened it from the barbed wire and brought it into the tent. It looked like leather but was actually plastic.
We’re here, was what went through Wisting’s head. This is the right place. He pictured the missing person photo of Charlotte Pedersen who vanished in 2009, captured by the CCTV camera at a Statoil service station outside Porsgrunn. She had bought cigarettes and chewing gum and had placed them both in a small brown bag.
Mortensen laid the bag, covered in a layer of slick waxy mud, on a table, and opened it. Most of the contents had turned into a lump of mud, but it was possible to make out a lipstick and a little bottle of perfume. He transferred it to a plastic basin, marked it and recorded the find in a notebook.
The brown water pumped from the well hollowed out furrows in the newly-fallen snow. A penetrating heavy rotten stench followed the muddy water. ‘Stop!’ shouted the man supervising the pump.
The pump motor was cut and the flow of water stalled.
Wisting approached the edge. In the floodlight beam, a shapeless bundle came into view in the dark water. One of the men lowered himself down and tugged at it gingerly before attaching a cargo strap.
Slowly, a waterlogged sack was lifted out of the well. The sound of dripping water amplified, echoing around the walls of the well. When it was hauled over the edge, Wisting could see it was a sleeping bag. At the open end, where the cargo strap was fastened, it was tied with a shredded length of rope.
The bag swayed from side to side as the water seeped out. Espen Mortensen prepared a tarpaulin on the ground while Nils Hammer took hold, pulled the bag to one side, signalled for it to be lowered, and the men huddled in a semi-circle.
Hilde Jansen, Wisting thought, who hitchhiked from Risør in the summer of 2005 with a rucksack and sleeping bag, heading for the music festival in Kristiansand.
Hammer removed the cargo strap and left Espen Mortensen to get two of the men to stretch the sleeping bag fabric while he made a metre-long incision with a scalpel. A rotten smell billowed out and those standing nearest drew back.
Wisting covered his nose and mouth with his arm as he stepped closer. Spindly bones protruded from the fragments of clothes inside the sleeping bag.
Mortensen lengthened the incision and folded the sodden material to one side. The remains were lying head down at the foot end of the sleeping bag. A grimy face with open mouth. As well as the corpse, there were a few stones to keep it on the bottom.
In silence, Mortensen covered the opening and lifted the bag with assistance into a white plastic body bag. Snow fell softly, blanketing the corpse.
The bilge pump was switched on again but after a few minutes the order was made for it to stop. Another bundle had come into sight at the bottom of the well. It looked as if it had been lying for longer, and they did not risk hauling it up in its present condition. Instead, a stretcher was lowered and pushed underneath so that they could hoist it like an injured mountaineer rescued from a rocky mountainside.
A rough woollen travel rug was bound with rope tied around a large flat stone. The rug was disintegrating like the decomposing bandages encasing a mummy. They lifted this bundle directly into another body bag without examining it more closely.
The bilge pump sucked up more of the thick liquid silt. The men responsible for securing the extracted objects dropped small brown bones into transparent bags. These looked like detached bones from a hand.
Wisting walked to the edge of the well again. It was, so to speak, empty of water now, and measured approximately seven metres to the bottom. The man in the abseil harness looked up. Perspiration left grubby tracks down his cheeks. Underneath him lay a pile of bones and unrecognisable fragments. Two yellowed skulls lay forehead to forehead as if engaged in intimate conversation.
Wisting turned towards Leif Malm. ‘I think you should ask that team of yours to come,’ he said.
‘They’re already on their way,’ Malm replied.
70
Leif Malm, Ingmar Bergquist and the two FBI agents piled into Wisting’s car for the return journey to the police station. They had seen what they needed to see, and there was no longer any use for them at the discovery site.
The press contingent outside the crime scene tape swelled in number when Wisting drove off. Experienced journalists sat in their vehicles along the main road. Their doors were flung open and they stepped out of their cars when the police drove past. They still did not know what was going on, Wisting realised, but when the story broke, the crowd would grow like a virus spreading at record speed.
‘He’s going to slip through our fingers,’ Donald Baker said, turning to avoid a camera lens. ‘In only a few hours, he’ll be out of the country.’
‘All the same, we’re closer now than you’ve been in twenty years,’ Wisting said.
His phone began ringing as soon as they passed the huddled press pack. He took it out and checked the display. Morten P, VG. He stepped on the gas when he arrived at the dual carriageway as a passing lorry whipped up a cloud of snow. ‘We have the lists of names,’ he said, braking. ‘We can block their transit out of the country. If any of them turn up on airline or ferry tickets, we’ll pick it up.’ He had already keyed in Torunn Borg’s number to ask her to send the names to the Customs Service.
‘We don’t even know if his name is on that list,’ Leif Malm said.
At the station, Wisting was met by the communications adviser for the district. It was 13.00. They had a quick meeting in Christine Thiis’ office, where Wisting provided them with a brief status report.
‘We’ll have to send out a press statement and call a press conference,’ was the information adviser’s immediate reaction. ‘When can you meet the press?’
Wisting was already on his way out the door. ‘When Robert Godwin’s been arrested,’ he said. ‘Until then, we’ve something else on our minds.’
For the next hour they felt as if they were treading water. Their efforts and movements did not lead them in any particular direction. They aimed to keep their heads above water, and all they could do was let themselves be carried along by events.
They had received a handful of approaches from the public after VG published Bob Crabb’s photograph. Copies of the tip-offs had been left on his desk. Two neighbours in Stavern had contacted the police even though they did not have any fresh information to offer, and a pensioner couple thought they had seen him on board a ferry to Denmark when they had been on their summer holidays. A passenger who arrived on the same plane as him thought he should let them know, but he had not noticed him on board the flight. Three others thought they had seen a man resembling the man in the photograph in Stavern last summer, but could not pin the time down and had not noticed anything else.
From that perspective this case did not distinguish itself from any other. Investigation was a business with countless blind alleys and colossal amounts of wasted time and effort.
They used the firing range in the police station basement as a collection area, and the first car of remains arrived at quarter to two. Wisting went down to see how the team of technicians from Kripos organised their work.
The coppery stench from the stagnant well water met them inside, masking the smell of gunpowder and lead that permeated the walls. The firing range was not only the location affording most space but also had its own ventilation system with air exchange to avoid the accumulation of dangerous airborne pollutants and noxious gases.
Thick plastic cloth was rolled over the floor. Men in white suits made notes and collected papers in folders, took photographs, sorted and recorded. One of them was Jon Berge, the crime scene technician who had participated in the video broadcast post-mortem. He greeted Wisting with a nod of the head before returning to his note-taking.
The corpse wrapped in a woollen travel rug lay nearest the door under the floodlight from the large ceiling lamps. A crime scene technician took a close-up photograph of the tight knot before the rope was cut. The ragged travel rug was unwrapped to reveal a waxy shape wi
th the external contours of a body. Wisting had seen similar transmutations on cadavers recovered from the sea and corpses that had lain for a considerable time in damp surroundings. The adipose tissue of the body had been transformed into a white, brittle, swollen mass that resembled solidified stearin.
The macabre remains would make the task of identification simpler than only bones would have. Tissue samples would provide them with a DNA profile but even now a faded red leather belt with rusty buckle told them that this was Silje from Vinstra, transported more than four hundred kilometres before being dumped in the well.
Wisting tried to envisage what she had gone through before the woollen rug was wrapped round her and the knots tightened. Before Godwin began to cover his tracks in the USA, his victims had been dumped in ditches along the Interstate Highway and so the crime scene technicians and forensic scientists had more to work with. It emerged that some of the victims had been kept alive for up to seventy-two hours before they were killed. During that time they had been raped repeatedly.
‘The bodies have been subject to different degrees of decomposition,’ Jon Berge said, ‘depending on how long they have been in the well and what they have been wrapped in. We probably can’t expect to find any more than bones from the oldest remains.’
Wisting followed him to the corpse in the sleeping bag. Among the crumbling clothes lay black bones, still with fragments of organic material, not completely decomposed.
‘It’s absolutely incredible that he has been able to continue like this,’ Berge added, ‘for more than twenty years, without anyone having spotted a pattern or suspected anyone in any way whatsoever.’
Wisting did not answer.
‘But it is possible, of course,’ Berge went on. ‘If you do it in the right way and don’t become over-eager. A young girl disappears every other year, one in Western Norway, one in the east, and another in the south. It reminds me of the guy who designed the first computer system for the savings banks. He wrote into the program that all financial transactions should be rounded down to the nearest whole ten øre. The few øre rounded off were transferred to his own account. No one noticed the loss of a few øre here or there, but it amounted to a great deal of money in the long run.’
The Caveman Page 24