The Caveman

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Wisting was about to mention that he had been caught and sentenced to three years for fraud, but was interrupted by his mobile phone. He answered with his name, but heard nothing but scraping sounds. The concrete walls in the firing range were affecting the signal. He walked to the door. ‘Hello?’ he tried again, emerging into the corridor.

  ‘Hello?’ answered the voice at the other end.

  ‘Sorry, poor signal,’ Wisting said. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Steinar Brunvall,’ the man said. ‘We’re almost next door neighbours.’

  ‘You’re Tor and Marianne’s son,’ Wisting said as he walked towards the stairs. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No. I was actually trying to phone Line. She called in yesterday in connection with a story she’s writing about Viggo Hansen. I told her then about a man who visited him last summer.’

  ‘A man?’

  ‘Yes, and today there’s a picture of him in the newspaper.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve tried to call Line several times, but she’s not answering her phone. Then Ida said I should phone you instead. After all, it’s the police who are looking for information about him.’

  ‘What are you telling me?’ Wisting asked, his chest tightening.

  ‘Line was curious about a man who visited Viggo Hansen last summer. He never normally had visitors, and then we saw the picture in today’s paper. It fits that he was driving a hired car as well, Bob Crabb from the USA. The professor who was found dead beside the Christmas trees last week.’

  It felt as though a secret door had opened.

  71

  Line woke in a cold, cramped space that was pitch dark and with no wiggle room. She had a thumping headache and no inkling of how long she had been unconscious. Her hands and feet were tied together behind her back, her mouth was taped shut and she was covered with some sort of woollen blanket. Tossing her head, she managed to uncover her face, and lay breathing heavily through her nose. The air was stuffy, and she began to feel queasy. If she threw up, the consequences could be fatal. Feeling the material beneath her spring as she twisted about, she realised she was in the boot of a car.

  She listened intently, straining to hear with breath held, but the silence was total. The car must be parked in some deserted spot, and there could not be anyone else inside or she would be aware, either by movement or sound. With her hands and feet tied behind her she was unable to hit or kick the boot lid.

  Despite her extremely limited opportunity to move, she began to feel about behind her back until her fingers closed on something, an empty plastic bottle. There was a newspaper and things that felt like paintbrushes. Then her fingers grasped something different, a thin metal plate with a handle. A putty knife, she thought. She had used one like it while redecorating her flat. The edge might be sharp enough to file through the rope.

  She pulled it towards her, fumbling for a secure grip, and succeeded in positioning it to file the rope. As droplets of perspiration formed on her top lip, she blew them away and kept rubbing the putty knife to and fro, fearing at every second that the boot lid would be flung open. While she worked, her thoughts strayed to how she had arrived in this situation.

  She remembered her car breaking down, and how pleased she was when another car stopped and she recognised the driver, but then came the damp cloth pressed over her nose and mouth, and the smell reminding her of glue or varnish, burning her lips and nostrils until everything went black. With no idea how much time had passed, she wondered whether she should have anticipated something like this, whether she should have realised she had come too close to something, too near the truth about Viggo Hansen.

  The rope snapped suddenly and her legs shot forward to strike the side of the boot compartment. She dropped the putty knife and lay considering her next step, contemplating whether she should try to attract attention and, if she succeeded, whether anyone other than the man who had shut her in would hear.

  Her hands and feet were still bound, but she could wriggle into a position from which she could kick the boot lid. She tried to shout from behind the tape, managed a few feeble sounds and lay listening. Nothing. No footsteps. No cars in the distance. She would freeze to death if she stayed here, she thought. No matter what, she had to get out before he came back.

  She twisted round, placing her feet against the back of the rear seats separating the boot from the car interior. When she felt it give a little, she drew her knees to her chest and pushed with her feet. The whole vehicle rocked, and the back of the seat creaked. She kicked again, and a chink of grey light appeared. It was still daylight outside.

  She pressed her back against the wall of the compartment and her feet against the rear seat until she almost passed out and the chink of light grew in size, giving her renewed strength before the partition gave way with a crash.

  72

  Wisting tried to reach Line three times both on her mobile and the land line at home on his way upstairs to his office. Her mobile phone must be either switched off or in an area with no signal.

  There was a link between the Viggo Hansen story she was working on and his own investigation. The trail was already four months old, but new to them. Strands were interlinked, and he needed to ascertain what she knew.

  The FBI agents had been critical of his statement to VG, but a witness had now turned up with information, justifying his decision. He called both FBI agents and his own people into the conference room.

  ‘Go to the witness’ house,’ he said, pointing his pen at Benjamin Fjeld. ‘Get him to tell you everything he remembers about that visit last summer.’

  The young detective left at once.

  ‘Who is this Viggo Hansen?’ Donald Baker asked.

  ‘He actually lived in my own neighbourhood,’ Wisting said, explaining how the dead man had sat undiscovered in his own living room.

  ‘And this man was visited by Bob Crabb in July?’

  ‘That’s what our new witness says.’

  ‘Have you any background on him?’

  Wisting gave an account of what he recollected from the case documents. As he spoke, it dawned on him that Viggo Hansen would be the perfect shell for Robert Godwin to hide behind. The same thought struck all the others in the room.

  ‘Do you have his fingerprints?’ Donald Baker asked.

  Wisting shook his head. They had been unable to secure fingerprints from the desiccated corpse. ‘Only DNA.’

  ‘When can we have it?’

  Leif Malm took out his phone. ‘I’ll get the records section to send it to the same place we sent Bob Crabb’s profile. How soon can we have the comparison done?’

  ‘As soon as we receive the DNA,’ Baker answered, lifting his own phone.

  Christine Thiis leafed through her papers. ‘Why is this Viggo Hansen not listed among the possible candidates?’

  Torunn Borg leaned back. ‘We were only searching for living people.’

  The police lawyer nodded as she grabbed a pen and took notes.

  Wisting ran his hand through his hair. They could not be detained by this single possibility. ‘Where are we otherwise?’ he asked.

  ‘The Customs barrier is in place,’ Torunn Borg said. ‘We’ve made a few house calls and were able to delete some names from our list. Several officers recruited from neighbouring areas are still out in the field.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Line?’ Christine Thiis asked.

  ‘Not yet. She didn’t come home last night.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  He shook his head, unable to recall the last time Line had not been accessible by phone. ‘I’m going to nip home. She’s probably sitting there immersed in work.’

  He pulled on his jacket and headed for his car in the backyard, more troubled than he was willing to admit. Line was a fearless journalist, not only in swimming against the current or writing about controversial matters, but also in her unconventional methods. She might have crossed a dangerous boundary.

/>   Thick snow was falling: huge snowflakes swirled from a leaden sky. His windscreen wipers struggled to work, and the roads were slippery.

  New-fallen snow lay like down on his tyre tracks from earlier that day; there were no others. Line could not have been home, but he decided to go inside anyway. She had gathered notes and cuttings in Ingrid’s old workroom. He did not like the thought of snooping among her papers, but something lying there might shine a light on Bob Crabb.

  His phone rang as he stepped from the car. Leif Malm asked, ‘How’s it going?’

  Wisting fumbled for his house key and let himself in. ‘She’s not at home.’

  ‘There’s something you ought to know.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Your daughter spent last night at the Farris Bad.’

  Wisting paused in the hallway. ‘At the hotel? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not really anything to do with either of us,’ Leif Malm said, ‘but she spent the night in John Bantam’s room.’

  ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘Donald Baker came to tell me. They met in the bar there a couple of nights ago. Last night she stayed over.’

  ‘How could he . . . She’s a journalist, for God’s sake.’

  ‘He didn’t know she was your daughter until our last meeting.’

  ‘It’s all the same whose daughter she is. It was bloody unprofessional.’

  ‘Above all else, she’s become an interesting witness. We need to find out what she knows about the connection between Bob Crabb and this Viggo Hansen.’

  Wisting glanced at the clock: almost half past three. ‘Could she still be there?’ he asked, walking inside, still wearing his snow-covered shoes.

  ‘They’re checking that now. No one’s answering the phone in the room, but Bantam has gone there to find out.’

  Wisting was climbing the stairs. ‘Let me know if she’s there,’ he said, not believing she would be. More likely she had been re-assigned and transferred to the Bob Crabb case.

  Opening the door to what had been Ingrid’s workroom he noted the tidy desk and shut-down computer. Documents and printouts were stacked in bundles. She was like her father, preferring the papers in front of her instead of browsing through electronic documents.

  On the expansive pinboard, pictures and notes were placed to form a chronological overview of Viggo Hansen’s life. It was really impressive how she had managed to sketch a portrait of this solitary man, who seemed to have led a sad life. A father who had worked in construction and been absent for most of his son’s upbringing, and later spent almost four years in jail. His mother admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

  1969, he read, moving his finger along the timeline. Father hangs himself in basement. Viggo finds him.

  1974 – Mother dies.

  1989 – admitted to psychiatric unit.

  She had also drawn up a relationship chart. Inside a circle at the centre of a large sheet of paper, she had written the name Viggo Hansen, surrounding this with the names of the people who in some way and at some time had been in his social circle. Some of the names were familiar: neighbours and parents, the artist Eivind Aske. Wisting recalled her saying he had been Viggo Hansen’s schoolmate. He recollected another name without knowing why.

  Odd Werner Ellefsen.

  He spoke the name aloud in the hope of triggering information he had absorbed but not yet properly processed. His eyes flitted over the other notices, stopping at an old class photograph on which the name appeared again. Odd Werner Ellefsen was the boy on Viggo Hansen’s right, but there was nothing familiar about the face from almost fifty years ago.

  He took the relationship chart from the pinboard and folded it. Then it dawned on him. Odd Werner Ellefsen was one of the forty-six names on Torunn Borg’s list of possible cavemen.

  73

  Wisting tapped in Torunn Borg’s number on his way downstairs. The snow he had brought in on his shoes had melted and lay in soggy puddles on the hallway floor. ‘Odd Werner Ellefsen, has anyone been to his door?’

  ‘Let me check.’

  Outside, it had stopped snowing. Wisting closed and locked the front door behind him.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked. He explained how he had discovered a specific intersection between Line’s story and the material they had gathered. He could hear Torunn Borg riffling through papers while she listened.

  ‘There’s a connection here,’ he concluded.

  ‘He lives in Torstrand. We were there at 13.45 but he wasn’t at home.’

  ‘Do we have a photo of him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do we still have people out and about?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Put surveillance on his address,’ Wisting said, ‘and find out as much as you can about him.’

  He clambered into the car before calling Nils Hammer and explaining how the people in these two cases were like links in a chain. Bob Crabb was connected to Viggo Hansen and Viggo Hansen was connected to Odd Werner Ellefsen.

  ‘He’s one of the few remaining men on Torunn’s list of possible cavemen,’ he said, manoeuvring the car out of the courtyard. ‘We’re putting a watch on him, but I want you to call in the officers from the Emergency Squad and prepare them for action.’

  Hammer gave a brief confirmatory response and closed without asking any more questions.

  On the dual carriageway Wisting stepped up his speed. He was in a legal borderland and would have to think how to present this to Christine Thiis before he phoned. She would have to make the decision about whether Odd Werner Ellefsen could be arrested and his house searched.

  The criminal code demanded what was called reasonable grounds for suspicion that a crime had been committed. There had to be a balance of probability that Odd Werner Ellefsen was the person they were looking for but, so far, all they had learned could as easily be a fluke, a coincidence. He was working on his own gut feeling, knowing that only hard facts and evidence counted in a court of law, but it was often this same intuition that led to a breakthrough. He keyed in her number and detailed the facts.

  ‘We need more than that,’ she said.

  ‘We’re working on it. We’ve set up a surveillance operation and are gathering intelligence.’

  Too late, he discovered he was driving too fast when he turned into a bend. He stamped on the brakes, the ABS system kicked in, and the pedal vibrated under his foot. The car skidded on the slippery road surface, swerving sideways, on the verge of spinning right round. A billowing cloud of snow obscured his view until he turned the steering wheel in the opposite direction. The tyres gripped the road at last and he regained control.

  ‘Tell me as soon as you have anything,’ Christine Thiis said. ‘This is too flimsy for an arrest. You can bring him in for questioning and take his fingerprints if he agrees, but no more than that.’

  He had not expected more, and it was important to keep her continually updated so that she could make a rapid decision when the decisive pieces fell into place.

  He passed the Farris Bad Hotel on his route into town. An imposing, magnificent ice palace on the shore, the building was shrouded in snow with light streaming from all the windows.

  Line had not been in a long-term relationship for more than a year. He knew very little about the life she led in Oslo, but was astonished to hear that she had spent the night in a hotel room with someone who could only be regarded as a stranger.

  He called Leif Malm’s number. ‘Any news?’

  ‘She’s not at the hotel. The room was cleaned about 12.30. She must have left before that.’

  ‘Okay, but do you think we could keep this information about the hotel room between ourselves?’

  ‘That was why Donald Baker came to me. None of your immediate colleagues knows about it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  There was silence at Malm’s end. Finally she asked, ‘Should we set something in motion? Run a trace on her phone, something like that?’

  �
��Not yet. I’ve a feeling I know where she might be.’

  He rounded off the conversation and turned into the Statoil petrol station in Torstrand. Odd Werner Ellefsen’s house was located only a few blocks away. He looked through his telephone contacts until he came to Morten P, VG. The journalist answered immediately. Wisting glanced at his reflection in the rear-view mirror. ‘This is William Wisting,’ he said.

  ‘I see that. Your name comes up on the display.’

  ‘Are you still in Larvik?’ Wisting asked, peering up at the sky. It had brightened a little. Soon the editors of the major newspapers would have helicopters in the air.

  ‘I’m at Halle. Do you have any news?’

  ‘I was wondering whether my daughter was with you,’ Wisting said. ‘Line.’

  ‘No, why do you ask?’

  ‘I can’t get hold of her.’

  ‘I’ve actually been trying to contact her myself. I think she must have run out of battery or something.’

  ‘Thanks anyway.’

  ‘Wisting,’ the journalist said, holding him on the line, ‘while I’m talking to you. What is actually going on here? You’ve cordoned off a large area of forest and there’s a lot of officers working in there. Cars are driving in and out all the time, and it’s totally impossible to find out anything.’

  ‘There’ll be a press conference sometime this evening.’

  ‘Has there been a development, then?’

  ‘I can give you the direct number for our press liaison officer.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to him, but he isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know. You’ve always been so open and honest. Tell me something about what is going on.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Wisting said. ‘I have another call now.’