Death on Pilot Hill (An Inspector Harald Sohlberg Mystery)

by Jens Amundsen

  “With his stepmother or alone?”

  “Alone.”

  Sohlberg took the cap off his Waterman fountain pen and drew a rectangle around the words ‘volunteer’ in the summary. “What is the relationship between the stepmother and the teacher?”

  “Not good. The stepmother Agnes Haugen often volunteers at the school and works closely with the boy’s teacher Lisbeth Bøe . . . a little too closely according to the teacher.”

  “Oh? . . . What does that mean?”

  “The stepmother is a frustrated teacher. She has a bachelor and master’s degree in education and a teaching license but no longer works as a teacher. The school has three more volunteers just like her. The teachers appreciate the help from the volunteers . . . but the teachers don’t like the second-guessing that goes on from fellow professionals who make impossible demands because their own children attend the school.”

  “I see.”

  “There’s more. At the end of each week the school sends the children home with a colored paper slip that has their name on it. Green means that they behaved and learned well. Yellow means they have some issues with behavior or learning. And red means they had problems with behavior or learning.”

  “I see,” said Sohlberg. After living abroad for a long time Sohlberg now found it bizarre as to how the Japanese and Norwegians teach school children to conform socially and always act and think as part of a closely cooperating team working for the common good. “I see the old Norwegian principal of dugnad is alive and well.”

  “Ja. I think the Americans call it barn-rising? . . . Like the Amish people?”

  “Barn raising. . . . Ja . . . the Mormons in Utah also practice that . . . their state symbol is the beehive.”

  “That’s where you investigated and solved the case of the missing nerve gas at the Dugway Proving Ground military base . . . right?”

  “No,” he said surprised at her knowledge of his career.

  “No?”

  “I only helped others investigate and solve the case of the missing nerve gas. How very dugnad of me . . . aye?”

  She nodded and continued reading the executive summary. “Anyway . . . the stepmother demanded daily not weekly color slips. That meant much more work for the teacher because Agnes Haugen would then call her every Monday and have long conversations to find out exactly why the boy had been tagged with a yellow or red slip.”

  “So there’s no love lost between teacher and stepmother.”

  “Ja.”

  “But Constable Wangelin . . . it seems to me that at least the stepmother involved herself in the boy’s life and education. I see so many mothers and fathers nowadays . . . they have zero interest on what goes on in the lives of their children.”

  “Ja.”

  “Keep on.”

  “According to the stepmother the bell rang at quarter to nine and she then walked with her stepson down a hallway toward his classroom and the boy told her 'I'm going back to the classroom Mom' and he took off in the direction of the classroom while she waved at him and she left the school through another hallway thinking that he was safe at school just like he is everyday.”

  “But it wasn’t just any day . . . was it?. . . This science fair . . . it was the perfect cover for the boy’s disappearance unless the boy left on his own . . . and then something or someone happened to him. I know about this Hasidic boy who got lost in New York on his first day walking home alone from school without his mother and a predator found him and took him.”

  “Horrible. What happened?”

  “A lucky break in the case led to the suspect a day later . . . but it was too late. They found the boy cut up in garbage bags and in the man’s refrigerator.”

  “Awful!”

  “Ja. Can you imagine? . . . What are the chances of that . . . one in a million? On the one day of the year when the little eight-year-old boy asks to be allowed to walk home alone from school without his mother he meets a murdering predator. What a disaster.”

  “Ja.”

  “Anything pointing to that happening here?”

  “Not really. In this case Chief Inspector Sohlberg it’s not likely at all that Karl Haugen took off on his own. The father and everyone we’ve talked to insists that he was afraid of the woods and being alone. He was shy and afraid of strangers.”

  “What does the stepmother say?”

  “Only that he had been acting oddly a few weeks before he vanished . . . he’d stare off into space like a zombie . . . was very distracted at times.”

  “True?”

  “Apparently. The father attributes it to the baby crying at night and keeping them awake. I guess that babies cry a lot when they’re nineteen months old.”

  “Hhhmm. Wouldn’t you think Karl Haugen had his own room in the house since his father’s a well-to-do Nokia engineer?”

  “Ja.”

  “And wouldn’t you think that Karl’s parents would close the door to his room if and when the baby cried?”

  “That crossed my mind.”

  “By the way . . . have you ever come across a seven- or eight-year-old who was not able to sleep because of background noise? . . . I’ve seen some children sleep in the noisiest of trains or airports with no problem at all. I saw some kids sleeping right in the middle of a loud party that my wife and I attended for St. John’s Eve.”

  “Ja. I saw my own little nephews and nieces in that age group at Sankthans . . . they slept soundly through all the loud music and talking.”

  “Continue please.”

  “At nine o’clock the children were supposed to report to their classes where they’d be divided into small groups . . . of a couple of students each. A volunteer was to chaperone each group during a tour of the science fair in the auditorium. Of course all of the teachers made sure that all of their little groups stayed together from the minute they left the classrooms to the minute that they came back to the classrooms. A half hour later they all returned to their classes for roll call and Karl Haugen wasn't at his class with Frøken Bøe. She marks him absent.”

  “So we have a half-hour window for him to walk out or be taken out of the school?”

  “Actually less than a half-hour. No one remembers seeing him go on the tour of the science fair with the chaperones and teachers.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re highly confident that he never went to the auditorium with a chaperoned group of classmates because more than twenty of us spent two weeks interviewing and re-interviewing all the teachers and chaperones and students and administrators . . . . And no one remembers seeing him at the auditorium from nine to nine-thirty . . . or anywhere else in the school after nine in the morning.”

  “So Karl Haugen disappeared in that fifteen minute time frame . . . from eight forty-five to nine o’clock . . . when his mother let him walk to his classroom?”

  “Ja.”

  Sohlberg closed his eyes as he tried to comprehend the mind-boggling implications of the place and time of the little boy’s disappearance. He rubbed his eyes with his fists as if he could squeeze an image into his eyes that would explain the mystery.

  “Fifteen minutes?”

  “Ja Chief Inspector.”

  “And no one remembers seeing any stranger or anyone who did not belong at the school that day?”

  “That’s correct. No strangers. Everyone recognized everyone else. Also . . . extensive fingerprinting of all bathrooms and door-handles and rooms and desks and playground equipment etcetera . . . revealed no prints for anyone who should not have been there that day. We also questioned and verified the whereabouts of all known sex offenders in a ten mile radius and none were near the school that day.”

  “Thank God the team at least did the fingerprint dusting . . . and they rounded up and ruled out the usual suspects. Well . . . the case is half-solved.”

  “How so Chief Inspector?”

  “First of all . . . remember to always work smart and not hard.”

  “That sounds
good . . . in theory . . . does it work in practice?”

  “Ja. You see we could waste time and resources and exhaust our mental energies by going the hard route and calling in half the Oslo police force to look for someone who hid inside the school or slipped into the school to take Karl Haugen. But at this point there’s only one logical path to follow based on the evidence . . . and only two people . . . you and me . . . are needed to crack this case.”

  “How can just the two of us solve a year-old case that more than forty investigators could not?”

  “It’s simple . . . we already know the kidnapper . . . he or she is right under our noses. Don’t you see? We know the person who took Karl Haugen . . . we just don’t know their exact name.”

  Constable Wanglein frowned. “I . . . I guess that no one ever wanted the investigation to come to this point . . . where a parent or someone else at the school took Karl Haugen. . . .”

  “But all the evidence points to a parent.”

  “I . . . I hate saying this Chief Inspector . . . but I guess that we didn’t really want to admit that we had a predator among the teachers or the staff or the administrators or the parents at Grindbakken skole or any other elementary school in Norway.”

  “Exactly Constable Wangelin. We also know that the kidnapper probably won’t be a teacher or a staffer or an administrator since all of their whereabouts have been accounted for that day . . . and evening . . . right?”

  “Ja. None were missing in school and all of their times and activities during and after school were checked and re-checked.”

  “So I doubt if any of them would have had the time and opportunity during a fifteen minute period to overpower Karl Haugen and stuff him in a suitcase or bag and keep him there all day long and then take him away from the school when school ended in the afternoon.”

  “True.”

  “Now as for the school building and grounds . . . I hope they were thoroughly searched. There’s a case from the nineteen-sixties where children disappeared from school . . . it turned out that a camp of homeless bums raped and killed the school children who went to play in the schools’ basement where the bums lived.”

  “Uhhh.”

  “I imagine the team carefully searched the school?”

  “Ja.”

  “Every nook and cranny from roof to foundation and wall to wall . . . right?”

  “Ja ja,” said Constable Wangelin who nodded slowly as she came to understand the implications of what Sohlberg was saying. “This means Chief Inspector that . . . all of our suspects are the normal and lovely and well-dressed and well-educated and law-abiding citizens of the well-to-do suburb of Holmenkollen . . . home of the Holmenkollen Ski Festival and the Ski Museum.”

  “Exactly Constable Wangelin. The banality of evil.”

  “And . . . the person who took Karl Haugen is most likely found in his circle of family or friends . . . or less likely . . . it’s someone else . . . a parent . . . who went to the school that day and left with him.”

  “Bingo.”

  “But we all thought the culprit would be a known sex offender. We thought—”

  “That’s the problem Constable Wangelin. All of you thought. A detective should never ever think at the beginning of an investigation. He or she should only investigate and collect all the facts . . . the good investigator must not think . . . but rather keep an open mind as the evidence starts coming in. Once the evidence collection phase of the investigation is over then the good investigator starts thinking and following hunches or intuition or logic.”

  “I see that now. I’m glad I’m training with you.”

  “Thinking in the initial phases derails an investigation . . . bias creeps in . . . groupthink takes over . . . I’ve seen huge and horribly botched investigations eventually collapse because investigators made a few small but very wrong assumptions from the start.”

  “Rule number one . . . work smart not hard.”

  “Right.”

  “Rule number two . . . don’t think at the start of an investigation. Collect all the facts. Keep an open mind.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Get ready for some difficult interviews because it’s going to be nasty and difficult finding this most depraved of criminal minds among the suburban parents who live in pretty homes and drive nice cars and dress in Ralph Lauren and . . . smell and look nice and are polite. . . .”

  “A monster,” said Constable Wangelin.

  “Ja . . .which leads us to Rule Number three. Never judge. That prevents you from understanding the criminal. Judging throws bias into the picture. No . . . it’s best to just sympathize with the criminal . . . understand what makes them tick.”

  “Disgusting . . . but I can see how effective your strategy is—”

  “Not mine! I learned it from my mentor . . . Lars Eliassen . . . an old police officer in the Romsdal valley. Now I’m passing it on to you . . . and one day you will pass it on to another generation.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Anyway . . . we’re dealing in this case with an upper middle class parent who has the audacity to boldly launch his or her criminal enterprise in Pilot Hill Elementary School between quarter to nine and nine in the morning on the Fourth of June.”

  “This is stunning . . . hard to believe.”

  “That . . . Constable Wangelin . . . is the audacity of evil.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Karl Haugen woke up. He wasn’t sure if he had slept for hours or just dozed off for minutes. Nothing seemed real. Sadness rose in him as he realized that his father had not looked for him for a long long time. His father felt so far away. They had been so close.

  “Daddy! Where are you?”

  He wondered why no one heard him. It had been a long time since anyone had looked for him.

  “Daddy! Where are you?”

  He missed sitting with his father on the sofa after his father came home from work and telling him everything that had happened to him at school. He had so much he wanted to tell his father.

  “Mom! Mom . . . can you hear me?”

  He missed his mother as badly as he missed his father. She had kept looking for him unlike his father. He wished that she was not living so far away. Namsos was too far away.

  Why didn’t she ask Daddy to let him live with her throughout the year?

  If she had asked then he would not be where he was.

  ~ ~ ~

  Wangelin and Sohlberg took a short break. She went to re-fill her enormous coffee mug following the Norwegian tradition of consuming huge amounts of coffee at work. Meanwhile Sohlberg called his wife.

  “Are your parents able to come?”

  “Ja! . . . My Dad said they’d need a day or so to pack up.”

  “I won’t be home for dinner.”

  “Case speeding up?”

  “Drastically. . . .”

  “I’ll leave your dinner in the frig . . . top shelf . . . if you’re coming in after midnight.”

  “I doubt it,” said Sohlberg. “I should be in by eleven. I have to go see someone at Halden Fengsel.”

  “Wake me up when you get home.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. You wake me up so I know you’re home safe and sound.”

  “Alright.”

  “Love you.”

  “For time and for all eternity.”

  The Sohlbergs always said goodnight to each other with a little routine of one saying ‘Love you’ and the other one replying ‘For time and for all eternity’ or ‘Forever and ever always’. They had kept that routine during their more than 25 years of marriage because Sohlberg was permanently traumatized over the fact that he had never had the opportunity to say ‘Goodbye’ or ‘I love you’ to his first wife Karoline before and while she fell to her death. The sudden unexpected death of Sohlberg’s first wife had left him terrified of not being able to saying ‘I love you’ to those dear ones whom death steals without a warning.

&nb
sp; Commissioner Thorsen walked into the cubicle just as Sholberg ended the call with Fru Sohlberg. Thorsen plopped down on the chair in front of Sohlberg. “So . . . did you solve it?”

  Sohlberg stared at Thorsen with undisguised contempt. “No. Not yet . . . but we’re getting there. At least a few things were done right.”

  “Imagine that. The great detective from Interpol approves of what us bumpkins do in Norway. Well now! . . . How marvelous that you approve. . . . So tell me . . . what did we do right?”