Closed for Winter

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Prodding a rasher of bacon with his fork, he raised it to his mouth before explaining what had happened overnight.

  Martin Ahlberg shook his head disapprovingly. ‘You’ve no idea what kind of people they are,’ he said.

  Even when he left the hotel the previous evening, Wisting had been prepared for Ahlberg’s criticism. If the outcome had been different, it would have been justified. ‘I know now.’

  Ahlberg sighed in resignation. ‘Do you believe them?’

  Wisting saw no reason not to believe the Lithuanians’ version, although it did not provide a complete picture. They still knew only fragments of the story, with the most important parts missing. Before they left the breakfast table, they discussed some practical details about Ahlberg’s continuing work on the case. Wisting then collected his suitcase and checked out of the hotel.

  Ahlberg accompanied him to the queue of waiting taxis. ‘It’s been a pleasure,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  ‘Thanks, same to you,’ Wisting replied.

  He had come to know his colleague as a competent investigator. Methodical and thorough, but had to admit that they were very different in outlook.

  He thought of Martin Ahlberg as a tired policeman, someone who had encountered too many people who had suffered from criminality, too many people whose security had been stolen. His everyday working life among East European criminals had rubbed away the nuances. You would think that the opposite would happen but, if you became weary enough, you lost the strength to absorb the complexities of the world. Then it was easier to see criminals and victims in black and white although, deep inside, you knew fine well that it wasn’t always easy to decide where the moral blame lay.

  The legal blame was, as a rule, easy to allocate, but everyone who worked with criminality knew that morality was considerably more complicated.

  An hour later he sat on seat number 18F watching the city diminish below him until it vanished in the grey carpet of clouds. Momentarily he ruminated on the arbitrariness of having been born in Norway in peacetime, and whether any kind of justice truly existed. The plane broke through the clouds to reveal blue skies all around.

  59

  Darkness descended as Wisting approached Larvik. The sky was clear, a deep shade of blue and the opalescent moon, full and round, was wreathed in quivering light.

  The phone rang as he swung the car off the motorway. ‘Where are you?’ Nils Hammer asked.

  ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘I’m at Gusland,’ Hammer explained. ‘You should probably come straight here and see for yourself. You were right. There’s another body.’

  The conversation ended with no new information. Curling his fingers around the steering wheel, he took the road leading to Helgeroa. Ten minutes later he stopped at the parking area at the outer edge of the cluster of cottages that had been in the glare of media focus for the past week. The voluntary searchers were in the process of packing up, and the first journalist had arrived on the scene.

  Some way along the path, he encountered a uniformed police officer who provided him with a flashlight and pointed him in the right direction. He followed a trail of broken branches. Ahead of him he heard the noise of generators and voices, and eventually took his bearings from the light shed by the newly erected floodlights.

  Seven policemen huddled together on the discovery site, frosty mist swirling between them in the heat from the huge lamps. Hammer turned to meet Wisting as he crouched under the last branches and emerged onto the plateau. ‘Welcome back.’

  Wisting thanked him, staring into the distance. Only then did he notice that policemen were standing on either side of a crevice that divided the hillside in two. Espen Mortensen hauled himself out as Wisting strode past.

  ‘He’s been lying here for a week,’ Mortensen said, adjusting his headlamp.

  Wisting peered into the cleft, not at first understanding what he saw. It was a human body, lying approximately two metres below him. The head was positioned at an odd angle in relation to the neck, the mouth open and the eye sockets empty. On the right shoulder, a splinter of bone jutted from a decomposing wound, but there was something else down there too, that sent shivers through his body.

  Around and across the dead body lay dead birds of different kinds, protected from foxes and other scavengers by the precipitous hillside. There were blackbirds, starlings, a couple of crows and several birds whose names Wisting did not know, enough to fill a sack.

  ‘We’re most probably dealing with an accident,’ Mortensen said. ‘He leapt right into the jaws of death.’

  Rubbing his hand across his forehead, Wisting saw for himself what had happened after the unknown man Valdas Muravjev had met on the path stormed into the woodland. The drop had not been sheer, but in the darkness it must have been sudden and savage.

  The corpse lay entangled in the branches of a birch tree, the roots of which protruded from the boulders at the foot of the chasm. Beside the dead birds lay the bag that Muravjev had told him about, its side ripped open and the contents spilled out.

  Wisting jumped to the other side of the fissure. From this angle, it was easier to see. A number of brick-sized packages were scattered across the rocks, sealed in plastic and thick, brown tape. One of them had burst open, and the white powder packed inside had turned into a glutinous mass.

  ‘Cocaine?’

  Nils Hammer nodded. ‘We think his name is Malte Ancher,’ he said, opening a folder he carried under his arm. ‘We received information from the Danish Police this morning. He was reported missing on Tuesday by his girlfriend in Aalborg.’

  Wisting accepted the papers, but continued to listen.

  ‘He served a sentence at the same time as Klaus Bang in a prison in Horsens in 2006. It seems they’ve hung out together quite a lot since. Two years ago they were caught in a car with five thousand blue Valium tablets on the border between Germany and Denmark.’

  ‘Professional narcotics couriers?’

  ‘It’s not exactly professional to put two men in a car full of smuggled drugs, but it does at least seem as though they’re involved in that line of business. Klaus Bang was interviewed in connection with the missing person report. He says he was at home with a sore stomach all weekend and didn’t have any contact with anyone. He didn’t say a word about a boat trip.’

  ‘Have the Danes confronted him with our photographs?’

  ‘No.’

  Wisting nodded in satisfaction. That gave them an excellent starting point for the investigation to follow. The photographs of the boat and the discovery in the rock crevice would be enough for a charge of aggravated importation of drugs. Klaus Bang risked more than ten years jail for that. The simplest course of action would be to put all the blame onto his dead friend. If he was smart enough, or managed to obtain a good defence lawyer, he could strengthen his credibility by giving the police details of their lines of connection with Norway. He could give them Rudi Muller.

  As a light, cold mist began to settle over the landscape, Wisting pushed his hands into his pockets and drew his head down between his shoulders. ‘How are you planning to get him up?’

  ‘There’s equipment coming,’ Mortensen said. ‘We’ll rig up a tripod crane with a hand winch over the crevice, pull the body onto a canvas sheet and haul him out. That’s the plan.’

  ‘When can we have the ID verified?’

  ‘I’ve already been down to secure fingerprints. I’ll scan them as soon as I get back. Malte Ancher is on record in Denmark, but it’s not certain we’ll get an answer from them until their offices open in the morning.’

  Wisting nodded in acknowledgement. Before leaving the discovery scene, he positioned himself so that he could look to the east. Now that most of the foliage was gone, the plateau made an excellent lookout point. A fine veil of mist drifted in the air, but he could make out the illumination from the lighthouse out at Tvistein and an island that must be Jomfruland. Further inland, he could distinguish the scattered outdoor light
s of the cottages, closed for winter. Here and there, windows were illuminated.

  The contours of what must be Thomas Rønningen’s holiday cottage were outlined against the backdrop of the sea and, to his left, lights were on in the cottage belonging to Jostein Hammersnes. He tried to pinpoint the cottage where Line was staying, but by now the mist was thickening and eventually he had to desist, turning his back on the panorama.

  60

  Recognising that he needed rest, Wisting drove home without calling at the police station. He called Leif Malm from his car. The leader of the intelligence section in Oslo answered at once, and Wisting gave a brief account of the discovery of the third body.

  ‘I’ll see what I can find out about him through our channels,’ Malm said. ‘I don’t know his name from our intelligence files, but there must be some connection to Rudi Muller.’

  ‘Any news about the planned robbery?’

  ‘It’s probably fairly imminent.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Days. We’ve informed the management of the cash service company, but as long as we don’t know anything about where or when, there’s little we can do. For the moment, they’re withholding the information from their staff. The probability of them getting information from the inside is high, and we can’t risk any leaks. The surveillance on Muller is tight, and we’ll have warning when things start to move.’

  Wisting restrained himself before picking up the thread of the conversation they’d had at the scene of the fire. ‘At some point we need to interview Tommy Kvanter,’ he said, telling him about the results of his visit to Lithuania. ‘The Lithuanians confirm that the car he used that night was at the crime scene.’

  There was such a long silence at the other end that Wisting wondered whether the connection had been broken. When he was about to ask if Malm was still there, he received his answer: ‘I think it would be unwise to do that now. It would reveal how closely we’re breathing down their necks. Before you do anything like that, we need to have Trond Holmberg’s DNA confirmed. That would link him directly to your crime scene.’

  Wisting had to agree with this tactical assessment. If they played their cards in the right order, they should also detain Klaus Bang before exposing themselves to the circle surrounding Rudi Muller. All the same, he could not wait to pass on the information to his investigation group, and he would do that at the meeting tomorrow morning.

  He rounded off their discussion as he swung the car in front of his house in Herman Wildenveys gate. The huge birch tree in the garden had dropped many more leaves since Suzanne had raked away a wheelbarrow-load earlier in the week. He carried his suitcase inside, to be met by glowing candles and a warm embrace.

  ‘Good to have you home again,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘Great to be back,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No, I grabbed a bite at a petrol station.’

  They sat in the living room. Suzanne turned down the volume on the television and demanded to know how his trip had gone.

  He recollected Lithuania as grey and grim, but Vilnius as a city of contrasts. After the fall of the Soviet dictatorship, a great deal of freedom had been returned to the people and, with that, a greater opportunity to influence their own lives. The economy of the country was making visible progress, but the poverty still remaining had made the strongest impression on him.

  ‘I’ve brought something for you,’ he said, standing up.

  He stepped out to the hallway, where he opened his suitcase to produce the amber necklace. It dawned on him that this was the first time he had bought her a present.

  Unwrapping it, she said, ‘It’s beautiful. You must put it on me.’ She returned it to him and pulled her hair up.

  ‘You don’t need to wear it all the time,’ he said, looking at the heart-shaped pendant. ‘I bought it mostly as a charitable gesture.’ He told her about the boy who had sold it to him in an alleyway in Vilnius.

  Suzanne placed her hand on it. ‘That just makes it even more beautiful. It says so much about you.’

  ‘I have something else.’ He took out the knitted doll he had bought for a hundred litas, thinking of the little girl’s hopeful eyes, dirty hands and broad smile.

  ‘What’s that?’ Suzanne asked, pointing towards the suitcase.

  Wisting picked up the glass ornament. The reflection from the candles on the table made it almost incandescent. ‘It’s a dreamcatcher,’ he said, handing it to her, ‘to hold all your thoughts about the future. You should have been given something like this.’

  ‘Who does it belong to?’

  Wisting explained how the little glass figure was one of the most cherished objects that had been stolen from Jostein Hammersnes’ cottage, and how he had found it in a secluded storeroom in Lithuania.

  ‘He’ll be pleased to get it back,’ Suzanne said.

  Wisting smiled, looking forward to delivering the glass pendant to the man who felt he had lost everything. ‘Have you spoken to Line today?’

  ‘I put together some food and had a leisurely lunch with her,’ Suzanne replied, handing him back the glass ornament. ‘She’s writing a book.’

  ‘A book?’

  ‘A crime novel, and I think she’ll manage to do it. She’s smart. If there’s something she wants to do, she usually manages to accomplish it.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘Did you discuss Tommy?’

  ‘Not much. I think she worries about what he’s doing when he’s not with her.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I didn’t like to ask, but she knows that some of the people he’s working with are involved in shady dealings. That was one of the reasons she finished with him.’

  ‘So it is all over?’

  ‘I think she became even surer of that after his visit.’

  Wisting nodded in satisfaction.

  A familiar face appeared on the television screen, and Suzanne turned up the volume to listen to Thomas Rønningen’s trailer for the next day’s programme. Among the guests were a couple of actors who both appeared naked in a new film, a politician who felt naked and exposed, and a celebrity from the world of finance who wanted his guests to swim in the nude at his spa hotel.

  That’s what everything is about when push comes to shove, Wisting mused: money, power and sex.

  61

  Christine Thiis’ office was as tidy as it had been on the morning they initiated the investigation. She was sitting behind her desk with a cup of tea and a selection of the day’s newspapers when Wisting entered. The case was on the front pages again, with the discovery of the third body splashed. ‘Welcome home,’ she smiled.

  ‘Well played,’ said Wisting, nodding in the direction of the newspapers. That the police had not found the corpse earlier with dogs and helicopters could have prompted headlines about police deficiencies. Instead, Christine Thiis was quoted as saying that progress in the investigation had led to the decision to carry out a further search in extremely rugged woodland terrain.

  Beyond confirming that the discovery of a dead man in his late twenties was being linked to the current enquiry, she had been extremely reticent with information and would not make further comment. The statement gave the impression that the police were on the offensive and close to a breakthrough, which was exactly how Wisting viewed the situation.

  ‘How are the children?’ he asked, leafing through one of the newspapers. The media had not dropped the story about the dead birds.

  ‘Fine. My mother’s staying until after the weekend.’

  They discussed the main aspects of the case before leaving to join the others in the conference room.

  The morning meeting was divided into five segments. Wisting took the final segment first, asking Espen Mortensen to elaborate on what had been reported in the newspapers.

  ‘I’ll start with the most important information,’ Mortensen said, opening a folder. He laid out s
everal photographs illustrating the discovery site. ‘The deceased has been identified by fingerprints as Malte Ancher, twenty-nine years old, from Aalborg in Denmark. His post mortem will take place today, and I would expect it to report that the cause of death is blunt trauma to the head, his injuries consistent with a fall. So we’re talking about an accident.’

  ‘We’ve interviewed Gunnar B. Hystad,’ Torunn Borg interrupted.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The birdwatcher who took the photographs of the other Dane, Klaus Bang.’

  Wisting nodded. This was the witness Line had come across.

  ‘It seems the boat was close to shore almost all day Saturday,’ Torunn Borg said. ‘As though waiting for someone or something.’

  Wisting’s mobile phone vibrated on the tabletop, Leif Malm’s number on the display. Letting it ring, he asked Espen Mortensen to continue.

  ‘We found a black bag in the crevice on the hillside. It had torn open and some of the contents had spilled out. A quick test we carried out yesterday was positive for cocaine. The weight is just under ten kilos.’

  ‘As most of you know, we have verified the identity of the man in the rowing boat,’ Wisting said. Moving to the second segment of the meeting he told them what he had learned in Lithuania. ‘The formal statements are being translated and will arrive in the course of today.’

  The third segment concerned information being dealt with on a need to know basis. Although most team members understood that the case revolved around a drugs confrontation, limits had been set on the intelligence from the informant. Wisting also felt that the information received from Leif Malm had been filtered before it reached him. He peered at the keywords he had noted for the agenda before continuing.

  ‘You know my daughter, Line,’ he said. ‘Some of you also know that she has been living with Tommy Kvanter in Oslo, and that a number of years ago he was sentenced for a drugs offence. I want you to know as well that he is an associate of Rudi Muller and they both have ownership interests in Shazam Station. The Oslo Police, who have contact with an informant and are conducting a surveillance operation on Muller, naturally know this too. His relationship with Line is over, actually, and as the case stands now, I don’t feel that it creates any conflict of interest, but that’s something I’ll keep in mind as we progress.’