‘Where’s the skeleton?’ Wisting asked.
‘It’s been packed up. The National Crime Team at Kripos will get some anatomy professor or other to look at it along with an archaeologist.’
‘Do we know for sure that it’s Kai Skaugen?’
‘The hospital records confirm that he sustained an arm fracture. That’s the surest lead we have. Together with the letter, the rucksack with his father-in-law’s name and the fact that he is still missing, it should ensure that this pile of bones will end up in a grave marked with his name.’
‘Who else could it possibly be?’ Dokken asked.
Wisting had toyed with the idea that it might be Marvin Bergan, the driver of the cash delivery in 1925, but the theory was too fanciful to share.
‘What about the old case?’ he asked instead.
‘We’re wrapping it up,’ Dokken replied. ‘We know now what happened, and no one can be brought to justice for it. We’ll tie a string round the papers and store them in the archives.’
‘There are still a lot of unanswered questions,’ Wisting said.
‘Who is going to answer them?’
‘I think Anna Skaugen knows what happened. I think she’s known for many years, and what she may not have known was in that part of the farewell letter of her husband’s that has gone missing.’
He still felt that it had not been wrong to let her read the letter, but it had been a mistake to trust her.
Even though it was not Ove Dokken’s fault that half the letter was missing, nevertheless he did not like to be reminded.
‘You’re not going to get any answers out of her,’ he said. ‘Anyway, she has probably burned it.’ He took out a cigarette and lit up. ‘Let it lie. We’re never going to find answers to everything. You have to carry around a few unanswered questions. You’ll just have to learn to live with it.’
His cigarette smoke curled up beneath the garage roof. ‘Some of them will tear and chafe at you, and give you sleepless nights. It’s just something you have to get used to if you’re going to be an investigator.’
Wisting looked at him. ‘There’s a vacant post,’ he ventured tentatively.
Dokken shook his head. ‘The advert’s been withdrawn.’ He blew cigarette smoke through his nostrils. ‘I’ve spoken to the Chief Constable. We thought we’d offer you the post.’
33 years later
Wisting stood in the shade of an oak tree. The ten student police officers had changed into field uniforms and boots. The day was growing late, and the sun was low on the horizon. The sky above them looked dull and hazy.
A similar sized group of regular officers from the police station had also been mustered. Some carried spades, others pickaxes. They lined up behind the ruins of the old barn at a distance of one metre from each other. Seasons had come and gone, doing their best to hide what was left of the building beneath weeds and grass. The forest loomed silently around them, and the ground was speckled with sunlight that filtered through the leaves.
Line, tense and expectant, was also present, her camera slung over her shoulder.
Wisting again read through the faded text of the letter he had received earlier that day. For thirty-three years it had been concealed behind a framed photograph, but now it provided the answer to an even older secret, a mystery more than ninety years old.
Anna Skaugen wrote about how her whole life had consisted of secrets and lies, but also contained a lifelong love, and she told of how she had lied in that snowy winter of 1983 when she hid part of her husband’s last words.
She had known what her fiancé had done in 1925. The outcome had not been planned. The intention had been only to use the pistol as a threat, but Marvin Bergan had been unwilling to stop at the barricade Kai Skaugen had set up.
He had never confided the details, but the robbery and murder of the driver had become their secret. She had accepted him for what he was and what he had done, and entered into marriage with him. The money had given them reason to look forward to a bright future, but that future had rapidly grown dark. At regular intervals, he had helped himself to the stashed money. Never so much that it would lead to suspicions from his brother or the others, but it all spiralled out of control.
He started to drink and sailed close to the wind in many other ways. Anxiety and depression followed. Eventually, it became increasingly difficult for him to help himself to the money and, when war came, there was nothing to spend it on. After the war, monetary reform was introduced. Banknotes were exchanged for ration cards, and bank deposits and securities were recorded before new banknotes were released into circulation. The remaining stolen money became worthless, and Kai Haugen’s fragile hope of a bright future collapsed in tatters.
When two sharp blasts from a car horn sounded on the road they all turned towards it. A sleek and shiny veteran car was approaching. A few pointed, and a murmur of voices rose from the police officers and students.
Rupert Hansson was nearly eighty now. Doffing his driver’s cap, he stretched his arm through the window and gave a cheerful wave. The old tyres crunched on the gravel.
Line raised her camera and took a few photographs. A cloud of dust rose behind the car as Wisting walked over to greet him.
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, ‘and for bringing the car with you.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,’ the old man said, clambering out to stand beside Line.
Wisting turned to the row of police personnel and repeated what they were to look for. Approximately one hundred metres into the forest, they should find a round stone, about the same size as a manhole cover, with a smaller stone placed to the north of it.
So the search began.
Wisting approached two old men who stood watching. ‘Is she the one with the ponytail?’ he asked the elder of the two.
Ove Dokken took the cigarette from his mouth and smiled proudly at his granddaughter. ‘She’s a clever girl,’ the retired Chief Inspector said. ‘She’s going to be a good policewoman.’
Finn Haber waved away a fly. ‘So, there was another page to the farewell letter?’
Wisting handed him the sheaf of papers. In the letter that Anna Skaugen had hidden away thirty-three years earlier, her husband described the place where the robbery proceeds were concealed. The money was unusable, and had probably disintegrated, he thought, but the gold was still there.
He was in no position to look after her, but if she should ever find herself in a situation where she needed it, she could pick it up.
The search chain moved through the forest. Wisting and the two retired police officers followed it with Line and Rupert Hansson. The air was alive with the noise of twigs snapping and insects buzzing.
‘Eighty metres!’ shouted the search leader, who was holding a tape measure.
The police searchers began to walk more slowly, lifting branches and checking under bushes.
Moving to the left flank of the search chain, Line stopped and took more photographs. She was part of the old case too, thought Wisting. She had always been fond of taking pictures, and had become an excellent photographer. Now she was working as a freelance journalist, a tough, demanding career in a competitive job market, but she had the right contacts and knew what editors were looking for. Moreover, she had a tireless love of work and bags of energy.
‘Ninety metres!’
When Ove Dokken dried his neck with a handkerchief Line turned her camera lens on them. Wisting tried not to look in her direction.
Haber gazed back at the demolished barn. ‘There must have been others who knew about it,’ he said. ‘The man who owned the barn, for one, must have known something about it.’
‘He was paid handsomely,’ Dokken said.
Wisting agreed. ‘The people who knew about the robbery kept silent because of the strike. There was nothing in the newspapers. The car was left in the barn so that nobody could put two and two together.’
A large bird was scared off from the forest floor ahead of
them. Flying low, it forced the nearest people in the search chain to duck.
‘They should be there now,’ Haber said, glancing back at the barn again.
The search party worked even more carefully. Many of them used sticks to probe the ground for stones that might lie hidden beneath the turf.
The search leader came over to report to Wisting. ‘One hundred and seven metres,’ he said.
‘A bit farther.’ Wisting stood beside Haber and Dokken while the search proceeded.
‘It must be here,’ Dokken said. ‘No one removes stones from a forest, unless they intend to cultivate a field.’
The search leader turned to face Wisting. ‘One hundred and twenty!’
Wisting beckoned him. ‘Pull them back to one hundred metres and search backwards,’ he suggested. ‘I think we’ve gone past it. A hundred metres is a long distance to carry a bank chest, and distance is a difficult thing to estimate.’
At eighty-seven metres, someone called out to report a find. The others flocked around, but moved aside at Wisting’s approach.
The flat stone was covered in moss and almost hidden by a wild raspberry bush. A smaller stone lay beside it, as Kai Skaugen had described, and an overgrown mound suggested that the earth had been dug out and the hole subsequently filled. This must be it.
‘Should we lift it off?’ the search leader asked. Wisting nodded.
One of the men stepped forward and took hold of the edge of the stone. With ease, he tilted it to one side. The ground beneath was damp and black, with tiny insects scurrying in all directions.
A spade was passed forward, and it struck something hard at the first cut. Wisting began to clear away the soil with his hands. Under several centimetres of loose earth, a rusty metal surface became visible, corroded to such an extent that earth and flakes of rust had dropped through the holes.
Soon the entire lid was uncovered. The chest was about 80 x 60 centimetres and fitted with hinges but, instead of lifting off the lid, two of the policemen began to dig it out completely from either side. Half an hour later, they lifted the whole chest out of the hole and set it down on a tarpaulin.
Wisting squatted, with soil on his hands and face where he had wiped away perspiration. Everyone who had participated in the search stood in a circle around him.
At one time the metal chest had been fitted with a padlock. Only fragments of the hasp remained after it had been broken open. Earth and rust had jammed the lid tight. He rocked it back and forth until it became increasingly loose and could be lifted.
He could hear the shutter on Line’s camera; apart from that, silence.
The chest was still half-full of banknotes, discoloured by earth and in thick bundles, partly covered by the soil and pebbles that had fallen through the lid. Wisting lifted one of the bundles. The paper crumbled between his fingers, and he quickly put it back.
In a separate compartment lay items wrapped in felt fabric. Wisting picked up one, weighing it in his hand, before unwrapping the cloth to reveal a gold bar.
Someone began to clap. Behind him he heard widespread laughter and shouted hurrahs.
A stretcher was set up to carry the chest out of the forest. They used the tarpaulin to hoist it before four men each took a corner of the stretcher and carried it off. Wisting was left standing with Ove Dokken and Finn Haber.
Maren Dokken came over and hugged her grandfather. She adjusted her ponytail, produced a tin of snuff from her trouser pocket, and tucked a sachet behind her lips.
‘Something doesn’t add up,’ she said.
Wisting lifted a spade that had been left lying in front of them.
‘What are you thinking about?’ her grandfather asked.
‘That heap of earth,’ she said, pointing at the tussocks of long grass beside the trench. ‘If that was dug out to make room for the chest then something doesn’t tally. It’s more than double the size of the hole in the ground.’
‘Hard packed earth takes on a different volume when it’s dug up and turned over,’ Finn Haber pointed out.
‘All the same,’ Maren Dokken said, ‘the mound has probably bedded down now, surely, if it was dug in 1925?’
Wisting handed her the spade.
She looked at him. ‘Is there something else down there?’
‘There’s only one way to find out.’
She glanced across at her grandfather, picked up the spade and began to dig. Some of the other students arrived to help. Tree roots had twined and twisted in all directions, hampering the digging.
‘Wait!’ she shouted, when they had been working for a while. She put down her spade, crouched and took hold of a mysterious scrap protruding from the ground. ‘It’s a blanket or something,’ she said, tugging at it.
‘Shouldn’t someone else take over?’ one of the students asked. ‘Maybe a crime scene technician?’
Wisting glanced at Finn Haber. ‘It’s fine,’ he reassured him. ‘Just continue.’
It was not a blanket they had found lying under the earth, but a black coat with buttons and a belt. Maren folded out the lapels. Splinters of bone and brown knuckles were exposed.
‘Marvin Bergan,’ Wisting said.
‘Did you know that?’ she asked.
‘It was always a possibility.’
Painstakingly, the students dug their way to the head of the grave, where the remains of a chauffeur’s cap with a leather peak were revealed. Underneath, they could make out the rounded contours of a skull.
Wisting let the student police officers finish the work. All necessary equipment was brought and every bone photographed and recorded on a special form before being slipped into a paper bag. The various rags of clothing, loose buttons, the remains of a wallet and a wristwatch, were all handled in similar fashion.
Ove Dokken and Finn Haber had gone home. Wisting wanted to stay until the end.
The young student police officers gradually grew more excited. Wisting envied them their eagerness and vitality, but not the assignments that lay ahead of them. Since the time when he had started in the police, many changes had taken place. He had embarked on his career in the belief that he could help to create a better world. Now he thought that in many ways he had failed. More precisely: he thought that he had been naïve. The world, and crime, was more momentous than he was. Seen from his present vantage point, things had moved in the wrong direction.
Crime nowadays was more complex than when he had set out. Organised, frontier-crossing criminals who cooperated across national and cultural affiliations were now the norm. Their crimes were more serious, their violence more brutal. There had been an increase in corruption and bribery. A combination of illegal and legal activity had evolved, and was now in the process of undermining people’s confidence and security. The relative strength of the police and the threat posed by crime had been dislocated in an entirely negative direction.
He wondered what he could have done differently during the past three decades, but failed to find an answer. He also knew there was no simple answer.
It was growing dark, but someone had brought out a generator and a floodlight. Maren Dokken switched it on, pointed the lamp at the hole in the ground, and got on with the job.
Table of Contents
Praise for Jorn Lier Horst’s William Wisting series
Contents
33 years earlier
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
33 years later
Jorn Lier Horst, When It Grows Dark (William Wisting series)
When It Grows Dark (William Wisting series) Page 15