Ordeal (William Wisting Series)

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Line looked at Sofie. ‘You do it,’ Sofie pleaded. Line stepped forward and opened the door. It was heavy, but slid open easily.

  The safe was kitted out like a cupboard, with three shelves and a drawer at the bottom. On the lowest shelf there were several thick brown envelopes with a few black notebooks. On the middle shelf, a stack of five black ring binders, and on the top shelf bundles of banknotes bound together with rubber bands. Line took one out and handed it to Sofie. They were five hundred kroner notes, fifty thousand in total, she estimated. There were similar bundles of thousand-kroner and two-hundred-kroner notes. In total, there must have been around half a million kroner.

  She could not hold back her laughter and it infected Sofie, even though they both knew that the money had not been earned by any honourable means.

  Atle filled out a work sheet with half an eye on the safe, as if the contents did not really concern him. He handed the sheet to Sofie to sign that the work had been completed. ‘Don’t give it all away,’ he suggested, smiling. ‘Enjoy yourself a bit.’

  Line put the money back and discovered a key that must open the lockable drawer at the bottom. She left it lying while she escorted the man to the front door with Sofie. They could hear that Maja was awake, and Sofie brought her down to the basement.

  ‘Shall we count them?’ Line suggested, taking out one of the bundles again.

  Sofie nodded and moved Maja to her other hip.

  Line stacked the bundles on top of the safe as she counted them, arriving at a total of 480,000. ‘There’s something else in here,’ she said, pulling an envelope from the back of the top shelf. Sofie craned her neck to look when she opened it. ‘More money,’ Line gasped, displaying the contents before emptying the loose notes out beside the bundles. Thousand-kroner notes, maybe as much as a million altogether. They seemed to be discoloured with red ink.

  ‘The proceeds of a robbery,’ Line whispered.

  She had written about it in an article for the newspaper. Cases used for transporting valuables and the cassettes in ATMs were secured with colour cartridges. When anyone attempted to open them illegally, the colour ampules were activated and the banknotes stained so that they became worthless.

  ‘Put them back again,’ Sofie begged. ‘I need to give Maja some food.’

  Line tidied away the money and picked up the little key. ‘We haven’t checked the drawer,’ she said. The key turned without difficulty, and she used it as a handle to pull out the drawer. There was an object there, wrapped in a piece of grey fabric. Line lifted it out, placed it on the floor and unfolded the material. It was a revolver.

  ‘I knew it we’d have problems if we opened it,’ said Sofie. ‘ First money from a robbery and then an illegal weapon. We can’t lock it up again either. The lock’s destroyed.’ Maja began to whimper.

  Line lifted the gun and turned it over in her hand. The metal was dull black.

  ‘Be careful,’ Sofie said, holding Maja away. ‘It might be loaded.’

  ‘My father once took me to the firing range in the basement at the police station,’ Line said, releasing the cylinder latch. There were cartridges in two of the six chambers.

  ‘Let’s chuck it in the water.’

  Line shook the two cartridges into her open hand and pushed the cylinder back into place. ‘I can take it with me. You did say that I could have whatever was inside the safe.’

  Sofie frowned. ‘What’ll you do with it?’

  ‘Hand it in. My father can take it with him. The police are always getting old guns handed in to be destroyed. It’ll be completely anonymous. I’ll just say that I got it from a friend who found it among her grandfather’s belongings.’

  ‘Okay, then.’ Sofie grabbed a few banknotes from one of the bundles. ‘But only if I’m allowed to treat you to lunch.’

  17

  Wisting had forgotten that the police station canteen was closed for summer. He went into the conference room and found a packet of crispbread that had been sitting for ages in the cupboard above the mini-kitchen. He helped himself to two of them and stood at the window eating them dry. A car with stereo at full blast passed in the street. He followed it with his gaze until it had gone by, crossed to the mini-kitchen again, turned on the tap and let the water run cold.

  He felt restless. A great deal now suggested that Jens Hummel had lived a double life they had not managed to uncover in the initial phase of the investigation. They had been on the right track but, instead of investigating it further, they had widened the search. He could account for this with reference to pressure of work and lack of resources but, nevertheless, it had been a misjudgement and he would have to take responsibility.

  He brought his glass back to the window. Since the time when he had patrolled the streets out there, he had become an experienced and respected detective. Now he wondered whether he was getting too old. At fifty-five he would soon be a grandfather, and was not impressed by what he saw around him. Organised crime was gaining ground, at the same time as the legal framework that constrained an investigation was becoming more complex, with stricter formal demands and increasingly more advanced and time-consuming investigative methods. In addition, there were fewer people to carry out the tasks.

  He drank from the glass.

  It was not merely crime that had changed in thirty-two years. It was also the attitude of society towards the police. Previously, citizens came forward to tell what they knew and what they had seen. Now the police were met increasingly often by a wall of silence, even when seeking information that was absolutely peripheral to a crime. Fear had crept in. People did not want to get mixed up in anything, and were afraid to give information. Simultaneously, they had become more distant from one another and less concerned about what was going on around them.

  Back at the kitchen sink he threw out the rest of the water. All this was probably just an excuse to avoid taking to heart the fact that society was changing and, with it, crime.

  Nils Hammer appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame. ‘The phone gave us nothing,’ he said, waving the plastic bag with the phone inside. ‘Messages and calls must have been deleted continuously. There’s nothing in the internal memory.’

  Wisting looked at him. He had hoped that the phone hidden in Hummel’s car would have brought them a step further. ‘Isn’t it possible to retrieve deleted messages? Like on a computer?’

  ‘We can get someone to take a look at it,’ Hammer said. ‘But it’s going to take time, and it’s not certain that it will give us anything.’ He put down the evidence bag on the conference table and shook the thermos to see if there was any coffee left before fetching a mug from the cupboard. ‘I thought he’d turn up when the snow melted.’

  In the hours after Jens Hummel’s disappearance, but before he had been reported missing, there had been a light snowfall across the southern part of the Vestfold district. Tracks had been wiped out. ‘Do you think Aron Heisel knows anything?’ Hammer asked.

  ‘Not about Jens Hummel, but I think he does know a lot about Frank Mandt and the narcotics trade, enough to know who had access to the barn, and who might have put the taxi in there.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll say anything?’

  Wisting took out a mug for himself. ‘I’m afraid we won’t get any more out of him than you got out of that mobile phone.’

  ‘Have you considered that we may have a missing link?’

  ‘We have several.’

  ‘I’m thinking of Frank Mandt. If he had still been alive we would have picked him up. No one would have put a hot taxi in his barn without him sanctioning it.’

  ‘He’d never have told us anything.’

  ‘I know that,’ Hammer said as he walked towards the door. ‘But it could have been an opportunity to catch him at last. There were twelve kilos of amphetamines out there. He would have been forced to answer for that as well.’

  Wisting followed him with his coffee, along the corridor to his own office.

  At four o�
��clock he gathered the investigators in the conference room again. Christine Thiis arrived directly from court, where she had petitioned to have Aron Heisel remanded in custody. ‘He had no explanation with regard to the narcotics find, other than that he didn’t know about it,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody will believe him on that point,’ Espen Mortensen said, pushing two pictures across the table. One was of the sole of a shoe, the other a plaster cast. The patterns on the soles were identical. ‘Aron Heisel has been inside the potato cellar.’

  Wisting drew the two images towards him and examined them more closely.

  ‘At last, a connection,’ Nils Hammer said.

  Mortensen took the photos back and exchanged them for three others from his folder. ‘Since we’re talking about shoes. This was found on the floor mat in front of the driver’s seat and on the brake pedal in Jens Hummel’s taxi.’

  It looked like three torn scraps of paper, each about the size of a fingernail.

  ‘What is it?’ Wisting asked.

  ‘Sawdust,’ Mortensen said.

  Christine Thiis pulled one of the images towards her. ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘We don’t know how long it’s been there, but there are two obvious explanations. Either Jens Hummel has been somewhere that he’s stepped on sawdust and trailed it with him into the car or the murderer has done that when he hid the car in the barn.’

  ‘Could the sawdust have come from the barn?’ Wisting asked.

  Mortensen shook his head. ‘We haven’t found any sawdust in the barn. This comes from somewhere else.’

  Wisting sat up straight. ‘We have, of course, charted Jens Hummel’s movements for the twenty-four hours before he disappeared. I can’t remember him being anywhere that he could have picked up sawdust on his feet and carried it into the taxi.’

  ‘Where do you get sawdust, anyway?’ Christine Thiis asked.

  ‘At a planing mill, sawmill, joiners’ yard or building site,’ Torunn Borg said.

  ‘Or a circus,’ Hammer suggested.

  Wisting used his pen to point at him. ‘Undertake a charting exercise,’ he said.

  Torunn Borg had spoken to the snowplough driver. ‘There wasn’t very much to learn from him,’ she said. ‘The old farm track is in his field of operations. He’s had an agreement with Frank Mandt for ten years to keep it clear of snow. On the night Jens Hummel disappeared he noticed that it started snowing about seven o’clock in the morning and was out clearing from nine o’clock until about three. The smallholding at Huken is approximately in the centre of his rounds, so he reckoned he’d been there at about twelve o’clock, but he can’t recall spotting anything in particular. Probably he would have remembered if he had seen vehicles or people.’

  The discussion round the table returned to the narcotics cache in the potato cellar. It made them feel optimistic. In narcotics cases, there was always a profusion of people involved: recipients, suppliers, couriers and pushers: a number of stages in the process and a number of occasions that could offer the police access to the case, in contrast to the prevailing situation in a murder enquiry.

  After almost an hour they had marked out the way forward, and the meeting was drawn to a close. Wisting was on his own in his office when he received a message from Line, another invitation to her barbecue. The steak would not benefit from being kept any longer.

  They were at the jittery phase in an investigation when a great deal hinged on waiting for answers. Answers from routine interviews and door to door enquiries, technical examinations, analysis results and everything else that comprised an investigation. He might just as well wait somewhere else, so he stood up and left the office.

  In the car on his way to Line’s, his thoughts drifted to the grandchild who was going to grow up without a father, unless Line met a new man willing to step into that role. When he looked back at himself as a father, he had to admit that his job in the police had cast a shadow over his personal life. Far too often, he had prioritised it before his family.

  He parked outside his own house and walked the few metres to Line’s. He tramped through the weed-filled garden and round the corner, where Line welcomed him with a hug. ‘Will you see to the steak?’ she asked, vanishing into the house.

  He turned the pieces on the grill until she emerged again with a large bowl of salad. ‘These look ready,’ he said.

  ‘I took a chance and put them on before you came,’ she said, holding out a dish. ‘I’m pleased you could find the time.’

  ‘Me too,’ he said, and took a seat at the table. ‘Have you collected the wallpaper?’

  ‘No, but it has arrived.’ She helped herself. ‘Do you think you’ll have time to help me?’

  ‘I’ll make the time,’ he promised again.

  ‘Do you know anything more about what’s happened to Jens Hummel?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But what direction is it taking?’ she asked. ‘Could he have hidden the taxi in the barn and gone off to the Caribbean, for instance?’

  ‘We don’t believe he’s disappeared voluntarily.’

  ‘Who’s the owner of the barn?’

  ‘You’re no longer working as a journalist,’ he reminded her. Line pulled a face in return. ‘We’re talking about a disused smallholding,’ Wisting said. ‘Most of your colleagues have traced the owner through the property register, but he’s been eliminated from our enquiries. He’s rented out the place for years.’

  They chatted some more about the case as they ate. Line did not manage to root out any details, only enough to understand that there had been a development. For dessert, she brought out a tub of ice cream. Wisting helped himself twice and sat slumped in his chair.

  ‘I’ve got something here I’d like you to take care of,’ Line said.

  ’What’s that?’

  Line went into the house and came back with something in a carrier bag that she placed on his lap. Wisting glanced down at it and lifted a length of grey fabric wrapped round a heavy object. He folded the material to one side and found himself looking at a revolver with an octagonal barrel.

  ‘An old friend of mine from primary school found it when she was clearing up her grandfather’s belongings.’

  Wisting picked up the revolver, swung out the cylinder and checked that it was not loaded. ‘Have you kept it long?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a few hours. It’s probably not in the gun records. She wanted to throw it into the sea, but I suggested that you could send it to be disposed of properly.’

  Wisting nodded. Guns continually turned up in connection with deceased person’s estates. Shotguns, rifles, pistols and revolvers that the heirs did not want to keep and had little idea what to do with. ‘It’s a Nagant,’ he said, ‘7.5 millimetre. Made in Belgium at the end of the nineteenth century.’ He raised the hammer and heard a click when he pulled the trigger.

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘Revolvers are extremely reliable. It works as well now as the day it was made.’

  ‘What happens to weapons that are disposed of?’

  ‘They’re ground down in a metal mill and end up as nails.’

  ‘That could make an interesting story,’ she said.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘An old weapon is full of history. That one there has been through two world wars. It would be thrilling to tell the story of a weapon that ends up being turned into nails.’

  Wisting wound the material round the revolver again. ‘What is it they say?’ he said, as he looked at the nails on the cladding of his daughter’s house. ‘History permeates these walls.’

  Line grew enthusiastic. ‘Isn’t it true? I could sell it to VG for Men or something like that.’ She began to clear the table.

  ‘Was he in the military?’ Wisting asked, returning the revolver to the carrier bag.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who owned it. Nagant revolvers were used in both the army and the navy.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Line answered quickly
and lingered at the terrace door with the empty plates in her hands. ‘I don’t know why he had it, or what he used it for.’

  18

  Wisting locked the old revolver in the safe he kept inside a cupboard in his basement, moving a photo album to make room, pictures from when he and Ingrid had married one summer day thirty years ago. He leafed through the pages. They had celebrated in the Hotel Wassilioff in Stavern with their closest relatives. Both of his parents-in-law and his own mother had been alive, and even Ingrid’s grandmother had joined them. The following day they had driven to Denmark and stayed in a tent at Løkken. It had rained for three days at a stretch, but it was one of his best memories.

  One of the photos had been taken beside a church that over the centuries had become buried in sand shifted by the wind. The building had eventually been demolished and moved, and all that was left was the square tower protruding from the sand. He had taken the photograph, Ingrid standing with her hair soaked by the rain, laughing at him. She was several years younger than Line was now, but the resemblance was striking. Two months later, Ingrid became pregnant.

  They had journeyed back there the summer that Line and her twin brother were twelve when the sand dunes were lower and more of the tower had become visible. A man explained that it had been built on a moraine foundation that had gradually been washed away by rain water and the waves that broke over the land. In time the ground below the church would disappear and the tower would collapse into the sea. He put the album back, wondering whether it was still in existence.

  The wedding photograph had hung on their bedroom wall and he had removed it a few days after Suzanne spent the night with him for the first time. It had left an empty photo hook and a square patch darker than the rest of the wall, but neither of them commented. The framed photo was too large for the safe, so he had simply placed it edgewise inside the wardrobe. He had never thought to hang it up again, and wondered whether he should do so now, but decided to leave it. Maybe he could get Line to give him a hand with wallpapering the bedroom instead. He changed his trousers and put on a clean shirt before heading for town and The Golden Peace.