The Katharina Code

by Jorn Lier Horst

  This missing word was of no consequence. It changed nothing, but it made him think there might be other things in the comprehensive investigation material that he had overlooked.

  He put down the report and plunged into the nearest bundle with renewed interest and enthusiasm. When anyone disappeared as Katharina had done, there were four distinct possibilities: suicide, accident, escape or some sort of crime. They had investigated all the theories, including the possibility that she had left the country without telling anyone in order to start a new life.

  Wisting had never believed in the idea that Katharina had disappeared of her own free will. Even though they had no body or crime scene, he had always regarded the Katharina case as a murder investigation. No single aspect caused him to draw this conclusion but rather the sum total of circumstances. Such as the suitcase on the bed, the books removed from the bookcase and the picture taken out of its frame. And then there was the code on the kitchen table.

  He picked up the photocopy and studied it once again. Three faint curved lines divided the sheet of paper and formed two columns, with a line drawn across at the bottom. The remainder consisted of a series of numbers. The number 362 was circled and noted in two instances. The same applied to 334. Similarly, the number 18 was written twice and enclosed in a square. In addition, several numbers were scattered around the paper: 206, 613, 148, 701, 404 and 49. What made the cryptic information so intriguing was that a plus sign had been drawn on one side of the paper, with the vertical line longer than the horizontal, so that it resembled a religious symbol, a cross. Time after time the black ballpoint pen had been drawn back and forth over the same symbol almost until a hole was torn in the paper.

  Yet again Wisting sat looking at the cross and the numbers. This time it was as if something tugged at his subconscious – he felt as if the numbers were about to convey some sort of meaning.

  He took in a deep breath and held it. Such a spark was what he was after when he took out the old case documents again, a hope that he might have learned something in the course of the year gone by – heard, seen or somehow lived through something to extend his experience in such a way that when he re-read the papers he would be able to interpret the contents differently. He felt he was there now, on the brink of understanding. A response, a picture or an insignificant detail that had attached itself to his subconscious in the course of the past twelve months was about to provide him with a lead in the case.

  He read the numbers aloud in an attempt to assist his brain to let something surface: ‘Two hundred and six, six hundred and thirteen, one hundred and forty-eight …’

  Little Amalie mimicked him. She tried to say the same numbers and laughed at her own unsuccessful efforts.

  Wisting glanced across at her. All around her mouth was completely blue, and she had a ballpoint pen in her hand. She had bitten a hole into it and the ink was running down her hand.

  She gurgled and chuckled as she put the pen back in her mouth.

  Wisting threw aside the papers, rushed across and snatched the pen from her fingers.

  Her lips, teeth, tongue and the entire lower part of her face were stained blue. Carrying her under his arm, he dashed out to the bathroom, where he turned on the water and held her over the basin. He filled his hand with water and splashed it on her face repeatedly. Amalie began to shriek but he scooped up more water and flung it at her, into her open mouth. Amalie coughed and spluttered. Coloured water ran into the basin. Despite her protests, he continued to rinse her face until he was sure her mouth had been emptied of ink, then he sat down on the toilet seat with his granddaughter on his knee and tried to comfort her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, struggling to sound cheerful.

  Amalie calmed down a bit. Wisting coaxed his mobile phone from his pocket: he rang Accident and Emergency and gave a hurried account of what had happened.

  The nurse asked for the child’s name. ‘Ingrid Amalie Wisting,’ he answered, and provided her date of birth.

  He heard the sound of a keyboard rattling at the other end of the line. ‘How much ink has she ingested?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wisting admitted, carrying Amalie back into the living room. The pen was lying on the floor and had left a blue mark on the carpet.

  ‘There’s just over half the ink left,’ he said. ‘But I think most of it is probably on her clothes and hands.’

  ‘Small quantities of ink are normally perfectly harmless,’ the nurse reassured him. ‘The worst thing is if she’s swallowed some pieces of plastic.’

  As Wisting studied the pen, he saw that the top was splintered. ‘What would happen then?’ he asked.

  ‘They could get caught in her throat,’ the nurse replied. ‘But it sounds as if she’s fine. She might have an upset tummy, but any fragments will probably come out naturally.’

  Wisting thanked her and carried Amalie into the bathroom again, where he wet a flannel and tried to wash her face and fingers. This helped a little, but the blue stain stubbornly refused to disappear. He picked up her toothbrush, applied some toothpaste and made an effort to brush her tiny, discoloured teeth. Amalie protested and began to grizzle again. Now he gave up, brought her back to the living room and slumped into his chair with his granddaughter on his lap. The fear he had felt was changing to annoyance: he was furious with himself.

  Amalie went on sobbing. She was probably tired and his anxiety had affected her. He stood up again and, with his granddaughter hoisted on his hip, he collected all the papers connected to the Katharina case and returned them to the box. One of the ring binders was not closed and loose papers drifted on to the table and down to the floor. He swept them up and stuffed them back into the large box, heedless of whether they became crumpled or disordered. He simply wanted it all out of the way.

  Shifting Amalie to his other hip, he closed the lids on the big cardboard box and used his foot to push it alongside the wall. He sat down on the floor and studied her closely. Her clothes were ruined. She was probably growing out of them anyway, but he would have to offer to replace them.

  By the time Line returned home Amalie’s tears had subsided and they were both absorbed in a game of stacking wooden blocks.

  She smiled when she saw them playing but froze when she noticed the blue dye around Amalie’s mouth and on her clothes.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, lifting her daughter.

  ‘She got hold of a ballpoint pen,’ Wisting answered.

  ‘Weren’t you watching her?’

  ‘She was too quick,’ Wisting replied.

  ‘But you were with her, weren’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Wisting said. ‘But then all of a sudden she was sitting there with her face covered in ink. I think it was your pen. It must have fallen out of your bag when you showed me your parking ticket.’

  Line moistened her thumb and began to rub Amalie’s chin.

  ‘I phoned Accident and Emergency,’ Wisting explained. ‘Ink isn’t dangerous, at least not in small quantities. A bit difficult to remove, but not harmful.’

  Line sighed. ‘I’ll have to take her home and give her a bath.’

  She sat down on a chair and began to put a snowsuit on her daughter, while Wisting started to clear the toys from the floor.

  ‘I can buy her some new clothes?’ he offered. ‘Or at least pay for them.’

  Line shook her head. ‘Not at all,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Thanks for looking after her, anyway.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Wisting said. ‘I’m obviously a terrible babysitter.’

  Line gave him a fleeting smile. ‘It’s perfectly okay,’ she said, glancing at the box of case documents. ‘Remember Thomas is coming home this weekend, won’t you?’ she said.

  Thomas was her twin brother who worked as a helicopter pilot in the military, and he came home only a couple of times a year.

  ‘I’ll make pizza!’ Wisting said enthusiastically.

  This was something Wisting had instigated when
Line and Thomas were teenagers. Every Friday when he returned home from work, he made pizza dough and Line and Thomas helped to prepare the topping. This was a practice they had continued right up until Thomas left to join the army.

  ‘We’ll be there,’ Line said, hugging her daughter. ‘Are you going to say cheerio to Grandpa, then?’

  Wisting approached them and gave each a hug before accompanying them to the door. He stood gazing after them as they walked through the rain down to Line’s house at the bottom of the street.

  He had lied, and he realized how easy it had been to say he was with Amalie instead of admitting how engrossed he had been in the Katharina case. It wasn’t only that he had lied, but he had pushed part of the blame and responsibility on to Line by claiming it was her fault that a pen had been among the toys.

  Closing the door, he returned to the living room and stood looking at the cardboard box he had shoved aside.

  Lies were an element of every investigation. Everyone lied. It was seldom a matter of downright untruths, but most people avoided the unvarnished truth in some way or another. They equivocated, kept quiet about particulars, exaggerated and embellished things to make them more interesting or held back circumstances that cast them in a bad light. In addition, things slipped people’s minds, they remembered their experiences differently from how they had actually taken place. And instead of admitting they could not remember, they filled in the blanks with what they believed and thought must have occurred, usually based on what other people had heard or seen. In order to expose these lies, you depended on being in possession of supplementary information, making it possible to verify what had been stated.

  He crouched down to retrieve the pen Amalie had been chewing. The Police Federation logo was only just visible beneath the marks left by Amalie’s teeth. It was his ballpoint pen. He wondered whether he should tell Line or just let it drop. He slung it into the kitchen rubbish bin. He returned to the living room, opened the flaps on the cardboard box and extracted the case notes once again.

  2

  Torrents of water slashed through the darkness in front of the headlights as Wisting reversed from the garage. The rain had intensified overnight. He had stayed up past midnight in an effort to seize the lead that had eluded him earlier that evening, but it was gone.

  Glancing over his shoulder, down towards the house where his daughter lived, he spotted a light in the kitchen. He knew Amalie woke around six o’clock and hesitated momentarily behind the wheel, wondering whether he should stop to ask Line how Amalie was doing. He had plenty of time, as usual in the mornings. His working day did not begin for another hour, but she would probably be struggling to get Amalie back to sleep again, and he didn’t want to disturb them.

  Twenty-four years ago, 10 October had been a cloudless day with a gentle, south-westerly breeze, he recalled from the reports. It had clouded over slightly in the course of the evening when the wind strength had increased and the temperature had dropped to around eight degrees Celsius. He remembered all these details as if it were yesterday.

  He drove steadily through the residential area and swung to the left as he emerged on to Larviksveien, well aware that his working day would be unproductive; he would be unable to concentrate on much else, either before or after his meeting with Martin Haugen.

  Katharina had disappeared once prior to this when her name had been Katharina Bauer. At the age of twenty-one, she had mounted her motorbike at home in Perg and driven out of the small Austrian town, never to return.

  At that time she was fleeing a dysfunctional family with a violent, alcoholic stepfather and an unstable mother with mental-health problems. Katharina and her sister had stuck together, looking after their younger brother, but when he grew old enough to take care of himself Katharina had packed a rucksack and left.

  Her journey had ended in Norway. Somewhere in that country she had a father. At least that was what her mother had told her, that her father was Norwegian. She had scant hope of finding him: all she knew was that his name was Richardt and that he had been a regular customer for a while in the restaurant where her mother worked during the summer of 1958. Subsequently he had moved on, and it was not even certain he was aware he had become a father.

  To be honest, her unidentified father had not been the reason she had travelled to Norway. Above all it had been a question of running away. However, she had been curious about the country – before she left she had learned something of the geography and history of the place, and a little of the language.

  She had tried to find her father after she arrived in Norway. Among the effects she left behind were lists of names and addresses of men called Richardt, spelled in different ways, but this looked like a project she had given up on several years before she went missing. Some of the names had been scored through, but more than three quarters remained. The police had been in contact with all of them. The ones crossed out confirmed they had been contacted, but that none had been the person she was seeking.

  Wisting was forced to increase the speed of the windscreen wipers. Once he approached the town centre, the traffic became congested. The rainwater of the past few days had found new courses and in several places earth had been washed away and parts of the road had collapsed, causing traffic to be diverted.

  In Austria, Katharina had studied to become a surveyor and land-use planner, and she had undertaken some work for the local roads authority after her arrival in Norway. With a talent for languages, she rapidly became fluent in Norwegian and had taken further qualifications at technical college. Eventually she had obtained contract work with the National Directorate of Public Roads and took part in the design and construction of a new motorway through the southern part of Telemark. This was where she had met Martin Haugen, who worked as a foreman and was one of the road workers constantly in and out of the planning office.

  The traffic made slow progress as a cyclist in full rain gear picked his way through the cars.

  He would visit Martin Haugen at home around twelve o’clock. They never had any fixed arrangement, but every year since Katharina disappeared, he had turned up there at the same time, and he expected Martin Haugen would be waiting for him this year too. The coffee would be ready, and the shop-bought cake would be on the table – probably a lemon-drizzle cake with icing or a raspberry Swiss roll. At first they would make small talk and then the conversation would find its way to Katharina.

  Wisting had met her once. He could not recollect it himself, however, and it was not until five or six years after her disappearance that Martin Haugen had reminded him of it. It had been on 17 May, Norway’s national day, he had said, showing him a newspaper cutting. Katharina and her friends in the choir had been singing during the festivities in Bøkeskogen. A photograph of them appeared in the newspaper and Wisting, who had been on duty, could be glimpsed in the background.

  When the photo was published, Katharina had pointed out Wisting and told Martin that just as they were about to sing, she had found a bunch of keys. She had handed them to the policeman in the picture.

  His initial reaction had been that Katharina must have mixed him up with another police officer. He had rooted out the lost-property register, leafed back through it and, to his surprise, had discovered his own note that one item, namely a bunch of keys, had been found and handed over by Katharina Haugen. So he had spoken to her, noted her name and later transferred the information into the lost-property register. When he tried to cast his mind back, he only managed to conjure up a vague recollection. Martin Haugen had also forgotten about it, until he had been tidying a drawer, found the clipping and recognized Wisting.

  A car tooted behind him, wrenching Wisting from his thoughts. He crawled forward to fill the space that had opened up while his attention had drifted.

  The vehicles moved more smoothly through the town-centre streets, and he reached the police station with plenty of time to switch on the coffee machine before other members of staff arrived.

  No maj
or incidents had been reported from the previous night. He divided up the most important cases for investigation, sifting out the ones where there was no basis for further action. He had a budget meeting at ten o’clock, and would go through the lists of arrears with one of the police lawyers. In addition, his input was required for the criminal-investigation department’s consequence analysis regarding the planned amalgamation of the police district with neighbouring police forces, but that could wait until after his meeting with Martin Haugen.

  Reclining in his office chair, he sat with his hands clasped behind his head, before leaning forward to pull out the bottom desk drawer. He had taken a copy of the newspaper’s photograph from 17 May, and brought it out to examine it.

  The photo was black and white. Katharina stood with a group of friends, all dressed to the nines; she was wearing a light summer dress. Her hair was long and he knew it was reddish-blonde. She had blue eyes, but there was a touch of sadness in her expression, an obvious despondency even though there was a smile on her full lips. They looked soft, he thought, as he gazed at them now. Softer than her eyes.

  He did not believe she was still alive but wondered what she might have looked like now. As for himself, he had changed a lot. In the picture he was in his late twenties, slim, with dark hair only just visible under his uniform cap. His back was ramrod-straight.

  As far as Wisting was concerned, the Katharina case had begun on Wednesday 11 October, when her husband had reported her missing. Two detectives had travelled out to Kleiverveien to undertake the initial investigations, Wisting and Eivind Larsen. Wisting had sat in the living room with Martin Haugen while Larsen had gone through the house searching for something to indicate what had become of Katharina. Nothing found in the house or emerging from their conversation had led them closer to an answer.

  Wisting stood up, crossed to the window and paused there, aware of a strange but nevertheless familiar grumbling sensation in his body. A restlessness caused by unfinished business.

  The suspicion that Martin Haugen had been somehow involved in his wife’s disappearance was one of the first things to be checked out. At that time, he was working on road construction in Trøndelag and living in workmen’s barracks in Malvik, more than eight hours’ drive from his home.