The Katharina Code

by Jorn Lier Horst

  As the room was stuffy, he moved to open the window. The green curtains, decorated with an indeterminate pattern, were drawn to one side and afforded an outlook to a drab wall on the opposite side of the street.

  He surveyed the room. On a cork wallboard above the desk, the last investigator to use the office had left some red, green and blue drawing pins. Last year’s calendar hung on the wall beside a poster with an appeal to ‘Say No to Drugs’.

  The office chair had no armrests and was covered in blue fabric, threadbare on the seat. It creaked loudly when he sat down.

  The computer was slower than what he was used to. It took ages before he was even asked for his user name and password, and it looked as if it would take even longer for him to gain access to the system.

  Everything was progressing more slowly than he had planned and anticipated. Irritated, he glanced at the time and saw it was 13.42. He had expected by this point that he would be familiar with all the salient aspects of the Katharina case and ready to inform the local police officers about his plans for the investigation.

  The reopening of the Krogh kidnapping was the first case he had been given personal responsibility for in the CCG. It was crucial that he succeeded.

  He had difficulty discerning any clear link between the two old cases, apart from the fact that they both concerned women who had gone missing. The modus operandi was different in each, and they were too dissimilar to be able to highlight any pattern or connection. As things appeared now, Martin Haugen was the only common denominator. This was interesting enough, but it also complicated matters. All the same, it pleased him as it meant the Katharina case might be solved in the cross-current, all due to him.

  14

  Wisting reversed his car along the driveway, as close to the front door as possible, before letting himself in and heading for the living room. His shoes left wet footprints on the floor.

  The cardboard box filled with the Katharina case documents still sat with the lid open. He collected the scattered ring binders and put them back. Some of the papers were still loose, and a report slid out: a picture was attached to it with a paper clip. He picked it up and stood holding both parts in his hand.

  The photograph depicted the three notes fixed to the mirror above the chest of drawers in the hallway of Katharina Haugen’s home. The camera flash was reflected in the glass, and it was possible to make out the silhouette of the crime-scene technician who had taken the picture.

  The report contained answers to what was hidden behind these household memos. The note with the date and time had to do with a hairdresser appointment arranged a fortnight before Katharina disappeared. Katharina had wanted to have her hair cut and coloured. The hairdresser had been able to tell them that the appointment had been cancelled a few days later. The name and phone number belonged to one of the choir members. The sum of money, a hundred and twenty-five kroner, referred to a collection for a gift for the conductor’s fiftieth birthday. AML was the treasurer, Anne Marie Larsen.

  This was how the police had spent the days and weeks following the disappearance. The newspapers wrote that they had ‘left no stone unturned’. Tiny fragments of Katharina Haugen’s life had been pieced together. For every answer, they came up with new questions. Why had Katharina planned to have her hair cut and coloured, and why had she cancelled the appointment?

  Wisting returned the photo and report to the ring binder and carried the box out to his car. Then he climbed the stairs to the bedroom to fetch the two boxes still stored in his wardrobe. They were large and heavy, and he had to make two journeys.

  When he slammed the boot lid closed he spotted Line and Amalie standing beside his car. Line was wearing a raincoat and wellington boots and had her hood pulled over her head.

  ‘Are you clearing things out?’ she asked, adjusting the rain cover on the pram.

  ‘I thought it was about time,’ Wisting answered, a smile on his lips.

  ‘I thought maybe you’d come home to make the dough,’ Line said.

  Wisting had no idea what she meant.

  ‘The pizza dough,’ she explained. ‘Remember? Thomas is arriving tonight.’

  ‘Oh yes – no, I’ll do that later,’ he said, refusing to admit he had forgotten both Thomas and the pizza. ‘It only needs to rise for an hour,’ he added, sheltering beneath the overhang above the front door. ‘Are you going far?’ He motioned towards the pram with rainwater overflowing from its cover.

  ‘We’ve been for a long walk, and now we’re going home.’

  ‘See you tonight, then,’ Wisting said, making for the driver’s door. ‘Pizza night!’ He started the car, but then rolled down the window on the passenger side and leaned across. ‘There was one thing I was wondering,’ he said. ‘Do you have access to old copies of VG?’

  Line nodded as she adjusted the hood on her rain jacket. ‘Why do you ask?’ she queried.

  Wisting was not sure how to answer. He wanted to look at the newspaper from which Martin Haugen was supposed to have cut out the letters and words but did not want to mention the threatening letter and the Krogh kidnapping.

  ‘I just wanted to have a look at an old newspaper,’ he replied, nodding in the direction of the boxes in the boot, as if it had to do with them.

  ‘You can search for it yourself,’ Line told him. ‘Everything’s on the Internet. It’s a paid service, but I can send you a link with a user name and password.’

  ‘That would be brilliant,’ he said.

  He let the window slide up but waited until Line and the pram had left the courtyard before he let the car crawl forward. He knew he had a packet of white flour in the kitchen cupboard, and maybe even a few packets of dried yeast, but they were probably out of date. He also needed to surreptitiously buy cheese and the ingredients for the pizza toppings.

  15

  Wisting parked his vehicle at the car wash in the police station garage and found a trolley for the cardboard boxes before moving them up to the admin office.

  Bjørg Karin glanced up at him from her desk.

  ‘The Katharina case,’ he informed her as he set down the boxes on the floor. ‘Somebody from Kripos will be asking for them.’

  ‘He’s already been here,’ Bjørg Karin told him.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ Wisting assured her.

  The computer screen told him he had gained access to the electronic version of the Krogh case. The machine toiled as it uploaded all the documents that had been scanned in. They originated from a time when all documents were produced on typewriters. What he was looking for was, however, one of the most recent documents: the one confirming that Martin Haugen’s fingerprints were linked to the crime.

  He sorted the documents in chronological order, with the most recent at the top. Among the very last ones was an application to the District Court for comms surveillance. He opened the document that contained the ruling and saw it had been approved.

  Further down the overview was the fingerprint report from Kripos. It ran to four pages, including photocopies of the two letters from the kidnappers. The report opened by describing how the original ransom letter from 1987 had been swabbed with a magna brush. It was still one of the most popular methods of searching for fingerprints. The report explained how in the nineties they had begun to use ninhydrin to reveal fingerprints on paper and other porous materials. Wisting was aware of how the chemical reacted with amino acids from perspiration to produce a purple stain. When the letters from the kidnappers were re-examined, this was the method that had been used. It resulted in the discovery of three fingerprints on the first letter.

  The accompanying photocopies were the same as the ones Stiller had shown him earlier that day. Wisting read the first letter over again. We have Nadia. You can get her back. The price is three million kroner. Further instructions to follow. In three separate places, it was marked in pencil where Martin Haugen’s fingerprints had been detected. The findings were incontestable.

  His mobile phone buzzed with a tex
t message. Line had sent him a user name and password for the VG archives. He clicked on the link and was able to log straight in.

  He tested it out by searching for Nadia Krogh. The screen filled up with a row of miniature images of newspaper pages on which her name was cited. VG had written about her a total of eighty-nine times. The name was so unusual that he assumed all the results were connected to the kidnapping. The images were relatively poor-quality newspaper pages in black and white. The pictures lacked contrast and were indecipherable but the text was evidently searchable. Most of the coverage was from the autumn she had gone missing, but there were also a few more recent results for articles about the unsolved mystery. Or else it appeared as an example in other kidnapping cases.

  He made a similar search for Katharina Haugen. That produced four hits in the capital city’s newspaper. The Krogh kidnapping had obviously been of more interest to the media, as if there were something more sophisticated about a case that involved a threatening letter and a ransom demand rather than a presumed suicide.

  He returned to the image with the fingerprint report. The investigators had almost certainly identified the edition of VG the cut-out words had come from and which kiosks had sold them. This was probably mentioned in one of the reports but Wisting wanted to try something else. He had noticed that the first letter from the kidnappers was signed The Grey Panthers, while in the second it had said The Grey Ones. The three words in The Grey Panthers were in bold letters and the phrase had been cut out in its entirety. So they were consecutive words in the newspaper, whereas The Grey Ones had been assembled from three separate words.

  He went back to the VG archive and typed in ‘The Grey Panthers’, in quotation marks. This produced three results. The Grey Panthers were a political organization campaigning for improved rights for retired workers. Two of the results were from December 1987, three months after Nadia Krogh was kidnapped, while the last result was from Thursday 27 August 1987, three weeks before.

  Wisting clicked on the article and found The Grey Panthers in the caption below a picture of a man described as the Senior General.

  Organizing the screen so that he had the newspaper page on one half and the letter from the kidnappers on the other, he looked from one side to the other and discovered three other words that had probably been taken from the same article. Price, million and kroner.

  The fingerprints had been found on the words Panthers and million, in addition to the three final letters of the word Nadia.

  The name was composed of two cut-outs, Na and dia. Wisting made a search on dia in the edition he had in front of him now – it produced several hits on media and one on dialysis.

  He clicked his way back to the front page of the newspaper, where the headline stories included an armed raid in Bodø and a daredevil who had jumped from the Pulpit Rock with a parachute. The article on page two focused on the local government election campaigns that were taking place.

  At one time, twenty-six years ago, Martin Haugen had sat leafing through this same newspaper. There was no doubt about that.

  He rose from his desk and went to see Bjørg Karin in the admin office. One of the boxes of the Katharina case files had been removed. Wisting opened one of the others and took out a ring binder marked Finances.

  Katharina and Martin Haugen’s personal finances had been examined in connection with the investigation, primarily to see whether Katharina could have set aside money to start a new life elsewhere, but nothing had come of it. Seen in light of the Krogh kidnapping, however, certain circumstances could have given Martin Haugen a financial motive for attempting extortion. A couple of years prior to Katharina’s disappearance, they had had problems paying their mortgage. The situation had not improved when Katharina went missing and Martin Haugen had to cope alone with all the expenses, but a drop in the interest rate had ensured that he had managed to keep the house.

  Nils Hammer popped his head round the office door as Wisting sat down again. ‘Stiller wants a meeting with us at three o’clock,’ he said.

  Wisting glanced at his wristwatch. It was already quarter to. ‘Half past three,’ he said, opening the ring binder. The top document referred to the payout on an insurance policy in Katharina Haugen’s name.

  ‘I think it has to be three on the dot,’ Hammer said. ‘The police chief and his colleague from Telemark are coming, as well as the public prosecutor.’

  Wisting raised his head and sat gazing at Hammer. He understood what Stiller was up to. The presence of the police chief and public prosecutor was a means of applying pressure to Wisting to persuade him to go along with the investigation strategy devised by the CCG.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and turned his attention once more to the papers in the binder.

  The insurance payment had not arrived until four years after Katharina disappeared and was part of a collective agreement in the Roads Directorate, of which Martin Haugen had not been aware. Wisting had helped him to get the money paid out, a sum of approximately one hundred thousand kroner. It was not settled until the District Court had made a legal declaration that Katharina Haugen could now be presumed dead.

  He flicked back to find the papers he was actually looking for, a copy of a letter from the Sparebanken bank dealing with a default on their loan and threatening the enforced sale of the property. They had subsequently come to an agreement which ensured this did not come to pass, but the letter was dated 14 September, five days before Nadia Krogh was abducted.

  Almost unconsciously, Wisting drew a timeline on a blank sheet of paper, with the dates of the kidnapping, the bank letter and the two ransom letters. What did not quite fit was that the newspaper was dated 27 August, more than three weeks prior to the abduction. Newspapers were fresh goods. They were not usually things people had lying about for weeks on end. On his visits to Martin Haugen’s home he could not recollect ever seeing any stacks of newspapers. And at that time there was no notion of recycling – newspapers were burned on the fire or thrown out with the rest of the rubbish.

  Twenty-six days had elapsed from the time Martin Haugen had browsed through this newspaper until the first letter appeared in Nadia Krogh’s parents’ house. There could be numerous explanations for why this particular newspaper had been used. It could even be that the perpetrator had picked it out of a bin somewhere.

  He sat leafing through the newspaper pages on the screen, searching for plausible explanations. It might be that Martin Haugen had read the newspaper at work. He had been working on road construction outside Porsgrunn when Nadia Krogh was kidnapped. This was where he had first met Katharina, but Porsgrunn was also Nadia Krogh’s home town.

  He had reached the sports pages and an article about Grete Waitz, who was injured and unable to run the marathon at the World Championships in Rome, but had to thumb back through the pages. Something had caught his attention.

  He read the caption on the article he had passed, studied the photograph and read the text underneath twice over. It felt as if he were looking at a blinding light that had flashed out of nowhere, but it gave him exactly what he required: the knowledge that Martin Haugen was without a doubt involved in the Krogh kidnapping.

  16

  Stiller followed the second hand of the clock on the conference room wall. It was forty-three seconds past three.

  The public prosecutor and the two police chiefs were present, as were Christine Thiis and Nils Hammer. The only person they were waiting for was William Wisting, though it was too early to read anything into that.

  The local police chief poured a cup of coffee for his colleague from Telemark. They both sat in their uniforms with their jackets on. Ivan Sundt had only held his post for a couple of years, whereas the Telemark police chief was more experienced. Agnes Kiil had recently led a major narcotics case in the media. She was present because the Krogh inquiry actually belonged to Telemark district, giving her formal responsibility, whereas Ivan Sundt was the highest authority in the police district where the investigation would t
ake place. Both had applied for the position of head of the new, amalgamated police district, and a breakthrough in the Krogh case would lend them wind in their sails. Most likely, they would go out of their way to achieve a resolution, and even further to take credit for it.

  Wisting entered the room at two minutes past the hour, closing the door behind him and greeting the police chiefs and public prosecutor with a nod.

  ‘Apologies,’ he said, as he placed a bundle of papers on the table before assuming his seat.

  Stiller opened the meeting before anyone else had the chance to speak. He was a guest in the police station, but this was his meeting. His case.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ he began. ‘Some of you had shorter notice than others, but I’m pleased to see you’re all here.’

  He cleared his throat and shifted some documents. ‘As you know, the investigation into the Krogh kidnapping has been reopened. In light of new technical evidence, Martin Haugen has been accorded the status of suspect. In our journey towards a successful arrest, we intend to adopt a somewhat untraditional investigation method.’

  He paused to allow an opportunity for comment. The Telemark police chief seized the moment: ‘Personally, I’m really pleased about this development,’ she began. ‘An unsolved missing-persons case like this is a terrible burden for the family and the local community. Incidents like these provoke insecurity and speculation, and diminish confidence in the police.’

  The local police chief voiced his agreement, going on to address Wisting: ‘We’re prioritizing this work from now on.’

  Stiller continued, giving a brief summary of the recent fingerprint report.

  ‘However, the case does not depend on technical evidence alone,’ he added. ‘We’re going to have to prompt fresh evidence, including circumstantial.’

  ‘How can we do that?’ Ivan Sundt asked.

  Stiller avoided meeting Wisting’s eye. ‘Primarily through an infiltration initiative,’ he answered. ‘It’s well known that Martin Haugen and William Wisting are already close friends. We intend to exploit that.’