‘Fine,’ Stiller said, about to hang up.
‘What do I do now?’ Fischer asked.
‘Nothing,’ Stiller replied. ‘We’ll send someone to you after the weekend to take a formal statement from you, but it’s important you don’t contact this man. Don’t think of phoning him or anything.’
‘Of course not,’ the man at the other end assured him before the conversation finished.
Stiller put down the phone and turned to face Hammer. ‘Get hold of the police lawyer,’ he said. ‘We need a search-and-arrest warrant for Emil Slettaker. We need to find out what sort of gun Martin Haugen has armed himself with.’
54
The shopping trolley soon filled up – bread, sausages and baked beans as well as eggs and bacon and a couple of large steaks in case they didn’t catch any fish. Peanuts and two six-packs of beer. When they reached the checkout, they had loaded so much that Wisting was unsure whether there would be enough space in their rucksacks.
The newspaper rack had no copies of VG left. Wisting peered across at the neighbouring checkout, but it was empty too, and the same also applied to the other checkouts.
‘Have you sold out of VG?’ he asked.
‘We have been for a while,’ the young girl behind the conveyor belt told him. ‘Plastic bags?’
‘I’ll pay,’ Martin Haugen offered, taking out his wallet. ‘Then we can square things up later.’
Thanking him, Wisting put the shopping into plastic bags and carried them out to the pickup. ‘Could you drive over to the petrol station?’ he asked, pointing across the street. ‘I must try to get a copy of VG. Line’s writing about Nadia Krogh today.’
The display racks outside the petrol station were also empty. Martin Haugen parked between the pumps as Wisting headed inside to discover the same was true of the indoor racks.
‘It’s not so strange, really,’ he said as he returned to his seat in the pickup. ‘After all, she lived around here.’ He pulled on his seatbelt. ‘Do you remember it?’ he asked. ‘You worked here at the time, didn’t you?’
Martin Haugen swivelled round, glanced out of the side window and let a moped pass before manoeuvring the vehicle out from the station.
‘Everyone was talking about it,’ he replied. ‘The police searched the workers’ barracks and trekked along the ditches beside the new road with sniffer dogs.’
‘Did you live in the barracks here?’ Wisting asked.
‘No, Katharina and I commuted every day. She worked in the construction office and, since I’d been made foreman, I worked only dayshifts.’
‘Getting evenings off was the best thing about becoming a chief inspector,’ Wisting commented. ‘What about weekends? Did you have every weekend off too?’
Nadia Krogh had gone missing the night before Saturday 19 September 1987, and he doubted whether it would be possible to lay hands on work rotas from that time.
‘On the whole,’ Martin answered. ‘Unless we’d fallen behind schedule.’
‘What did Katharina do, then, if you had to work overtime? As she must have worked office hours, surely?’
‘If it was pre-planned, she took her motorbike so we could travel independently. If not, she always had something to do in the office, or else she travelled home with a friend.’
Wisting nodded. After Katharina arrived in Norway, she had lived in Porsgrunn and eventually obtained a job in the planning office for the construction of the new motorway. This was where she had met Martin Haugen. He had the names of several of her friends from Porsgrunn somewhere in the investigation documents. They had been interviewed after Katharina disappeared, but it had not led to anything. What they had in common was that their contact with Katharina had gradually diminished after she moved in with Martin. Her closest friend thought the last time she had spoken to Katharina had been on the phone four months prior to her disappearance. However, now the case had taken a different turn, maybe her friends could say something about how Katharina had behaved at the time Nadia Krogh was abducted.
‘Was one of them called Ellen?’ Wisting asked. ‘I think I spoke to a couple of them in connection with the investigation.’
‘That could be right, yes,’ Martin said.
If they had used Wisting’s car, Hammer and Stiller would have been able to sit in the comms surveillance room, listening to live coverage of their conversation. They would have had the same thought as Wisting and taken out the statements given by those old friends. He wondered if he should send a text message but decided against it.
‘How long is it since the road was completed?’ he asked instead, casting a glance out of the rear window, towards the motorway.
‘It was done in stages. I finished here in 1988 and started work on the E6 up in Trøndelag.’
‘They said on the news that it was closed,’ Wisting said. ‘All this rain has caused the road to collapse. At least, one lane of the motorway.’
Martin Haugen braked hard and turned off the road into another petrol station. ‘Do you want to check if they’ve got the newspaper here?’ he asked, drawing up between the petrol pumps and the shop.
Wisting jumped out and dashed inside to find a couple of copies left. Line’s story was on the front page. They had used a 1980s photo of Nadia Krogh and chosen the simple headline Nadia Krogh Mystery.
Picking the newspaper from the stand, he placed it on the counter and paid.
Martin Haugen was waiting with the engine running. Wisting opened the newspaper while they drove. The story ran to three pages, and there was a small photo of Line beside her name, together with a younger journalist called Daniel Leanger. The main illustration was a map showing where Nadia Krogh had disappeared and where she had lived. A picture of the house where the party had been held was inserted, as was a photograph of the classmate who lived there. On the third page, a photo of Adrian Stiller appeared. At the foot of the page a reference was made to the podcast and the next article in the series, which would deal with the letters from the kidnappers.
‘Does it look good?’ Martin Haugen asked, without taking his eyes off the road.
Wisting folded the newspaper. ‘I’ll read it at the cabin tonight,’ he said.
They drove for a stretch in silence. Martin turned up the volume on the car radio and changed the channel until he found a song he liked. Wisting leaned back in his seat, waiting for a message from Hammer – pretending to be Line – asking him to listen to the podcast. The arrangement was that this would happen when they had driven about halfway. Wisting had consulted the map with Hammer and decided this would be approximately when they passed the bridge to Vestsiden in Porsgrunn. However, that had been five minutes ago.
They now had Volls Fjord on their left-hand side, where a flock of seagulls circled around a boat. Martin, resting his left arm on the side window, concentrated on the road ahead. They had caught up with a lorry driving at a snail’s pace. The road was too narrow and twisting to overtake it, and they lagged some distance behind.
After a couple of kilometres the lorry drew into the verge. Martin grabbed the wheel with both hands and sped past.
At last the phone buzzed and Wisting took it out. He had placed a full stop at the end of Line’s name so he could see at a glance when it was from Hammer.
‘It’s from Line,’ he said, turning to face Martin. ‘She wants me to listen to the podcast she’s made. Is that okay with you?’
Martin turned down the car radio. ‘I don’t know how these things work,’ he said.
‘Me neither,’ Wisting replied.
He clicked on the link in the message and switched on the phone’s loudspeaker function. Martin turned off the car radio. Following some instrumental music, Line’s voice filled the compartment.
They sat listening as Martin swung off towards Kilebygda, and soon forest flanked both sides of the road.
It was odd to listen to Line’s voice like this. She had a good speaking voice, bright and breezy, with a note of seriousness. She began by giving a
rough outline of the story before sketching a verbal portrait of Nadia Krogh and promising listeners she would do her utmost to discover what had happened to her.
The story was well constructed and journalistically methodical, with a steeply escalating sense of drama and tension.
Martin Haugen held both hands firmly on the steering wheel. No reaction could be read on his face. After less than ten minutes he turned off from the main road and up to the barrier closing off the rutted forest track. He put the pickup in neutral and pulled on the handbrake.
‘I can do it,’ Wisting offered.
Pausing the podcast, he took the key from Martin and leapt out.
‘It’s a bit tricky,’ Martin warned him.
Wisting fumbled with the key in the padlock but managed to prise it open and raise the barrier so that Haugen could drive through. Afterwards, he lowered it and put the padlock back in place before returning to the pickup.
The track was in dreadful condition, and gravel crunched as the vehicle was buffeted by the washboard surface beneath the tyres before crashing down into a crater. Wisting switched off his phone and let Martin Haugen negotiate his way forward. In some places he had to move to the far edge of the track to avoid bumps. Branches scraped across the bodywork, and Wisting was glad they had not taken his car.
The pickup lurched forward and hit another pothole. Martin Haugen gave it full throttle. With wheels spinning, the pickup juddered towards the ditch on Wisting’s side before the tyres gripped and the vehicle righted itself.
‘When my grandfather took over the place, there was no vehicle access,’ Martin explained. ‘In those days they reached it by boat. Materials were dragged in across the ice.’
After a few more kilometres the track divided in two. Wisting vaguely recognized the area from the last time he had been here. Martin Haugen drove to the left, though the track seemed almost impassable. Virtually all the gravel was washed away, and the track was made up of compacted earth in which rainwater had gouged deep furrows.
‘It improves at the top of the hill,’ Martin reassured him.
He was right. After cresting the summit the track descended again. Most of the rainwater had drained into a stream that ran parallel to the track. One kilometre later they had reached a sizeable turning place. A number of decaying logs were left from the time the track had been laid for the extraction of timber.
The space was overgrown with weeds that brushed against the undercarriage as Martin turned the pickup and reversed to park alongside a footpath.
As Wisting took his newspaper and jumped out, the dense trees surrounding them rustled in the breeze.
Martin accompanied him to the rear of the pickup and opened the tailgate. They split the food between them and quickly filled their rucksacks. In the end, the lightest foodstuffs were placed in a plastic bag that Martin offered to carry. They slung the rucksacks on their backs and set off.
55
The paperwork proceeded swiftly – it had been easy to convince Christine Thiis that Emil Slettaker might have sold an illegal weapon to Martin Haugen. She had decided to have him taken into custody and his house searched for more guns. Nils Hammer had arranged for officers to carry out these instructions.
Two patrol cars drove up in front of his house. Four men got out and strode up to the door. Adrian Stiller was sitting in a car on the opposite side of the street and watched as Emil Slettaker opened the door to them. The largest policeman handed him a sheet of paper, and the man at the door read it through while something was explained to him. He then put on his shoes and jacket before being handcuffed and led to one of the police vehicles.
Stiller headed over to them and asked them to postpone driving him away.
Inside the house, uniformed officers were already busy looking for guns. Room by room, the house was systematically searched.
The house showed signs that Emil Slettaker lived alone. The furnishings were simple but practical. In the kitchen, the cooker was switched on. Stiller peered at the oven door and spotted two large baked potatoes in tin foil inside. He flicked off the oven and turned towards the kitchen worktop, where a substantial steak lay in wait. In the living room, the TV was tuned to a sports channel.
‘Change of plan,’ one of the police officers commented. Another emerged from a room at the end of a passageway.
‘Found anything?’ Stiller asked.
‘An air pistol,’ the policeman answered, holding it up to him. It was the gun advertised on the Internet.
‘Okay, keep going,’ Stiller said.
He went outside again to sit in the back seat of the patrol car beside Emil Slettaker. The handcuffs behind Slettaker’s back made his sitting position uncomfortable. As he wriggled about, he gave Stiller a quizzical look. His initial surprise had changed to anger: he was cursing and demanding to know what was going on.
‘I switched off your oven,’ Stiller, unruffled, told him.
The man swore again, claiming he had not done anything wrong and insisting they would not find anything in his home.
‘Listen to me for a minute,’ Stiller said.
‘Who the hell are you?’ the man asked.
Stiller gave his name. ‘I work in a special section at Kripos,’ he said, knowing this sounded better than explaining that he worked in the section for unsolved cases.
Emil Slettaker clammed up.
‘I don’t give a shit if your steak lies in there and goes off over the weekend,’ he went on. ‘I don’t give a shit if there’s a football match you’re going to miss tonight. I don’t give a shit about you. I’m only interested in one thing and one thing only. What kind of gun did you sell to the guy who visited you from 17.34 to 17.49 yesterday?’
He had the times from the tracker on the pickup and felt this would make Slettaker believe the police knew more than was actually the case.
Stiller looked across at the house, where the policeman in the doorway was signalling they had found nothing further. ‘I need that information right now,’ he insisted. The man still kept his mouth shut.
‘I don’t give a shit about you,’ Stiller repeated. ‘But as soon as you’ve answered my question I’m going to remove those handcuffs and let you go back to your kitchen to cook that steak. But I need that information right now.’
Emil Slettaker gulped. ‘He wanted an air pistol,’ he began.
Stiller moved closer. ‘He did not,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘That was just an excuse to make contact with you. What did he leave with?’
Emil Slettaker gazed up at his house and back at Stiller. ‘A Glock 34,’ he replied.
‘In working order?’
‘Yes, a competition model with an extended barrel.’
‘Ammunition?’
‘Yes, two rounds in the magazine. It takes seventeen cartridges.’
Stiller waited.
‘He also took a pack of fifty cartridges.’
‘What did he pay?’
‘Twenty thousand kroner.’
‘Where’s the money now?’
‘In the living room, inside a DVD case.’
‘Excellent. We’ll take that with us.’
Stiller got out, skirted the car and opened the rear door. Emil Slettaker scrambled out. One of the uniformed officers approached and produced the key for the handcuffs.
‘What’s all this about?’ Emil Slettaker demanded. ‘Is it something to do with terrorism, or what?’
Stiller did not answer.
‘What happens now?’ He continued firing questions.
‘We’re finished with you, but you’ll hear from the local police in due course,’ Stiller replied.
The other man merely nodded as he looked around to see if any of his neighbours had been watching what was going on.
‘I’m going to tell them you cooperated with us, and that will make your sentence a lot more lenient. What’s important is that you do not in any way, shape or form try to get in touch with the man you sold the gun to.’ Stiller looked him s
traight in the eye. ‘Do you understand?’ he asked. ‘It will make things much worse for you.’
When Emil Slettaker agreed Stiller turned his back on him and strode across to his own car.
56
After walking for ten minutes Wisting spotted the grey roof between the trees ahead of them. The cabin was situated on a level expanse of ground. Wisting was familiar with the history of the place. It had been a croft, a sparse little farm owned by one of the major land-owning farmers in the area. Martin Haugen’s predecessors had made their home there until the early years of the twentieth century. At its height, four adults and nine children had lived there. They had owned a couple of cows, as well as several goats, pigs and hens.
Martin’s grandfather was the last person to be born in the forest. He had bought the property after the war and renovated the log cabin.
Two other buildings had been located there, a hay barn and a byre. Apparently, the hay barn had burned down and overgrown stones were all that was left of it. Half of the byre had collapsed during a heavy snowfall, but the other half with the outside toilet and wood store still remained.
The weather bars and bargeboards had been removed on the south side of the roof. The old ones lay on the ground and had been replaced by lighter wood.
Martin Haugen went straight to the door, unlocked it and ushered Wisting inside.
The cabin consisted of a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms with bunk beds. Wisting ducked his head beneath the low doorway and headed for the bedroom he had used last time. He put down his rucksack and heard Martin do the same in the adjacent room.
From the window in the living room he could see Langen. Evening mist had settled over the lake so he could barely make out the forest on the other side. In the middle of the old hayfield down by the waterside there was an ancient apple tree, stripped of leaves, but a few small apples were still hanging from its branches.
The Katharina Code Page 23