The Katharina Code

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Wisting agreed.

  ‘I think that’s reasonable,’ Martin continued. ‘Everybody changes. It’s wrong to punish someone for things they did in a different life. The person who is brought before the court is not the same as the one who committed the crime.’

  Good arguments existed for having an expiry date for homicide, Wisting thought, but consideration for the murderer was not one of them. He was still searching for the right words to use.

  ‘I can agree with that,’ he said instead. ‘Besides, evidence is weakened with the passing of years. Witnesses remember less clearly. The danger of a miscarriage of justice increases when someone is brought to book after such a long time.’

  Martin got to his feet again. ‘They’re ready,’ he said, indicating the frying pan.

  Wisting lifted the steaks on to their plates.

  Martin took out a tin of sweetcorn niblets, opened it and carried it through to the table in the living room, along with two more cans of beer. Wisting cut open the baked potatoes and dropped a dollop of herb butter on each before carrying the plates through. Martin met him before he reached the table, took his plate and sat down with his back to the wall.

  ‘Shall we go hiking tomorrow?’ he suggested. ‘You can see the towers on Grenland Bridge from the summit of Eikedokktoppen. It’s only an hour’s walk?’

  Wisting, happy to go along with this, cut off a slice of steak. The conversation had changed, and his opening had closed down once again.

  72

  As the excavator rumbled, smoke belched from the engine exhaust before the man at the controls raised the bucket and lowered it on to the grassy embankment. With expert precision, he scraped off the top layer, swung the arm and dumped loose earth on to the lorry’s cargo bed.

  Line took another sequence of pictures. The man in the driver’s cab clamped his cigarette between his lips and swivelled the bucket again.

  Huge tripod floodlights were trained on the operative range. Adrian Stiller stood on the sidelines with Nils Hammer, a few local police officers and a couple of men from the roads authority, following each and every movement of the bucket. Line pointed her camera at them, took a photograph and zoomed in so that only Stiller’s face was captured in her lens. He lifted his head to her, seemingly aware the lens was directed at him. He looked shattered, as if the investigation had drained him of energy.

  She pressed the release button quickly a couple of times before he managed to pull himself together. The result was an authentic portrait. The clenched jaws said something about the gravity of the task he had taken on.

  She was grateful to him for allowing her to step behind the cordon, but to be frank, it was no more than fair and proper. He had made use of her and the newspaper in a game of some sort and was obliged to offer something in return.

  The digger had removed the top layer of earth in an area approximately five metres long by three metres wide, and she could smell the damp odour of newly turned soil.

  Adrian Stiller approached her.

  ‘How deep might she be buried?’ Line asked.

  ‘Martin Haugen had access to all the construction machines here at that time,’ Stiller said. ‘He could have dug down quite far.’

  ‘Do you have enough to charge him, even if you don’t find the body?’

  Adrian Stiller’s eyes searched for her recorder. It was inside her deep jacket pocket and not switched on. ‘We think so,’ he said tersely.

  ‘Are you going to go and arrest him at his cabin, right now?’

  Stiller took out his packet of Fisherman’s Friend lozenges. ‘Even if we find her here tonight, it’s going to take time to establish with absolute certainty that the body is Nadia Krogh,’ he explained. ‘That has to be in place first.’

  ‘What else do you have on him?’ Line asked. ‘You must have something, something that made you reopen the case in the first place.’

  The lozenge crunched between Stiller’s teeth. ‘It’s important to do things in the right order,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t publish it until you give me the go-ahead,’ she told him.

  Stiller cracked a smile, as if this was an offer he had received from journalists many times before. ‘Fingerprints,’ he answered, all the same. ‘The ransom letters were re-examined, using new technology. Haugen’s prints showed up in three places.’

  ‘Why didn’t you arrest him immediately, then?’

  ‘Because the prints were not on the actual letters but on the newspaper the message was clipped out of. That makes the fingerprints only circumstantial evidence. We wanted to try to get more on him.’

  ‘So is that what Dad’s doing?’ Line demanded. ‘Are you using him as bait to reel Martin Haugen in?’

  ‘Your father has worked undercover on this for twenty-four years,’ Stiller replied. ‘He’s never fully believed in his innocence.’

  Line took some time to digest what Stiller was telling her. ‘So that means there’s a connection between the Krogh kidnapping and the Katharina case?’

  ‘They do at least have a common denominator.’

  The police radio belonging to one of the officers overseeing the excavation crackled into life. He gave a brief reply, called Stiller over and then pointed along the road, where a large white delivery van was trundling towards them.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Line queried.

  ‘Crime-scene technicians,’ Stiller answered, explaining that they would be on standby. ‘They won’t like that big excavator.’

  Work progressed slowly. The driver dealt with one five-centimetre layer of earth at a time. Now and again he was given orders to stop and a police officer examined any objects that had turned up: roots, twigs and pebbles.

  Line photographed the process and uploaded images to the news desk so that they could update the online story.

  After half an hour the cargo bed was full and the lorry had driven off. Line remained with Stiller at the edge of the hole, which was now about one metre deep. Torn roots protruded from the smooth walls of earth but, apart from that, there was nothing to be seen.

  The police agreed to continue down for another metre before shifting the excavator.

  The empty lorry drove forward and work went on. After another half-hour it was full again, though still nothing of interest had appeared.

  The excavator moved five metres further away and began to scrape off another top layer.

  It was now almost midnight. The police officers not involved in overseeing the excavation work were huddled inside a car.

  Line felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, an MMS from Daniel Leanger. An outside broadcast van from TV2 was parked at the roadblock while the reporter was in heated discussion with the woman in the patrol car.

  The picture had been taken from inside the barrier. Line lifted her head and watched as Daniel’s black Audi drew up.

  He parked behind Line’s car and leapt out to approach her with a beaker of coffee. ‘Any news?’ he asked.

  Line accepted the coffee. ‘Not yet,’ she said, cupping her hands around the beaker.

  Daniel disappeared back to his vehicle and returned with video equipment.

  Another load of earth was driven away, and the first lorry took over. The excavator driver lowered the bucket again and lifted more soil. The hand of one of the supervising officers shot up in the air – a stop signal – and he shouted something. He was brimming with an eagerness that seemed very different from any of the emotions he had displayed before.

  Line scrabbled to take out her recorder and switched it on as she stepped closer. The excavator shook and shuddered before the engine stopped and silence fell.

  ‘Found something!’ was the shout from the gap on the hillside.

  73

  Wisting dug out his mobile phone while Martin was outside taking a leak. The battery was down to five per cent. Three hours ago he had learned that Stiller had sent sniffer dogs to the E6 at Malvik, but there were no new messages now.

  He quickly checked the VG Internet
pages too. The main story was that police had closed the E18 outside Porsgrunn in connection with their search for Nadia Krogh. Line had written the piece and had obviously been present when the road was blocked. He hurried to switch off his phone again, and filled the cognac glasses.

  There was a certain logic in believing that Katharina’s body was buried in Trøndelag. In an attempt to make the timeline fit with Martin Haugen as the killer, he had sketched out an inverted course of events: Katharina could have travelled up to see Martin at the construction site and he could have murdered her there. With the starting point as the telephone conversation between them which had ended at 22.14, theoretically, Katharina could have been in Malvik around half past six the next morning, if she drove through the night. This gave Martin a window of thirty minutes before his shift at seven, when his colleagues saw him behind the controls of his excavator. Alternatively, she could have waited until the next day to pay him a visit and arrived there after his shift was over. At any rate, no one had seen her, and witnesses who had eaten dinner with Martin after work gave him even less room for manoeuvre before he tried to call her and began to grow worried. However, what knocked that theory for six was that both the car and the motorbike belonging to Katharina were parked in their garage at home.

  Martin Haugen came in again. They had lit a fire in the open fireplace in the living room. Martin added another couple of logs before he sat down.

  ‘Have you never been afraid?’ he asked. ‘In your job, I mean?’

  ‘Mostly I sit in an office these days,’ Wisting replied. ‘There’s not much there to be afraid of.’

  ‘I’m thinking more of when you’re coming close to a solution and the murderer knows you’re about to expose him. Have you ever been scared of what he might do?’

  Wisting shook his head and took a sip of cognac. ‘Investigations involve more than one person,’ Wisting answered. ‘A murderer wouldn’t achieve anything by hurting me.’

  ‘But do you think a murderer thinks as rationally as that? If he has killed before, surely he might well kill again?’

  ‘I think being a road worker is more dangerous,’ Wisting said wryly. ‘Working with big machines and explosive charges and suchlike.’

  The flames from the fire cast restless shadows over the dark timber walls.

  ‘But there must have been things you haven’t shared with the other officers?’ Martin continued. ‘Suspicions you’ve kept to yourself, or connections only you can see?’

  Wisting understood that Martin was exploring the lie of the land, feeling his way forward, in the same way that Wisting had done. He had said so himself. Martin was not someone to turn the other cheek or remain passive – he would go on the offensive.

  ‘The churchyard is full of irreplaceable people,’ Wisting joked. ‘I’ve no intention of taking any work-related secrets with me to the grave.’

  Martin raised his cognac glass in a toast. ‘What sort of case are you working on now?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing major,’ Wisting replied. ‘I’ve been busy with a consequence analysis in connection with the new police district.’

  ‘What are the consequences?’

  ‘I don’t entirely know,’ Wisting replied. ‘That’s my main point. We don’t know how it will work out. Police work has too many variables for it to be possible to say anything with certainty.’

  Martin refilled Wisting’s tumbler. ‘Why did you become a policeman?’ he queried.

  ‘I wanted a demanding, exciting and meaningful line of work,’ Wisting responded. ‘Also, I think it had something to do with justice.’

  ‘What is justice, though?’

  Wisting raised his tumbler to his mouth. This was like the discussions he and Ingrid could have had if she were still living. He enjoyed challenging opinions but restricted himself to what was familiar. Ingrid always saw questions in a larger context. He and Martin had never spoken about such things, and the conversation had an undertone that put him on his guard.

  ‘Everyone being treated equally, and anyone who takes something from someone else being punished for it,’ he replied.

  ‘Do you think just solutions exist for everything?’ Martin went on. ‘I mean, justice must surely involve finding a solution to satisfy both parties in a conflict.’

  ‘In that case it wouldn’t be fair to put anyone in prison,’ Wisting said, in an effort to steer the conversation. ‘A perpetrator will rarely or never consider that just. I’d prefer to say that justice means everyone gets what they deserve.’

  ‘Punishment as just deserts?’

  ‘Call it that if you like.’

  ‘But that assumes you’re familiar with all aspects of a case?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Martin raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if searching for the right way to explain. ‘If a man shoots and kills his wife, then of course he deserves to be punished,’ he began. ‘But what if the gun went off by accident? Then perhaps it’s punishment enough to carry the guilt for what he has done.’

  Wisting nodded, wondering whether Martin was about to tell him that either Katharina’s or Nadia’s death had resulted from an accident. ‘Accidents are not punished,’ he replied, neglecting to add that this did not apply if a perpetrator had been careless or reckless. ‘It has to be an intentional act.’

  ‘Then that means you must be aware of all the circumstances of a case?’

  ‘That’s what we call investigation,’ Wisting said sardonically. ‘Trying to bring the whole truth to light. Only then can we talk about justice.’

  Martin Haugen went quiet on the other side of the table. Wisting struggled to find the appropriate words to persuade him to open up. However, before he arrived at anything, Martin drained his tumbler of cognac and got to his feet.

  ‘Right,’ he said, stretching. ‘If we’re going to make it to Eikedokktoppen tomorrow, it’s best we go to bed now.’

  74

  Line moved towards the trench with the others and switched on the recorder to capture the drama swirling in the air. She stood a couple of steps from the edge in case of erosion and craned forward to look down.

  The pit was about two metres deep. To begin with, she could see nothing other than soft clay and stones of various sizes. The police were preoccupied with something at the very bottom on one side.

  Automatically, Line raised her camera and through the lens was able to see the tip of a boot protruding from the earth wall. The police officers were talking about leather and synthetic materials that did not decompose.

  A ladder was propped up and the two crime-scene technicians who had arrived late climbed into the hole. They were not wearing the usual white protective suits normally used by crime-scene examiners but were instead dressed in dark blue overalls with Police emblazoned on the back.

  Line retreated a few paces to gain some distance. She took several rapid shots and checked the result in the display behind the camera. The images told their own story.

  One of the crime-scene technicians had brought a spoon-like tool of the type used by archaeologists. Line stepped forward to the edge again and watched as he began to pick at the earth around the boot while his colleague documented the find with a camera. Soon the entire boot was visible. The shape and style suggested it belonged to a woman.

  ‘It could be just some old rubbish,’ cautioned one of the police officers. ‘Something left in the road-fill waste.’

  No one contradicted him, even though no one around the pit believed that for a second.

  A big clump of soil loosened from the earth wall where the technicians were working, uncovering the sole of another boot.

  The pair of boots lay less than ten centimetres apart, one a bit further inside the wall, as would be expected if someone were lying with one foot drawn up slightly.

  The two technicians discussed how to proceed and agreed to try to pull one of the boots free.

  The man with the trowel took hold of the boot and jiggled it loose. A shower of soil spewe
d out as the first bone appeared, a greyish-brown shaft jutting from the earth.

  The crime-scene technician peered down into the boot and showed the contents to his colleague before they turned their attention to the large bone.

  ‘She’s lying horizontally, this way,’ the man with the trowel decided, using his hand to indicate the direction. ‘We’ll have to dig a corridor to get her out.’

  They scaled the ladder again.

  The man in the driver’s cab of the excavator discarded a cigarette butt and started the machine again. Following directions, he worked his way down through the layer of earth to the left of the boot.

  Line sat in her car with her laptop on her knee, writing a news story describing the discovery of the first human remains. Daniel was walking around with his video camera but was spoken to by one of the police officers, who must have instructed him not to film what was found inside the hole.

  Adrian Stiller strode up to the car, opened the passenger door and sat down beside her.

  ‘The family’s been notified,’ he said, with no preamble of any kind. ‘We can’t confirm it’s Nadia Krogh we’ve found, but she’s the reason we’re here.’

  Line typed in what he was saying. ‘Cause of death?’ she asked.

  ‘Too early to say anything about that, but the case has always been investigated as a crime.’

  ‘Any suspect?’

  Adrian Stiller clammed up.

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask,’ Line said. ‘In the strictest sense, it’s a yes/no question. I know the answer, but you can formulate it however you like.’

  ‘You can write that I don’t wish to comment on that,’ Stiller told her, gripping the door handle.

  ‘A press statement will be released about the discovery in ten minutes or so,’ he went on. ‘If you want to get your story out before then, go ahead.’

  Thanking him, Line hammered down a few concluding sentences before reading it through. The text was clear – short and concise. She sent it to the news desk with the photograph of the crime-scene technicians on their way down the ladder into the pit and followed this up with a quick phone call to double-check receipt of the story.