The wind and rain tear and buffet the corrugated boathouse roof. Bjørkang and Harvey strip off the tarpaulin and place it on the earth floor against one of the walls.
‘So here you have the boat,’ the local police chief says, stroking it with one hand.
The boat, about six metres long, is a blue and white RIB – a rigid inflatable boat – with a 150-horsepower Evinrude engine and a fibreglass hull boasting the trademark Zodiac Pro. I clamber aboard. There is a rope and an air cylinder inside the boat, as well as a wooden chest filled with what seems to be old bits and pieces collected from the seabed.
‘Quite a craft, eh?’ Harvey picks up a square box covered in dry strands of algae and tiny white shells and passes it to me.
‘The Danish guy obviously collected old rubbish,’ Bjørkang mutters, nodding at the old transistor radio I’m holding in my hand. It had once been white, with a blue border, and I can just make out the number three together with some letters, P b K A, up in the left-hand corner of the shell- and algae-infested apparatus.
‘No GPS?’ I ask, nodding at the empty casing beside the steering wheel.
‘Maybe it fell out while the RIB was drifting,’ Bjørkang answers casually.
‘Why didn’t this fall out, then?’ I ask, lifting the transistor radio. ‘I assume this was lying in the boat and the GPS was attached to the centre console?’
‘Who knows?’ Bjørkang shrugs, heaving a sigh.
‘OK.’ I replace the radio in the RIB. ‘You said he was most likely diving in a place called Øyet. Where’s that?’
‘Øyet is an underwater mountain right between the lighthouse and the islands on the other side of the fjord.’ Bjørkang looks at his watch and heads to the boathouse door to point over to where a black pole with a topmost flashing light stands on a rock that juts out of the sea. ‘Put there at one time to help boats that venture into the reefs, through the Grøt Sound.’
‘It’s called Øyet – the eye,’ Harvey explains, ‘because when the sea is calm, it looks as if someone is looking up from the depths at the sky. Over the years there’s been many a ship and crew that has gone down after steering too close to that reef.’
‘I presume that’s why he was diving? Because of all the wrecks?’
All three nod in unison. ‘We had divers down there but they didn’t find anything,’ the local police chief begins after a brief silence. ‘We’ll just have to wait,’ he goes on, ‘let nature take its course, and he’ll come up again in time, you’ll see.’
‘When the crabs are finished with him,’ Harvey adds.
It is growing dark, and the sky is disappearing behind black clouds.
‘I’ll need to take a trip out there,’ I say. ‘To the lighthouse.’
Bjørkang looks at his watch again. ‘We should wrap this nonsense up now,’ he says, before spitting on the ground. ‘There’s more bad weather forecast all weekend. You go home to Stavanger, Aske. I said the same thing to the Danish guy’s mother when she was up here yelling and shrieking to be taken out there in the middle of a gale, even though it would risk the crew’s lives. We’ll call you when he pops up again. They always surface, these bodies in the sea. But it can take time.’
‘His parents want me to go out there, so I’m going to do that, unless you have legal grounds to prevent me.’
‘OK, OK.’ Bjørkang flings out his arms in annoyance. ‘If you want to stay up here waiting, that’s fine by me. We can’t deny you that. But be a bit cautious, that’s all I ask. You’re no longer a policeman.’
‘I’m just here to help,’ I answer. ‘The same as you.’
‘Great,’ Bjørkang grunts. ‘Remember, if there’s anything else you think we should waste our time on, then it’ll have to wait till Monday. OK?’
I nod and Bjørkang consults his watch one last time before beckoning Arnt and indicating they are about to leave.
‘Cognac and card games,’ Harvey chuckles once the two policemen are sitting in their car again. ‘At weekends he drinks cognac and plays cards with the other old boys out here on the islands. Public servants, you know.’ Harvey laughs. ‘Crime is something that only takes place on weekdays between the hours of eight and four up here. Didn’t you know that?’
‘I see,’ I say, sighing, when it dawns on me that I’ve left my car parked outside the local police station.
‘Why do you actually want to go out to the lighthouse?’ Harvey asks after closing the boathouse door and attaching the padlock. ‘I was there with Bjørkang after we found the boat. There’s nothing out there.’
‘His mother wanted me to. As for myself, I just want to get it over and done with. I’m freezing to death.’
‘OK.’ Harvey beats a tattoo with his fingers on the boathouse door. ‘Well, you can come with me tomorrow morning if you like. I’m going past there on my way to the farm.’
‘The farm?’
‘Mussels.’ He smiles again. ‘That’s where the money is.’
CHAPTER 12
I get a lift from Harvey in his pickup. He has come up with the idea of having me stay overnight, since we’ll be going out to the lighthouse next morning, so as to spare me the trouble of commuting the hundred kilometres and two ferry trips from my hotel room in Tromsø. His house is located in a new housing estate with a view over the fjord and the lighthouse on its little island.
We go inside and sit at the kitchen table. Harvey brings two mugs of coffee. In the background, his wife is fussing after a boy of about six; she’s in a hurry, trying to get him dressed.
‘We’re leaving now,’ she says, taking the boy with her to the hallway, where she struggles to put on her jacket, using only one hand.
‘Come here.’ When she approaches us, Harvey pulls her down on to his knee and kisses her hair. ‘This is Thorkild Aske, a former policeman, here to search for the missing man.’ He kisses her again. ‘And this is my darling wife, Merethe.’
Merethe extricates herself from Harvey’s embrace and offers me her hand.
‘Hi,’ I say, straining to smile with both corners of my mouth at the same time.
‘Hi, Thorkild,’ she says before abruptly releasing my hand and heading off to the hallway, where the little boy is now flinging shoes around, making sounds of gunfire to accompany the missiles.
‘Merethe works as an occupational therapist up at the residential centre. Senior yoga, healing, crystal therapy and that sort of thing. She’ll soon be a real celebrity into the bargain, won’t you, sweetheart?’
‘What?’ Merethe yells from the hallway.
‘You! You’ll soon be a celebrity,’ Harvey answers. ‘Come here, and you can have a go with Thorkild. I’m sure you’ll find some ghosts hanging around him too.’
Stumbling to her feet with her hands full of shoes, Merethe lobs one at Harvey in the kitchen. ‘Not now, Harvey. Can’t you see I’m running late?’
Harvey turns to face me again as his wife rushes out of the door with the boy in tow. ‘She’s always in spiritual unbalance at this time in her cycle.’ He laughs loudly, slapping himself on the knees.
‘What’s she famous for?’
‘Clairvoyant,’ Harvey replies. ‘She’s been hired for the next series of Spiritual Powers, if you follow that programme. They’re starting filming now and into the New Year. She’s been booked for four episodes in the first instance. Big shot, eh?’
‘I don’t watch as much TV as I should,’ I venture, before Harvey gets suddenly to his feet and disappears down into the basement. He emerges with a plastic container that he places on the table between us.
‘You look like a guy who won’t say no to a drop or two.’ He unscrews the lid and dilutes the coffee with the crystal-clear spirit. ‘Don’t they serve laced coffee in Iceland? That’s where you come from, right?’
‘Yes, and yes – they’re just not so generous with the coffee.’
Harvey laughs and we sit drinking in silence as we stare through the kitchen window at the sea and the polar night now falling over the landscape.
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‘What would life be without children?’ Harvey says in the end. ‘Do you have any?’
‘No.’
‘Married?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘What happened?’
‘I went to the USA, and she went to Gunnar.’
‘Gunnar?’
‘Gunnar Ore. My former boss in Internal Affairs.’
‘Bloody hell, man, sounds like a real bitch.’
I shrug. ‘We weren’t getting on very well.’
‘So that’s why you became a private investigator?’
‘Something like that,’ I answer wearily. I can see the lighthouse looming over the top of the small island in the murk. The whole place is grey. It won’t be long until it, too, is swallowed by the blue-black wall.
‘Harvey Nielsen,’ I begin after another hiatus. ‘Is that a northern Norwegian name?’
‘Absolutely.’ Harvey guffaws again. ‘My forebears emigrated to Minnesota in 1913, before my great-grandfather came back during the First World War and was gassed to death in a field in northern France not long after.’
‘And you? How did you find your way back to the Promised Land?’
‘Signed on board a fishing boat after college and ended up by chance in Tromsø, where I met Merethe, working in a pub in the city.’
‘And became a mussel farmer?’
‘Among other things. Merethe’s family had a smallholding where we kept sheep for a while until early in the noughties, when I happened across a course in mussel cultivation. I applied to the government’s trade and rural development fund for support and got started. I began with a small patch, a few plastic containers, some old herring net, tractor parts, electric cables and concrete foundations I poured myself. I built the floating rig myself too. Most mussel farmers went under in the first few years, but we held on, gritted our teeth and kept going until we came out on the other side – changed,’ Harvey says with a grin. ‘And in May we delivered seven tonnes of mussels. Next year we’re going after ten.’
‘Where is the farm?’
‘In a cove farther north, where Merethe’s family had their farm before it was wound up. We went on running it for a while after her parents had moved into residential care, and kept it going for a few years, but there’s no money in small farms any longer, nothing but work and hard slog.’
‘Do you miss the States?’
‘No,’ Harvey answers. ‘Not at all. I didn’t belong there – I knew that when I was a kid. The sea, you know. It’s in the blood, breaking against the artery walls and calling out.’ Harvey knocks the bottom of his mug on the kitchen table before letting his gaze roam out of the window where the streetlights are twinkling in the ice-cold autumn darkness. ‘I could never leave this place. Never.’
I’m aware of the alcohol starting to have an effect on me. My body is filled with an intense heat I haven’t felt for a long time.
‘You said you went to the US.’ Harvey looks at me through limpid grey eyes. ‘What did you do there?’
‘Professional development,’ I answer. ‘Or was it to escape from a broken marriage? It’s hard to recall now, looking back.’
Harvey raises his mug in a silent toast. ‘Hear, hear!’ Then he drinks and puts down the mug, all the while looking at me, with a half-smile playing on his lips. ‘So, why did you go there, in truth?’ he eventually asks.
‘Here in Norway the police force follows a standardised interview technique called KREATIV,’ I begin to explain.
‘And that is?’
‘KREATIV focuses on the accused’s witness statement. The aim of the interview is not necessarily for the accused to confess, but rather to reduce his chances of putting forward plausible cover stories and counter-strategies along the way. In Miami there was a totally unique opportunity to learn about more advanced interview techniques and investigative psychology from no less a person than Dr Titus Ohlenborg.’
‘And he is?’
‘Heard of KUBARK?’
‘Nope.’
‘KUBARK was a total of seven interview manuals intended for training specialist staff in the CIA, the army and other special forces. The first one was published in 1963 during the Cold War. One of them was purely a training tool for lead interviewers specially linked to counter-espionage, and came with a series of techniques meant to be used to facilitate breaking everyone from defectors to refugees, agitators, agents and double agents, and discover whether they were bona fide or not. This manual was written by the good doctor himself.’
‘Spy shit? Really?’ Harvey rolls his eyes and gives a crooked grin. ‘You don’t strike me as the type.’
I shrug. ‘Ohlenborg is a professional psychologist and began his career by studying the interaction between people and buildings, before he transferred to the CIA. Now he teaches everywhere from official investigative agencies to private security firms such as Blackwater, DynCorp and Triple Canopy.’
‘And Norwegian policemen?’
Nodding, I signal to ask for a refill. ‘The problem with manuals like KUBARK and more recent European methods like our own KREATIV is always the same.’
‘And that is?’ Grabbing the plastic container, Harvey stands up and leans across the table to pour out more.
‘How do you interview someone who knows and can do exactly the same as you? Someone who may have received and mastered the same training as you?’
He puts the container on the floor and flops down into the chair again. ‘I see,’ he says, nodding decisively. ‘How to break one of your own.’
‘Correct. The special thing about Ohlenborg is that, for a number of years, he has travelled around American prisons and interviewed police officers from both local and federal police forces, who have all served sentences for a range of crimes from robbery and narcotics smuggling to hired killing, rape and serial murder.’
‘Cops gone bad.’ Harvey chuckles into his mug. ‘What a world.’
‘Intelligence organisations, the military and police all face the same challenges in an interview situation when interrogating one of their own. People who have themselves conducted hundreds, maybe thousands of interviews throughout their careers, who are familiar with the methods, who might have perfected these over the years with that very idea in mind – the day when they’re caught and everything’s at stake.’
‘So what do you do to break them?’
‘Your own experiences, training and belief in your own capabilities count the highest in every interview situation. But what you eventually learn is that these very men, no matter how good they are and how accomplished at the game, and whatever their portfolio of life experience might contain, they can’t succeed in disguising the human being, and their humanity is the way in. The bottom line.’
‘You’ve lost me, man.’ Harvey shakes his head.
‘We are all ruled by the elementary strings in our emotional register. The difference is what happens to each and every one of us when someone plays on these strings. No matter what,’ I plough on as I rotate the mug between my hands and stare down at the muddy liquid. ‘After nine months of travelling, Dr Ohlenborg fell ill and had to go through a new type of radical radiation treatment for a brain tumour, and I came back to Bergen and Internal Affairs once again.’
‘So why did you give up the police?’
‘Another time,’ I whisper. ‘Another time altogether.’
Outside, the rain has frozen into hail, tapping on the kitchen window before falling back into the darkness again.
‘You said it was the Danish guy’s parents who had hired you,’ Harvey finally says.
I nod.
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t quite know,’ I reply. ‘Search. Hope can actually be bought, you know.’
‘Hope?’
‘As long as they pay, I search. As long as I search … there’s hope that I might find something.’
‘Find what, do you think?’
‘A magic key to turn back time.’ I peer into my cof
fee mug again as Harvey fills it up. The aroma of the alcohol tickles my nose, heating, breaking open my ruined tear ducts and beckoning clouds of memory from the depths of my mind. Nodding, I open my mouth and swallow. Huge gulps.
‘Do you ever find it?’ Harvey asks, half mockingly, and looks at me. ‘This key?’
‘Never,’ I reply, with a short, sharp laugh.
CHAPTER 13
My second day with Frei, Stavanger, 23 October 2011
Café Sting stood next to the Valberg Tower. The building was an old timber house containing the smart rustic restaurant that Stavanger and its inhabitants seemed to like so well. The woman behind the bar fixed me a cup of coffee and a glass of water clinking with ice cubes that I carried over to a table at the far end of the room, where I sat down to wait for Frei.
She turned up at a quarter to seven. I was sitting at a window table peering out at the stone tower then under attack from the rain that was streaming in rivulets down the café windows.
‘Awful weather,’ she said, shaking off a hooded khaki-green parka with fitted pockets. She hung it over the back of the chair and shot a look at the bar, where the woman behind the counter responded by switching on the kettle and rooting around in a bowl of teabags. ‘Have you been waiting long?’
‘I’d have waited longer if you wanted me to.’
Tilting her head, Frei gazed at me for a moment without saying a word, before turning around and vanishing in the direction of the bar.
‘Why did you come?’ she asked once she had finally sat down on the cast-iron chair opposite me. She picked up three big brown sugar cubes and dropped them into the apple-green liquid in her teacup. Then she took her spoon and stirred it round lazily until the sugar had dissolved and given the contents a darker, more earthy and impure quality.
‘Loneliness,’ I answered. ‘Without a doubt.’
‘Do you think I can help you with that?’
‘Almost certainly not.’
‘So why?’
I shrugged. ‘Because you asked.’
‘My uncle wanted me to.’ She placed the teaspoon under her lip and closed her mouth. ‘He’s expecting a visit,’ she said, setting the spoon down on the dish of lemon slices.
I Will Miss You Tomorrow Page 5