Dregs (27 page)

‘Where’s Hammer?’ Wisting asked, getting up.

‘He’s still in Oslo. He’s got the banknotes from the collector and taken them to
Kripos
. He thought we would get the first reports from the fingerprint section as early as tomorrow afternoon.’

Wisting pulled off the gloves and related the story of his trip to Kongsberg.

‘I think we might be getting close to something,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the banknotes. ‘This is what it’s about. Money. They’d become invalid and were dumped in the sea together with the murder weapon and the dead bodies.’

‘Could Carsten Meyer have played an active role in this drama?’ Torunn Borg wondered. ‘The money must have some connection to the five-man group and he’s the only survivor.’

‘Carsten Meyer is an old man with a walking stick,’ Wisting said, thinking back to his meeting with him. ‘He seems uneasy about something but I think it’s more likely that he’s afraid he is the next on the list.’

‘By the way, we’ve got the weapon ashore. Mortensen has it in his office. Carsten Meyer is correct. It’s an unregistered Colt put together from weapon parts that the employees in the Kongsberg factory smuggled out in their lunchboxes during the war. Apparently there are something like five hundred of them.’

‘It’s the grandson who has taken over Carsten Meyer’s gun,’ Wisting explained. ‘We need to contact him and find out if he still has it.’

Torunn Borg noted it down as a task that she would take care of.

‘The same applies to the other descendants,’ Wisting continued, going over to the door. ‘All the members of the five-man group were equipped with the same type of weapon. We must locate those pistols. Who still has them?’

There were not many of the investigators left in the police station. Wisting sent the rest home and sat down behind his office desk. The reminder note with the message about phoning the doctor was still lying in the middle of his desk. He took a piece of tape and fastened it in the middle of his computer screen before picking out two of the expensive tablets he had bought in the health-food shop. He swallowed them dry and decided to phone early the next morning. The doctor had his mobile number and would have phoned him if it were anything serious. Moreover, he did not feel quite so exhausted now. He was still tired and out of sorts, but did not feel just as feeble.

The clock above the doorway showed almost nine o’clock, so it was still not too late to visit Suzanne. He would just make one phone call before he finished.

Turning on the computer he searched for the phone number of Svenn Tollefsen, moving the message from the doctor’s surgery to the side of the screen.

Wisting had first met Tollefsen on December 8th 1980. On the same day, John Lennon was shot and killed by a mentally disturbed fan in New York. It was also the day a deranged man had decided to raid the town’s branch of
Norges Bank
with a bulldozer.

Svenn Tollefsen had been sitting in the counting house when the whole building began to shake. Wisting had been in the first patrol car to arrive on the scene. By then the bulldozer had become stuck and the driver had given up and run off. Wisting caught up with him a couple of blocks away and an arrest had taken place via the doctor on duty at the closed psychiatric ward. Later, Svenn Tollefsen had stopped counting money and become responsible for security at the bank. It was natural for them to keep in touch.

Svenn Tollefsen commented that it had been a long time since they had contact, before asking what he could do for the police.

‘Tell me what you know about fifty-kroner notes,’ Wisting requested.

‘Well, printed on cotton paper with gravure printing. The watermark consists of a row of portraits, the same as in the main picture. That would be Asbjornsen, as in Asbjornsen and Moe of the folktales. The serial number is printed with ultraviolet fluorescence, and there are various microscopic letters in it, among them a hidden N in the rosette on the front. It was upgraded in 2003 with a broad security thread. Almost nobody forges it. There’s more to be made from forging the larger notes. To date, over 100 million of them have been printed. The circulation period is becoming steadily shorter. It’s not unlikely that they’ll soon be replaced by a 50-kroner coin, or simply be done away with.’

Wisting leafed through his notes from the interview with the adviser from the savings bank in Oslo.

‘When was it introduced?’ he asked.

‘The first ones were printed in 1996. Prior to that, we had the
nynorsk
banknote.’

‘
Nynorsk
?’

‘Yes, with the portrait of Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. He was of course the champion of
nynorsk
, the New Norwegian language, and on that one it was called
Noregs Bank
, instead of
Norges Bank
.’

‘And that’s not valid any longer?’

‘No, it went out of production twelve years ago. The first were printed in 1984. Now it’s completely out of circulation. After January last year you weren’t able to exchange it either, but it can have a high value to collectors.’

‘What about the banknotes that are even older?’

‘When Camilla Collett was replaced by Kirsten Flagstad on the hundred-kroner note in the middle nineties, it was decided that old notes would continue to be legal tender for one year after being discontinued, and after that you could exchange them in a bank for a further ten years. In order to clear the situation up, it was also decreed that all old notes could be exchanged in banks up until July 1999.’

‘So all old notes had a value up until that time?’

‘That’s right.’ Tollefsen cleared his throat at the other end. ‘Is this about the money that the two boys found?’

‘Have you heard?’

‘It’s on the internet. There’s speculation about whether it has something to do with the missing men.’

Wisting clicked on to the web pages of
Verdens Gang
newspaper. The discovery of the money was one of the top news items, illustrated by a picture of two boys sitting behind a camping table covered in fifty-kroner notes. He recognised them as the two boys he had bumped into in reception a short time earlier. They had gone to the newspaper before the police. It was probably the only way they could turn the discovery into hard currency.

‘Do you think there’s a connection?’ Tollefsen asked.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ Wisting responded. He had the information he wanted, and rounded off the conversation with some questions about family and some remarks about the weather.

The sheet of paper in front of him was now filled with dates. He took it with him and let himself into Torunn Borg’s office. The money was still piled up on the floor.

He switched on the ceiling light and put on a new pair of gloves to go systematically through the banknotes with the portrait of Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. Some copies of the first edition from 1984 looked in good condition. The bags they had been in must have been tied up well so that water had been kept out. A collector would certainly buy them.

He had jotted down that the old fifty-kroner note had been printed between 1984 and 1996. However, there were no banknotes in the pile that had been printed after 1991. The conclusion was simple: the money must have been kept hidden since that time.

Wisting became thoughtful as he looked out the window. The clouds had come closer and were darker. The sea was churning, and the little boats were heading for shore.

In 1991, Ken Ronny Hauge had shot and killed a policeman with a Colt, or hadn’t he? The components of the case were starting to come together, he thought. However, he still could not see in what direction they were pointing. One thing was certain. Something was about to break the surface.

CHAPTER 50

‘I like that sound,’ said Line.

‘Mm hmm,’ Tommy replied at her side. She could tell by his tone that what he wanted most was to go to sleep.

The rain was drumming steadily and rhythmically on the roof tiles. She stood up and went through to the living room where raindrops were meandering across the windowpane, chased by playful gusts of wind. Down in the street, puddles and little streams gathered and overflowed into one another.

From the living room window she could see the black sea. Flashes of lightning ripped through the night sky out there in the distance, but she didn’t hear any thunder. The storm was still a long way off.

She peeped in at Tommy, listening to his heavy breathing. Then she went out to the kitchen and sat at the computer. Ken Ronny Hauge had taken up all her time in the past few days, although she had finished writing up the interview. The possibility that he was innocent had become an obsessive thought. Her deadline was approaching, and she still had three more interviews to do. The first of these was the only woman on the list. Her name was Beate Olsen, who had served fifteen years for killing her uncle. On the evidence of the newspaper reports she emerged as a sly and greedy woman. The actual murder concerned money. Her grandfather owned a company that galvanised metals for use in the shipping industry. Beate was employed in the accounts department, and she had a good understanding of how the business was declining, although the same business had made her grandfather a multi-millionaire. At the time of the murder he was on his deathbed, and there were only two heirs to the fortune: Beate Olsen and her uncle.

The uncle remained a bachelor until he met a woman during a holiday to the Philippines. They planned to marry, but the wedding was postponed when the grandfather’s condition worsened and he was admitted to hospital. While he lay on his deathbed, Beate Olsen poisoned her uncle with the aid of potassium cyanide that she had obtained from the galvanising works and mixed into a bowl of sugar. The poison had paralysed his respiratory system and destroyed his lung tissue.

The death had looked like a cardiac arrest, and the case would probably not have been investigated as anything different if internal stocktaking on the same day had not revealed irregularities in the chemical accounts. Several grammes of the deadly powder were missing from the storeroom. A thorough check of the access system showed that Beate Olsen had let herself into the department the previous night. It was a chemist who put two and two together and requested a meeting with the police.

Her stay in prison had turned Beate Olsen into a Christian. She had met Jesus in a cell at Bredtvedt women’s prison. Now she was running her own small religious community in Vennesla. Her spell behind bars had enriched her life, and hers was a story that contrasted with the other murderers Line had met.

Her interview subjects had a variety of motives for turning to murder. It was not something she had consciously set up, but it would make more interesting reading. After Beate Olsen she was to interview a gang leader who had served time for a revenge killing in the Pakistani community in Oslo.

The digression brought her back to the police murder. Whether it was Ken Ronny Hauge or someone he was protecting who had committed it, the motive was incomprehensible. There was no relationship between the victim and the culprit. It was an accidental meeting. Two people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anything else would have been easier to understand.

She left the folder of material about Beate Olsen lie and read the articles about the police murder one more time, picking out some chance snippets here and there. If she continued to let her thoughts revolve around the case there was always the possibility that she would arrive at something that hadn’t struck her before.

Finally, she was sitting looking at the interview with the brother that the local newspaper had printed the previous Saturday in connection with the new, large contracts his company had entered.

Rune E. Hauge had started his company with two empty hands seventeen years before, she read. Today he runs a million kroner business.

Another clipping talked about the son who had been newborn when his father started up. Nowadays he worked part-time in the company as well as pursuing his studies, preparing to take over the successful business some day.

Line’s thoughts began to wander. She wondered what the E in Rune E. Hauge stood for, and thought that Ken Ronny should really have called himself Ken R. Hauge, which had a somewhat grander appearance.

The storm had come closer while she had sat at the kitchen table, the sound of thunder rumbling in from the sea. Lightning lit up the room in a blue-white flash when she clicked on to the folder with the photographs she had taken out at Ken Ronny Hauge’s little farm. In one of them, he was sitting with empty hands on his lap. She liked that picture; it was of the kind that didn’t simply provide an illustration, but also told a story. The light was captured in the right way, making his hands appear warm and protective.

She felt she knew Ken Ronny Hauge now, but she knew almost nothing about his brother.

CHAPTER 51

The phone rang at 03.40. Wisting sat up in confusion and fumbled for his mobile phone on the mattress.

He answered in a rough voice, listened, said thanks and promised to be there within half an hour.

Suzanne turned over by his side. He’d been dreaming about her and tried to hold on to what it had been about, but the details had already slipped away.

He lay back, closing his eyes for a moment to gather his thoughts. It was pouring rain. The sound echoed through the entire house, and he contemplated simply remaining there. He did not need to go around and look at every single dead body that was washed up by the sea. He could read about it in a report, sit with a coffee and study the photographs that would be lying on his office desk in an hour or two.

A clap of thunder shook the house as he was about to slip back into sleep. Instead, he got up and pulled on the same clothes he had been wearing the night before.

Suzanne sat up, drawing the duvet round her.

‘Are you going out?’

He whispered a reply and kissed her on the cheek before he left.

The rain darkened the summer night. He squinted ahead with his forehead at the windscreen. Trees lining the road were swinging and swaying in the wind. Just before he reached his destination, he was overtaken by a police patrol car, the blue light pulsing rhythmically through the driving rain before disappearing beyond a bend.