Dregs (8 page)

At home the courtyard was empty. He parked in such a way that Line would have space to park without blocking him in. Evening darkness was closing in. The cat came creeping out from behind the hedge and stroked his head against Wisting’s leg. He bent down and scratched him behind the ear before opening the door, deciding to set his alarm for six o’clock.

The kitchen table was filled with Line’s notes, which he glanced at while looking out the cat’s dinner. He filled the cat’s dish and stood in front of the table reading the old headlines proclaiming brutal murder. Most of the cases he recognised. The police murder at Eikeren being one. He had known that she was working on a series of interviews and had an appointment with a man in Helgeroa. Now he realised she had been talking about Ken Ronny Hauge. It must be almost twenty years. He didn’t know that the man had moved back.

There were several other cases, such as the murder of 37-year-old Stine Nymann in 1989, raped and strangled in a park in Mysen. It was not one of the most brutal murders in history, but memorable because it was the first case in Norway in which DNA had been used as evidence.

One of her other interview subjects was obviously Age Reinholdt, who had killed twice in his life. In 1974, when he was 23 years of age, he murdered his girlfriend with a knife in a drunken quarrel. That got him eleven years behind bars. Ten years after he was freed, he did the same thing again, and a live-in partner the same age as he was, in Romerike, died of eleven knife wounds. It was evidence of an uncontrollable rage.

The darkest aspects of the human psyche were portrayed in the newspaper reports and he didn’t like the idea of his daughter empathising with such men or excusing the misery they caused.

When Buster was full he stretched and padded off to the living room. Wisting opened the refrigerator, which was rarely so well filled, and contemplated whether he should fry the slices of beef. Looking at the time, he decided that it was too late. According to the date stamp they would last another couple of days.

There was a noise at the front door and Line called from the hallway. He greeted her with a hug. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘No,’ she answered, taking off her shoes. ‘I ate out.’

‘I just need to have a sandwich.’

She followed him into the kitchen. ‘I didn’t mean to leave all this mess,’ she apologised, starting to tidy up all her paperwork.

‘Let it lie,’ Wisting waved her away. ‘I’ll eat in the living room.’

He buttered himself a couple of slices and put them on a plate. Line filled a glass with milk. ‘Are you going to interview all of them?’ he asked, nodding towards the kitchen table.

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Most people would give a lot to avoid having anything to do with any of them.’

Line drank from her glass. ‘I’m obviously not like most people, then,’ she smiled, wiping round her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Do you remember the police murder in 1991?’

Wisting nodded. ‘I saw the newspaper cutting. Has he been freed already?’

‘He got 21 years, but was released on licence a year and a half ago. Moved back home to Helgeroa. I’ve an appointment with him on Friday.’

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

Line gave no reply. ‘How many murderers have
you
talked to?’ she asked.

Wisting took a bite of his sandwich and chewed while he thought.

‘Eight,’ he answered, swallowing. From some place or other came a thought that there had been more murderers than women in his life.

‘Are there any of them who have killed more than once?’

‘You know that of course. You’ve written about some of the cases. A new murder is committed in order to cover up the first one.’

‘Yes, but I’m thinking about whether anyone has killed again
after
they have served their sentence?’

Wisting shook his head.

‘That’s the topic I’m writing about. Whether punishment actually helps.’

Wisting took another bite.

‘Have you found any answers?’

‘I’d like the readers to find the answer for themselves, but have you not wondered whether there’s any point in punishment?’

He had asked himself the question many times. All too many of the people he arrested came back and committed new, worse crimes as soon as they had served their sentences. Prisons functioned as a crime school where new contacts were formed.

‘Those who are convicted of murder are an unsuitable statistical group if you want to look at the rate of recidivism,’ he replied, trying to avoid the question. ‘Most people who become murderers find themselves in some kind of extreme situation that they probably only encounter once in their lives.’

‘Under those circumstances punishment doesn’t serve any purpose.’ Line rinsed her glass and placed it in the dishwasher. ‘Then it isn’t the fear of punishment that prevents them from committing another crime?’

‘Perhaps it doesn’t have any individual preventive effect in murder cases,’ Wisting conceded, ‘but we must certainly have laws and regulations. That someone is punished will hopefully act as a deterrent to others.’

‘People who are in such an extreme situation that they commit murder, probably don’t think so rationally that they take into account the possibility of punishment before they kill?’

Wisting put down his plate and took a glass out of the cupboard. ‘Now you’re pestering me with philosophy,’ he grunted, filling his glass from the tap. He liked these discussions with his daughter, but at the moment he didn’t have the ability to concentrate. ‘It depends on the circumstances,’ he attempted as a final argument.

Line took out the newspaper article about the man who had first knifed his girlfriend to death 35 years previously, and who had done the same thing again 21 years later. ‘A prison sentence didn’t help Age Reinholdt.’

‘Perhaps we should have capital punishment?’ Wisting suggested, to provoke her in the same way that she had provoked him.

She didn’t take the bait. ‘I’m going to talk to him on Saturday,’ she went on. ‘He lives in Gusland. His parents were from Brunlanes, but moved to Oslo before he was born. His mother died when he was little, but his father moved back and took over the farm from his grandparents while he was serving his first prison sentence. Now he has taken it over.’

‘Are you going alone?’

She nodded. Wisting did not like the thought, but said nothing. He knew he would not be able to persuade her to change her plans.

‘Did you know about it?’ she enquired. ‘That there were two murderers in your district? Age Reinholdt and Ken Ronny Hauge.’

Wisting shook his head. Not two, he thought, thinking of the severed feet. Three.

CHAPTER 13

He didn’t switch on the light, but put on the coffee machine and stood at the window looking down at the square in front of the police station, waiting for the water to run through the filter. He was trying to order his thoughts.

The bulletin about Camilla Thaulow was already prepared and lying on his office desk. The short press release described her, the car in which she had disappeared and the clothes she had been wearing at the time. Dark trousers, white blouse, checked scarf around her neck and a pair of black trainers. A folder of photographs accompanied the report. It had not been easy to find a recent image, as she didn’t have a passport and the photo albums at home had not been updated for many years. One of her work colleagues had, however, found a suitably neutral picture that had been taken at the Christmas dinner the previous year. She neither smiled nor showed other emotions. Her hair was styled in the way that her colleagues said it had been while she worked at the nursing home.

The coffee machine rumbled lightly and emitted hot steam. He filled a cup and returned to the window. The new day was going to be a fine one. Buildings in the town centre twinkled with a brownish-red hue in the morning sunshine and the streets were quiet. One of the council’s cleansing vehicles moved slowly across the grey asphalt. The cup was slightly too hot to hold. He took a careful gulp, moved his hand and carried it to the table, deciding to go through the cases of the two men missing from the nursing home one more time.

Torkel Lauritzen and Otto Saga were both widowers. He would look for people in the circles around them who could tell more about them. The smallest details could turn out to be crucial, but he didn’t find anything that he had overlooked in the files. In the course of the day he would take a trip to the nursing home and look up someone who might know a bit more about the two men.

The morning meeting was short. Most of the time was taken up with a discussion of how the different newspapers had presented the case. All had pictures of training shoes on the front page.
Verdens Gang
had presumably realised that all the editors would go for the same spread, and had sharpened up their coverage with a comment from a well-known television actor who holidayed at a summer cottage in Nevlunghavn. The whole thing was unpleasant.

‘Bloody hell,’ Hammer complained. ‘Not even a murder can be reported without linking it to a celebrity.’

Wisting wound up the meeting and withdrew to his office. Ten minutes went by before he was disturbed by a knock at his door by one of the police guard’s summer temps. Wisting looked at the young man in the doorway. His uniform was clean and newly pressed, his hair cut short and his shoes polished. Wisting wondered if he had any idea how much human tragedy and misery he was going to experience in the years that lay ahead.

‘Yes?’ Wisting said, giving him an obliging smile.

‘There’s a lady downstairs,’ the man said. ‘She says she knows who one of the shoes in the newspaper belongs to.’

Wisting got up. ‘Which of them?’

‘The most recent. The one that was found yesterday.’

Wisting followed the young policeman down to the front desk where a woman in her mid-forties was waiting. She had short, silver-grey hair, was tall and slim and had blue-grey eyes with bags and dark rings beneath them. Wisting shook her hand, but didn’t catch her name. ‘You know something about the shoe that was pictured in the newspaper?’ he began.

‘Yes,’ she said, searching for something in her handbag. ‘I think it belongs to my sister.’ She brought out a picture. ‘Look at this.’

Wisting took it. It was a colour photograph of a woman in a tracksuit, standing in front of an apple tree that was heavy with fruit and wearing a pair of white trainers. Although the details were tiny, he could make out the three black stripes of Adidas.

‘It was taken just before she disappeared,’ the woman explained.

Wisting felt that he did not quite understand. ‘Your sister?’ he asked, hesitantly.

‘Hanne Richter,’ the woman elaborated. ‘She vanished in September last year, at the same time as the old men.’

CHAPTER 14

This was a new situation. They had not viewed the case of Hanne Richter as though it had any connection with the three missing old men who had gone. A psychiatric patient, she had no connections to the other three. The fact that one of the feet belonged to her lifted the investigation onto a completely different level of complication.

Hanne Richter had been reported missing on the 10th September the previous year, but had probably disappeared at some point after the seventh, just a few days after Torkel Lauritzen and Otto Saga, who were reported missing on Monday 1st and Thursday 4th respectively. On Monday 8th, Sverre Lund had been reported missing.

Wisting read her case documents again. A paranoid schizophrenic, when she disappeared she had been in a period of what the doctors described as moderate psychotic disturbance. Her treatment was about regaining self-knowledge and consisted mainly of medication.

He jotted down the name of the psychiatrist who had been treating her so that he could make an appointment, but remained sitting, looking at the picture of Hanne Richter in front of the big apple tree. Her disappearance had led neither to any major search nor headlines in the newspapers. She was simply another unfinished case, yet another unknown fate.

Espen Mortensen popped his head round the door.

‘Just in time,’ Wisting said, grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘I want you to come with me to Hanne Richter’s home.’

‘I’ve got the DNA results from forensics,’ the crime technician explained, holding up the papers. ‘I think we should go over them first.’

Wisting put on his jacket, nodding to indicate that he wanted to hear more.

‘Ok,’ Mortensen continued. ‘The first shoe we found belongs to Torkel Lauritzen. The DNA profile matches the reference sample we got from his son.’

‘Good.’

‘The third shoe we now think belongs to Hanne Richter, and that probably adds up. We don’t have any reference samples, but the gender marker shows that it’s a woman’s. We’ll get that confirmed when the analysis from her sister’s sample is ready.’

‘What about number two?’

‘That has an unknown DNA profile.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The profile of the old head teacher we have from the toothbrush we got from his wife.’

‘Sverre Lund,’ Wisting nodded, glancing at the case file.

‘It’s not his profile, and neither is there any relationship shown to Otto Saga’s daughter.’

Wisting sat down again, unable to keep a tight rein on all these threads. He drew his fingers through his hair and then took the papers from Mortensen, accounts of the methods of analysis and monitoring routines. There were words and expressions he had difficulty understanding, but the conclusion was clear. Only one of the feet they had found belonged to one of the three missing men. ‘Could there be a mistake in the analysis?’ he suggested.

‘I can get them to run the test once more, but I doubt if they’ll come up with a different result.’

‘Let’s do it anyway,’ Wisting requested. ‘For safety’s sake.’

CHAPTER 15

Hanne Richter’s house was situated at the end of a gravel road. Wisting’s car sent dust whirling up that settled on the windscreen as he manoeuvered around the worst of the bumps.

A two-storey wooden house, painted white, sitting on a paved foundation, its decay was evident. Surrounded by a large garden with old fruit trees, with grass grown high and old leaves gathered in small piles, the paint was flaking off its walls, the roof tiles cracked and moss covered. Wisting recognised the tree in front of which Hanne Richter had been photographed. The apples had been harvested long ago, the leaves had fallen and new ones sprouted. Now it stood with new, white apple blossoms.