The Caveman (15 page)

A deafening silence filled the conference room. Donald Baker’s words still hung in the air, creating a collective anxiety and a tension no one wanted to break.

Wisting felt the skin on his face turn cold. The case they were working on had grown to undreamed-of proportions. He did not know why the thought had not struck him previously, but if a serial murderer from the USA had been living in Norway for more than twenty years, there was no reason he would not have continued to kill.

The idea made his hands sweaty, and perspiration formed along his hairline. He could not think of any missing women in his own area, but a missing person case in Porsgrunn a couple of years earlier had received a great deal of media attention, and never been solved. The same applied to a case in Kristiansand in which a young girl was last seen at the verge beside the zoo, hitching a lift. And then there was the Diana case in Drammen, and at least a couple of cases in Oslo. Only accounting for cases he recalled from newspaper coverage, he was able to count five young women.

Clearing his throat, he addressed the FBI agent in the dark suit. ‘What is it you see in the pictures? What is it we’ve overlooked?’

‘The well,’ Donald Baker answered.

Wisting looked at the screen again. In the centre of the picture there was a round, paved area.

‘Several of Robert Godwin’s victims were found on deserted farms like these,’ Baker said. ‘At the bottom of disused wells.’

Wisting picked up the sheaf of papers, copies of the American case documents. ‘It says here the women were found in ditches, that he picked up hitchhikers along the highways and dumped them afterwards.’

‘Those are the earlier cases. The ones that gave us the DNA evidence. Later, he got smarter and hid his victims. Seventeen women were found in wells and similar hiding places. One of them was found after a few days. Our technicians found Godwin’s DNA on her, but we haven’t been able to link him conclusively to the sixteen others. They are listed only as possible victims.’

‘Show us the two other places,’ Wisting said, looking at the screen.

Espen Mortensen clicked through the images until he reached an area where there were no buildings, only an open field with a tractor track between the trees.

‘Look at that!’ Nils Hammer said, pointing at a circular concrete slab protruding from the grass at the outer edge of the field. ‘That’s a soil irrigation tank or something like that.’

The third place where Bob Crabb had taken pictures was also an abandoned smallholding, a white farmhouse and grey barn among slender birch trees. To the left of the barn, an old-fashioned, pyramid-shaped well cover was visible.

‘Bob Crabb must have surveyed all the old wells in the area,’ Mortensen said.

‘How far have we come with finding where these places are?’

‘Benjamin’s working on it,’ Torunn Borg said. ‘He’s been speaking to various people with local knowledge all day long, but I don’t think it’s brought any results.’

Leif Malm of
Kripos
had kept quiet throughout the meeting, until now. ‘I can have a list of missing women ready some time tonight,’ he said. ‘The question is what parameters we should set as far as age and geography are concerned.’

‘With us he operated across five adjoining States,’ John Bantam said. ‘An area with a circumference of more than three thousand kilometres.’

‘Everything south of Trondheim,’ Wisting decided.

Christine Thiis coughed. ‘How many might we be talking about?’

Leif Malm stared into space, in the direction of the window and the darkness outside. ‘Over a period of twenty years,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘around five hundred in total in all of Norway. Mostly in the south-east, and mostly men. I would think we’ll end up with a list in the region of one hundred women who cannot be accounted for.’

‘A hundred?’

‘Of course, that could be pared down. Some were lost at sea, others on walking trips in the mountains. Some will be mentally ill people missing from institutions, and some have left suicide notes. Perhaps we’ll be left with a total of fifty missing without trace.’

Donald Baker sat up straight. ‘Follow the main roads,’ he said. ‘Robert Godwin found his victims along the Interstate Highway. You need to look for young women who disappeared along the motorways or close by.’ He turned and pointed at the picture on the screen. ‘Because as soon as you find out where this is, you’re going to start finding bodies.’

The padlock did not give way at the first blow. Line raised the hefty spanner once more and hit it again with force so that it burst open and was left dangling from the hasp. She unhooked it and opened the door. Light spilled onto a pile of boxes stacked on the concrete floor.

She groped her way to a wall switch to turn on the bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling. It afforded only a dim glow that did not reach as far as the corners. The storeroom was almost empty but, in addition to three cardboard boxes on the floor, there was an old cardboard suitcase with metal fittings and some clothes hanging from pegs along one wall. Everything was covered in dust.

Line pulled one of the boxes into the light and opened it to find ring binders with the name Gustav Hansen written on the spines. She picked up one and leafed through the papers: various letters and documents from
Bergenshalvøens Kommunale Kraftselskap
, a Bergen power company, dating from the fifties, another binder marked
Bergsdalsvassdraget,
a water course in Hordaland, containing a number of technical specifications and working diagrams.

Documents left behind by his father, Line thought, finding a folder held closed by an elastic band at the bottom of the box. She released the elastic and opened the file, a bundle of old newspaper cuttings. The top one was from
Bergens Tidende
and dated 27th June 1960.
Safe blown at Bergen post office
was the headline.

Line lifted the dry sheet of newsprint and read:
Around three o’clock last night, a safe-blower succeeded in blowing a safe at Bergen central post office in Småstrandgaten. People living in the vicinity were woken by the explosion, and a taxi driver saw the man at close quarters as he disappeared in the direction of Rådstuplassen. The safe-blower entered the post office premises with the aid of a ladder propped up against the wall of the building where a window on the first floor was broken into. It is feared that a considerable sum of money may have been stolen, and nervous post office officials anxiously await the crime scene experts finishing their work so that they can count what is left
.

The next clipping was dated two days later:
Safe-blower got away with 175,000 kroner
was the caption extending across four columns.

The man who blew the safe at the central post office in Småstrandgaten on Sunday night struck at a time when the cash stored there was at its maximum, Postmaster Kåre Palmer Holm informed Bergens Tidende. Record proceeds of around 175,000 kroner
.

Next day, the newspaper was able to report that the safe-blower had been arrested.

Police have arrested a man from Eastern Norway suspected of blowing the safe at the central post office on Sunday night and stealing the contents, a total of 175,000 kroner. The man was arrested at a workers’ barracks in Masfjorden where he worked on the construction of the Matrevassdraget hydro-electric power station
.

175,000 kroner, Line mused. How much would that be in today’s money? Around two million?

There were several news cuttings.

Safe
-blower refuses to talk to police
, was the next headline. The article went on to explain how the man denied having anything to do with the crime and refused several times to be questioned.

In another cutting, Police Inspector Brinchmann gave details of the evidence police had amassed against the man from Eastern Norway. They had found traces of powder from the fire retardant insulation material in the safe on his clothing, and he could be linked to the theft of dynamite from the construction site where he was employed. Witnesses at his workplace testified that he had been off site in a work vehicle on the night in question.

Money vanished without trace
was the newspaper’s claim on the day before his trial commenced at Bergen City Court.

The final cutting was an account of the court case at which Gustav Hansen was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for three years and ten months:
As aggravating factors in this case, the unanimous judgment of the court has noted that there is no doubt that the accused methodically strove to become proficient as a safe-blower, the considerable sum of cash that was stolen, and that the accused has not shown any willingness to cooperate with the police investigation or to assist with the recovery of the stolen money
.

Returning the newspaper cuttings to the folder, Line closed it and put the elastic band back in place.

Family secrets, she thought. This must have been difficult to bear. The day his father was arrested must have been a fateful moment in Viggo Hansen’s life. It can never have been the same again.

She put everything back and investigated the other two boxes: shirts, ties, a pair of suit trousers, a jacket and highly polished shoes in one and work clothes in the other.

Reinforced at the corners, the suitcase had two catches and a leather handle. She pushed the catches aside and opened them to find it half-filled with old framed photographs, a few gramophone records, a couple of books, a thick, brown envelope and a bundle of yellowed letters tied together with a length of tattered string.

A sheet of paper lay on top. Line unfolded it and found that it was a death certificate for Gustav Hansen, born 19th October 1928. Time of death was 24th May 1969 at around 05.00. The cause of death was given as
intentional self-harm, death by hanging
.

Line let the hand holding the yellow paper rest on her lap as she looked around the room. What was left of Gustav Hansen was hoarded here, she reflected. It did not take up much space, but had been placed here and the door closed and locked. A shelf unit had been installed in front of the door as if the surviving members of the family did not want to be reminded of him.

She put the death certificate on the floor beside her as she looked through the rest of the suitcase contents.

There were old photographs. One of them showed a family gathered around a settee, and others depicted four men and two women, all with solemn and serious expressions. From the clothes, the pictures appeared to have been taken around the turn of the last century. Line turned them over, but found nothing written on the back. No dates or names.

On the sleeves of the old LP records by artistes such as Bill Haley and his Comets, Pat Boone, Nat King Cole and Elvis Presley, Gustav Hansen had written his name in the lower right-hand corner. Musicians whose music was still played on the radio, but whose heyday had been in the fifties, when Viggo Hansen’s father was young.

Line lifted one of the books.
Owls to Athens
by Herman Wildenvey, published in 1953. There was a dedication on the flyleaf:
To Gustav Hansen on 19
th October 1953. Best Wishes, Herman Wildenvey.
A birthday present.

There were a number of poetry collections, by André Bjerke, Gunnar Reiss-Andersen and Tarjei Vesaas. Line stacked them on the floor beside the suitcase and lifted the bundle of letters. Without removing the string, she understood that these were letters Gustav Hansen had sent to his wife from prison. She put them aside.

The brown envelope contained old printed letters and documents with Gothic script. A faded postcard showed a steamship tied up in port,
DS Norge
emblazoned in large white letters on the prow. The card had been sent to Anna Sofie Nielsen, Manvik, Brunlanæs and was dated 26th April 1889. The florid handwriting was difficult to decipher, but was addressed to
Dear mother
, and said something about it being difficult to say a final farewell, and that the next stop was America. The card was signed
Your Hans
.

More letters followed in which Hans wrote of fertile fields, good crops, streets with electric light and test drives in swanky motor cars. Hans Gustav Nielsen settled in the Midwest, met a woman who had emigrated from Western Norway, married and had several children with her.

Another document, a family tree, showed how Hans Gustav Nielsen was the brother of Viggo Hansen’s great-grandfather. All the members of his family were included there, packed away in the old suitcase.

Line sat in the dim light with the family tree chart in her hand as a new possibility opened. Viggo Hansen might have relatives.

A set of old police documents in a transparent plastic folder sat in the middle of Wisting’s desk when he returned to his office. Bjørg Karin had written on a yellow post-it note that she hoped this was what Line needed.

He drew the papers out of the folder. The top sheet was from a typewritten duty record: 24th May 1969 at 07.48, a message had come from the on-call doctor requesting police attendance at Herman Wildenveys gate 4. Solveig Hansen had found her husband hanging in the basement. The responding patrol reported that Dr. Gravdahl had declared forty-one-year-old Gustav Hansen dead at the scene. There was also a correction recorded to the on-call doctor’s report. Nineteen-year-old son Viggo Hansen had found his father dead in a basement storeroom. Report from Police Officer Thorsen.

The report was enclosed with a copy of the death certificate and amounted to only three-quarters of a page. Gustav Hansen had hanged himself from an exposed sewage pipe in a basement storeroom. The ceiling was low, so the suicide had been accomplished by the deceased leaning forward in a kneeling position. The man’s extreme determination to carry this through was reinforced by his wife’s statement that her husband had been very depressed because he was now unemployed after working on the building of a power station in Western Norway on a lengthy contract.

No photographs were included in the folder but, forty years ago, it was not common to make use of photographic material in such cases.

Wisting gathered the documents and placed them at the corner of his desk. Even greater tragedies, recorded in even shorter reports, were stored in the historical archives. He held that thought for some time.

‘Of course,’ he muttered irritably.

He activated his computer and clicked into the folder of Bob Crabb’s photographs, browsing through them until he found what he was looking for, double-clicked and let the farmyard well in front of the ramshackle farmhouse fill the screen. Now that he knew what might be at the bottom it drew his attention, but of more interest was the barn in the background that had been destroyed by fire. Probably the homestead had been abandoned before the fire, but it must have been serious, leading to attendance by the police and fire service.

They did not have many fires of such proportions in this area, barely one or two per year. Somewhere in the historical archives there had to be a report describing the scale, damage and possibly even the cause.

He looked again at the picture. It looked as if vegetation had completely taken over. It must be at least ten years since the fire.

He opened the computer program for processing criminal case files. Designed not only to identify quickly where in the system a case was located, it also allowed extraction of statistics and analysis. To learn how many cars had been stolen in the police district in the previous year, it was a simple matter of filling in the type of crime and the time period in the search fields. The result could be broken down into areas of the town and even street and on what day of the week or time of day. Thus the volume of cases could also become a management tool the police could utilise to target intervention.

Wisting was not trained in its use. He keyed in a time interval between 1989, the year Robert Godwin went on the run from the USA, and an end date of 2005. The problem was that fires were entered in the statistics in many different ways, depending upon the cause of the fire and extent of the damage. In addition, some fires were registered as cases under investigation in the same way that a single death could be registered, to establish whether grounds existed to suspect a crime.

The computer froze before finally coming up with 1,132 results. Everything from fires in refuse bins and cars to fires in detached houses and schools. Too much. He leaned back, deciding on a different approach. Finn Haber had been crime scene technician and fire investigator at the station until his retirement. Wisting had his number stored. He took out his mobile and called.

The voice that answered was calm and steady, as it had always been, even when Wisting had called him at night to scenes of the most dreadful crimes. ‘I need your help,’ he said after exchanging a few pleasantries. ‘And I can’t explain why.’

‘With what?’

‘I’m sitting here with a photo taken some time during the summer. We’re trying to find out where it was taken.’

‘Have you asked the person who took it?’

‘He’s dead.’

There was a moment’s silence before Finn Haber continued. ‘What makes you think I can contribute something?’

‘It’s a picture of an old smallholding with the barn burned to the ground. I thought it might have been a place where you had worked.’

‘I’d really have to see the picture,’ Haber said. ‘Or is it so secret that’s not possible?’

‘I can send it to you via my phone.’

‘Go ahead,’ Haber replied, hanging up without another word.

Wisting held his mobile phone in front of his computer screen and took a photograph of the image. The result was surprisingly good. He fumbled with the keys and managed to send the photo as an attachment to a text. Ten seconds later, Haber called back.

‘Hagatun,’ he said. ‘Abandoned in the seventies, it has stood empty ever since. Burned down in August 2000. Children playing with matches, apparently. There was no electricity supply, and no other obvious reason.’

Wisting remembered the case now. Two small boys from one of the neighbouring farms had been brought in for questioning, but denied having anything to do with the blaze.

‘There’s an overgrown track leading to it directly opposite the old Tanum school,’ Haber continued. ‘It might be difficult to reach after the last snowfall.’

Wisting took a map from his desk drawer and unfolded it. Two large and three smaller buildings were shown on the site. The place was surrounded by forest.

‘Good luck, whatever you plan,’ Haber concluded. ‘And have a good Christmas when it comes.’

‘Merry Christmas to you too,’ Wisting said, ‘and thanks for your help.’

He hung up as Benjamin Fjeld entered the office, immediately followed by Nils Hammer. ‘I think I’ve located one of the places,’ Fjeld said, laying the picture of the abandoned smallholding on the desk before Wisting.

Wisting looked from the photograph to the same image on his computer screen. ‘Hagatun,’ he said.

The young detective opened his mouth but did not say a word. Hammer showed his teeth in a broad grin.

‘I found out just two minutes ago,’ Wisting said, recounting his conversation with Finn Haber.

‘What do you want me to do now?’ Fjeld asked. ‘Continue with the local history society and that sort of thing?’

Wisting thought about it. The information embedded in the digital files implied that all the photographs were taken on the same day within a time period of less than two hours. The farm was impossible to access by car, as the road did not go as far as that. This meant that the photographer had probably not travelled very far and that the other locations in the photographs had to be in the vicinity. ‘Concentrate on the landowners in that area,’ he said, drawing a wide circle round Hagatun on the map.

Fjeld nodded and left the room.

‘He deserved a little praise,’ Hammer remarked, sliding his snuffbox from his pocket.

Wisting gave a brief nod. He was not good at praising the investigators when they had done an outstanding job although, as leader of the investigation, it fell to him to maintain the enthusiasm and commitment of the team.

Wisting leaned back in his chair. ‘Can you take responsibility for this?’

‘What do you mean?’

Wisting waited until Hammer had placed the pinch of snuff behind his top lip. ‘I want you to think of a plan to get into that farmyard and empty the well,’ he said. ‘Without anyone knowing a police operation has been instigated.’