Closed for Winter (9 page)

‘Where were you yesterday evening and last night?’ Wisting enquired, refusing to go down the conversational route.

With a smile, Thomas Rønningen changed position once more. ‘You would perhaps think I have the best alibi in the world – a million TV viewers, but the truth is that what everybody sees on the screen is a recording. The programme is recorded in the afternoon and broadcast unedited.’

‘So where were you?’

‘At home. Alone.’

‘We’ve been trying to phone you, and even sent a car to your door this morning.’

Thomas Rønningen nodded. ‘I disconnected everything,’ he said. ‘Mobile phone, doorbell, television, everything. I arrived home at about seven o’clock and sat down to write. I kept going until almost five, and then collapsed into bed. When I woke, I switched on my mobile, read my texts and phoned you.’

Wisting considered the possible methods of checking his alibi. If he had been sitting at a computer connected to a home network, data traffic would have been registered. Leaving this aside, he posed several additional routine questions. The hour-long interview gave him a slightly different picture of the man than he had gained from his television persona. There was something feigned and affected about him that did not find its way onto the TV screen.

Interview over, he accompanied his visitor outside, where the illumination from the street lamps was dulled by drizzling rain. ‘Where are you heading now?’ Wisting asked.

Thomas Rønningen pulled up his jacket zip and thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘I was thinking of going out to have a look at the cottage. Do you think I’ll be able to do that?’

‘We still have technicians there. You’ll probably not be allowed in.’

‘I’ll go out anyway, and drive home afterwards.’ They shook hands in farewell. Thomas Rønningen sat in his car and reversed out of the courtyard.

We’re not getting anywhere, Wisting thought, in a sudden attack of pessimism. We are at a standstill, stranded in a total vacuum, and don’t even know what we’re looking for.

At 21.57 Wisting brought their second working day to a close by gathering the detectives for a meeting. Despite his fatigue, he summarised the main features in the case – not fully thought through, but nevertheless weighty.

‘The crime scene!’ he offered as a key word to Espen Mortensen when he concluded his own summary. The crime scene technician switched on the projector.

‘At the moment it’s the footprints that are of most interest,’ he said, showing them photographs of bloody footprints heading towards the exit. The grooves in the tread on the soles were clearly delineated in the angled beam of light. ‘They’re interesting because they’re marked in blood and must be from the last person in the house.’

‘Type of shoe?’

‘We’re working on that, but preliminary findings are that it’s a casual shoe in size 44.’

The next photograph was self-explanatory. Several fingerprints had been found on the doorframes. ‘The victim was wearing gloves, and we don’t know whether they belong to the owner of the cottage or someone on a visit. A search through the records is being conducted.’

A picture of a crumpled cash receipt appeared on the screen. As the ink had run on the wet paper, the letters had blended together and were impossible to decipher. ‘This was found at the side of the path leading to the cottage,’ Mortensen explained. ‘It hasn’t been lying outside for very long, but enough to damage it. I’ve placed it in the vacuum container. Hopefully the text will become clearer once the paper is freeze-dried.’

Nils Hammer tilted his head, squinting at the large picture. ‘I think it says
Hot Dogs
. Probably a receipt from a Statoil petrol station dropped by somebody in the dog patrol.’

His comments unleashed a burst of laughter.

‘How’s the video project progressing?’ Wisting asked.

Hammer lifted his coffee cup. The gathering of CCTV videos was his responsibility. ‘We’re in the process of collecting them all, but it’s a huge task. I’ve been in contact with every petrol station in town to make sure nothing is deleted. Some places have people working who can deal with the CCTV equipment, but in other places they have to wait until somebody competent comes on duty.’ He swallowed a mouthful of coffee. ‘And then things are going slightly more slowly with the toll station project. That’s come to a complete standstill.’

‘Oh?’

‘The vehicle register is down for maintenance and won’t be in service again until tomorrow morning.’

Wisting felt his irritation grow. He had become used to the outdated police data systems causing problems but, now they had reached such a critical point in the investigation, it was difficult to be patient. He progressed the meeting. Torunn Borg had been to Oslo with Benjamin Fjeld. Wisting chose to let the young probationer give an account of their cooperation with the Oslo police.

‘Now at least the body has been safely delivered to Forensics,’ said Fjeld. ‘The post mortem starts early tomorrow, but I don’t think we have great expectations. There was little to obtain from the examination of the vehicle either. There were traces of inflammable liquid, but it doesn’t come as a surprise that the fire was deliberate.’

‘Witnesses?’

‘Nobody other than the hikers who reported it. We’ve spoken to the lab technician who saw the car outside the National Hospital. She can’t tell us any more than that. She saw the car from the side and partly from the rear. She didn’t see who was driving.’

‘Anything new about the driver from the undertakers?’

‘No, and that’s actually quite remarkable. He surely can’t simply vanish.’

‘What are we doing about it?’

‘We’ve contacted his employer and family, and have made a formal missing person report.’

The uncertainty surrounding the driver had created a vague internal ache of unease in Wisting. Something did not add up, but the whole day had been like that. Nothing added up, and their time had been spent searching for the unknown. The best he could hope for now was that both he and the investigators could get a good night’s sleep, and that tomorrow would provide more answers.

Wisting drove through the darkness, his thoughts skipping across the events of the past twenty-four hours like an anchor hauled across a seabed without finding any grip. The tide of reflections withdrew as he approached his house in Stavern. Not until he swung the car to a halt though, did it dawn on him that he ought to phone his daughter. He stayed in the car to call. ‘Hello! How are things going?’

‘Fine, thanks,’ Line answered. ‘Suzanne just phoned to ask the same question. She was hoping you’d be home soon.’

‘I’m on my way into the house at the moment,’ he said, stepping from the car. ‘Was the place really filthy?’

‘Oh no! It smelled a bit stuffy, but now the fragrance of green soap has taken over.’

‘Have you spoken to Tommy?’

‘Yes, he phoned earlier.’

‘What did he want?’

‘I don’t think he knows what he wants.’

‘When do you go back to work?’

‘Next Monday, but I’ve a few more days holiday owing.’

Wisting entered his house. ‘Just phone if you need anything,’ he said.

Suzanne met him in the hallway. ‘Was that Line?’

‘Yes.’

‘I just spoke to her. We had a good chat, but I felt she was holding something back. I think she misses her mother.’

Wisting exhaled heavily. He missed Ingrid too, but said nothing to Suzanne. Instead he gave her a kiss and whispered in her ear: ‘I’m happy I have you.’

There was room for two women in his life, as he had discovered. They were not to be compared though, and love for one in a way overlapped his love for the other. Ingrid, as the mother of his children, would always be the more significant.

They sat in the living room, where Suzanne had been reading. A book lay on the table, page down and spine upwards, that had belonged to Ingrid, taken from the bookcase upstairs.

‘How’s the case progressing?’ Suzanne asked.

Wisting shrugged his shoulders. ‘We’ve still a long way to go before we have a breakthrough, but you never know. Something could happen all of a sudden.’

Suzanne tucked her feet underneath herself on the settee. ‘Are you not scared?’ she asked.

‘Of what?’

‘Of the unknown. What you don’t know, lying in wait for you.’

Wisting appreciated Suzanne’s interest in his work. ‘It doesn’t frighten me. I think it’s probably the opposite. Not knowing drives me on.’

Suzanne appeared pensive and Wisting, lacking energy for a serious discussion, changed the subject. ‘What were you thinking about?’ he asked.

‘When?’

‘When you were raking the leaves. You said you enjoyed going out to have a think.’

She laughed, as though embarrassed to share her thoughts with him. ‘I was thinking of a name,’ she responded.

Wisting did not immediately understand what she meant, but then it dawned. Only twenty-four hours earlier, they had been sitting in this same spot and Suzanne had been talking about resigning from her administrative post and opening an art café. ‘For the restaurant?’

She nodded.

‘Let me hear then!’

She hesitated slightly before announcing,
‘The Golden Peace.’

Wisting turned the name over in his head. ‘Excellent choice for an art café! When does it open?’

‘It probably won’t come to anything.’

‘What’s holding you back? Are you afraid of the unknown?’

‘Perhaps that’s what it is, the insecurity. It’s not exactly a secure business, after all. It feels safer to sit in an office as an administrator, with a fixed salary.’

Wisting studied her. She had experienced war and fled as a refugee to a foreign country. She had sought out new challenges through education and employment. They had been plentiful, and seldom had she known the answers in advance. It was difficult to understand how such factors about insecurity could hold her back.

‘Where would we be if we knew everything that lay ahead?’ he asked. ‘There would be nothing left. Hope and faith and dreams would all be worth nothing. I think you should go ahead. Think about how good it would be – I’d be able to have my own regular table.’

Laughter lines spread across her face and she chuckled as she stood up. ‘Now we must get to bed,’ she said.

Wisting followed her to the bathroom and ten minutes later was laying his head on the pillow. He had a strong sense of disquiet about what the next day had in store.

Line slammed the cottage door behind her. She did not usually rise so early, at least not when she had a day off, but had wakened an hour earlier and been unable to get back to sleep. Tying her scarf around the collar of her jacket, she turned into the wind and descended from the verandah onto the coastal path.

Sheets of rain and ragged clouds hung in the lowering, dismal sky. The wind had freshened during the night, dissipating the fog, though it left the air damp and cold.

The previous evening, she had written seven pages of her crime novel. She had thought from time to time that it would be fun to use her writing skills for something more than newspaper articles and in-depth interviews. She had technical competence as a writer, and had gained a great deal of knowledge about police work and investigation from her father. Thoughts of a crime novel naturally followed.

It had started as a game. She brought a fictional protagonist to life, endowing her with personal qualities and outward appearance, set her in a time and place, and sketched out her surroundings. After seven pages though, she had dried up, and when she read those seven pages she thought that much of it was good, but lacked form and direction.

She had considered how to build her narrative while cleaning the kitchen cupboards, but then thoughts kept buzzing around her head and she was too tired to put them in order. The flood of ideas had disturbed her sleep, and that was why she had wakened early. Also, too many unresolved emotions jangled inside, preventing her from focusing properly, and her thoughts returned to Tommy.

For breakfast she ate two slices of crispbread and drank a cup of coffee, and then decided to take a long walk and let her thoughts wander.

She was alone, with the cold and uninviting coast before her, surf breaking over rocks and underwater reefs. On the steely horizon, a cargo ship was heading westwards. The cries of seagulls sounded like teasing laughter on the wind. They looked beautiful from a distance, graceful to watch, but she knew they would eat anything and that made her think of them as filthy scavengers, full of parasites.

The coastline alternated between pebble beaches, rocky slopes and wind-blasted woodland. Line rambled along the path between dog rose and blackthorn bushes until it petered out in the bare hillside.

Inside a cove, a flock of gulls thronged in the air above an abandoned rowing boat, the birds swooping around it, fighting over something lying on board, wrestling with their wings and tugging at the same scraps. The unsuccessful ones pecked at the more fortunate, forcing those that were too small or too weak to release their spoils. The strongest birds bolted down their loot to become even stronger.

The path brought her close to the boat, scaring off the gulls. It was a strange place to tie up, she thought. The little craft must have come adrift somewhere and been washed ashore. Now it was beached and scraped against the large, round pebbles.

She froze; someone was on board. A man was sitting on the bottom partly supported by the stern crossbench, with his head upturned. His eyes had been pecked out and his mouth was gaping.

The first phone call arrived while Wisting stood beside the kitchen worktop in the conference room, filling his cup with coffee. The caller’s name was Leif Malm, leader of the intelligence section in Oslo police district. ‘We have information,’ he said.

Wisting strode towards his office, his mobile phone at his ear.

‘An informant has told us about a narcotics delivery that should have arrived by sea from Denmark on Friday evening. The cargo should have been shipped in near Helgeroa but something went wrong. The main man is said to have suffered a loss of several million kroner and one of his men was killed in a shooting incident.’

This sounded like a breakthrough. Wisting sat down. ‘Do we know the identity of the main guy?’

‘He’s Rudi Muller, one of the big fish at the centre of a major network that deals in weapons, narcotics and prostitution.’

Wisting nodded. Muller’s was a familiar name from many intelligence reports. ‘Was he here himself?’

‘No, two men drove down to collect the cargo. We haven’t identified them yet.’

‘Do we know what went wrong?’

‘Apparently this was a regular arrangement over the past six months; ten kilos of cocaine every third week. Someone got wind of it and there was a raid.’

Wisting scribbled keywords on his notepad. ‘Can we arrange a meeting?’

‘I think we should,’ Leif Malm replied. ‘We‘re meeting our source at eleven o’clock, and can come down to see you after that. Maybe we’ll know more by then.’

They wrapped up their conversation. Wisting was unsure what this implied, but he was suddenly tense. They were on the track of something.

There was another half hour before the regular morning meeting. He could already hear a few of the detectives in the corridor and was looking forward to telling them about this new development when the phone rang again. This time it was Line. Before she uttered a word he could sense that something was wrong. ‘I’ve found a dead man,’ she said.

He heard what she said, but nevertheless asked her to repeat it. ‘I’m out for a walk,’ she explained. ‘There’s a dead man in a boat. I think he’s drifted ashore.’

‘Are you certain he’s dead?’

‘The seagulls have pecked out his eyes.’

Wisting controlled his voice with an effort. ‘Tell me exactly where you are.’

A chart lay in front of him with Thomas Rønningen’s cottage marked. Drawing it towards him, he scrutinised it closely while Line explained. The discovery site was situated directly west of the camping grounds at Oddane Sand. Only Havnebukta with the skerries of Råholmen and Bramskjæra separated this place from Friday’s crime scene. ‘Okay. Stay there,’ he instructed. ‘We’re on our way.’

He felt almost ill. Line was alone there and it was not safe now, not safe at all.