Closed for Winter (13 page)

A man stood on the wide verandah with his hands cupped on the living room window, peering inside. Only when she approached more closely did she see it was her father.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I wanted to see how you were getting on.’

‘At nine o’clock on a Monday morning?’

‘I was in the vicinity.’

‘This isn’t in the vicinity of anywhere,’ she commented, turning to face the bitter wind. It buffeted her hair back from her face.

‘The crime scene’s not so far away,’ he explained, following her into the cottage. ‘I want to talk to Thomas Rønningen.’

Line unhooked her camera bag from her shoulder. ‘Have you released the crime scene?’

‘Yes, we finished there yesterday evening. I can’t get hold of him by phone, so I thought I’d take a trip out to see if he’s at his cottage.’

‘Has he not made a statement?’

‘Oh yes, but I’ve a few supplementary questions. A few details need to be set straight.’

Line wanted to ask more, but decided to let it drop.

‘I haven’t been here for years,’ her father remarked as he surveyed the room. ‘It’s very pleasant.’

‘I’m happy with it.’ She crossed to the kitchen worktop to fill the kettle. ‘Would you like a cup?’

‘Yes, please,’ he replied.

Her father made a tour of the house, checking room after room, before sitting at the table in front of the large window. ‘You shouldn’t leave your computer like that,’ he said. ‘It’s easily seen from outside. Tempting for burglars.’

‘You’re right,’ she answered. ‘I’m relieved I wasn’t here on Friday night, when everything happened.’

Her father picked up the business card Benjamin Fjeld had left. ‘Did you go straight home after dinner on Friday?’

‘Yes, I did some shopping before going home to watch Rønningen on TV.’

‘Did you have your car?’

‘No, I took the tram. It’s much easier.’ She sat down to wait for the water to boil. ‘Tommy had the car.’

‘Why didn’t he come and eat with us?’

‘I don’t know. He said something about a meeting with some Danes who were going to open a restaurant. I wasn’t really interested. It suited me just as well that he didn’t come. I’d already decided to finish with him.’

Her father replaced the young policeman’s card on the table. ‘When did you tell him?’

‘When he came home. I sat up waiting but he didn’t arrive until almost four in the morning. By that time I had fallen asleep on the settee. We had a brief conversation and he disappeared again. I went to bed.’

‘Did he go out in the middle of the night?’

Line did not understand her father’s intense interest in Tommy. There was concern in the tone of his voice, but his questions seemed to be heading towards a definite goal. He was weaving an invisible web.

The kettle was boiling, so she rose from her seat. ‘He went out. That was after I told him I was coming home for a few days, and he’d to pack his belongings and find another place to live before I returned.’

‘Do you think he’s met someone else?’ her father asked, accepting the cup she handed him.

Line sat down again. She hadn’t wanted to think about that since it involved betrayal and deception, but it was an obvious conclusion. Many of Tommy’s explanations about why he could not be at home or with her were just too blatant.

‘That may turn out to be the case,’ she said, tucking her feet underneath herself on the chair. ‘But at the moment I couldn’t care less. I’m just glad it’s over.’

She wanted to change the subject and was going to tell him about the little hiding place someone had built on the steep outcrop, but her father spoke first. ‘Is there a lot needing done here? It looks as though some of the timber is pretty dry.’

‘Yes, it will probably have to be treated this summer,’ she replied. ‘I was thinking I could do some painting inside as well. Brighten the place up.’

‘I can take care of the outside. You can fix things up inside, if you like,’ her father suggested.

They sat talking about the things needing done, and how wonderful the summer was going to be at the mouth of the fjord, before her father stood up. He had to move on.

A sizeable bonfire was ablaze on the muddy, well-trodden area in front of Thomas Rønningen’s cottage. Two men in joiners’ overalls each carried a bundle of wooden planks in their arms that they threw on the flames. Wisting could feel the heat all the way to the walls of the cottage. All the bloody flooring in the outer hallway had been removed, as well as the walls, front door and splintered doorframe.

Wisting asked for Rønningen, but neither of the joiners had seen him. He dialled the number he had stored on his mobile, and this time received an immediate answer. ‘Is there any news?’ the TV host asked.

‘I’m at your cottage,’ Wisting explained. ‘The joiners are keeping busy.’

‘That’s good. The insurance company agreed I could rip it all out.’

‘Are you back in Oslo?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I’ve a few more questions, and we need to take your fingerprints.’

‘I see. I’ll be able to come down, but it will be late this afternoon,’ Thomas Rønningen said, suggesting a time.

They made an appointment and Wisting replaced his phone in his jacket pocket. A flock of black birds wheeled above a plateau in the dense woodland. Like him, he thought, they were searching.

Instead of walking up to his car, he followed the path eastwards to the nearest cottage. Thick black smoke rose from the chimney, where it was dispersed by the wind.

Wisting had read Jostein Hammersnes’s statement to Benjamin Fjeld, describing how he travelled to his cottage on Friday evening, as he had done every weekend since the summer. Until the divorce settlement was finalised, he still lived under the same roof as his wife and two daughters, aged seven and nine, in a villa in Bærum. The weekends had become long and difficult, and he preferred to spend them on his own at the cottage.

The written statement did not contain any information about his short visit to the petrol station at the exit road for Larvik. It was probably a detail he considered insignificant, as indeed it was. The receipt found on the path below the parking place had turned out to be a dead end.

Wisting recognised the man from the CCTV footage when he opened the door to invite him in. He was wearing different clothes now: a loose-fitting pair of jogging trousers and chunky sweater. The cottage had probably belonged to Jostein Hammersnes’ family for generations and never been modernised. The living room was decorated in rustic style with bell pulls and old copper kitchen utensils hanging on the walls. The damp air was filled with a strange, pungent odour, which Wisting could not identify.

Jostein Hammersnes crossed to the open fireplace where he rummaged in the embers, reinvigorating the flames before putting on two logs.

Wisting sat down at a long pine table with newspapers from the past few days spread over its surface, one of them opened at an article illustrated by a photograph of Christine Thiis. ‘Haven’t you gone back to work?’ he enquired.

Jostein Hammersnes sat opposite. ‘I would have liked to be somewhere else, but it’s autumn half-term holiday and my wife, or former wife, is a teacher. We’ve just separated but are still living under the same roof. It’s unbearable to be bumping into each other all the time. Anyway, I can get most things done from here using broadband. I usually like being out here, but the enjoyment has gone.’

‘Why is that?’

‘The physical damage from the burglary is not too great, but the thought that there’s been somebody here is almost intolerable. It overshadows all the happy memories I have of Else here with the children, and from the time when I was little. Now I’m not bothered that the cottage has to be sold to finalise the divorce settlement.’

Jostein Hammersnes avoided Wisting’s gaze by lowering his eyes and staring at the tabletop. When he looked up again, they were shining. ‘It’s empty here,’ he said wearily. He glanced past Wisting, towards a shelf on the panel wall, where a pale area revealed that something had been on display.

‘They even took my glass ornament,’ he said, crossing to the bare spot. ‘I got it from my father the summer of my eighth birthday, after I succeeded in swimming across the inlet.’ He moved his head in the direction of the sea.

‘It’s the only prize I ever won. I was a good swimmer, but I’ve never been involved in any kind of sport. My father was a glass craftsman. He had his own workshop at home in Høvik. I could sit for hours watching how he transformed molten, red-hot glass into the most beautiful shapes. That ornament was one of the loveliest things he ever made. He treated glass as if it were a precious metal, melted it, shaped, ground and polished it with love and care. When he gave it to me, he said that I could collect all my dreams in it. Fill it with my thoughts and hopes, without it ever becoming full or running over. Now it’s gone.’

Wisting allowed the owner of the cottage to express the feelings he was nursing before making a start. ‘Did you stop anywhere before you arrived at the cottage?’

‘I dropped into the
Meny
shop at Holmen and did some shopping. I’d done my packing in the morning and worked a few hours overtime before I set out.’

‘Did you make any other stops? At a petrol station for instance?’

‘Yes. I stopped at an Esso station when I left the motorway.’

‘Why was that?’

‘I usually stop and buy some takeaway food. That way I avoid having to make anything myself.’

‘What did you buy?’

‘A hotdog, and a box of pastilles. Is this important? The policeman who spoke to me on Saturday didn’t go into so much detail.’

‘It wasn’t important in the beginning, but we found an Esso receipt on the path out here,’ Wisting said. ‘There was a possibility it had been dropped by either the perpetrator or the victim, or there could be a third, simple explanation.’

He went through the rest of the man’s statement, trying to make him recall whether he had passed any vehicles along the road or heard any sounds that might be connected to the burglaries or the murder. In the end he had to admit that Hammersnes had nothing to contribute. When they concluded their conversation, the flames in the hearth had died. Wisting rose to his feet and thanked the man for his time.

‘I’ll come out with you,’ Hammersnes said. ‘I need some air.’

Two pairs of girls’ light summer shoes were lined up beside Hammersnes’ big Wellington boots in the hallway. Wisting thought of how the girls would no longer be able to run over the rocks or paddle at the edge of the sea once the cottage was sold. A stroke of the pen by their intransigent parents wiped out future summer memories.

Hammersnes pulled on his boots and followed Wisting out. They trudged together partway along the path without uttering a word, until Wisting broke away and ascended to his car.

A magazine lay open in the conference room. Someone had acquired the summer edition of
Se og Hør
with the report about Thomas Rønningen’s cottage. In the largest photograph, Thomas Rønningen was sitting closest to the camera, at the end of a long table laden with prawns and crabs. His guests were drinking white wine against a backdrop of blue sky.
Summer Idyll in Vestfold
was the caption.

Thomas Rønningen showed the readers around his cottage, room by room. In one of the pictures, he sat in a deep armchair in front of an abundantly filled bookcase, flicking through a crime novel. The article related that Rønningen was engaged in a book project, the theme and contents of which were secret.

The famous TV host enjoyed having visitors at his summer paradise, the report explained, rattling off a list of names almost identical to the list he had given Wisting.

Wisting read through half the report before being interrupted by his phone. It was Leif Malm from the intelligence section of Oslo Police. ‘The surveillance team has lost Rudi Muller,’ Malm said. ‘He left home half an hour ago, much earlier than usual, and so we were short staffed. He called into
Deli de Luca
in Bogstadveien before continuing towards the centre. They lost him at the National Theatre.’

‘Do you know where he was going?’

‘No, we haven’t picked up anything in particular on the
KK
, so he hasn’t talked about it on the phone.’

KK
was the abbreviation in use for
Kommunikasjonskontroll
, meaning that the police listened in to all forms of communication a person had either by phone or via the Internet. One of the hidden methods of investigation, it was used mostly in the fight against serious organised crime, but was not as effective as they wished. The real candidates for this form of surveillance were aware of the interest and spoke in pre-arranged codes using keywords, and then only to arrange times and places.

‘It’s possible he has a mobile number and phone we don’t know about,’ Leif Malm continued. ‘We’re covering both his flat and
Shazam Station
.’

‘What about the internet?’

‘He’s reading more or less everything the online newspapers have written about the case. There’s one thing that supports our suspicion that he was involved in the incident with the hearse. He’s spent a long time looking at pages dealing with fires and incineration. The one he has spent most time on describes fires and arson and the injuries caused by the effects of heat. The search words indicate he is interested in how lengthy and intense the heat must be in order to incinerate an entire body, and what possibilities exist to identify a charred body from dental records and DNA.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Yes, it could be valuable evidence if we eventually reveal the communications surveillance,’ Leif Malm agreed.

‘Has the informant come up with anything else?’

‘No. There was no meeting between him and Rudi yesterday. It may be that he’s getting cold feet and wants to pull out.’

‘That mustn’t happen,’ Wisting said. ‘We need him.’

‘Petter is encouraging him.’

‘What’s his motivation, really? Why has he put himself in such a dangerous position?’

For a moment there was silence. The use of police informants was demanding and could eventually turn out to be a game in which the police were simply pawns. The person who gave the police information often had his own personal motives: possibly revenge, possibly ambition within the criminal circle. It was a dangerous game, where the stakes were life-threateningly high. Therefore only an extremely restricted number of investigators knew the identity of any source.

‘That’s our business.’

Wisting considered asking whether they had taken into account that the source might have an interest in shifting their focus, that giving information to the police might involve moving suspicion away from himself and onto a trustworthy third person. He decided to let it lie, reassuring himself that Leif Malm and his officers were specially schooled in handling informants.

‘I see the pilots of the police helicopters are denying their responsibility for the deaths of the birds,’ Malm said. ‘They’re even writing about it in American newspapers. Rudi Muller is preoccupied by that as well. He’s reading everything that appears about it on the net.’

‘I’m relying on you to keep me informed,’ Wisting said, returning to the point. He rounded off the conversation with a feeling that Malm was holding something back.

He stood by the window. The rain had started again, an impenetrable fine drizzle that made the town and landscape even greyer than before.

A broad-winged bird flew from a crack in the chimney on the old factory building beside the police station. It circled and squawked hoarsely before gliding in soundless flight over the rooftops and out of sight. At once Wisting felt an internal chill, as though the temperature in the room had fallen by several degrees. The unpleasant sensation crept down his spine and across his fingers. His hands became clammy, his heart was racing and his mouth became dry.

The cold is not inside the room, but inside me, he thought, and shrugged it off.