Dregs (26 page)

‘I mean the actual banknotes,’ Wisting elaborated. There were always fingerprints on banknotes, and if they were talking about money that had been out of circulation for a long time, it might be easier to discover a print that would tell them where they came from.

‘What has physically happened to them?’ he added.

‘I expect that they’ve been destroyed at
Norges Bank
.’

‘All of them?’

‘Some of the notes, as I said, were of extremely high quality and still had their original gloss. Several of them appeared to be perfectly preserved. Not mistreated by the printer, a bank employee, or anyone else. The paper was clean and tight, with no discolouration. The corners were sharp and at the correct angle, with no sign of being rounded off.’

‘Are you a collector?’

‘Yes. My father travelled a great deal, and I had uncles in the shipping industry. When I was still a young boy I had a large collection of banknotes from all over the world, but I have become a specialist in Norwegian notes.’

‘So what did you do with the best banknotes?’

The bank assistant squirmed in his chair.

‘I purchased them. It would have been a shame for the notes to be destroyed. Many of them were replacement notes.’

‘Replacement notes?’

‘When a banknote is spoiled during the printing process, it’s replaced by a replacement note,’ Malmstrom explained. ‘There’s no difference between them and the originals, apart from that the replacement notes are given their own serial numbers. That makes them desirable to collectors.’

‘How much might such an uncirculated hundred-kroner note actually be worth?’

‘That also depends on what year it was printed. The hundred-kroner note with Camilla Collett, for example, was issued from 1979, but was printed with dates from 1977 onwards. A perfect example from the first year of printing could be worth up to ten times the original value.’

‘A thousand kroner?’

‘It depends of course on the market and the demand. A rare banknote of a type that few people are collecting will not have a particularly high value, while a less rare example of good quality of a type that is popular to collect can quickly become very expensive.’

Nils Hammer appeared impatient.

‘How many banknotes did you transfer to yourself?’

‘I bought just over forty thousand.’

Hammer rolled his eyes.

‘The first time,’ Malmstrom added. ‘In fact when Sverre Lund came five days later, I sold a few blocks of shares in order to redeem some more notes.’

‘Do you still have all the banknotes?’

‘Not all of them. I have, naturally, helped others to complete their collections.’

‘How much have you earned from that?’

‘I don’t know … I haven’t added it up, but none of the banknotes were sold for less than three times their face value.’

Nils Hammer rose abruptly.

‘We need those notes,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

‘At home in the safe, but I don’t understand what you want with them?’

‘We believe that the money may be the direct reason for at least three murders,’ Hammer explained. ‘Where they come from will be crucial for our further investigations. A fingerprint examination might well help.’

‘But will that kind of examination not spoil the notes? With fingerprint powder and suchlike?’

‘Oh yes.’ Hammer went over to the door. ‘Shall we go and get them right away?’

CHAPTER 48

An hour and a quarter later Wisting was driving over the Gamlebrua bridge in Kongsberg. The water level was low and the waterfall not at its most intense, but still an impressive sight. Some people were playing about, paddling in the rapids. One of them got caught in an eddy and was struggling to get out. It was an appropriate picture of how the investigation was progressing, he thought. It seemed as though everything was still swirling uselessly and meaninglessly round and round.

He parked in the same place as the last time he had visited Carsten Meyer, taking a few minutes to gather his thoughts before getting out. The air felt different from down by the coast. It was humid and still, almost oppressive.

Some time elapsed between his ring on the doorbell and the door opening as far as the heavy door chain allowed. Carsten Meyer stared through the gap.

‘Is that you?’ he asked, glancing up at the street behind Wisting. ‘I thought it might be the home help come early.’

‘It’s me,’ Wisting smiled. ‘I was hoping we could have a chat.’

‘Of course,’ the old man nodded. ‘Just a moment.’

There was a clanking sound as he released the chain and the door opened wide. Carsten Meyer trudged back towards the living room, supporting himself with a crutch.

Wisting sat down in the same place as before. A new crossword puzzle lay open on the table facing Meyer’s chair with only a few of the squares filled in.

‘They say it’s going to rain,’ Carsten Meyer said, looking warily out of the window to the mountain.

‘We certainly need it,’ Wisting nodded. He hadn’t listened to the weather forecast for many days.

‘But you haven’t come here to talk about the weather, have you?’ The old man seemed ill at ease as he moved a cup and a ballpoint pen on the table beside him. He grasped his pipe that was lying in the dish beside the crossword. ‘I heard that you’ve found Sverre.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Wisting confirmed. ‘There’s no longer any doubt that this concerns a crime.’

Carsten Meyer filled his pipe with slow movements, looking at him from underneath his bushy eyebrows.

‘How were the five-man group and the rest of the alert organisation financed?’ Wisting asked.

Carsten Meyer frowned. His loose and almost transparent skin tightened over his hand as he worked on his pipe.

‘We were issued with funds from confidential items in the defence budget,’ he explained. ‘But it was never money that motivated or spurred us on. It was idealism and personal conviction. We did, of course, have our actual expenses covered.’

‘Did the group have any other income?’

The old man facing him struck a match with a clumsy motion and lit his pipe.

‘That’s something you can read about in Daniel’s book,’ he replied when he had lit up. ‘You would think that most things had been written and talked about concerning the war and the post war period, but there are still lots of secrets to reveal.’

Wisting leaned back in the chair to encourage the old man to talk.

‘The contributions from the budget financed only a small part of what we required in order to build an effective organisation in readiness for invasion,’ Meyer continued. ‘The most important supplementary funds came to us from actions taken to recapture war proceeds and compensation for war profits.’

He took the pipe out of his mouth and let it rest in his hand.

‘The war was a good time for those who knew how to profit from it,’ he went on, putting his pipe back. ‘Share prices rose and unemployment went down to almost zero. Prices for goods were very good. Actually it was quite logical, since almost half a million Germans came here and needed to be supplied with most things. Many people became extremely well off through co-operation with the Germans. It was an especially good time for the construction industries that helped the Germans build aerodromes, barracks and railways, or that produced different materials with the help of Russian and Serbian prisoners of war.’

Carsten Meyer took a deep breath, closed his eyes and lowered his head as though he was already tired of the story.

‘Many Norwegian war profiteers went free after the Second World War,’ he went on. ‘Financial compensation from traitors was based on class inequality. At the same time as wanting to punish companies and individuals that had made good money from the war, the wheels of commerce had to been kept oiled. The country had to be rebuilt, and there was little point in punishing the big companies that employed a large number of people. Many of the biggest profiteers went free.’

‘But you made sure of fairness all the same?’

‘We carried out some equalising actions, as I said, that ensured that we were self-financing.’

‘What was that about?’

Carsten Meyer blew a puff of smoke from the side of his mouth that rose in a blue ring towards the ceiling.

‘We liberated money that had been hidden away and preserved.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘We made visits at night to industrialists, contractors, barracks barons and other profiteers. You will perhaps call it burglary and theft but it had to do with confiscating funds from people who had gained financially from the presence of the Germans.’

‘Were there no police investigations?’

The old man shook his head.

‘We’re talking about hidden wealth and black market money. The people whose profits we took risked being investigated as traitors if it became known what had happened to them.’

Wisting sat back with a sceptical expression on his face. What Carsten Meyer was describing was plain theft. The five-man group had been in reality a band of thieves, but Meyer was making them sound like heroes. In a sense they were talking about the perfect crime. Thefts that would never be investigated. Breaking the law in a way that was almost morally justified.

‘How much money are we talking about here?’ he asked.

‘In one place we took out over three hundred thousand kroner from a safe. That’s more than five million in today’s money. The man we visited ran a cement company in Telemark and was the only person in the area with a cement ship. He had three of them in fact, and had transported all the material for the bunkers along the coast between Oslo and Kristiansand.’

‘What did you use the money for?’

‘We built training centres abroad. In England and America. In addition, we set up cash reserves so that we had funds available in case of an invasion. None of us made any kind of personal gain.’

‘Is there any money left from these cash reserves today?’

Carsten Meyer shook his head.

‘I understand what you’re driving at. I heard about the money on the news, but we carried out the last action in the summer of 1949. The group was dissolved in 1990. The money was gone long before then. What remained of liquid assets was returned to the Ministry of Defence.’

‘Does that apply to your weapons also?’

Carsten Meyer’s pipe had gone out while he was talking. Nevertheless, he raised it to his mouth, sucking slowly until his cheeks became hollow.

‘Not the personal ones,’ he replied, bringing his pipe down to his chest. ‘No one asked about those.’

Wisting pulled a printout from his inside pocket with the picture of the pistol that had been found in the depths of the sea. He unfolded and laid it on top of the half-finished crossword puzzle.

The old man put the pipe back on the dish and lifted the sheet of paper. Wisting explained how they had found the weapon.

‘Do you think Sverre was shot with it?’

‘We don’t know, but we’re having a problem tracing it.’

‘It might be Sverre’s own gun.’ Carsten Meyer raised his head to look at him. Something unfamiliar had come into his eyes, something glowering and stubborn. ‘We were all equipped with weapons like that, but you’ll probably never be able to trace them.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s what they call a lunchbox Colt, made here in Konsberg during the war.’ He pointed at the picture. ‘It’s completely lacking in serial number or any other identification marks. During the war, the employees at the weapons factory smuggled out pistols for use in resistance activities in their lunchboxes.’

Wisting leaned forward.

‘Do you have such a weapon?’

Carsten Meyer gripped his pipe, knocking it on the side of the dish before refilling with painstaking movements. He glanced out of the window where the first dark clouds had appeared above the mountains.

‘Daniel has taken charge of it,’ he replied after a pause. ‘He’s interested in everything that has to do with the war.’

CHAPTER 49

Dark clouds had gathered on the horizon by the time Wisting arrived in town. The air was closer, warm and heavy.

He met two boys and, he presumed, their fathers as he went into the police station. They appeared almost disheartened and excited at the same time, and it was difficult to tell what their complaint was. Perhaps one of them had a bicycle or a mobile phone stolen. Everyday events took place, in a sense, in parallel with the investigation. Other duties did not disappear - they simply piled up.

The other investigators had eaten and left their empty pizza boxes in the conference room. He found a corner slice to chew down.

Torunn Borg passed the open door, popping her head inside when she saw him.

‘There’s something you need to look at,’ she said. ‘Come on!’

Wisting followed her along the corridor and into her office. She had laid out grey paper from a roll on the floor, in the way they usually did when they received objects that must not be contaminated prior to being examined in detail by a crime technician.

Four carrier bags and a black plastic bag were lying on the underlay. One of the bags was marked with
FM-kjeden
, a grocery chain that had merged with other stores and disappeared as a trademark.

The contents of one of the bags had been taken out and lay in a little heap. It was money. Old fifty-kroner banknotes.

‘Where do they come from?’

‘From the sea,’ Torunn Borg explained. ‘Two boys came here with them. They had drifted onto land in a black bin-bag out by Lydhusstranda beach.’

Wisting helped himself to a pair of plastic gloves from a box on the office desk and squatted down to study the find. He was aware of the smell of salt seawater, and many of the banknotes were wrinkled and seemed stiff after they had lain in the water and then dried out again.

Most of the notes were from the 1980s with a picture of Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. He pulled on the gloves and took out a bundle from one of the other bags. These were even older. On the right of the portrait of Bjornstjerne Bjornson he found various dates from the 1970s. Several of the notes had been printed as far back as 1966. There were also some notes of a different design and more than fifty years old. There had to be about a million kroner altogether. Money that had become completely worthless.