The Caveman (20 page)

The courtyard in front of the house was empty when Line arrived. Her father must still be at work.

As she switched off the ignition, she heard knocking noises from the engine followed by an indefinable rumbling sound. When it ended she picked up her bag and stepped outside. A gust of wind blew powdery snow into her face. Tugging the lapels of her jacket round her neck, she hunched her shoulders and lingered for a second or two in the chilly darkness before making up her mind, taking out the key to Viggo Hansen’s house, trudging down the street and letting herself in.

All was cold and silent, but the nauseating smell still hung in the air. She located the switch and turned on the hallway ceiling light before entering the living room and switching on the old standard lamp and wall lights.

Her mobile phone gave a signal, and she took it out to read the message:
Thanks for a pleasant evening
, in English.
John.
She had not really expected to hear anything further from the American, but tapped in a return message to say she had enjoyed meeting him.

The TV magazine was still spread out on the coffee table. The pages, once glossy, were now faded and dog-eared. She picked it up and browsed through, again noting that, in several places, the times of programmes he had wanted to watch were circled, and others had an asterisk drawn at the side.

She glanced at the television set and back at the TV listings. It did not take her long to work out the code. The asterisks appeared every time he wanted to watch two programmes broadcast simultaneously. On a shelf under the television sat an old video recorder. Viggo Hansen must have asterisked the programme he intended to record. All the same, something did not add up. On that last day, he had asterisked the programme about notorious cases from the archives of the FBI, even though it did not clash with another programme on the broadcast schedule.

She put the magazine down again. That might mean he wanted to watch it more than once, or possibly he would be busy while it was showing. He may have been expecting a visitor.

In the kitchen the fridge motor kicked into life, breaking the silence. It struck her that the possibility of a visitor was consistent with the coffee in the machine.

She crossed to the opposite end of the living room, where the game of solitaire was laid out on the table. The cards Viggo Hansen had held in his hand were lying on the left of the spread of cards. She picked up the little bundle of four cards: four of clubs, ten of hearts, eight of hearts and two of diamonds.

The ten could be played immediately. Five moves later, she had won the game.

Viggo Hansen had not stopped playing because he could not finish, so there must have been another reason.

The wind outside picked up and a sudden squall drew a creak out of the north-facing wall. A long-drawn-out wail echoed along the roof ridge. Line crossed her arms. Who had been here on the last day of his life?

She had scrutinised Viggo Hansen’s existence, but the closest she had come to someone who knew him was a girlfriend from the time he had been admitted to a psychiatric unit, twenty years previously, and a random locksmith who, to the best of her knowledge, had been the last person to speak to him. She turned off the lights on her way out.

For every step she took away from the house, an uncomfortable, stabbing sensation grew along her spine. A feeling that something quite odd had happened there during the last days of Viggo Hansen’s life.

Wisting stood at John Bantam’s side, studying the map on the office wall. Outside, it was becoming possible to make out the neighbouring buildings in the silvery light of dawn. ‘We’ll go out to the other well as soon as it’s light,’ he said.

The young FBI agent raised his coffee cup to his lips and nodded in agreement. ‘What are you doing about the women on the Swedish side of the border?’

Wisting gathered his notes for the morning meeting. ‘Being cautious,’ he said. Leif Malm and Anne Finstad of the
Kripos
international section had returned to Oslo, but he had already discussed it with them by phone. They agreed that a discreet approach should be made to their colleagues in the National Bureau of Investigation in Stockholm.

John Bantam nodded and followed Wisting into the conference room, which was cold. He crossed to the window and felt the radiator. Cold.

‘I’ve told the caretaker,’ said Torunn Borg, who had already taken her seat.

Wisting sat at the head of the table and checked the agenda as the room filled.

Hammer had brought the morning edition of the
VG
newspaper. ‘Fucking freezing in here,’ he said.

‘The caretaker said he’d attend to it.’

‘Here,’ Hammer said, flinging the newspaper onto the table.

Wisting drew it towards him.
Mysterious death
was the front page headline.
Chief Inspector William Wisting has admitted that the man found dead last week in a Christmas tree felling area presents the police with a mystery. They do not know who he is, where he comes from, how he died or what he was doing in the location where his body was found
.

Donald Baker and Maggie Griffin sat beside John Bantam in what had become their usual seats at the table. Wisting translated the report for their benefit.

‘We really need to watch our step,’ Baker said. ‘If they dig deeper, the case could unravel.’

‘Let’s get started,’ Christine Thiis said.

Wisting agreed. ‘We’ve located another well. Hammer?’

‘Not exactly a well, but a water tank belonging to a private irrigation system that farmers use. Something about the hydraulic gradient meant the tank was never used.’

‘How can we check it without arousing curiosity? It’s clearly visible from the main road.’

‘I’ve borrowed overalls and a vehicle from the local authority,’ Hammer said. ‘It will look like a routine inspection. Anyway, one department doesn’t know what the other is doing.’

‘What about the third well?’ Wisting enquired, turning to Benjamin Fjeld.

‘Nothing new, but all this palaver about the wells is really incidental work. How do we know whether any well Bob Crabb tracked down is one that Godwin has used? Assuming he has even used one at all. Shouldn’t we adopt a more systematic approach and conduct a survey of all the old wells in the area?’

‘There’s probably one on every farm in the region,’ Mortensen said.

Wisting agreed. ‘Bob Crabb must have had access to information we don’t have. Torunn?’

‘We’re receiving help from the National Archives in Kongsberg to go through old parish records, censuses and other records from the nineteenth century. We know the person who led Robert Godwin’s family to the USA was Niels Gustavsen who emigrated in 1889. The archivists up there have gone back two generations and are now working on finding all the surviving relatives in Norway. That could give us something, but it could also be a time-consuming blind alley.’

‘What about the list of possible Godwin aliases?’

‘Dwindling. We don’t have a match from the face recognition software, but we’ve been able to exclude a few who are completely out of the question on the grounds of ethnicity. Soon we’ll have about fifty men who should be examined more closely. The question is how to do that without revealing our motives.’

‘What about the age progression software?’ Espen Mortensen asked Donald Baker.

‘We’ve told our people to subject his photo to a simulated ageing process.’

Baker produced three pictures from his folder. In them the features of Robert Godwin, as depicted in the wanted poster, were recognisable. One was a simple picture in which he had been given wrinkles and other signs of age. In the other two, the software program had provided him with a beard and glasses. What all three had in common was the receding hairline, which had retreated even further, and his much thinner hair.

They spent half an hour dealing with practicalities and allocation of assignments but, by the end of the meeting, had not made much progress.

Torunn Borg sent him the provisional list of names which Robert Godwin could be hiding behind. The printer spewed out thirteen pages, an alphabetical overview of 123 men accompanied by dates of birth and current addresses.

The list had been pruned from 2,127 names. Some left by statistical criteria could be deleted.
ASKE, Eivind
was entered on page one, the artist Line had interviewed in connection with Viggo Hansen.

Otherwise, it included people who had not drawn attention to themselves in any way whatsoever. People who had lived anonymously throughout their lives. Cave dwellers.

Hunting for serial killers was not part of in-service training at the Police College. Wisting had read a considerable amount but had not followed recent research. Quite simply, they were too far removed from his everyday work.

The internet was crammed with articles about mentally ill killers who ate their victims, left messages for the police and collected trophies. On the web pages of CEPOL, the European Police College Network, he found an article summarising several years’ research in Australia.

As a rule, he read, a serial killer took the lives of people he or she did not know, and the murders were usually sexually motivated. The time interval between homicides could vary from hours, days, weeks, to months or years. Many serial killers were psychopaths but could appear entirely normal and were often extremely charming. The average serial killer was in the main a white, unmarried man with normal, if not higher than average, intelligence.

Around sixty per cent of them had been bed-wetters until the age of twelve. They seldom held down permanent jobs for long. They showed an early fascination for arson, cruelty to animals and similar sadistic activities. As a rule, they had grown up with single mothers and had little or no contact with their fathers. It was not unusual for them to have higher education and prestigious jobs.

Serial killers often choose the same type of victim and employ more or less the same
modus operandi
both in making their approach and taking lives, the article concluded.

Nothing helped. He tapped the stack of papers on the desktop to straighten the edges, and attached a paper clip at the top left-hand corner. Then, reclining in his seat, he read each and every name. Not until the final page did a familiar name appear.
WANG, Jonathan.
The man with the scars who had been in charge of the farm at Halle when Bob Crabb had been murdered.

He took the papers to Torunn Borg’s office. Her desk was unusually untidy, with case documents piled in several bundles, and various printouts spread out, dotted with notes in different colours.

‘How many names have you arrived at?’ Wisting asked as he sat down.

‘Fifty-eight.’

‘Is Jonathan Wang still on the list?’

Torunn Borg squinted at the screen and scrolled down. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘His is the only name that’s already cropped up.’

‘The temporary relief worker at Halle farm,’ she said. She drew a stack of documents towards her and riffled through to find Benjamin Fjeld’s interview.

‘We have a video recording of the interview,’ Wisting said. ‘I spoke to him when he was here, but actually thought he doesn’t look like Godwin.’

‘I’ll have his picture run through the face recognition software program anyway,’ she said. ‘The software doesn’t recognise facial features as we do, but takes measurements of various aspects of the face, for example the distance between the eyes or the breadth of the upper lip. A face contains different geometric characteristics that form a key to identify the person. But I don’t think we should rely on it too much. The shape of any face can alter in twenty years. Glasses and facial hair can confuse the system, and the suspect may even have had plastic surgery.’

Wisting raked his hands through his hair. They lacked forward momentum when the most important element in any investigation was to keep up the pace. As things stood, they were at a complete standstill. His mobile phone rang: Nils Hammer.

‘Empty,’ said Hammer.

‘You mean the water tank?’

‘It took some time to locate it under all the snow, but when we finally removed the concrete lid, it was completely dry. Only a few fragments of old pipe from the irrigation system.’

Benjamin Fjeld appeared at the door. ‘I’ve found the third well,’ he said, waving the picture from Bob Crabb’s camera.

‘Wait,’ Wisting said. He put his phone on the desk and switched it to loudspeaker. ‘Benjamin has got something.’

‘The third well is no more than a kilometre from where you are now,’ Benjamin Fjeld explained to Hammer, leaning across the desk. ‘It’s a disused smallholding, just like the place you went to yesterday.’

‘Do you still have a crew there?’ Wisting asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then we’ll come to you.’

The pathologist who conducted Viggo Hansen’s autopsy was called Mogens Poulsen. He had something of the same accent as Frank Iversen, using Norwegian words but with Danish pronunciation.

‘I’ve received a copy of the autopsy report from the police,’ Line explained. ‘Do you remember Viggo Hansen?’

‘Of course,’ Poulsen replied. ‘It was an extremely unusual case. Bodies that have lain for as long as that will normally be decomposed and rotten. This one was almost mummified.’

‘How could that be?’

‘First and foremost because it was not exposed to different kinds of living organisms that can produce enzymes to degrade organic material. In this case, the corpse was located in an almost air-tight house in which all doors, windows and air vents were closed, and low humidity and temperature led to it drying out.’ He checked himself. ‘Actually, that has to be a general observation. I can’t speak about individual cases.’

‘I have a more general question,’ Line said. ‘It’s most likely that I won’t write anything about this, but I wonder what he actually died of?’

‘Loneliness, presumably.’

‘Loneliness?’ Line repeated, hoping at the same time this might be something she could quote, even though she doubted whether it was a strictly medical diagnosis.

‘Or of mental distress,’ the doctor clarified. ‘That is perhaps more accurate. He must really have led a dreadfully lonely existence if he could sit dead for four months without anyone finding out.’ The doctor sighed. ‘What good does it do us to have all the riches in the world if we no longer bother about one another? We are spiritually backward in this country. Empty shells only concerned with satisfying our own needs.’

‘Do you really mean that?’ Line asked. ‘That someone can die of loneliness?’

‘It’s obvious. Good social networks, friendship and family ties are important for our health, more important than blood pressure and cholesterol. Studies show people who are lonely are more disposed to contract all sorts of diseases and ailments. Everything from sadness, anxiety and depression to physical illnesses such as heart and vascular problems.’

Line took notes.

‘Many married couples practically keep themselves alive so they can spend happy days with the one they love and help and support one another. When one of them dies the surviving partner will often follow after only a few months.’

Line could not restrain a smile. She had obviously hit upon a subject close to the doctor’s heart.

‘One thing is the long-term lack of social contact,’ he went on. ‘Another is that you actually don’t have anyone to call the emergency number when you suffer from chest pains or fall downstairs. No one who can make sure your airways are not blocked, administer artificial resuscitation or heart compression before the ambulance arrives.’

‘Do you believe Viggo Hansen died of a heart attack or a stroke?’

‘Those are the most common causes of death, but it’s quite impossible to give a conclusive answer to that.’

‘What else might it have been?’

‘For all I know, he might have choked on something and suffocated. Although the body was well preserved there was not much to work with. What I can at least tell you is that he was neither shot, nor stabbed with a knife, nor hit over the head with a blunt instrument.’

‘So you lean towards the conclusion that Viggo Hansen died a natural death?’

‘Death is always natural,’ the doctor replied. ‘Sometimes it simply comes more suddenly and more violently and brutally than other times.’

Line glanced down at her notepad.
Suffocated
she had written, followed by a question mark. ‘You said he could have been suffocated?’

‘That was just an example. There are no grounds for saying anything at all. No physical clues such as overturned furniture or other indications of a fight. The body was not sitting in an unnatural position, on the contrary really. He had fallen asleep nice and easy in his chair in front of the TV.’

‘But someone could, for example, have held a cushion over his face and suffocated him, without there being any visible signs?’

‘What I’m saying is we probably won’t arrive at any answers about how Viggo Hansen died, at least not from a forensic perspective.’

Line thanked him and crossed to the window. Outside, the wind was whipping up the loose, powdery snow and sweeping it down the street. She had read more than enough police and post-mortem reports, as well as public statements, to know that what was printed on paper was only what the author was certain about. Leaving room for doubt or interpretation only created problems. What was stated in such reports was therefore, as a rule, plain facts: information it was possible to vouch for one hundred per cent. Her conversation with the pathologist, however, opened up other possibilities.