Dregs (11 page)

Mortensen told him that a report would be ready for him that afternoon. He asked him to continue and left.

The sun quickly warmed the cramped saloon car. Wisting adjusted the ventilators on the air conditioning so they were blowing directly at him, and looked thoughtfully through the windscreen. It was covered in the flattened remains of dead insects.

The fjord was milky-blue and calm. Today the beaches and rocky shores would fill up once more with volunteers searching for dead bodies.

Stavern nursing home was a two-storied brown-stained building with a flat roof and extensions coming off at various angles. It was an option for elderly people who, for health reasons, could no longer live at home. Wisting had visited the place one Christmas almost twenty years before, when Line sang in a children’s gospel choir in the foyer. An old building, it looked well maintained, but rather like a barracks. It was not a place he would choose to spend his old age. The staff had received good references in all the interviews and that was probably the deciding factor for residents to thrive.

Inga Svendsen, the departmental manager, greeted him, offering him coffee in her cramped, basement office. Folders, books and ring binders filled the shelves along the wall and the day’s newspapers lay open on the desk. Wisting sat on the only visitor’s chair. She glanced inquisitively over at him, but at the same time appeared resigned. Wisting thought he recognised that look. It was holiday time, the place was certain to be understaffed and would be unbearably warm.

‘Can we talk about Camilla Thaulow first of all?’ he enquired.

‘She works in my department,’ Inga Svendsen confirmed. ‘This disappearance is very unlike her. She’s conscientious and has hardly ever been off sick.’ She gestured towards the computer screen. ‘She took a few days off when her mother had a hip operation two years ago, and since then hasn’t missed a single day.’

‘So, where can she be?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody here knows.’ She cleared away the newspapers in which the discovery of the red Fiesta was reported. ‘But I understand that it’s now a criminal investigation? This too.’

She was thinking of the missing men. Wisting avoided a reply by putting the cup to his lips. ‘What did her work involve?’ he asked.

‘She was a care worker, participating in occupational therapy and rehabilitation initiatives, helping the residents with practical assistance and taking care of daily tasks. Personal hygiene, morning and evening care and feeding for those who need help.’

‘Was there anyone here she had more contact with than others?’

‘Those who worked permanently on the same shift, of course,’ the departmental manager nodded, rattling off a few names. ‘She was well liked by everyone, both staff and patients.’

Wisting posed a few different questions in the hope of discovering some possible trigger for her disappearance, or something that could be connected to the two other disappearances, but made no progress. Nor did he find out anything more about Otto Saga and Torkel Lauritzen.

‘Torkel had almost become too healthy to stay here,’ she explained. ‘He didn’t have the same need for care and support as when he was admitted. The nursing home was not the right place for Otto either. He had more of a social disability and should have been in a dementia wing.’

Wisting leafed through his notepad to a page with the heading
Christian Hauge
. ‘There was another man staying here: Christian Hauge. He died on the 10th August last year.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you know what he died of?’

‘Does that have anything to do with the missing persons cases?’ the departmental manager asked.

‘It might have,’ Wisting did not want to explain that he was the man who owned the house from which Hanne Richter had vanished, or that he was the grandfather of a police murderer who had returned home.

‘That information is normally confidential,’ Inga Svendsen elaborated.

Wisting remained silent, waiting for her to tell him all the same.

‘It’s not exactly a secret though. He came here after a major heart attack four or five years ago when he was in need of care. After the doctors had to amputate his other leg as well, he became extremely weakened and seemed to lose the spark of life. With a prosthesis he was able to move about freely of course, but with two amputations he was forced to use a wheelchair.’

‘Amputate?’

Inga Svendsen nodded. ‘A lower leg amputation. He got a blood clot in a vein in his leg. The disturbance to his circulation led to gangrene and the doctors had to remove the leg bone to prevent it spreading.’

‘But that was the second amputation, you said?’

‘Yes, he had lost his other foot many years ago.’

‘Why did that happen?’

‘I don’t know.’

Wisting bit his lower lip. ‘Which foot are we talking about?’ he asked.

The departmental manager thought carefully before she answered: ‘The last time now, they removed the right foot.’

‘But the actual death was of natural causes?’

Inga Svendsen nodded. ‘Heart attack.’

‘Do you know anything about the relatives?’

‘He had two grown up grandchildren who visited. The younger one was a regular visitor, and brought the great-grandchildren.’ She smiled. ‘Otherwise, I don’t think he had any family. Camilla Thaulow went to the funeral. One of us always does that and Camilla wanted to, even though the announcement stated that the ceremony would be private.’

She glanced at the clock as if to make the point that she had other things to do. Wisting did not see any reason to remain longer. He too had other tasks. He got up and was accompanied out.

The walls in the corridor were decorated with framed black-and-white photographs. Wisting recognised the old Brestrup farm, Lysheim school, the old BP-station at the harbour and the restaurant at the beach beside the Kronprins gap site. When he smiled the departmental manager followed his eye.

‘These are mementos of Stavern,’ she explained. ‘From Petter Norli’s book. Pictures he found in his father’s photograph archive. They were put up on the wall here last summer. There’s a picture of Torkel and Otto here as well.’

She took a few steps and stopped at a picture of five young men on a stone stairway with wrought iron railings. It was summertime and they were sitting in short-sleeved shirts. The man who sat at the front was holding a pipe in his hand. ‘Lund, the head teacher, is with them too,’ she said, pointing to the man furthest back on the right. ‘He’s gone also, of course.’

Wisting leaned forwards. Sverre Lund was sitting with the top of his shirt buttoned and wearing a pleasant smile. He studied the other faces. The picture had to be about sixty years old, but all the same he recognised the distinctive facial features of Torkel Lauritzen on the left at the middle step on the stairway. He pointed to him with his finger and looked at the departmental manager to check if he was correct.

She nodded. ‘And there’s Otto Saga,’ she said, pointing to the man beside him.

‘Who is this one, the man with the pipe?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but the one beside Sverre Lund is Christian Hauge, the man you were just asking me about.’

Wisting’s eyes became narrow lines in his face. He squinted at the man on the top step while he felt his heart beat faster. ‘So they knew each other from the old days?’

‘Certainly. They were all from Stavern. They were very pleased when the picture was put up. They called themselves the five-man group.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Well, I suppose it was just because there were five of them. Five pals.’

‘The five-man group?’ Wisting repeated, without taking his eyes off the men in the picture. Four of them were dead, or at least it had to be supposed so. He would have liked to know who the fifth man with the pipe was.

CHAPTER 20

The road was closed off by a gate and a sign that forbade entrance. Line thought at first that she had driven the wrong way but, when she crested the brow of a hill, saw that the road led to a little property down by the sea. The sunshine sparkled on a byre with a corrugated iron roof. The actual farmhouse was white, and was situated in the middle of the property. It appeared run down and badly maintained, and the surrounding fields, which had once been arable, were gradually reverting to wilderness. The garden was overgrown and full of rusty car parts, an old lorry grown through with grass and spotted with rusty holes. The shell of a burned down washhouse lay on the fringes and climbing plants twined round an old chimneystack in the midst of the ruins.

Down by the water’s edge was a boathouse with a
sjekte
, a traditional clinker-built vessel, tied to the jetty and a dilapidated fishing boat sittting in a homemade dock. Half of its wooden hull was gone and it resembled the skeleton of a prehistoric animal. A dog ran barking towards her, but kept its distance when she got out of the car. A man in denim jeans and a white singlet came out of the barn, drying his hands on an oily rag. Line immediately saw it as a picture she wanted to print, a pair of working hands in a dirty rag.

‘Ken Ronny Hauge?’ she asked, putting on a smile.

‘Just Ken,’ the man nodded. He scrutinised her, allowing his eyes to rest on her breasts long enough for her to be aware. Then he smiled too. Line extended her hand to greet him. The man’s glance moved to his own dirty hand before returning the gesture.

‘I’m grateful that you showed up,’ she said, gazing into the building behind him. A heavy miasma of motor oil and sawdust hung in the air. In the middle of the room there was an American car with its bonnet up. Car parts, welding lights and cutting equipment were scattered around, and the walls were covered in shelves of tools smeared oily black. A radio was on.

‘We can sit down in the shade,’ Ken suggested, pointing towards a seating area beneath an oak tree.

The dog shuffled behind them and lay underneath the table while Ken Ronny Hauge went inside for something to drink. It was obvious to Line that he, like so many others, had used his prison time to exercise. His singlet was close fitting, and the muscles in his back were visible beneath the thin material. His arms were strong and sinewy, and he had already managed to acquire a summer tan. He returned with two bottles of cola and a glass for her.

She had wondered for a long time about how she should start the conversation, but had not thought of a good introduction. ‘How does it feel?’ she asked spontaneously. Only then realising that he did not understand, she added, ‘To be free?’

The former prisoner drank from the cola bottle. Remaining seated he picked at the label. ‘To begin with it felt strange,’ he said. ‘Everything looked different. Larvik was a different town, with a hotel on the beach promenade and a park in the harbour where before there had been only queues of traffic for the ferry. It was uncomfortable to see how life outside had gone its own way while my own stayed still. To see how pals from that time had become grown men, that the girl I had been in love with had married and had children. Their confirmation pictures were in the newspaper.’

He threw out his arms.

‘But right here, this place, time has also stood still. I was here a great deal when I was younger. My great-great-grandparents came from here. My grandfather owned the place with his brothers, but my brother took it over fifteen years ago. He could have sold it for millions to rich folk from Oslo who wanted a place in the country, but I think he held on to it for my sake. He doesn’t need the money either. Rune has always been smarter than me, and is doing well, with his own company and all that. The house has decayed, but it has stood here waiting for me.’

‘Sixteen years is a long time,’ Line commented.

‘You can’t take it in,’ Ken Ronny Hauge nodded, ‘night after night when you’re lying in your bunk listening to the warden locking the cell doors, and his footsteps disappearing down the corridor. You’ve got a lot of time to think in sixteen years.’

‘What did you think about?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I didn’t let myself think about the future, tried to take it one day at a time. Nowadays I’m not so bothered when I think back. In many ways I got on well. The boys were nice. The staff was all right. Sometimes I almost wish I was back. After sixteen years, prison becomes somewhere safe, regular and familiar, a community where everyone accepts each other and there’s room to be a failure.’

Line made notes, pleased with the comprehensiveness of the former prisoner’s answers.

‘It’s not serving the sentence that’s difficult,’ Ken Ronny Hauge continued, ‘but being released. It’s almost like you have to teach yourself how to live all over again.’

‘How did the transition go?’

‘The prison arranges for a gradual return to society. You get more frequent leaves of absence and move to an open prison, so that you get a taste of freedom. But when you’re released, you’re released to nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘No job, no social circle, nowhere to live. As a former prisoner you don’t just fall outside society, but drop right to the bottom. You become the dregs of society.’

‘You’re getting on well here?’

‘I’m lucky. I live here free of charge. Repair old cars for people.’ He nodded in the direction of the barn. ‘The Yank car is owned by a well-heeled guy in Tonsberg. He doesn’t know a thing about cars, other than it’s fun to have one sitting there. I qualified as a car mechanic in prison, and I guess I’m well paid, considering. It’s a bit unfamiliar, earning several hundred kroner in hourly rate, to somebody who was used to fifty kroner a day.’

‘What did prison do to you?’

He thought carefully. ‘It wore me down. It took away my sense of belonging and personal identity. I think I managed to keep myself going by looking on myself as a student rather than a prisoner.’

‘You studied?’

‘I got a bachelor’s degree in criminology and sociology, and learned Spanish. Hablo Espanel.’

‘Spanish?’

‘My brother has a house in Albir on the Costa Blanca coast. I can use it as much as I like, as soon as I’m finished with parole.’

‘Parole?’