Free Dregs by Jørn Lier Horst Page B

Lauritzen and Otto Saga were both widowers. He would look for people in the circles around them who could tell more about them. The smallest details could turn out to be crucial, but he didn’t find anything that he had overlooked in the files. In the course of the day he would take a trip to the nursing home and look up someone who might know a bit more about the two men.
    The morning meeting was short. Most of the time was taken up with a discussion of how the different newspapers had presented the case. All had pictures of training shoes on the front page. Verdens Gang had presumably realised that all the editors would go for the same spread, and had sharpened up their coverage with a comment from a well-known television actor who holidayed at a summer cottage in Nevlunghavn. The whole thing was unpleasant.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ Hammer complained. ‘Not even a murder can be reported without linking it to a celebrity.’
    Wisting wound up the meeting and withdrew to his office. Ten minutes went by before he was disturbed by a knock at his door by one of the police guard’s summer temps. Wisting looked at the young man in the doorway. His uniform was clean and newly pressed, his hair cut short and his shoes polished. Wisting wondered if he had any idea how much human tragedy and misery he was going to experience in the years that lay ahead.
    ‘Yes?’ Wisting said, giving him an obliging smile.
    ‘There’s a lady downstairs,’ the man said. ‘She says she knows who one of the shoes in the newspaper belongs to.’
    Wisting got up. ‘Which of them?’
    ‘The most recent. The one that was found yesterday.’
    Wisting followed the young policeman down to the front desk where a woman in her mid-forties was waiting. She had short, silver-grey hair, was tall and slim and had blue-grey eyes with bags and dark rings beneath them. Wisting shook her hand, but didn’t catch her name. ‘You know something about the shoe that was pictured in the newspaper?’ he began.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, searching for something in her handbag. ‘I think it belongs to my sister.’ She brought out a picture. ‘Look at this.’
    Wisting took it. It was a colour photograph of a woman in a tracksuit, standing in front of an apple tree that was heavy with fruit and wearing a pair of white trainers. Although the details were tiny, he could make out the three black stripes of Adidas.
    ‘It was taken just before she disappeared,’ the woman explained.
    Wisting felt that he did not quite understand. ‘Your sister?’ he asked, hesitantly.
    ‘Hanne Richter,’ the woman elaborated. ‘She vanished in September last year, at the same time as the old men.’

CHAPTER 14
    This was a new situation. They had not viewed the case of Hanne Richter as though it had any connection with the three missing old men who had gone. A psychiatric patient, she had no connections to the other three. The fact that one of the feet belonged to her lifted the investigation onto a completely different level of complication.
    Hanne Richter had been reported missing on the 10th September the previous year, but had probably disappeared at some point after the seventh, just a few days after Torkel Lauritzen and Otto Saga, who were reported missing on Monday 1st and Thursday 4th respectively. On Monday 8th, Sverre Lund had been reported missing.
    Wisting read her case documents again. A paranoid schizophrenic, when she disappeared she had been in a period of what the doctors described as moderate psychotic disturbance. Her treatment was about regaining self-knowledge and consisted mainly of medication.
    He jotted down the name of the psychiatrist who had been treating her so that he could make an appointment, but remained sitting, looking at the picture of Hanne Richter in front of the big apple tree. Her disappearance had led neither to any major search nor headlines in the newspapers. She was simply another unfinished case, yet another unknown fate.
    Espen Mortensen popped