Closed for Winter (19 page)

The grimy silver van belonged to Gunnar B. Hystad from Sandefjord. The text message from the Roads Department did not contain any information other than that his road tax had been paid. Taking out the Yellow Pages, Line found that he was listed with a landline and a mobile subscription, at an address in what she knew was an established residential area west of the town centre. A woman was listed at the same address and number.

She found him again in the tax lists and noticed he was born in 1950. There was no indication of what the B in his name stood for. He had a small amount of capital and an annual income of just under half a million kroner.

A simple internet search produced no hits. The newspaper’s text archive did not contain any information either. A search with only the words
gunnar
and
hystad
produced too many results, making it impossible to sort through them.

Gunnar B. Hystad might be the mysterious man with the binoculars.

She wondered whether she should phone Benjamin Fjeld and give him the registration number, but from what she had discovered online, Hystad did not seem particularly interesting.

Sunlight shone diagonally through the smudged cottage windows, causing glittering dust to dance in the air. Closing the lid of her laptop, Line concluded that it had provided no answers. Nevertheless, there was something about Gunnar B. that titillated her curiosity. The vehicle had been parked overnight. Of course, he could be staying at one of the other cottages, but she had a growing conviction that he had spent the night in the makeshift shelter she had discovered.

She fetched her camera and looked through the photos she had taken a day or two earlier before putting on her outdoor clothes and going out. The sea lapped gently and softly on the shore and the air was crystal clear. Two fishing boats were heading towards the Skagerrak, their masts in sharp silhouette against the horizon.

Line followed the path westward, through the dense woodland. The waterlogged forest floor softened beneath her feet and, with each step she took, her Wellington boots sank deeper into the mud.

She reached the sea at the same spot as before; waves were beating rhythmically on the beach below. Windswept, crooked pine trees hung over the stony outcrop, and wild flowers grew in the clefts between the rocks. Raising her camera, she located the hidden shelter with her lens. For a long time she waited, hoping to catch a movement. Eventually her arms became tired, and then she caught sight of him.

He was standing on a plateau beside the sea, scanning in an oblique line along the pebbly coastal edge. His back was half turned towards her, so she could not see what he looked like other than he had stubble covering his cheeks, chin and throat.

Line took a couple of photographs before squatting again in the undergrowth. Several black crows took off from the treetops, screeching and fluttering through the foliage before coming to rest a short distance away.

A trail across the springy carpet of moss led her closer to the man. She halted just before the woodland met the hillside to prevent him from spotting her and looked again, but could no longer see him.

Leaving the woodland behind, she scared several more birds. The sun’s rays were intense now, and steam rose from the glistening rocks on the shore.

A narrow crevice led down from where she stood. Holding her camera to her chest with one hand, and supporting herself on the slope with the other, she followed the path downwards until she reached the plateau. She could find no trace of him, but looked in the direction he had been facing.

Breakers rolled in from the sea, crashing onto the pebbled beach. Further inland lay the woodland, almost grey in its bleakness. The wind had wrenched the autumn leaves from the trees, leaving only fragile branches.

While she stood there, a flock of black birds, probably a hundred times larger than the one she had seen several days earlier, took flight, gathered into a huge oval ball and soared into the sky like a dark cloud. The roar created by the flapping of their many thousand wings drowned out the sound of the waves, and a fluttering shadow from the massive flock slid across the landscape. It was like an enormous flying carpet as it veered and writhed through the air.

When the flock moved out to sea, the temperature dropped as the birds covered the sun.

The flock then divided into two pointed groups heading back inland. The sun reappeared, and just as suddenly as the birds had materialised they vanished, descending into the woodland. She was left with only the sound of their flapping wings in her ears. Not until then did she lift her camera, but it was too late to capture the spectacular sight.

‘Did you see that?’ a voice behind her asked.

Line wheeled round. The man was standing two metres away. He must have been sheltering in a cleft at the outer edge of the hillside and had climbed unnoticed to where she stood. His binoculars were hanging from his neck, and he carried a camera. He seemed delighted to have someone to share the experience with.

Line nodded. ‘Yes, it was fantastic.’

The man was still peering in the direction the birds had disappeared. ‘I’ve been waiting for something like that for days, but that was even better than I expected.’ Letting the camera rest, he lifted the binoculars to his eyes. ‘There it is,’ he said suddenly, letting go the binoculars to point out a huge falcon or eagle flapping its wings to catch the air currents. ‘They gather here to search for food before they journey on. Then they’re especially vulnerable to attacks by birds of prey. That’s why they fly in flocks, just like a shoal of herring in flight. They change direction hither and thither to fool the enemy.’

‘Amazing how they manage to do it,’ Line said.

‘Birds have large hearts in relation to their body size,’ he explained. ‘The distance between their eyes and brain is short, and the electrical impulses that are sent out travel at lightning speed. To us, it looks as though the entire flock turns instantaneously when a bird reacts to its neighbour’s movement.’

Line studied the man, obviously an extremely enthusiastic ornithologist, before extending her hand to introduce herself. ‘Yes indeed,’ he said, confirming that he was the owner of the dirty van. ‘Gunnar Hystad.’

‘You’re interested in birds?’

He smiled at her. ‘It’s always been a hobby, but this summer I took early retirement and that has given me more time. During this past week, I’ve practically lived out here.’

‘Do you have a cottage nearby?’

‘Unfortunately not. I would like to, especially now at the migration season. The flyways go directly over this area.’

‘But you stayed the night out here?’

‘Sometimes I sleep in the back of the van, but otherwise I have built myself a lean-to. I arrived here yesterday afternoon. The weather forecast predicted high pressure and wind from the west-northwest, optimal conditions for migration, and I was ready from first light. Now I’m just waiting for the woodpigeons. Tens of thousands of them can pass in the course of a few morning hours.’

Line looked at the sky, where a number of seagulls were circling. Excepting them, the heavens were empty.

Gunnar B. lifted the binoculars to his eyes again, scanning the skies before lowering them again. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘What brings you out in the autumn chill?’

‘I’m staying at a cottage here,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to write a book.’

Together they made their way down from the plateau.

‘Then it’s a good idea to be fairly isolated,’ the man said, hopping from one boulder to the next. ‘There aren’t many people to be seen out here.’

‘I noticed you the first day I arrived, but apart from that, I haven’t seen anyone.’

‘When did you arrive?’

‘On Saturday.’

Nodding, Gunnar B. rubbed his hand over the stubble on his chin. ‘That was after all the commotion at Gusland. Did you hear about that?’

Acknowledging that she had, Line wondered whether she should tell him that she was the one who found the second body. She decided against.

‘There was quite a lot of traffic along the coast then, of course. One of the boats was busy all day Saturday, going back and forth all day long, scaring the birds out at the Måkesjæra rock. I don’t know what they were searching for.’ Keeping his head cocked as he spoke, the man abruptly raised his camera to point it at something he had spotted, but too late to capture the image with his lens.

‘There’s a sea eagle around here,’ he said. ‘They’re rare. They don’t usually nest so far south. It’s a mature female. Her wingspan is almost two point five metres.’ He came to a standstill. ‘I can show you,’ he said, tilting his camera screen upwards. Various birds glided rapidly over the display until he stopped at an eagle soaring majestically towards a leaden sky. ‘I have a series showing it catching a fish too,’ he said, flicking further on.

A self-bailing inflatable dinghy with a man onboard occupied the display before the sea eagle returned.

‘What was that?’ Line asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The boat.’

The man flipped back through the images. ‘That was the boat I was talking about. It was going to and fro here all weekend. The pilot was scouting the land along the coast the whole time, obviously searching for something or someone.’

Line took hold of the camera, scrutinising the picture. The boat was large, battleship grey with an aluminium hull and enormous inflatable pontoons along the gunwales. She knew the police had been searching with helicopters and dogs after the body had been found at Thomas Rønningen’s cottage, but not that they had used a boat. If they had, then they would probably have found the boat that had drifted ashore near her cottage with a corpse on board. This boat was not marked with a registration number or nationality either.

She tried to study the face of the man behind the steering controls, but the details were too minuscule on the display. ‘I don’t think this is a policeman,’ she said.

‘No? Who is it then?’

Line shrugged. ‘My father works in the police. I can send him the photo.’ The man retrieved his camera, as though reluctant to let go of something so valuable. ‘You can come with me to the cottage,’ she said. ‘Then I can offer you a cup of hot coffee while I transfer the photos to my computer.’

Stroking his hand over his stubbly chin, the man smiled and nodded.

‘In Denmark they call it the black sun,’ Gunnar B. called to her from beside the window.

Line counted five spoonfuls into the coffee filter. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, filling the container with water.

‘When thousands of birds fly in a flock and cover the sky like an eclipse, it’s a tourist attraction every autumn and spring in western Jutland.’

‘Have you been there?’

‘Many times.’

Crossing the room, Line opened the lid of her computer on the low coffee table.

‘Can I borrow your memory card?’ she asked.

Opening his camera, Gunnar B. removed the card and handed it to her. She inserted it in her computer, selected eleven images of the boat and copied them across. By the time she removed the card, coffee was ready.

Generously filling two mugs, she handed one to her visitor who had taken a seat on the settee. ‘What do you think about the dead birds?’ she asked, curling her hands around her mug.

Gunnar B. peered through the steam rising from his cup. ‘Dead birds will fall from the sky,’ he laughed. ‘Isn’t that what the doomsday prophets say? It’s the first sign that the end is nigh? There were a hundred thousand birds in that flock we saw today. That makes a few hundred dead birds nothing more than a small percentage. Birds die all the time.’

‘But what can have killed them?’ Line persisted.

‘If the sea eagle dives into the flock in pursuit of prey, it can kill a dozen just with the flapping of its wings. Others may have become terrified and flown into trees or quite simply died of exhaustion. Birds are easily stressed.’

‘I’ve found two on the doorstep,’ Line said. ‘Before that, I think it’s been a decade since I found a dead bird, and that one flew into a window at home.’

‘There could be some kind of illness or poisoning. A group of them may have eaten something that did not agree with them. People are so thoughtless. A lot of the stuff they put on bird-trays is downright dangerous, leftover fatty food that causes diarrhoea and leads to the birds being unable to accept nourishment. They die within a day or two.’

They talked about birds for almost half an hour before Gunnar B. stood up, thanking her for the coffee. As soon as he was gone, Line sat at the computer, allowing one of the photos from the birdwatcher’s camera to fill the screen.

The resolution was excellent. She could zoom onto the face at the controls without the quality degrading. Leaning slightly forward with a stern expression on his face, his eyes were hidden behind dark pilot’s glasses and his hair ruffled by the wind. He was not wearing any kind of uniform and did not appear to be a policeman or from any of the rescue services. Moreover, police officers always work in pairs.

She zoomed out a couple of notches to see him full length, searching for details. He was wearing a dark windcheater with a large red
R
emblazoned on the chest and the name
Sailwear
. She googled it and discovered a Danish clothing company.

She then went through the same procedure with the dinghy. Behind one of the pontoons the name
RaveRib
was printed in white letters. A search on that took her to the webpage of a Danish boat manufacturer.

Zooming all the way out, she leaned back in her seat. The boat was large enough to have crossed the sea from Denmark, but what was it doing here?

It struck Line that she was hungry. She got to her feet and crossed to the refrigerator. Butter and cheese, that was all. Before she sat down again, she refilled her cup. Regardless of what the man in the picture was searching for it must have something to do with the murder case.

Opening her email program, she typed her father’s name into the address field, noting the words
Observation of suspicious boat
in the subject field. She then wrote a short summary, giving the name, address and phone number of Gunnar B. Hystad and attaching three of the photographs.

Just as she was about to send it, it struck her that her father was away. She deleted his address and picked up the business card belonging to the policeman who had interviewed her, adding his email address before clicking
Send
. With that, she stood up and went to do some shopping.