Where Roses Never Die

There are days in your life when you are barely present, and today was one of those. I was sitting behind my desk, half-cut and half-asleep, when I heard a shot from the other side of Vågen, the bay in Bergen. Not long afterwards I heard the first police sirens, although there was no reason to assume this would ever be a case that might involve me. By the time I had eventually staggered to my feet and made it to the window, it was all over.

Reading the newspapers the following day, I found out most of what had gone on, the rest I learned in dribs and drabs.

Afterwards they were universally referred to as the
Shell Suit Robbers.
There were just two customers in the exclusive jewellery shop in Bryggen when, at 15.23 on Friday, 7th December 2001, the door swung open and three heavily armed individuals, wearing balaclavas and dressed in what are informally known as BBQ suits, burst into the premises.

The two customers, an older woman and a younger one, cowered in the corner. In addition to the customers there were two female assistants in the shop. The owner was in the back room. He’d hardly had time to look up before one robber was standing in the doorway and pointing a sawn-off shotgun at him. He said in what was supposed to be English: ‘Don’t move yourself! The first person who presses an alarm button are shot!’

One of the robbers took up a position by the front door with an automatic weapon hanging down at thigh-height and kept lookout. The third opened a big bag, gave it to the assistant in front of the display cabinets and pointed a gun at her. He spoke in English too: ‘Fill up!’

The assistant objected: ‘They’re locked!’

‘Unlock!’

‘But I’ll have to get…’ She motioned to the counter.

‘Move, move, move!’

She cast a glance at the other assistant, who nodded resigned agreement. Then she opened a drawer behind the counter, took out a bunch of keys and went back to the display cabinets.

The robber in front of her directed a glance at the door: ‘Everything OK?’

The robber posted there nodded mutely.

The robber by the office door intoned the same message: ‘Move!’

The jewellery-shop owner shouted: ‘You have no idea what you’re doing! All our items are registered internationally. No one will buy the most expensive pieces.’

‘Shut up!’ The robber pointed to a safe in the wall. ‘Open.’

‘I haven’t got…’

The robber rushed forward and held the rifle to his head. ‘Open. If you…’

Sweat poured from the jeweller’s forehead. ‘Yes, alright … Don’t…’ He swivelled the office chair and rolled it towards the safe. ‘I just have to … the code.’ He put a finger to his brow to show how hard he was trying to remember.

‘You know. Don’t make me to laugh.’

‘Yes, but when I’m nervous…’

‘You soon have even more reason to be nervous if you…’

The robber tapped the safe door with the weapon, and the owner stretched out his right hand and with trembling fingers started to turn the lock and enter the code.

Inside the shop the older of the two assistants opened a display cabinet. She took out the watches one by one and carefully placed them in the bag, so slowly that the robber impatiently pushed her aside and began to scoop watches of all price ranges into the bag while shouting orders: ‘Open the other cabinets! And you…’ He looked at the assistant by the counter. ‘All the drawers! At the bottom also.’

In the back room, the safe was open. The robber brutally shoved the jeweller out of the way and emptied the safe contents on to the work
table. Papers and documents were sent flying to the floor. With a triumphant flourish, he held up a box of eight diamond-studded watches. The owner eyed him with an expression of despair.

The robber stuffed the box into a shoulder bag. Then he grabbed a wad of notes from the back of the safe and in they went too. ‘Black money, eh?’

‘Cash reserves,’ the jeweller mumbled bitterly.

The robber backed towards the door and glanced out into the shop. ‘Everything OK?’

The robber by the front door nodded. The other one was busy emptying the drawers from the counter. ‘Just a moment.’

The robber who had been in the back room swung the sawn-off shotgun from the jeweller, to the two customers and finally to the older of the two assistants. ‘Don’t you move yourselves. The first person who presses the alarm button are shot.’ He was still standing in the doorway with a view of the back room. ‘Finished?’ he said to the man behind the counter.

‘That’s it now.’

‘Good.’

The robber by the front door leaned on the handle and glanced across the shop for instructions. The robber in the back room nodded, the front door was opened and with their weapons at the ready they dashed out.

That was when it happened.

None of the four women saw what went wrong. Other witnesses, on the pavement and around the quay on the other side of the street, could only relay fragments of what they thought they had observed. A passing motorist was convinced he had seen everything, ‘from the corner of his eye’, as he later put it.

As the robbers were making their getaway they must have collided with a man on the pavement. The man yelled, there was a second or two of silence, then further words were exchanged and a shot was fired, the man was hurled backwards and crashed on to the pavement, blood spurting from his chest, near his heart.

The three robbers hotfooted it across the street, sprinted along the harbour front and threw the bags into a small, white plastic boat waiting for them by the quay. An engine roared and the little boat, foam spraying over its bows, hurtled across Vågen, where eye-witnesses saw it disappear around the tip of Nordnes peninsula soon afterwards.

In the shop, the owner appeared from the back-room door. With sagging shoulders he said: ‘I’ve rung the alarm.’

The younger of the two customers was the next to speak.

‘That one by the door … I’m pretty sure … that one was a woman.’

Five minutes later the first police officers arrived, alerted by radio that a full-scale search was under way in the whole district.

The case was to become something of a mystery. I followed it only desultorily in the newspapers, and on radio and TV; first of all it was breaking news, then it was relegated to the back pages. There was more interest locally than nationally, but here too it wound up in semi-obscurity, as do most unsolved crimes, until something new is revealed and they become front-page news again.

The greatest mystery was how the robbers could have vanished. After the boat had powered round Nordnes peninsula it was never seen again. At the time in question, on a cold, blustery December day, there were not many people out walking in Nordnes Park, and no witnesses came forward, either from there or anywhere else along Puddefjorden. It did seem as if the thieves had literally vanished into thin air.

The police searched all the quays from Georgenes Verft, the shipyard, and beyond, past Nøstet, Dokken and Møhlenpris, as far as Solheimsviken and from there to the Lyreneset promontory in Laksevåg, without turning up anything of any value. They went through the list of stolen boats in the region with a toothcomb. The ones they eventually found, they crossed off the list, but as late as March, three months after the robbery, there were still some that had not been located. It was the same story with the list of stolen cars. The general assumption was that the robbers must have come ashore somewhere in Nordnes or Laksevåg, transferred the booty to a car and driven off. Under such
circumstances thieves often used a stolen vehicle and later set fire to it, after switching to their own cars. But no cars had been torched, to the police’s knowledge, during that period – neither on the 7th December nor the following days.

What made the case especially serious was the murder. After a couple of days the dead man’s name was released. Nils Bringeland was my age, fifty-nine years old, ran a little company in Bryggen and from all the indications seemed to have been no more than a casual passer-by. He left behind a partner and three children, two of them from an earlier marriage.

The case received broad media coverage, locally and nationally, for the first few days after the robbery. The shop owner, Bernhard Schmidt, was interviewed widely. He said his business had been run on the same premises for three generations since his grandfather, Wilhelm Schmidt, set it up from scratch in 1912. Bernhard Schmidt took the shop over from his father in 1965. There had been minor thefts, and in 1973 there was an attempted break-in through the backyard, but this was the first time in the company’s history that they had experienced anything as dramatic as a robbery. He wouldn’t divulge to the press the value of the items that had been stolen, but other sources speculated the figure lay somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million Norwegian kroner, perhaps even more. Neither the police nor the insurance company wished to comment on this aspect of the case.

The two female shop assistants were also interviewed, anonymously, but they had nothing of any importance to add, apart from the trauma of the experience. The younger of the two customers, Liv Grethe Heggvoll, appeared in the press with her full name. She and her mother had been in the shop looking for a fiftieth-birthday present, and they were as shocked as the shop employees by what they had witnessed. Asked by journalists whether she had noticed anything special about the robbers, she answered they had spoken English with what she considered was a Norwegian, or maybe an Eastern European, accent. ‘What’s more,’ she added, ‘I’m positive one of them was a woman.’

This information was later taken up by the police. They said it was
too early to know whether this might have been an itinerant gang of professional robbers, but they were keeping all their avenues of inquiry open. As for the possibility of a woman being involved, they had no comment to make. The conspicuous get-ups – the so-called ‘BBQ shell suits’ – were discussed in several newspapers. The three suits were identical in colour and design: dark green with white stripes down the sleeves. Pictures of a similar style were everywhere, although the police refused to comment on whether they’d had any response from the general public.

As the investigation ground to a halt there was less and less to read about the case. There was no reason for me to give it a moment’s thought. I had my own daily demons to fight at that time. I was on the longest and darkest marathon of my life, and it was still a long way to the tape.