THE FISHING EXPEDITION
The sky was clear and jelly-pink as my plane touched down at Torp Sandefjord, the smaller of the two airports serving the Oslo region. Torp also served the peninsula to the south of Norway’s capital. Retired police captain Magnusson kept a holiday home in Stavern, a fishing village near the peninsula’s southernmost tip.
Petra had gone to stay with her cousin in Delft. I’d learned this by calling her from the Ibis hotel the previous night. She’d sounded serious about the separation, but I was trying not to think about it.
I’d managed to catch a direct flight that morning: one hour and forty minutes. The airport terminal was blessedly small, the air crystalline as I got outside. I was soon in my Budget rental car, driving out onto the E18 motorway, comforted by the sense of space and openness that I’d come to love up here.
Holland had traded with Norway for centuries. At one point, a fifth of the Dutch navy was made up of Norwegian sailors. Over the years, many Dutch had bought property here. Heinrich Karremans hadn’t exactly settled in Norway, but it sounded like he’d spent enough time in the country that my enquiries might yield something.
A veil of mist lay draped over the coastal hills. It called to mind my army training, and first meeting Olaf Magnusson as a young man. Norway shared a border with Russia in the High North and, under NATO guidance, had moved its army’s headquarters from Oslo to the remote town of Bardufoss, where Magnusson and I had been stationed together.
When I’d first arrived, Norway felt like a basic, primitive place. I recalled the training in winter forests, the northern lights and midnight sun. Norway can afford many things now, not least Heinrich Karremans’s architectural wonders in Oslo, but in the early 1980s oil production was only just beginning to ramp up.
I pulled into the car park of the public baths in Larvik – the nearest decent-sized town to Magnusson’s holiday home. Magnusson had suggested that we meet here for a sauna.
The Larvik public baths was a large sleek building, lavishly dressed in dark stone. I found Magnusson in the reception area, looking older but well rested.
‘Henk, God. It’s been too long…’
While I’d spoken to him by phone recently, we hadn’t seen each other in decades. His face was creased with lines. We hugged, then picked up towels and headed to the men’s changing area.
‘So this is your life now, saunas and spas?’ I joked.
He harrumphed. My fellow ex-soldier’s physique had become soft. His pectorals had sunk, his chest hair was snowy white.
We closed up our lockers, grabbed a couple of water bottles, and made our way through to one of the sauna cabins. Thankfully, we had it to ourselves.
Magnusson ladled water over the stove. The steam billowed and burned my sinuses. ‘That’s better,’ he said, seating himself on the highest bench. ‘I got a response about your man.’
I looked up at him. ‘From Kripos?’
‘Yes. Your friend Heinrich Karremans does appear on file here.’
I waited for him to go on.
‘The cabin he owns near Trondheim was broken into.’
‘When?’
‘Recently.’
‘What was taken?’
Another man stepped into the sauna, tentatively sitting on one of the lower benches. Magnusson ladled more water onto the stove, causing it to hiss ferociously. The man, who appeared to be foreign, was soon red-faced and breathing rapidly.
‘Here.’ I handed the man my water bottle.
He sipped appreciatively – ‘Takk’ – then left.
‘Heinrich Karremans wasn’t in the country at the time,’ Magnusson continued. ‘The burglars took just a couple of items, including a computer.’
‘When was this?’
‘Ten days ago. Karremans was in China, apparently. Still is, I understand from the Trondheim police team.’
I tried to work out what that meant. ‘Are there many burglaries in that area?’
‘A few, especially in shoulder season. The cabins are remote and closed-up. There’s a drugs problem in the area, as there is in many parts of the country.’
‘Odd that they didn’t steal more. A computer, you say? What else?’
‘I didn’t see the full report. What’s your interest in this one?’
The steam was searing my skin. Briefly, I explained my role in Driebergen and the team’s preoccupation with Karremans.
‘Do you think it’s worth a trip up to Trondheim?’ I asked.
‘To the cabin?’ Magnusson looked doubtful. ‘If you were here in an official capacity…’ He shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to see, Henk. The report has been filed, locksmiths will have been round to secure the place… What would you be looking for, anyway?’
It was a good question. ‘Listen, Olaf, I’ve got my doubts about this team I’m working with.’
‘In Driebergen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
I needed to be careful now. ‘I know for a fact that one of them lied about his record. Said he was in the UK’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment. He wasn’t.’
Magnusson sat forward, elbow on knee.
‘Surely he must have expected to be found out?’ I went on.
‘Not necessarily,’ Magnusson said. ‘The Brits keep membership of it a secret, don’t they? What about the other team members?’
‘Three of them were in regiments of some kind. But I’ve got my doubts about all of them. They claim to have engaged Heinrich Karremans in an online sting operation, but is that likely, given that Karremans is in China? Who in their right mind would engage in that kind of activity online there, in the ultimate surveillance state?’
‘Who in their right mind would engage in that kind of activity anywhere, these days?’
‘Hold on.’
I walked out of the heat and stepped into the plunge pool outside, gasping. For a moment I just sat there, the icy water needling my skin. Better.
I leapt out again and returned, dripping cool water.
Magnusson continued: ‘The guy I called in Kripos has good contacts in military circles, too. Give me the names of these other team members – let me have him run them.’
I persuaded myself that these were entirely different systems to the Dutch ones, and that there would be enough degrees of separation involved. In order to make the request more reasonable, I decided to give him just the names of the core team members to begin with – Boomkamp, Vermeulen and Engelhart.
‘I’ll write them down for you when we get outside.’
My skin was already burning again, all the way up my back. ‘By the way, does the expression beau soleil mean anything to you?’
‘No.’ Magnusson’s brow creased. ‘Should it?’
‘Just a saying they use around the squad room.’
He shook his head. ‘People say the strangest things. Do you remember that other Dutchman on our training intake?’
‘Who? Johan?’
‘No, I don’t remember his name. But do you recall that saying of his? About not staying in any place longer than the time it takes “for the fish to start smelling”, or something?’
‘Cas?’
‘That’s right,’ Magnusson said. ‘He didn’t seem to have received the memo that we were up in Bardufoss for the season.’ He laughed heartily. ‘The winter season.’
‘In fact, he graduated to the KMar.’
The KMar – the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee – is our royal protection service.
‘You see? All’s well that ends well.’ Magnusson clapped me on the back, making me wince. ‘Relax now. You need to save your strength for the fishing tomorrow. It will be rough out there on the water, and that’s a promise.’
*
The following day, there was indeed a powerful swell off the Skagerrak coast. We met beside Magnusson’s twenty-one-foot wooden skiff in Stavern harbour. The halyards of the other boats clanked noisily as we climbed onboard. Magnusson fired up the trusty Faerd inboard engine, and off we puttered towards the offshore Svenner Lighthouse. He’d set his lobster pots near it.
The dark sea rose and fell precipitously. The Baltic currents running around the Norwegian coast keep the sea clean and ensure that the lobsters caught here are among the most highly prized in the world, especially when consumed au naturel. But those same currents mean that you have just minutes to live if you end up in the water. There’s no waiting around for the rescue boat.
My bomber jacket suddenly felt highly inadequate.
‘I just heard back from Odd,’ Magnusson called over the throbbing of the four-horsepower engine. ‘My contact at Kripos,’ he reminded me. ‘About the men on your team.’
I suppressed a comment about the Kripos man’s Christian name. ‘What did Odd learn?’
‘I don’t know yet. He’s just waiting to finish his shift so that he can communicate more openly.’ Magnusson himself was distracted, trying to get the measure of the currents. Long waves can travel all the way up from the English Channel, moving terrifically fast and only revealing themselves as they break over submerged rocks. It’s a question of reading the ever-changing light and dark surface patterns, and feeling the sea’s energy.
I was speculating about what Magnusson’s contact had discovered when the boat dropped a metre or so in the water. My stomach flew into my mouth and there was a hollow boom before the hull rose again. The Humminbird echo sounder could only tell us what was directly beneath us; it couldn’t show us what lay ahead.
The bow kept climbing skywards, the horizon slanting at an alarming angle. I licked the salt water from my lips.
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to buy lobster at the local supermarket, Olaf? They’re in season, you know.’
Magnusson chuckled. ‘What, let you Dutch rid us of our “sea monsters” once more?’ He was referring to my canny fellow countrymen, who had offered to remove these creatures for free back in the seventeenth century, depicting them as a threat.
The unusual yaw of the boat was making my stomach turn.
Magnusson forced a grin. ‘What’s the matter, Henk? Getting a little seasick? I thought you were made of good mariner stock. Anyway, how I am supposed to keep my Norse spirit alive, shopping in supermarkets?’
Ah yes, the fabled Norse spirit. How they like to nourish the hunter part of themselves up here. It isn’t unusual for Norwegian men to go off for days at a time, alone, into the wilderness. Is that what had drawn Karremans to Norway? The remoteness, the hunting spirit?
We were approaching an area known as Rakke – an old word for the submerged rocks here. Like the coastal hills just visible on the horizon, the rocks are relatively smooth – seductive-looking, even. Excellent for setting pots against, and for trapping the kind of fish and other sea matter that make good lobster feed, lobsters being night creatures, of course.
‘So how’s life?’ Magnusson asked. ‘How’s the wife and daughter?’
‘Could be better,’ I replied.
‘Could, or couldn’t?’ he clarified over the strengthening wind.
‘Could.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
I shrugged and sighed, then summarised the umbrage that Petra had taken at my job. ‘But it’s not just that,’ I said loudly. ‘It feels like everything’s changing.’
‘How so?’
I could tell from the surface patterns that the water was moving faster. The shore was a grey line, the lighthouse ahead a needle.
‘“Loss” is how I’d mostly describe it, Olaf. Loss of time, opportunity, loss of years ahead of me… loss of a pain-free existence and even a solid night’s sleep without having to get up and take a piss every three hours.’
Magnusson chuckled in agreement.
‘Loss of memory and mental clarity, even…’
Was it the lighthouse ahead, or a metal pole sticking out from a submerged rock? A cormorant settled on it to dry its wings, deciding the matter finally. ‘And what scares me is that I’m being changed, in ways I don’t like or understand.’
Magnusson said nothing, opening up a space in the conversation for me to fill.
‘Petra’s concern is well-founded, in part at least.’ It felt good to get this off my chest, get it out in the open. ‘The other day, someone showed me an image of a girl online. Sixteen years old she was. Almost forty years my junior. A third younger than my daughter. And I felt aroused.’
‘Then at least you feel something,’ Magnusson said, scanning the dark sea surface, presumably for marker buoys.
‘But it made me wonder: is that how abusers start out? How the spiral down begins?’
Another memory, from earlier in my career: To catch the bad guys, you must think like bad guys. Some part of you must become them…
Magnusson was shaking his head firmly. ‘For abusers, it’s all about power… about getting the power they lack. That’s never been you, Henk. And nothing you’ve shared today suggests otherwise.’
I’d been prepared to believe this about Jan Stamms, the paroled offender in Liège – about powerlessness being at the base of it all.
‘But what about Karremans?’ I asked. ‘Surely the Rijksbouwmeester of Holland has power?’
‘It may be that his type feels the loss of power most acutely of all, as they age. That, again, isn’t you.’
‘Are you sure? Think about what I just told you. I’m more and more aware of my mortality.’
‘As am I,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a decade on you, remember.’
I felt bad for talking in such a self-centred way. I felt sick, too, for the first time ever in a boat. It was the unusual, persistent twisting of the hull as it cut across the currents. I could see orange and yellow marker buoys; we were approaching the pots – and the metal pole sticking out of the water.
‘You can look at it in one of two ways,’ Magnusson was saying, sitting up on the starboard side of the boat, one hand still on the wheel, his craggy face silhouetted. ‘You can think of yourself becoming older – or becoming an elder. Of losing physical power – or gaining something in your soul. Losing physical vitality, or gaining wisdom and the ability to help others… Here’ – he suddenly sat up taller – ‘could you take the wheel for a moment?’
I did so, watching him roll up his sleeve and reach in for the current buoy – a white-painted two-by-four, all but submerged; it showed which way the current was running. Strongly to the starboard side, it indicated.
The waters rode up furiously around Magnusson’s wrist as he felt it. I steered hard to port.
The current buoy was attached to a marker buoy by a long section of floating rope; the marker buoy in turn was anchored by the heavy lobster pot. It was important that the boat didn’t cross the line of the floating rope.
‘It’s the two-way pull in us all,’ Magnusson was saying. ‘Loss, gain. Weakness, courage. It all depends what you choose to tap into. Just like with the tides –’
‘Shouldn’t we focus on the task at hand?’ I interrupted him. The wind was getting louder. We were entering a place of converging currents.
I could feel the bile rise in my stomach. The boat was being rolled like a stick. Magnusson vomited; I followed suit, over the side, heaving it up from the tips of my toes.
Better.
But the metal pole was approaching fast. I needed to steer more to port.
Suddenly, one of our phones trilled. It surprised me that there was even coverage. It was Magnusson’s.
‘Hello?’
I was about to rebuke him for taking the call when he said, ‘Odd, we’re just hauling in lobster pots.’ He switched the phone to his other hand so that he could keep a firm hold of the rope. ‘What’s that? A NATO regiment?’ He shot me a warning look. ‘Let’s talk later, now’s not a good time.’
‘What is it?’ I called over the wind. Sea spray lashed at us.
‘They were all in the same NATO regiment – the names you gave me.’
Had Boomkamp, Vermeulen and Engelhart served together?
The world tilted. ‘Olaf!’ I warned as we pitched down into a watery dark canyon and rode up again as fast. If we hit a rock that way, the wood-panelled hull would shatter like a toy.
‘Where’s the rope?’ I yelled. It occurred to me that the hull might, of itself, be causing the waves to break. We were suddenly drenched, head to foot.
Magnusson had his phone in one hand, but no rope in the other.
‘Where the bloody hell is it?’ I shouted over the wind.
‘Steer to port!’ he cried, stowing his phone in his inside pocket. But we were turning the other way, in a place where the currents met, and the engine had slowed. With dread I sensed why – the rope was wrapped round the propeller.
‘Don’t cross the line of the rope!’ he yelled. ‘Kill the engine!’
‘Too late!’ I shouted about the rope, fighting my urge to retain the motor’s power, feeling my voice rise as the water lifted us up higher than seemed possible. There was a vertiginous moment as we slunk back down, just twenty metres or so from the metal pole. I wiped the stinging salt water from my eyes. The black cormorant was still sitting there. Jesus, this was dangerous.
‘We need to cut the rope,’ I yelled, leaning over the stern to try to see the propeller. The underside was being lifted clear out of the water, but all I could see was tangled rope. ‘You got a knife?’
‘What?’ Magnusson said, coming alongside. His knuckles blanched as he gripped the top of the hull.
‘Knife!’ I cried out.
Another wave broke into the boat, almost sweeping the bone-handled blade from his free hand.
‘If I was thirty years younger,’ he shouted over the shrieking wind, ‘I’d dive into that damn water and free the rope properly!’ His face was dripping wet.
‘No longer fit enough, eh?’
I shredded the rope on one side, then the other.
‘Not stupid enough,’ he replied.
I restarted the engine, barely letting the clutch out and trying to play with the pitch of the propeller as my feet slipped and slid.
‘There will be some nice six-pounders left in that pot,’ Magnusson complained.
‘They won’t be going anywhere if they’re wise.’
Some rope must have remained wrapped around the prop shaft, because I could barely get enough revs out of the engine to steer us across the face of the rock marked by the metal pole. For an agonising moment, the boat was stationary, fighting the current.
Magnusson was looking at his phone. ‘Odd sent me a text,’ he shouted. ‘About this NATO regiment. Your three men were in it in 94 and 95. NATO Headquarters in Brussels.’
Belgium, again. ‘Could you hand me that phone?’ My own phone had no coverage. ‘I think we should call the coastguard.’
‘In Stavern?’ Magnusson looked shocked. ‘Admit that we’re in trouble out here?’
‘They must be used to sailors getting into trouble on Rakke.’
‘Not these sailors.’ He sounded appalled. ‘Are you mad?’
I gestured at the inboard engine. ‘Well, you try getting more out of this beast!’ Water was swilling around the bottom of the vessel.
‘Just give it more revs…’
I did, adjusting the pitch once more.
Yet another wave broke over the hull. The amount of water in the boat was concerning me as much as anything now. And then a current suddenly pushed us away from the rocks. As quickly as we’d got into trouble, I was able to use it to navigate away from them. We were being swept along in the coastal current.
It took another half-hour to get close enough to the shore to be able to double back beside it to Stavern, the engine reluctant, the propeller seriously down on power. By the time we limped home, the engine was practically running on fumes, it was so nearly out of fuel.
‘That’s what you get when you cross the line,’ Magnusson rued.