Dregs by Jørn Lier Horst Read Free Book Online

kicked off her shoes in the hallway. Her father had not installed a burglar alarm as most of his neighbours had done and she had mentioned it to him a couple of times. Last winter, she had worked on a series of articles about migrant criminals from Eastern Europe who broke into houses and helped themselves to everything of value. Next day they could be in a completely different part of the country, the stolen goods already far, far away. Her father’s house was in a beautiful situation on the hillside above Stavern, and would probably interest that kind of criminal. Furthermore, it lay empty for most hours of the day and night. He spent a lot of time at work, and she knew that he also spent evenings and holidays with Suzanne Bjerke, whom he had met at the same time that she herself had met Tommy Kvanter.
    It was clean and tidy inside the house, smelling just as she remembered. Her father had most likely spent a few hours the evening before tidying up, knowing she was coming.
    She carried her bag containing a change of clothes up to her old room on the first floor and then went down to the kitchen. She got a glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water from the tap. Tap water here tasted cleaner and fresher than in Oslo, but then it was the water from the Farris spring. She cleared away a coffee cup her father had left lying and took out her portable computer and research file, as usual using the big kitchen table as a work area.
    Her next interview subject was called Ken Ronny Hauge. It really was a typical name for a villain, she thought. In many of the criminal cases she worked on, the culprit had a double-barrelled name – for one reason or another, the phonetics made her associate it with criminals. There was Ken Arvid, Roy Tore, Jim Raymond, and Tom Roger. Tommy was also a name that she had often come across in forensic reports, when she thought about it.
    Ken Ronny Hauge was the most fascinating person on her list of interview subjects. On the night of 23rd September 1991, he had shot and killed a policeman. The case was one of Line’s earliest recollections. Her father had bought all of the Oslo newspapers while the case was on the front pages and both parents followed the reports on television and radio.
    The murdered policeman was called Edgar Bisjord and had been the same age as her father. They had gone on a few in-service courses together. Edgar Bisjord had worked at the district sheriff’s office in Øvre Eiker. He was called out from home because of a traffic accident on the main route 35 south of Vestføssen, but the actual accident was a routine matter. He helped the two parties to fill out the claim report form and left the scene as soon as the damaged vehicles were towed away, but never arrived home. The following day his police car was found at a turning area at the end of a little side road near Eikeren and Edgar Bisjord lay three metres away with three bullet holes in his chest.
    Line had been eight years old at the time and frightened that something similar might happen to her father. She screamed when he went to work and, all these years later, could still remember the clammy feeling of anxiety. Her feelings didn’t improve when she learned that the perpetrator was from Helgeroa, only ten minutes away. His escape route could have been through Stavern and past the house where Line had been lying asleep.
    Ken Ronny Hauge was captured that same evening, and it was sixteen years before he was a free man again. By then he had served more than the legally required two-thirds of his sentence. When Line looked him up she discovered that he had chosen to move back to his hometown, although many people would remember who he was. That surprised her, but almost a generation had gone by since the murder. Moreover, the world had experienced worse and more brutal cases in subsequent years.
    When she had phoned him three weeks before, he listened with interest as she explained that the aim of her series was