Читать книгу Thomas Quick - Hannes Råstam - Страница 28

THE DEAD END

ONE LATE AFTERNOON on 23 April 1996 the police’s little convoy of vehicles drove via Örebro and Lindesberg on Highway E18 into a little settlement known as Ørje on Svenskvejen (‘the Swedish road’) towards Oslo. Thomas Quick sat in the middle seat of a white minibus next to Inspector Seppo Penttinen.

The aim of the trip was for Quick to show where and how he had murdered two asylum-seeking African boys and nine-year-old Therese Johannesen in Norway.

The details Quick had given corresponded exactly with the case of two boys who had gone missing from the Red Cross asylum-seekers’ centre on the outskirts of Oslo.

During the trip to Norway he outlined the route for how to get there. Before the trip he had made a drawing of the building, which was a fairly unusual old wooden house with a number of unique details. When they arrived, they found that the house looked exactly as in the drawing.

Quick showed them the way to a place known as Mysen, where apparently one of the boys had been killed. The boys’ bodies had then been moved by Quick to Sweden, where he had cannibalised his victims before burying them in Lindesberg.

Detective Inspector Ture Nässén told me how Thomas Quick and the investigators drove to the football pitch in Lindesberg. There, the forensic technicians dug up a large area that Quick had pointed out. The cadaver dog Zampo reacted to the presence of human remains. When no body parts were found, Quick said that he had made a mistake; they should be searching the football pitch in Guldsmedshyttan instead. Despite determined digging and further sniffing by the cadaver dog, nothing was found there either.

While the excavations were in full swing in Guldsmedshyttan, something quite remarkable happened. Ture Nässén received confirmation that the two murder victims the police were looking for were in fact alive. Both had made their way to Sweden, where one of them had settled. The other was living in Canada.

And so two of Thomas Quick’s Norwegian murders no longer existed. Undeterred, their investigations into the third murder continued with renewed energy. After an inquiry lasting some two years, and twenty-one interviews about Therese Johannesen, in which Quick changed his story countless times, his insights into the murder were deemed to be of such accuracy that Hedemora District Court found him guilty.

With my newly acquired insights into witness psychology, and having recently learned of Svein Arne Haavik’s efforts as an informer, I realised that Quick’s testimony wasn’t worth a great deal. Nonetheless, there were the remaining bits of evidence: the pin-pointing of the crime scene in Ørje Forest, the fragments of bone . . .

I needed to go to Drammen, so I called Inspector Håkon Grøttland and invited myself.

‘You’re welcome,’ he agreed.