Normally it takes the police five to six weeks to get an answer when they send off a fingerprint to Kripos. But after locating Thorleif Brenden’s car in Kirkegaten and successfully lifting a fingerprint from the armrest on the passenger side, Brogeland persuaded forensic scientist Ann-Mari Sara to convince her bosses to give the sample top priority and run it through AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. It took only ten or twelve seconds before she got a hit. And after the result had been checked manually, there was no doubt that the fingerprint belonged to a man called Orjan Mjones.
Brogeland remembers Mjones from his plain-clothes days. His name also appeared on the long list Nokleby gave them after Elisabeth Haaland had described ‘Furio’ — the man who pretended to interview her.
It really is ridiculous, Brogeland thinks, that so few staff within the police force have access to the Indicia database where all information about everyone — obtained both officially and unofficially — is collected and stored. If you have a description of a person and if information about someone with similar features has previously been entered, everything relating to them — including any criminal record — appears in a matter of seconds. In some cases the level of information stored about the person includes the smallest details. All mapping of East Europeans, for example, in connection with Project Borderless is being entered into Indicia.
Brogeland studies the fact sheet on Mjones which Nokleby printed out and gave to them after Elisabeth Haaland had described ‘Furio’. His criminal career began in his teens, and he has two previous convictions. The first is for a robbery in the Majorstua area of Oslo where a car was used to ram-raid a jeweller’s, while the other conviction relates to possession of an illegal weapon in a bar in Oslo. When police searched his remarkably tidy home, they discovered several other weapons as well as explosives and burglary equipment. While he was suspected of being the brains behind a string of minor and major robberies in his early twenties, things quietened down around him at the end of the nineties and the start of the new millennium. For that reason, Mjones was suspected of having made the transition from petty to organised crime and of moving into an even more lucrative and discreet career as a fixer. This could mean anything from providing persuasive heavies to carrying out actual hits. But even though the rumours flourished, the police never found anything concrete they could arrest him for.
Yesterday, Brogeland had called one of his former colleagues at Organised Crime, Njal Vidar Hammerstad, to ask if they had come across Mjones in recent years. Hammerstad said that they didn’t have him under surveillance, but that his face popped up from time to time. They knew, for example, that Mjones had befriended several people in the criminal Albanian community. But Hammerstad didn’t know if there was a link between Mjones and Tore Pulli.
In an ideal world, Brogeland thinks, plain-clothes officers would have followed Mjones and his like every day all year round. But it’s too expensive. Every year Oslo Police spends billions of kroner fighting organised crime and yet it’s still not enough. It doesn’t even scratch the surface. Norway is an attractive country for criminal gangs because we’re an affluent nation, he thinks. With a chronically understaffed police force.
Sometimes his wife asks him if he misses his old life as a plain-clothes police officer. His reply is always no, but that’s a lie. Of course he does. He misses the buzz of the chase even though there might be long boring intervals in between. He remembers the endless hours sitting in cars or trying to blend in in the street. And then the high when everything kicked off at last, when he would explode into action, give his all without hesitating. Not for one second. But he couldn’t live that life once he had a family. The level of risk and the generally anti-social working hours were intolerable in the long run.
Brogeland heaves a sigh and looks at an old photograph of Mjones. A man who has stayed in the shadows in recent years but who has now emerged to carry out a hit. The chances that he has already left the country are considerable — unless something went wrong. But what would that be?