“We’ve got a lead,” he said into his phone. “I’m not entirely sure it deserves to be called that, though.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Oleg asked.
“Haven’t I said?”
Oleg didn’t answer.
“Kaja Solness,” Harry said. “A former colleague.”
“Are you two—”
“No. Nothing like that. Nothing...”
“Nothing I need to know?” Oleg filled in.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“OK.”
A pause.
“Do you think you’re going to find him?”
“I don’t know, Oleg.”
“But you know what I need to hear.”
“Mm. We’re probably going to find him.”
“OK.” Oleg sighed deeply. “Speak soon.”
Harry found Kaja on the sofa in the living room, where she was sitting with her laptop on her knees and her phone on the coffee table. She had found out the following: Peter Ringdal was forty-six years old, had been divorced twice, had no children, his relationship status was unclear, but he lived alone in a house in Kjelsås. His career had been mixed. He had studied economics at the Norwegian Business School, and had once launched a new transportation concept.
“I found two interviews with him, both in Finansavisen,” Kaja said. “In the first, from 2004, he was looking for investors for what he claimed was going to revolutionise the way we think about individual transport. The headline was Killer of the Private Car.” She tapped her laptop. “Here it is. A quote from Ringdaclass="underline" ‘Today we convey one or two people in vehicles weighing a ton on roads that demand huge amounts of space and a lot of maintenance to handle the traffic they have to carry. The amount of energy required to get these machines rolling with their wide tires on rough pavement is laughable when you consider the alternatives available to us. In addition there’s also the resources that go into making these outsized driving machines. But that isn’t the biggest cost to humanity of today’s private transport. It’s time. The loss of time when a potential contributor to society has to spend four hours each day focusing solely on steering his own private machine through the Los Angeles traffic. That isn’t just a pointless use of a quarter of a person’s waking life, it also means a loss in GDP that in this city alone would be enough to finance another trip to the moon — every year!’ ”
“Mm.” Harry ran his forefinger over the worn varnish on the armrest of the wingback chair he had sat down on. “What’s the alternative?”
“According to Ringdal, masts with small carriages hanging off them, containing one or two people, not unlike cable cars. The carriages are parked at platforms on every street corner, like bicycles. You get inside, tap in your personal code and where you want to go. Your debit card is charged a small amount per kilometre, and a computerised system sends the carriages off, gradually accelerating to up to two hundred kilometres an hour, even in the centre of Los Angeles. While you carry on working, reading, watching television, barely noticing the corners. Or the corner, because on most journeys there would only be one. No traffic lights, no concertina effect, the carriages are like electrons drifting through a computer system without ever colliding. And beneath the carriages, all the roads are freed up for the use of pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders.”
“What about heavy transport?”
“Anything that’s too heavy for the masts is carried in trucks that would have to drive at a snail’s pace in cities, in allocated time slots at night or early in the morning.”
“Sounds expensive, having to build both masts and roads.”
“According to Ringdal, the new masts and rails would cost between 5 and 10 percent of what a new road costs. The same with maintenance. In fact a transition to masts and rails would be paid for within ten years simply from the reduction in road maintenance. In addition to that, there would be the human and financial saving of fewer accidents. The target is no accidents at all, not a single one.”
“Mm. Sounds sensible in the city, but out in the sticks...”
“The cost of building masts to your cabin would be a fifth of an ordinary gritted road.”
Harry gave her a wry smile. “Sounds as if you like the idea.”
Kaja laughed. “If I’d had the money in 2004, I’d have invested in it.”
“And?”
“And would have lost it. The second interview with Ringdal is from 2009, and has the headline Black belt bankrupt. The investors lost everything and are furious with Ringdal. He for his part claims that he’s the victim, and that people with no vision for the future have ruined things for him by cutting off the money. Did you know he used to be Norwegian judo champion?”
“Mm.”
“He says something funny, actually...” Kaja scrolled down and read out loud with laughter in her voice: “ ‘The so-called financial elite are a gang of parasites who think it takes intelligence to get rich in a country with fifty successive years of growth. Whereas in fact the only thing you need is an inferiority complex, a willingness to risk other people’s money, and being born after 1960. Our so-called financial elite are a gaggle of blind hens in a corn silo, and Norway is the paradise of mediocrity.’ ”
“Strong words.”
“It doesn’t stop there, he’s got a conspiracy theory as well.”
Harry watched steam rise from the cup on the table in front of her. That meant fresh coffee in the kitchen. “Let’s hear it.”
“ ‘This development is inescapable, and who has most to lose from it?’ ”
“Are you asking me?”
“I’m reading from the interview!”
“You’d better use your funny voice, then.”
Kaja shot him a warning glance.
“Car manufacturers?” Harry sighed. “Road builders? Oil companies?”
Kaja cleared her throat and looked back at the screen: “ ‘Just like the big arms manufacturers, the car companies are extremely powerful players, and they live or die with private motoring. So they’re fighting desperately against development by pretending to be trailblazers. But when they try to convince people that driverless cars are the solution, of course it isn’t because they want better transport solutions, but because they want to slow things down as long as possible and carry on producing one-ton monsters even if they know that this is of no benefit to the world, and actually uses up its limited resources. And they’re trying to smother any other initiatives with everything they’ve got. They’ve been out to get me from day one. They haven’t managed to put me off, but they’ve obviously managed to frighten my investors.’ ” She looked up.
“And after that?” Harry asked.
“Not much. A short piece in 2016, also in Finansavisen, about the Norwegian Musk-wannabe Peter Ringdal, who is currently running a small tobacconist’s in Hellerud, but who once ruled a castle in the air that didn’t last long despite the fact that experts at the Institute of Transport Economics praised it as the most sensible proposal for the future of personal transportation, especially in cities.”
“Criminal record?”
“One report for beating up a guy when he was working as a bouncer while he was a student, and one for careless driving, also when he was a student. He wasn’t convicted in either instance. But I’ve found something else. An abandoned missing person case.”
“Oh?”
“His second ex-wife, Andrea Klitchkova, was reported missing last year. Because the case was dropped, the files have been deleted, but I found a copy of an email from the Norwegian friend who reported Andrea missing. She wrote that Andrea had told her that before she left Ringdal, he had threatened her several times with a knife when she criticised him about the bankruptcy. I found the friend’s number and had a chat with her. She says the police spoke to Ringdal, but then she got an email from Russia, from Andrea, in which she apologised for not telling her she was going leave so suddenly. Because Andrea was a Russian citizen, the matter was passed on to the Russian police.”