The Hanging Girl

4

The house on Sandflugtsvej was situated back from the road with a French balcony and the feeling of the good life emanating from it. Everything had been arranged down to the last detail, from the door knocker to the brass nameplate and well-mowed lawns. This was a place where you drove in newly washed VW Polos, French cars, or, for lack of something better, SUVs. All status symbols of the first degree in provincial Denmark.

There was only one name on the door, Nelly Rasmussen.

“Yes, Bjarke Habersaat certainly does live here,” she said with a friendly stress on Bjarke, as she stood there like a cougar in the half-open front door with a duster tucked in her cleavage and a cigarette burning between her outstretched fingers. “But you shouldn’t expect Bjarke to be in the mood to talk with you,” she said with the look of a professional landlady, glancing unimpressed at Carl’s ID card. He estimated that she was fifty-five. Blue housecoat, home-colored permed hair with highlighted split ends, and a crazily lopsided tattoo on her wrist that was probably, albeit in vain, supposed to make her more exotic.

“I think you should show a bit of sympathy and let him get over the shock. After all, it’s only a few hours since his dad, God bless him, took his own life.”

Assad took a step forward. “It’s really sweet that you’re so good to your lodger and look out for him. But what if we had a final letter with us for him from his dad? Wouldn’t it be a shame if he didn’t get it? Or what if his mom had also committed suicide? Do you really think we’d be allowed to tell you if that was the case? And what if we’re actually here to arrest Bjarke for arson? Would it still be all right then, that you’re standing here in your heels and mocking the course of justice?”

She looked a little perplexed as she took in all the information and his smiling face. Maybe she became even more confused when Assad took her arm, patted it, and reassured her that he understood how much it must also affect her to have a lodger in so much distress. At any rate, she let go of the door handle and allowed Carl to nudge the door open with his shoe.

“Bjarke!” she shouted reluctantly up the stairs. “You’ve got visitors.” She turned toward them. “Wait here in the hallway a minute before you go up. And knock on the door and wait until he opens himself, okay? Bjarke can sometimes be a little indisposed, but I hope you’ll overlook that under the circumstances. I certainly do. And double standards or not, that’s just the way it is.”

You could smell the indisposition already halfway up the stairs. In fact, it smelled like a hash café from the outskirts of Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district on unemployment benefit payment day.

“Skunk,” said Assad. “A very fine, strong smell. Not as sneaky and sour as hash.”

Carl scowled. That damned professor he was dragging along. Skunk or hash, the smell of decay was just as pathetic.

“Remember to knock,” came the reminder from the bottom of the stairs.

The message didn’t reach Assad’s hearing range because without further ado he grabbed the handle and opened the door.

Assad stopped immediately in the doorway and Carl understood why when he came up behind him.

“Hang on a minute, Rose,” he said, attempting to hold her back.

There, leaning back in a large worn armchair, sat Bjarke without a stitch on him, his legs pulled up under him and a bottle of paint thinner in his hand.

And apart from being naked, Bjarke was also stone-cold dead, as anyone could see from this distance despite the sun barely being able to penetrate the thick hash fog. Slitting his wrists, Bjarke had ended his life with half-closed eyes in a dreamlike gaze. It hadn’t been a difficult death.

“That wasn’t skunk you smelled, Assad. It was the combination of hash and cellulose thinner,” said Carl.

“Don’t stand there blocking my way,” snapped Rose from behind as she tried to push past them.

“You shouldn’t come in here, Rose, it isn’t pretty. Bjarke’s dead. There’s blood all over the floor because he’s slit his wrists. I’ve never seen so much blood from one person.”

Assad nodded quietly. “But then I’ve seen a bit more of this sort of thing than you, Carl.”

It was a long time before the technicians and the doctor who would carry out the postmortem arrived. As a result, Bjarke’s landlady had the entire staff of Department Q to cling to while she lamented over something so horrid invading her life. How in the world was she going to get compensation for the rug and chair when she didn’t have the receipts for them any longer?

When it finally sunk in for her that the young man upstairs had actually died while she was downstairs dusting, she needed to sit down to try to avoid hyperventilating.

“Imagine, what if someone has killed him,” she whispered over and over.

“I don’t think that is something you need worry about, unless, of course, you’ve heard something unusual. Has there been anyone on the stairs over the last few hours, or can you enter the bedroom from the back of the house?”

She shook her head.

“And you didn’t do it yourself, I assume?” continued Carl.

Her eyes rolled as she began to hyperventilate again.

“Right,” said Carl. “Then he must have cut his own wrists. He was certainly in a state where he could’ve done anything to himself.”

She pursed her lips and pulled herself together, mumbling about all sorts. She’d reached the point where she realized that she might have been an accomplice to crime by renting to someone who grew magic mushrooms on the windowsill and who, on top of that, breathed mostly through a chillum.

It was at this point Carl left her to the other two, went outside in the gleaming sunshine, and lit a smoke.

* * *

The search of Bjarke’s room, seizure of his computer and the knife he’d slit his wrists with, the collection of the technical data, and the postmortem and removal of the body down to the ambulance all happened so quickly that Carl was only on his fifth smoke when Birkedal stood with his investigator and a technician waving a scrap of paper in a plastic bag.

Carl read the scrap containing just the words: Sorry, Dad. “Strange,” said Assad.

Carl nodded. The message was so short and direct that it was moving in its own way. But why didn’t the note read Sorry, Mom? In contrast to her late ex-husband, she at least had the chance of getting the message.

Carl looked at Rose. “How old was Bjarke?”

“Thirty-five.”

“So he was eighteen in 1997, at the time his dad became preoccupied with the case.”

“Did you talk with June Habersaat?” interrupted Birkedal.

“Well, it went so-so. She wasn’t exactly cooperative if you ask me,” said Carl.

“Right, well then, I’ll give you the chance to try again.”

“Really, how so?”

“You could be the ones to drive down to her in Aakirkeby and inform her of her son’s death, couldn’t you? That would also give you the opportunity to ask her the questions you’re burning to ask and, in the meantime, it’ll give the rest of us more time to seal the room and prepare the body to be sent to forensics in Copenhagen.”

Carl shook his head. Seal the apartment and send the body to the mortuary? How long would that take precisely?

Ten minutes?