The Hanging Girl

53

Carl picked up Assad at the end of the road.

“June had her car parked at the farm down there,” he panted, pointing back. “It was so close that I had my hand on the door handle, but I didn’t manage. I’m still having muscle and breathing problems, Carl. I’m sorry.”

Carl understood. He had nothing to apologize for. Just the hundred meters he’d run himself had nearly knocked it out of him.

“Did you get the registration?” he asked.

He shook his head. Damn it.

“Look, I can see it driving down there,” shouted Assad, pointing forward.

Even though the car was at least five hundred meters in front of them, they could clearly hear June Habersaat putting the gears through their paces.

“That old rust bucket is being pushed right to its limit. She’s driving like a lunatic, Carl, you’ll never catch her.”

“Call Birkedal. I assume they can find a couple of cars that can help us go after her now.”

Carl put his foot down on the Peugeot as if he were trying to push the pedal out of the bottom, while trying to understand why June Habersaat would try to take her life at her son’s graveside. Was it depression due to his death or something more fundamental? Was it something lying in the back of her psyche? She’d been hiding that pistol all these years, after all. And why had she shot Atu? Was it self-defense? But if it was self-defense, why had she run, was it rea . . .

“Watch out!” screamed Assad, cell in hand. Smashed bottles littered the road in front of them. Treacherous needle-sharp shards that could stop anything with rubber tires.

Carl slowed down, crawling along for the next hundred meters. If Assad hadn’t seen it, the tires would’ve exploded with a bang.

“Tell Birkedal, too, they’ll need to send someone out to clean up.”

Another straight stretch of road lay before them, so Carl put his foot on the gas.

When they reached the buildings in Gildesbo, the road was black with skid marks where it swung south. The sign pointed to Åsedamsvej.

“What do you reckon, Assad? Are they her tracks?”

He nodded to confirm. Now he’d managed to get hold of the duty officer in Rønne. It only took him a few seconds to relay the message, while Carl sped up to a hundred and twenty-five kilometers an hour down a road where the visibility on either side was optimal.

“There!” shouted Assad.

Carl had seen it. Down at the end of the road the black car took a sharp right turn.

They reached the T-junction, followed her right turn, and then found themselves unsure.

About a hundred meters farther on, there were two options: Take the left onto Almindingensvej, or straight on?

“No skid marks this time, Assad. Straight on, do you think?”

He didn’t answer straightaway, so Carl turned to face him. His head had fallen slightly down on his chest and his jaw muscles were working away. It was obvious that he was concentrating like crazy to avoid moaning.

“Shall we drive to the hospital, Assad?” asked Carl. At this moment, June Habersaat could go to blazes.

Assad screwed his eyes shut, opening them again after filling his lungs to the bursting point.

“It’s over now, Carl. Just drive,” he said. But it wasn’t true, it wasn’t over.

“Drive!” he shouted, and Carl sped off.

The forest cover was significant and dense now. Several small roads looked tempting but they drove straight on. No matter what, it was the right direction if you wanted to go to Rønne, and that was where they needed to go if this pursuit failed. Then Assad could get some painkillers that actually did something.

Now they heard the noise of screeching brakes up above the forest, followed by a faint muffled bang. If it was June Habersaat’s car, not only had they driven in the right direction but they were close.

They discovered the car four hundred meters farther down the road. It lay on its side, as if it had just gently toppled over, but two stripes of burned rubber in a small parking space, really no more than an appendix to the road, and a mass of churned-up grass, told a different story.

“She was driving too fast and the brakes locked when she wanted to stop in here,” suggested Assad while Carl looked around.

“Maybe she thought she could drive it out into the high grass and let it disappear.”

They stood still for a moment, looking around. She was gone.

It was a beautiful but also strange sight so close to the road. A hill in the middle of the forest in an otherwise flat and wet meadow.

Carl glanced over to some information posters showing a castle formation located on top of the hill.

Lilleborg it said on a sign with an arrow, hanging between two red posts five meters farther ahead.

Carl looked out in the direction of the arrow. As far as he could tell, you had to go up and round the hill.

“Do you think she fled over to the other side of the road and into the forest?” asked Assad.

“She certainly hasn’t run around the hill down here, or she’d have trampled the grass down.”

Carl looked out over the meadow. It was a big open space. If she’d had a half-minute head start before they arrived, and it couldn’t have been much more than that, it was enough time to have disappeared into the forest and also enough to disappear up the path and around the hill, but definitely not enough to have crossed the meadow.

“If she was injured in the crash, which seems quite likely, I wouldn’t choose the forest if I was her,” he concluded. “You’d get knocked all the time in there.”

Assad nodded in agreement, and so they turned toward the hill.

It was less than twenty-four hours since their bodies had been subjected to extremely harsh treatment, making their climb up the slight incline to the hill a steady challenge. Already after the first turn and a short distance over some bare rock, they were both breathing heavily and totally worn out.

“We’re crazy, Assad. We should still be in bed at Kalmar Hospital,” said Carl after reaching the top of a second incline that gave them a clear view over the parking lot twenty-five meters below.

Assad raised his bandaged hand in the air and stopped. Carl had heard it, too. In westerns, twigs snapped. Here, it was a very big one.

“I think she’s waiting for us, Carl,” he whispered.

They looked up at a granite boulder wall, which the grass and shrubs hadn’t been able to cover. It was Lilleborg, a fortress whose layout they knew nothing about.

Carl regretted that they hadn’t paid more attention to the information below, as he approached a slope going down to the lake behind the meadow area. To his left, along the edge, a path winded down, but the noise hadn’t come from that direction. To the right, the path went over huge boulders and cliffs, enclosed by a metal railing stopping people from falling down into the gorge.

Behind him, Assad was trying to suppress the effect the slope had on him, so it was good that he took the lead.

Then they suddenly found themselves at the top. Long grass, cliffs, a picnic table for those who’d brought a picnic with them, and several walls, among them one with an opening out toward a spectacular view over the lake. But no June Habersaat.

“What was that noise we heard just before, then?” asked Carl.

Assad shrugged. Right now, he was utterly indifferent, that much was clear. His hand was all he could think about.

Carl recovered himself for a moment, his hands resting on his knees. This was simply pathetic. Understandable, yes, but pathetic. He hoped the situation wasn’t one they’d have to endure for much longer.

Carl was pissed off with the whole thing because there’d been significant costs with this case. Assad’s finger, first and foremost, but also time and money. They’d worked flat out for weeks, trying to find a man who only a short while ago had been murdered right under their noses. Flat out to get answers from a woman who’d then tried to kill them and who was dead now herself. And flat out to untie the knots Habersaat had tied himself up in over the course of decades, and tried to give closure to a couple about what happened to their daughter. And where were they now? Nowhere. Just adding fuel to Lars Bjørn’s fire.

Someone would maybe find June Habersaat in time, and hopefully still alive, but Carl doubted that now.

Then they heard Assad’s phone.

“It’s Rose,” he said, putting it on speakerphone.

Damn it. Now they’d have to explain everything. Carl almost couldn’t be bothered.

“How are you?” was the first thing he said. “Yes, it’s Carl, but my cell’s dead. Assad’s listening in.”

“Hi, Assad,” she said. “But we won’t talk about me just now, okay? I’m not doing too well, but I’ll be fine, so enough about that. What’s all this I hear about you?”

“Yes, we’ve been through the mill, we don’t mind admitting. Assad, well, he . . .”

He waved at him to stop. He didn’t want any mention of his hand.

“Assad’s standing next to me waving. We’re on Bornholm, and June Habersaat has just shot and killed Atu.”

“What did you say?”

“Yes, so far so good, but we’re no further forward.”

“Why did she do it?”

“We haven’t spoken to her. She fled the scene.”

“Everything is complicated in this case, if you ask me. I’ve also got something that shakes things up a bit.”

“Shouldn’t you be taking some time off, Rose? It is Saturday after all.”

“Very funny, Mr. Mørck. Then what about you? Well, I’ve worked through Bjarke’s computer now, and it’s been an interesting experience, I can tell you. Forty-five percent of the memory is taken up by PC games of different sorts. Some of them are extremely old, so I don’t think he’s played them in years.”

“How old is the computer?”

“It’s running Windows 95, which seemed to be an update of an earlier version, so you can work it out yourself.”

Mamma mia! It was a wonder that the machine hadn’t been donated to an African village a long time ago.

“Fifty-two percent are image files, and two percent is made up of spam mail, and then there’s a single text file. A poem, actually.”

“A poem?”

“Yes, he’s written a poem. The title is really quite transparent: To Frank. The file was in among some exe-files in a Star Trek game from ninety-five, so it wasn’t easy to find.”

Goodness, she’d certainly been thorough.

Then she read the poem aloud, and regardless of how talentless and inept it was, the meaning was inescapable. It was about rejected love and immense anger. Anger that Frank had brought their world crashing down. Anger that Bjarke’s family had been ruined by Frank’s decisions. Anger that Frank even existed.

“So Bjarke always knew about Frank and Alberte. He just didn’t want to tell his dad. Why?” Carl shook his head; it just didn’t add up. “No, I’m totally confused now.”

“Hold your horses, Sherlock. If you’ll allow me,” interrupted Rose. “Firstly, I want to say that if there’s ever another case where someone has to stare at naked men wearing nothing other than ugly leather caps and studded belts in very compromising situations, it will not be me next time. I dragged myself through more than five thousand—five thousand—photos of that filth before finding the one photo that makes sense in this case. You couldn’t make it up! And I think we should tell the police on Bornholm that next time they get a computer in for examination, they should bloody well check everything, just like I’ve done.”

She was complaining, but weren’t men in leather just up her street?

“Check out the MMS I’m sending to you—now!”

They waited a moment before a beep told them they had it.

A shiver went right through Carl.

It was a photo taken on a beautiful snowy day around Christmastime at a Boy Scout Christmas tree sale. The price was reasonable, twenty kroner per meter, but that was the only reasonable thing about the photo.

Assad stood next to him simply dumfounded.

“Hello, are you there?”

“Yes, Rose, we’re here,” he said on autopilot. “And you’re right. It’s an amazing photo. Well done. You’ve damn well earned the right to take the rest of the day off.”

He looked at the photo again. He was really shocked. Here he was, forced to realize in a split second that all the leads they’d followed had been misleading: the arduous search for an imaginary wooden board because of a stupid little splint Habersaat had found; the hunt for the VW Kombi, not to mention all the resources they’d used to underpin their suspicions that pointed to Frank alias Atu; and days of investigations and often misleading interviews. It’d all been for nothing from the beginning, and here was the evidence.

Bjarke stood in the photo with a big grin on his face in his Boy Scout uniform. His cap was pulled well down over his forehead, wearing his shoulder cord, the knife in his belt decorated with various small shields. He was as proud as a peacock: proud of his troop assistant distinctions, proud of his small enterprise, which was probably for charity, and proud of the four-wheel drive he was leaning up against. And he seemed just as pleased with the idea that he’d probably come up with all by himself. Because onto the four-wheel drive he’d mounted a plow, and written on the plow in large white capitals:

BOY SCOUT GRAND CHRISTMAS TREE SALE—MERRY CHRISTMAS

It was shocking. They’d come to Bornholm to protect June Habersaat from Frank, and in reality it should have been the other way around.

“What are you thinking?” asked Rose.

“We’re thinking that we could’ve done with this photo before. And, Rose, it’s the same old Toyota that June Habersaat escaped in twenty minutes ago, and which is now lying on its side in the meadow fifty meters farther down. Damn it!”

“You said we could have used this photo before now?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think Habersaat could’ve? Or, to put it another way, do you really think he didn’t know his son had that plow?”

“He was a policeman, Rose. He sacrificed seventeen years of his life for this case. Of course he didn’t know.”

“Listen to my theory. Habersaat had suspected his own son for years. That’s what I think, and that’s why he worked so insistently on the case. He had a suspicion, and he wanted to remove it no matter what. Wouldn’t the most convenient thing be to place the finger of suspicion on the person he hated most? His wife’s lover. What do you say to that?”

“Why did he put us on to the case, then? It would’ve been forgotten with his suicide.”

“He left the dirty work to us, hoping we’d bring it to its conclusion. Habersaat had hit a wall, but maybe we’d find Frank, and if we didn’t or if we discovered the real context of the case, then it would be us who’d have to do the heavy work of getting his son arrested. That was Habersaat’s dilemma. He wanted to cover for the boy but realized in the end that it was wrong. Bjarke was guilty. That’s why he chose to stand down.”

“That’s one hypothesis, Rose. A well-grounded and reasonable one, but still a hypothesis. If you’re right, I’ll feel terrible. Several people have died in this course of events. Remember that, Rose.”

“That’s life,” she said, correcting herself straightaway. “That’s death, I meant, of course.”

Assad threw his hand up in warning, looking over his shoulder.

“Brilliant work, Rose, thanks very much. We’ll leave it there for now, okay? The battery is about to go.”

She just managed to say, “Men! Can’t they ever look after . . .” before Carl ended the call.

Assad raised both hands, pointing toward a couple of steps in the cliff, which many years ago had led to yet another floor that had long since crumbled away.

Now Carl heard it, too.

“I’ll just go over here and pee,” said Assad, tiptoeing to the right while he directed Carl to the left.

Then they jumped out at the same time.

There, up the stone wall, June Habersaat was lying in a bed of grass about a meter down. The second she saw them, she swung a thick branch at them, hitting Assad on his disfigured hand. His scream blended with hers and was so intense that it caused her to drop the branch, retreating to the corner of the wall.

Fuming, Carl lunged at her, dragging her up and pulling her arms behind her back to cuff her.

She screamed with pain straightaway, and Carl realized she was injured. Her left shoulder was hanging and several fingers on her left hand were sticking out, dislocated.

“Are you okay, Assad?”

He was holding his hand, but nodded.

“Then call an ambulance for her,” he said.

Carl led her carefully over to the picnic table, directing her with his hand to sit down.

She’d lost a lot of weight since the first time they’d met almost three weeks ago. Her eyes looked big in her hollow face, her arms like a child’s.

“I heard everything that witch said on the phone,” she said after a few minutes’ silence. “And she’s totally wrong.”

Carl nodded to Assad. He’d already activated the recorder on his smartphone.

“Now’s your chance to tell us how it was, June. We won’t interrupt if you don’t want us to.”

She closed her eyes, presumably to block out the pain. “I was glad you hunted Frank or Atu, or whatever you call him, back to the island. It was a gift for me to see him suddenly standing there. Don’t you realize that?” She tried to laugh but her shoulder stopped her.

She opened her eyes and looked Carl straight in the eye. “I wanted to shoot myself. Bjarke and I had drifted too far from each other over the years, and it was all my fault. After Bjarke’s death, all I had left was guilt and it was too much to bear.”

“Guilt about what, June?”

“That I allowed Frank to have the influence he did over my family. That he ruined my life and the lives of everyone in my family. Bjarke couldn’t deal with it anymore. Not after his dad had given up.”

“Your son committed suicide because he was jealous of Alberte and killed her. We’ve seen the car and the snowplow. What more is there to say?”

“That it wasn’t Bjarke who killed Alberte. It was me.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re covering for your son,” said Assad.

“No!” She thumped the table despite the pain. Then she sat for a long time in silence, looking out over the hill and the forest on the other side of the lake.

When you get to the point where a suspect has opened up only to clam up, patience is the only thing that will help to get them going again. Carl had often sat that way for hours, and just now there was nothing else for it. Assad understood this, too.

After a few minutes, she turned her head toward him and caught his eye. Her eyes seemingly begging him to ask her a question.

Carl thought for a moment. The question had to be exactly the right one, or she’d seize up forever.

“Okay, June. I believe you, and I know Assad does, too. Tell us everything now from the beginning, and in your own way.”

She sighed, momentarily crying before looking down at the table and beginning to speak.

“I fell in love with Frank and thought we’d end up together. We used to meet up here, where you found me, and made love in the grass. My husband, Christian, couldn’t do what Frank could, so I fell passionately in love.”

She pressed her lips together.

“We saw each other for a couple of months.”

Carl realized it must’ve been the same time Frank was seeing Inge Dalby.

“And then he broke up with me despite all the promises, which there were plenty of. Why would I cheat on my husband otherwise, who I had a son with and lived with? Why?”

They both shrugged. Yes, why?

“He promised that I’d have a new life, get away from the island, and that the age difference didn’t matter. But he lied, the swine.”

She raised her head. The bitterness was visible.

“I knew full well that he’d found a younger woman. I could smell the cheap slutty perfume. He was stinking of it when he came to dump me, and when I thought about it, I’d noticed it several times before. I worked out that he’d been seeing her at the same time as me—that was the worst of it.” She snorted. “So I followed him to keep an eye on what he was up to. My God, those two lovebirds thought they were so clever! I saw how they kept in touch with one another, how they left small notes for each other out by the boulder in front of the school. Frank and I did the same thing, only our notes were left where he made love.”

So that was where Alberte and Frank had left their messages. By the big rock they’d passed at least ten times. How ironic.

“Just the once, I went to find Frank out at the commune at Ølene, where he told me straight that he was in love with Alberte and was taking her back with him to Copenhagen. I hated him for that, but I hated her just as much.”

She sat for a moment, chewing her words. It was easy to see how she was recalling the hatred at full strength.

“I wanted Alberte out of his life before that happened. She needed to be mutilated, her perfect looks destroyed. She just had to be out of the picture. Maybe then Frank would take me back. I actually believed that for a long time afterward. I waited for him to come back for years; it was crazy and naive. Since then, I just didn’t want to hear about him. Not from my ex-husband, not from my sister, and not from you. Frank was just wiped out of my life.”

Carl thought that he ended up paying for it anyway when he turned up again.

“I borrowed my son’s car—the one lying down in the ditch—while he was at work at the workshop in Aakirkeby. He always left it in front of my sister’s house because he got lunch there every day. It was really sweet actually.”

She smiled for a second.

“To make sure that the impact wouldn’t leave a mark on the car, I took the snowplow he’d welded together himself, which was lying at home in the garage in Listed. I put it in the back of my own car and drove to Jernbanegade, where I attached it to the fender on the Toyota, just like it’d been constructed to fit.”

“Excuse me for saying something just now, June, but I have to know. How did you know that Alberte was going to meet Frank out there by the tree that morning?”

She smiled, as if she was about to present her test piece. Maybe she was.

“I left a note under the boulder very early in the morning before I drove to Aakirkeby. I could forge Frank’s handwriting completely. It was very simple.”

“Yes, but how could you know that she’d see it so early in the morning?”

“She went out there every morning before everyone got up, even if there wasn’t anything. She was just a stupid young girl. It was a game for her.”

“And Alberte was so stupid that she just allowed herself to be run down, is that what you’re saying?”

There was that smile again. “No, she was standing at the roadside and I made it seem like I was going around her. She smiled at someone driving a snowplow with that inscription when there wasn’t even any snow, and it was over a month until Christmas. But she soon stopped when I jerked the steering wheel and drove into her. First her and then the bike.”

“And nobody saw you apart from her?”

“It was very early in the morning. We take things slowly over here on Bornholm.”

“Then you drove back to Aakirkeby and parked Bjarke’s car in front of Karin’s house where it’d been parked before? We spoke with her at the nursing home but she couldn’t help us.”

“Yes, that’s right. But Karin saw me put the plow back in my trunk. For years she threatened to report me, so it wasn’t me who was angry with her, like she always says. It was her who was angry with me.

“Afterward, I drove back to Listed and put the plow back. The day after, I found out that Karin had told Bjarke I’d borrowed the car and that she’d seen me with the plow. By that time the search for Alberte had already begun.

“All three of us were sitting around the dinner table that evening when Christian told us that he’d found her in a tree, and that it had left a terrible impression on him. I could tell that Bjarke had worked it out. It was just awful. My Bjarke wasn’t stupid, unfortunately, you might say now. And he hated me for it, but he never let me down. He never told his dad. So it was him he let down instead. That’s why he couldn’t live under the same roof as his dad when I moved out a few months later. He lived with Karin for a while and with me in Aakirkeby, but then found his own place.”

“Did you ever talk about it?”

She shook her head and wiped away a tear from the tip of her nose.

“No, we didn’t talk so much. He also drifted away from me because of his sexuality. It got too weird for me.”

“It was hard for you to accept?”

She nodded.

“And then you threw one of his magazines down in the grave for him, to show that you’d accepted it now after all this time?”

She nodded again. “There was so much that had stood between Bjarke and me. It needed to stop there. Everything needed to stop there.”

“So you knew full well why he wrote sorry to his dad and not to you?”

She nodded, rubbing the back of her hand on the other with the poor fingers, pressing her lips together for a moment before answering.

“Well, how could he live with his dad committing suicide over a case he could’ve solved for him? I think his apology was his way of asking his forgiveness,” she said, while the tears slowly dripped from her eyes, leaving dark marks on the dried-out table.

“Do you think your ex-husband suspected Bjarke, like Rose suggested just now?”

She shook her head. “No, he was too stupid for that. That Rose . . .”

All three of them heard the sound at the same time: loud whirling tones thrown above the treetops rising above them. First one and then another. Slowly but steadily they increased in strength, dropping in pitch before finally coming together. Help was on the way.

“There are two sirens,” she said, looking confused. “Is there a police car, too?”

“Yes, I assume so. There tends to be when things like this happen.”

Her large eyes grew smaller. “What’ll I get?” she asked.

“I don’t think you should worry about that now, June,” he tried.

“How many?” she asked Assad directly now.

“Probably ten to life, I imagine. Life is usually fourteen years,” he told her straight.

“Thanks. Now I know. I’ll be seventy-six then, if I’m still alive. I don’t think I’ll have the will to be.”

“A lot of people have their sentence reduced for good behavior,” said Carl to soften the news, while the sirens caused the birds to the west to fly away from the trees.

“I wish I had a river I could skate away on. But it don’t snow here, it stays pretty green . . .

“Do you remember that? I quoted that song in Jernbanegade the first time you were there. It’s from a Joni Mitchell song, did you know that?”

She smiled a little to herself. “It was Frank who taught me that. He was the one who taught me to dream myself away to another place where I’d rather be. It means that you’re no longer happy to be where you are. He taught me that, too. Do you know what I mean?”

They both nodded very slowly. The sirens were close to the parking lot now. In a moment she’d be in an ambulance under police escort. Of course she ended up thinking about that song.

She stood up so suddenly that they were caught off guard. Ran the four steps toward the opening in the wall, jumped four steps down, and then took the big leap over the wall and out into eternity.

They lunged forward, reaching the outer wall at the same time.

Far below, they saw her mutilated body. She’d hit the cliff hard and had probably been killed on the spot before she slid out over the last edge, hanging now from a tree with her head facing down.

Exactly like Alberte seventeen years earlier.