The Hanging Girl

20

“Did you find a photo of the board, Assad?” asked Carl on the way over to the garages.

“No.” He shook his head. Too many shelves. Too many papers.

“Did you arrange with the junk artist that we could drive out there?”

“Yes, he’ll be at his studio in an hour and a half.” He looked at his watch. “So we’ve got time to stop at Alberte’s parents’ first. They live on Dyssebakken, out in Hellerup.”

Carl frowned. “Right. How did they react when you told them the case was reopened?”

“The mom cried.”

Just as he’d expected, so this was going to be a cheerful visit.

After five minutes they turned down a road of villas, where Assad pointed to a well-kept red-painted bungalow. Everything needed to create a good and desirable framework for a healthy Danish family life was there: a wooden garden gate, weeping birch tree, and privet hedges in the front garden, a moss-grown path you could play hopscotch on, and, in the middle of the garden, a flagpole flying the Danish flag.

At least there was someone who remembered Denmark’s Liberation Day in 1945. He hadn’t seen so many flags out in Allerød that morning. But would he have remembered it, if he’d had a flagpole, that is?

“Come inside,” said the woman, her eyes lifeless.

“My husband’s a bit reluctant, so you’ll be talking with me,” she said a moment later.

They greeted a plump man with trousers pulled up halfway around his stomach. It obviously wasn’t him Alberte took after most. When he sat down and turned his head, his kippah slipped to the side a little. Didn’t they secure them with clips?

Carl looked around. If it hadn’t been for the squint kippah and the seven-armed candlestick, he never would’ve imagined this to be an Orthodox Jewish home. Mostly because he didn’t have a clue what an Orthodox Jewish home tended to look like.

“Have you found something new in the case?” asked Mrs. Goldschmid in a faint voice.

They brought her quickly up to speed, from Habersaat’s suicide to the establishment of a situation room in the basement of Police Headquarters.

“Christian Habersaat brought us more sorrow than joy,” came the resounding voice from the man in the armchair. “Is that what you’re also intending?”

Carl said no, but that he’d like to try to build on the picture they had so far of Alberte, though he knew that it might be hard for them to talk about her.

“Know more about Alberte?” Mrs. Goldschmid shook her head, as if she couldn’t contribute anything decisively new, and that was what pained her. “That’s what Habersaat was after, too. First the criminal investigation team from Bornholm and then Habersaat.”

“He insinuated that our little girl was a whore.” The man took over, his tone hateful rather than angry.

“That’s not what he said, Eli, to be fair. The man’s dead. He possibly committed suicide for the sake of our little girl.” She stopped and tried to compose herself. The hands in her lap became agitated. The scarf around her neck seemed suddenly to choke.

The man nodded. “That’s right, he didn’t use those words. But all the same, he implied that she’d been in relationships, and we don’t believe that could be true.”

Carl looked at Assad. The body hadn’t been subjected to sexual assault, but was she a virgin? He grabbed Assad’s notebook out of his hands and wrote virgin? before passing it back.

Assad shook his head.

“It might be the case that she’d had an affair,” suggested Carl. “That wouldn’t exactly be unusual for a girl of nineteen, not even then. We know for certain that she was seeing someone, as they say, which you’ll no doubt have been aware of.”

“Of course Alberte had suitors. She was a beautiful young girl, as if I didn’t know that.” Now it was the man’s voice that faltered.

“We are a totally normal Jewish family,” the woman continued, “and Alberte was a good daughter in our faith, so we don’t think anything bad of her. We can’t and we won’t. But Habersaat always went further than that. He maintained that Alberte wasn’t a virgin, but I told him that no one could know that because she had done a lot of gymnastics, and it’s possible that . . . well, that . . .”

She couldn’t get the word “hymen” past her lips.

“That’s why we wouldn’t talk with Habersaat anymore. He said so many horrible things, in our opinion,” she continued. “I know it was his job as a policeman to look at things in that way, but it became so vulgar. He also went behind our backs and asked friends and family about Alberte, but he didn’t get anywhere with that.”

“So there was nothing back then that might have given you cause for concern about Alberte’s behavior during her stay at the folk high school?”

They looked at each other. They weren’t old, possibly early sixties, but they seemed it. The dust didn’t seem to have been shaken from their habits or ideas in years, and it showed most when they looked at each other. Their look seemed to say that things would never be different, and it didn’t have anything to do with the limitations or restrictions of their Orthodox view of life, but rather the bitterness that follows when your life takes a knock.

“I can see that this is hard for you, but Assad and I would like nothing more than to bring the person responsible for Alberte’s death to justice. So we can’t rule out any theories, and we can’t allow ourselves to take sides about either your or Habersaat’s understanding of your daughter’s comings and goings. We hope you can understand that.”

It was only the wife who nodded.

“Was Alberte your oldest?”

“We had Alberte, David, and Sara, but now we only have Sara left. Sara is a wonderful girl.” She tried to smile. “She gave us a darling little grandchild on Rosh Hashanah. It couldn’t be better.”

“Rosh Ha . . . ?”

“The Jewish new year, Carl,” mumbled Assad.

The man of the house nodded. “Are you Jewish?” he asked Assad with increased interest.

Assad smiled. “No. But I try to be a cultivated person.”

A knowing look of recognition spread across both their faces. A cultivated person, would you look at that.

“You mentioned David. Was he an older brother?” asked Carl.

“He was Alberte’s twin. But yes, he was the oldest, but only by seven minutes.” Mrs. Goldschmid tried to smile, but it wasn’t easy for her.

“And David’s not with us anymore?”

“No. He couldn’t bear what happened with Alberte. He simply faded away.”

“Nonsense, Rachel, David died of AIDS,” her husband responded harshly. “Excuse my wife, but it’s still hard for us both to accept what David stood for.”

“I understand. But he and Alberte were close?”

Mrs. Goldschmid raised two crossed fingers. “Like peas in a pod, yes.” She turned to her husband. “And he was crushed, Eli. You can’t say otherwise.”

“Can I ask about something totally different, Mr. and Mrs. Goldschmid?” interrupted Assad.

They nodded, relieved at the change of topic. You don’t just say no to a cultivated person, and especially not when you consider yourself to be equally so.

“Didn’t you receive postcards from Alberte? Letters or something? After all, she’d been away from home for over four weeks and maybe for the first time in her life, wasn’t she?”

Mrs. Goldschmid smiled. “We received a few, yes. With scenes of the local attractions, of course. We still have them. Would you like to see them?” She looked at her husband as if looking for his approval. It didn’t come.

“She didn’t write much. Just about the school and what they were doing. She was a good singer, and she could also draw. I can show you some of her earlier work?”

Her husband was about to protest but he regained his composure and stared at the floor instead. Carl sensed that in spite of his brusque manner, he’d moved on more than his wife.

* * *

She led them down a small corridor with three doors.

“Have you kept Alberte’s room intact?” Carl asked cautiously.

She shook her head. “No, we’ve fitted it out for Sara and Bent, and for the baby, when they visit. They live in Sønderborg, so it’s nice for them to have a bed when they come to town. Alberte’s things are in here.”

She opened the door to a broom cupboard where a pile of cardboard boxes threatened to collapse.

“It’s almost all clothes, but in the box on top we’ve got it all, drawings and postcards.”

She took it down and got on her knees in front of the box. Carl and Assad knelt on the floor beside her.

“This is what she had hanging on her wall. She wasn’t your average girl, as you can see.”

She unfolded a few posters of pop stars and celebrities from the time. Very average, actually.

“And here are the drawings.”

She laid them in a pile on the floor, looking through them so slowly that their knees began to ache. Technically, they were very accomplished, sharp pencil strokes and contours, but as far as the subject matter was concerned, you couldn’t mistake the lack of maturity. Floating young girls with long legs and fairy costumes draped in stardust and hearts. She’d clearly had a period when her romantic side was given free rein.

“She hasn’t dated them. Were they drawn at the school?”

“No, they never sent those. I think they might have been part of an exhibition,” she suggested with pride in her voice.

“And here we’ve got the postcards.” She pushed the drawings to one side and pulled three postcards from a plastic wallet, handing them reverently to Carl.

Assad read along over his shoulder.

They were three glossy and well-read postcards with images from the town square in Rønne, Hammershus Castle Fortress, and a summer scene from Snogbæk with a smokehouse, seagulls in flight, and a view over the sea. Alberte had written short and sweet descriptions of what she’d seen on a couple of trips around the island, nothing else, in capitals with a ballpoint pen.

All ending with: I’m doing fine. Hugs from me.

Mrs. Goldschmid sighed, her face contorted. “Look, the last one is dated just three days before she died. It’s so awful to think about.”

They got up, rubbed their knees, and said thank you.

“What’s behind the other doors, if you don’t mind me asking, Mrs. Goldschmid?” asked Assad, glancing down the corridor. It was uncanny how polite he was suddenly being.

“Our bedroom and then David’s room.”

Carl was puzzled. “And David’s room hasn’t been turned into a nursery?”

She looked tired again. “David moved away from home when he was eighteen, leaving everything such a mess in there. He lived in Vesterbro, not one of the better places, I have to say. When he died in 2004, we got all sorts of things sent out here from his friend. We just put it all in the room.”

“So you’ve never looked through it?”

“No, we weren’t up to it. Not his things, too.”

Carl looked at Assad, who nodded back.

“I know it might seem strange and maybe also out of turn, but might we be allowed to look at those things?”

“I don’t know . . . what purpose would it serve?”

“You said David and Alberte were very close. Maybe she was in contact with him while she was at the folk high school. Maybe she wrote to him, too.”

Something happened with her face. As if a painful recognition tried to reach her consciousness, but she wouldn’t let it. Had the thought really never crossed their minds?

“I’ll have to ask my husband first,” she said, not wanting to meet their eyes.

* * *

Here in this room where dozens of boxes stood lined up against the wall and on the bed, there was plenty of evidence of the family’s Jewish roots, in contrast to the rest of the house: Star of David on the wall, the poster of the terrified little boy from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, photos from David’s own bar mitzvah in brown sandalwood frames, the scarf he’d worn over his shoulders for that occasion, all pinned to the wall with decorative tacks. Above the desk hung a small wooden bookshelf in teak holding literature by Jewish authors such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Singer, and the Danish Katz and Tafdrup. You couldn’t say it was a stereotypical collection of books for a young man. But what characterized the room even more was the colorful collection of revolt and undisguised aversion to the suburban environment and the safe, taken-for-granted boundaries it represented. There were Warhammer Fantasy battle figures on the windowsill. On the walls, posters from Roskilde Festival and a few others featuring George Michael and Freddie Mercury. CDs lay on top of the small stereo, consisting of everything from Judas Priest, Kiss, and AC/DC to Cher and Blur. There even hung a rusty machete and a pretty good copy of a samurai sword crossed together on the wall. It wasn’t hard to see that there had been significant distance between David and his plump father, Eli, sitting in the armchair.

They went through the boxes starting from one end, finding evidence of David Goldschmid’s alternative life of thievery in the first box they unpacked. A mass of colorful shirts, tailored jackets, and at least as expensive suits, ironed and dry-cleaned as if they were totally new. This was a man with style and taste, and to a certain extent a man with a wallet to match. They saw his diploma from business school with fantastic grades and reports, and the letter of appointment with a secure job in a distinguished company. Definitely a boy you ought to be proud of.

Unpacking the third box, Assad found something.

Most of the postcards in the cigar box were from a guy called Bendt-Christian, who’d sent greetings from Bangladesh, Hawaii, Thailand, and Berlin, among others. They always started with Dearest Davidovich and contained a few tender remarks here and there, but other than that were relatively neutral. When they got to the postcards from Alberte, there were a few reminders of the cards she’d sent to her parents. Just a few plain descriptions of the day the card referred to and lots of assurances that she missed her brother.

“There doesn’t seem to be much to go on here,” Assad said just as Carl pulled out a postcard with Østerlars Round Church on the front, with a red heart drawn above the cross on the spire.

He turned it over and skimmed it.

“Hang on a minute, Assad, not so fast,” he said. “Listen to what it says here:”

Hi bro. Trip to Østerlars Round Church this time. It’s meant to be fantastic with Knights Templar and everything, but the best thing was I met a sweet guy. He knew more about the church than the guide, and he was SO hot. Meeting him tomorrow outside school. More about that another time. Hugs and kisses, your sis, Alberte.

“Bloody hell, Carl! What’s the date?”

He turned it over and over but didn’t find anything.

“The mark from the stamp, can you make it out?”

They both squinted and scrutinized the stamp from all angles. There appeared to be a number 11, but it wasn’t possible to read any more.

“Then we’ll just have to ask the rector couple when they went on that trip.”

“Carl, I’m thinking. There must be someone from the school who took photos that day.”

Carl wasn’t sure. Compared to today’s digital reality, where everything was endlessly documented, and where everyone with even an ounce of self-respect had their smartphones and cell phones ever at the ready to capture all sorts of trivia and selfies, 1997 seemed like the Stone Age.

“Yes, let’s hope so. And that someone caught the guy she’s speaking about in the picture.”

They rooted around in the boxes for another half hour, but didn’t find anything else they could use. No name, no later postcard that could uncover the next chapter in this catastrophic saga, nothing.

“Did you find anything?” asked the man of the house as he followed them to the door.

“You had a son you can be proud of, that’s what we found out,” said Carl.

He nodded quietly. He knew it only too well. That’s what made it all the worse.

* * *

They reached Stefan von Kristoff’s studio at least an hour late, but the man was evidently not the type to worry about trivialities such as clocks and normal conventions.

“Welcome to the darkness,” he said, pulling down on a gigantic lever that turned on the lights in the machine room where, before the world had gone mad, at least sixty men had stood working metal.

“Big,” said Carl. And it damn well was.

“And a great name,” added Assad, pointing up at a welcome sign in metal, hanging under the glimmering fluorescent lights: Stefan von Kristoff—Universitopia.

“Well, if Lars Trier can adorn his cap with borrowed feathers, so can I. The name’s Steffen Kristoffersen; the ‘von’ is just for show.”

“I was thinking of the name of the studio.”

“Oh, that. Everything in my world is called something with ‘topia’ at the end. You want to see Fateopia, I understand?”

He led them down to the far end of the machine room, where a pair of projectors lit up the back wall to a level verging on daylight.

“She’s here,” he said, pulling the cover from a man-size installation.

Carl swallowed. In front of them stood something nearing the most disturbing sculpture he’d ever seen. For the uninitiated, probably nothing special, but for those who knew of Alberte and her fate, it was heavy going. If her parents ever got wind of the monstrosity, the lawsuits would be never-ending.

“Great, isn’t it?” said the idiot.

“Where have you acquired all these things from? And how did you get information about what things you thought were important to include?”

“I was on the island when it happened. I have a summerhouse and studio in Gudhjem, and there was a lot written and talked about in relation to the case, as you can imagine. Absolutely every car was searched, including mine, so you couldn’t exactly ignore the furor. In Gudhjem alone, all the men from the National Guard ran about searching without even knowing what they were looking for. And so did the rest of us, for that matter.”

Carl glanced over the monstrosity. Everything was built around a woman’s bike with buckled wheels and twisted handlebars. Reinforced crossbars were welded to the frame, pointing out in all directions like bundles of rays. And at the end of each crossbar, evidence hung of the specific details and other related misery.

It wasn’t badly made, just a tasteless jumble of different techniques. Around the bike, in the middle of the installation, there were etchings in metal and brass, depicting all sorts of imaginable car accidents. In addition, there was a colorful rendition of the checks at the ferry in enamel, and etchings in copper of a pixilated image of Alberte, probably taken from the local paper. There were casts of bone remains, branches, and leaves, and, not least, hands outstretched in an attempt at protection. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the plastic vessel he’d placed under the etching of Alberte’s smiling face, and that it was filled with blood.

“It’s not human blood, unfortunately,” laughed Kristoff. “It’s pigs’ blood that’s been treated to stop it rotting. It might smell a bit sweet just now, but I do change it sometimes.”

If they hadn’t been on duty, it would’ve been irresistibly tempting to dip his laughing face in the stuff.

Assad snapped away at the sculpture from every possible angle, while Carl stepped closer to the bike to assess it further.

It was a cheap bike, probably Chinese. Big wheels, huge prop stand, and high handlebars. Rust had eaten most of the yellow color away, and the rear rack was dangling. It wasn’t a very good bike.

“What have you done to it? Did it look like this at the time?”

“Yes. Apart from the fact that I’ve put it upright, it’s just as I found it.”

“Found it? You just as good as stole it from the police station in Rønne, didn’t you?”

“No, I found it in a pile of junk in a container on the road in front of the station. I actually went in to the guard and asked if I could take it. The lads in the office just said that if I did myself any injury getting it out, it was on my own head.”

Carl and Assad gathered their thoughts. On the last day in her life, Alberte had sat in this saddle and probably imagined that it would be a happy day.

Carl thought it was a good thing that people didn’t know the day or the hour when their time would come. It was a sad sight. Just as morbid as those plasticized bodies you could visit all over the place at almost no cost at all.

“You look like you want to buy the installation,” said Kristoff with a cunning smile. “I’ll do it at a mate’s price. What would you say to seventy-five thousand kroner?”

Carl smiled cynically. “Er, no, thank you. Right now we’re almost considering whether or not we should confiscate it.”