The Hanging Girl

24

Wednesday, May 7th, 2014

“I have a really ridiculous problem with the former students at the folk high school, Carl,” said Gordon. It was incredible how much he could hunch himself up to show his suffering.

“When I finally get hold of some of them, they can’t remember anything, and even if they do try, they mix things up. One of them had actually been to five different folk high schools since Bornholm, and she couldn’t differentiate one from the other. Another one, one of the ones from Lithuania, and the only one funnily enough who still lives at home, couldn’t speak a word of English, so how she managed to survive five months on Bornholm is a mystery to me. And then there are the addresses! Apart from this one from Lithuania, there wasn’t a single person with the same address as they had then, and that goes for most of the parents, too.” He sighed. “It’s an altogether hopeless job you’ve given me, Carl. The few I have managed to contact mostly remember something because Habersaat was so annoying, but otherwise only just the name Alberte and that she was found dead. That’s all. So, to be honest, and to put it a bit bluntly, her death obviously didn’t leave any lasting impression on them.”

Carl reluctantly focused again. When Gordon ranted on, he really had an uncanny ability to make people think about something else.

“Gordon,” he said so loudly that it caused the man to jump. “You just need to find one person who remembers and wants to talk. And when you find him or her you transfer them to Rose, who has all the old student interrogations. She’s the one who needs an overview, okay? So give it your best shot. Of course you can find them.”

He left Gordon with his head right down on the edge of the table, Assad giving him a gentle pat on the back. If he was to have any hope of being included in the team, he’d better lift his head up quickly.

Things were quite different in Rose’s office. Masses of paper piled high with notes, masses of scrunched-up paper in the bin, and masses of wrinkles on her forehead. She was busy, that much was clear.

“Anything new from the alternative world, Rose?” he dared to ask.

She shook her head. “I’ll need to call around in the evening, Carl. As we discussed earlier, the majority also have a more normal job. But I’ve been looking through the interviews with the folk high school students, and I stumbled across one that I think Gordon should try and make an appointment with. Read it for yourself. Here’s a transcript of the interview.”

“Can’t you read it aloud for me?”

“Just read, Carl. Go into your office, light a cigarette, and read. But remember to shut the door. All these papers from Habersaat stink enough of smoke already.”

Carl sniffed as he went past the shelves and on to his office. Apart from Rose’s perfume, which both made his nose itchy and made his eyes water, he couldn’t smell anything.

He put the paper down in front of him on his desk, obediently took a cigarette as suggested, and read Habersaat’s transcript.

12/9 1997. Interrogation of Synne Veland, 46 years old, Fall semester student. Middle school teacher currently on leave from Hvidovre Municipality. Social security number 161151-4012.

Transcript excerpt 12/10 1997.

Carl stopped. A thought came to him, but was it really imaginable that the man was so blindingly stupid? He tried to imagine Gordon at work. God almighty, it could just be.

He pressed the intercom.

“It’s coming from here,” shouted Assad into the intercom on the other side of the corridor, his own voice drowning himself out.

“It’s not you I want to talk to, Assad. Are you listening, Gordon? Are you there?”

Something squeaked. Was it the chair or an acknowledgment?

“You have made sure to get a list of the social security numbers of all those at the folk high school, right?” He caught himself nodding, but knew that it couldn’t be the case.

“No,” he confirmed. “The school said they couldn’t give them to me.”

Now Carl lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. What a tool, and definitely not the sharpest one in the shed!

“Are you a total idiot?” he shouted. “That’s the first thing you do. Damn it, Assad, tell him that he’s got direct access to all civil registration details, and that he has every right to those details from the school if anyone has, and that he can otherwise find all the social security numbers on Habersaat’s interrogations, if he bothered to look. Tell him to get on with it. And that means now, tell him!”

“Do I need to when you’ve just said it, boss?” Assad grunted back into the speaker.

Carl took a deep drag and coughed a couple of times. “And what are you up to, Assad?”

“I’m sitting with something I’ve just found. I’ll be in with it in a minute.”

Carl hung up. Why couldn’t anyone think for themselves?

But then maybe he should’ve seen this coming?

He shook his head and continued reading Habersaat’s report.

. . . 161151-4012

Transcript Excerpt 12/10 1997.

Synne Veland’s statement about Alberte:

“Yes, I didn’t really know her like many of the others did. We seniors aren’t with the young ones as much. The average age this year is roughly twenty-six and a half, raised by the group of over forties, who I have more to do with, of course, so we feel a bit past it in relation to the others. And on top of that, you need to remember that Alberte was one of the youngest. Younger than my own daughter, in fact, and not much older than those I normally say goodbye to when they leave tenth grade. But I talked with her, of course, and I noticed her too. We all did because she was so beautiful and full of life. I also noticed that some of the other young girls seemed somewhat jealous of her because all the boys, and the men for that matter, were always glancing over at her, but I didn’t think it was anything serious. It’s natural at that age.

And I remember that the day before she disappeared we had a visit from The Rhythmic Folk High School, and with Alberte being as interested in music as she was—she actually had a sweet and adorable voice too—I thought it was strange that she wasn’t there at the end of the afternoon and that she wasn’t at the party in the evening either.

One of the guys, one she’d flirted with, Kristoffer his name is, said at one point that she’d found herself someone outside the school, and I’d noticed that she’d been a bit distant over the last few days. You know how a girl in love can look—(she laughs here). And she was also distant in another sense of the word. We took glass work together, but she didn’t turn up to lessons for most of the last week.”

Q: Did you ever see the man or the young guy?

“No, but it struck me that Alberte had said one day that she’d met the most mystical and fascinating person ever. Nothing specifically about being in love but she was obviously very taken with him. Naturally, we asked who he was but she just giggled, she often did, and said he was just someone she’d met and that he sometimes drove past the school after lessons.”

Q: So you didn’t ask if they met to talk out by the road or if they went for a drive together?

“No, unfortunately.” (Synne Veland seems regretful and perhaps also a little sad.)

Q: Are there others you can think of who might know more about it?

“We have spoken about it since. Maybe Kristoffer, but otherwise, no, I don’t think so.”

Q: But isn’t it just the sort of thing you’d expect the girls to talk about?

“Yes, but I think Alberte was well aware that the other girls had had enough of all her flirting. So she just kept quiet, I think. Maybe to try and avoid provoking them more than was necessary.”

Q: Maybe it was a sort of game for her with this guy? A secret game?

“Yes, that could be it.”

Carl read on. There was absolutely nothing explosive in this interview.

He pressed the intercom again. “Rose, would you come in here?”

“You can just as well come out to me instead!” she shouted from the corridor.

Carl stuck his head out, and there she was, sitting on the floor with all the transcripts piled in between her legs.

“Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to sit in your office and read?” he tried without getting an answer. “Right, well, why do you think this interrogation is something special? Apart from making me aware of Gordon’s ineptitude, I don’t see anything in it that we didn’t know before. Maybe you want us to talk to the woman? Because from this, I don’t think there’s any point. She must be about sixty-two now. It’s almost twenty years ago, so why should she remember something useful now that didn’t come out in the open then?”

“You’re saying that because you’re a man. But men are sometimes so blind. Notice how simple the questions are that Habersaat asks her. If it had been you, would you have asked her the same?”

“Well, he certainly wasn’t an investigator, but otherwise mostly the same, I reckon.”

“But the details, Carl. What about them?”

“Such as?”

“Listen, if it’d been your case, and if it’d been fresh, you would’ve asked about lots of things that you can’t think of right now, but that a woman naturally thinks of even after such a long time.”

“Details? About Alberte, you mean?” Carl looked at the tightly packed shelves with tons of paper. As if they didn’t have enough details to deal with.

He sighed. “You mean footwear, clothes, hair?”

“Yes, that and a whole lot more. New movements, different makeup. Everything that tells us something about how a young woman feels. It can be expressed through things like that.”

He nodded. She was right. He’d had cases where women remembered everything about other women’s plucked eyebrows, but nothing about where they’d seen them, or in what connection.

“Hmm. And I suppose now you want us to find Synne Veland and ask about these things seventeen years later?”

“Of course we will. Synne Veland has an artistic nature. She discovered the creative side of herself at folk high school, appreciated music, took glass craft. She must have noticed things like that.”

“And so what even if she did? Maybe those signs will tell us that Alberte was in love or maybe just out to have a good time, but isn’t it irrelevant now? I think the lead is a bit thin.”

“Probably. But we can talk about that afterward.”

“Right, then. There’s another lead you might also check. Since you named Knarhøj yesterday in connection with the guy we’re looking for, it’s been on my mind. We’ve come across it before, someone who was digging there.”

“Hmm, yes, now that you mention it . . .”

Assad’s disheveled body appeared from his office, his hands full of paper and, unfortunately, also a steaming cup of tea. This would be good.

“I’ve found this here, Carl,” he said as they sat down in Carl’s office. “I wonder if it might be along the lines of what we’re looking for.”

He put down a few sheets in front of him with graphs and numbers, placing the steaming cup next to them.

“I thought you’d be in need of a pick-me-up, Carl.”

Oh God! The cup was for him.

“What is it?” It didn’t smell like it normally did. Better, actually.

“It’s chai. A great recipe. Indian tea and ginger. It’s good for everything.” He pointed to his crotch with a cheeky grin.

“You’ve been having problems with your waterworks, perhaps?” Carl said ironically.

Assad gave him a nudge with his elbow and winked. “There’s talk that Mona’s been asking after you.”

Damn, word got around quick here! And what was the idea? Was his libido to be pumped up by a strange-smelling tea?

“Forget it, Assad. Mona’s well and truly in the past.”

“What about Pristine? Wasn’t that the name of the last one?”

“You’re thinking of Kristine. But yes, what about her? She’s gone back to her ex-husband. I don’t think your tea can help much with that.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Look at this. Christian Habersaat has made a plan of the tree, the road past the tree, and the bike in the thicket. It needed to be very precise, so he probably hasn’t drawn it himself. I think it must’ve been the technicians.”

Carl turned the drawing a little and looked at it. Yes, not dissimilar to how he’d also envisioned it.

Assad produced another piece of paper. “But I’ve also done a drawing. It’s meant to be a vertical section of the accident site and surrounding area.”

He pointed to the different elements as he named them each in turn. “As you can see, it was approximately here that Alberte was hit to enable her to end up in the branches.” His finger followed the trajectory that Habersaat had drawn. It looked reasonable, if slightly steeper than Carl had imagined.

“On this third drawing he’s added what he thinks might’ve thrown her up in the air. Notice the angle of the whatsit. It’s at an angle and only seven to eight centimeters above the surface of the road.”

Carl nodded. “Yes, the shovel blade that threw Alberte up in the tree must’ve been at about this angle. I can see where he’s coming from. But why did it kill her? I don’t think it looks deadly.”

“Maybe the shock killed her, Carl. When you shoot people through the heart, they immediately die from the shock. This is probably similar.”

Carl shook his head. “Yeah, maybe, though I’ve got my doubts. But if Habersaat’s drawing is right, and there’s good reason to believe it is, then she was almost shoveled up into the treetop. Of course you’d get some nasty bruises and definitely some lesions, but would it kill someone?”

“Just a moment.” Assad disappeared out the door, and Carl stared at the cup. The combination of words like “libido” and “Mona” made him suddenly thirsty. A little sip couldn’t hurt.

He felt the steam and the smell of distant, exotic coasts and dived in. He thought it tasted rather good until the effect kicked in.

The combination of neck arteries suddenly opening, esophagus collapsing, vocal cords scratching like hell, and not being able to feel his uvula, all made him instinctively grab his throat with one hand and support himself on the edge of the table with the other. If there’d been acid in the cup, it wouldn’t have felt much different.

He wanted to swear but not a word came out, only tears and saliva from the corners of his mouth, and he had an unusually keen desire for revenge and ice-cold water by the bucketload.

“What’s wrong, Carl?” asked Assad as he came in with the report. “Was there too much ginger?”

* * *

Just as Police Superintendent Birkedal had told them, the autopsy upheld that Alberte’s body showed both fractures and internal bleeding, though not so severe that any single injury could be deemed to have been the cause of death.

Carl summed up: “We can conclude from the autopsy that Alberte was still alive when she was flung up in the tree, and that she was alive for a good while afterward. The shinbone and calf bone were broken in both legs, as well as additional fractures elsewhere, but the lesions weren’t individually so serious that they could be fatal. Not immediately, at least. She hung in the tree with her head down the entire time, so she lost blood. Not liters, but enough.”

Carl put the report down on the table. Alberte Goldschmid had hung there for a long time before she died. Poor girl.

“What do you say to that, Carl?” asked Assad.

“Nothing other than that Habersaat’s drawing may well be correct. She was shoveled up there and during the collision sustained fractures and internal lesions, and a couple of deep wounds on her shinbones, from which she bled. So it’s a collection of injuries that took her life. And time, of course.”

“Awful,” said Rose, standing in the doorway. “If only someone had seen her hanging there a bit earlier, she might have been saved.”

She stood there thinking for a moment, as if a new possibility had come to her.

“What is it?” asked Carl.

“I’m not sure. Maybe there is something, then, that suggests it could have been an accident.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, if it was a premeditated murder, the murderer would surely have made sure that she wasn’t still alive afterward and able to testify against him. If it’d been one of you who wanted to get rid of her, wouldn’t you have made sure of that?”

“Yes, I would,” came the prompt reply from Assad.

Carl frowned.

“Well, just speaking hypo . . . Oh! You know, just if I had to imagine it, Carl.”

“Thank you, Assad, we get it. But, Rose, the vehicle didn’t stop at the scene. So a lot could’ve happened that we don’t know about. Maybe the driver parked the car on the main road and walked back to check that she wasn’t moving. Maybe the driver observed it from the rearview mirror. Maybe the killer was in a situation where logic went completely out of the window. Killers don’t often think rationally, Rose, you know that. So we can’t allow ourselves to conclude that this one did.”

He collected Habersaat’s drawings together. “Assad, scan these drawings and send them to the technicians, and tell them that Laursen will call tomorrow and follow up on it all. Talk with Laursen; he can make things happen quicker than others. Over and above those questions already asked, the technicians should check what there is in their archives on the analysis of the wooden board. And we’d also like to know, insofar as Habersaat’s theory about the shovel blade holds, how thick the board would need to be to ensure it wasn’t completely smashed up during the collision. We’d also like to know if a board like that could be securely attached on the hood of a vehicle like the pictured VW Kombi, and without leaving marks on the body of the car. At the same time they can probably tell us, using Habersaat’s drawing and the probable speed of the vehicle, whether it’s possible that Alberte’s body was thrown up toward the vehicle’s windshield and subsequently broke it. And finally, ask if they can do anything to make our photo sharper of the man with the VW. Of course, we’ll keep trying to find the photographer and perhaps the negative, but they shouldn’t count on it, tell them that. Laursen is already acquainted with most of it, but we’ve got a bit more to go on now, so bring him up to speed on where we’re at.”

He turned to Rose. “You still there? Do you have something else for me?”

“I’ve found what you’re looking for, Carl.”

She looked so damn sure of herself.

“Found what? A sworn statement from the murderer and an admission of guilt?” He laughed.

“The thing about Knarhøj!”

“Good, what was it, then?”

“It was where the young scout Bjarke Habersaat went digging together with a man. You remember, the odd guy on the bench in Listed mentioned that June Habersaat met a man up there on the same occasion. Up by the maze, isn’t that what he said?”

Assad nodded like crazy, but then he had written it in his notebook.

“Right, that was it. But you look like you don’t think they were digging a fire pit. Let me guess. You think it’s the man from Ølene they met? Perhaps you’ve found his diaries?”

“Funny, Carl. I just know that it could be the same man, nothing else.”

Carl pulled himself in over the edge of the table. “And how do you know that?”

“I googled Knarhøj, and I didn’t get any hits. However, I found out that there are a lot of mazes on Bornholm, one of which should be situated just west of Listed. So I called a gallery out there, and they were able to tell me that it was actually the owner who made the maze, but that wasn’t until 2006. The mound this maze is built on is called Knarhøj. And the gallery owner had chosen to put it there because of the interesting history of the area. There was a Bronze Age settlement there actually, called Sorte Muld, and there have been a lot of good finds, including several thousand guldgubber, indicating a cult center.”

“Guldgubber?”

“Yes, thin pieces of gold embossed with figures, used as offerings. And the gallery owner had found a sunstone, and that type of find had never been heard of before. I’ve investigated it and it squares up. So it really is a special place.”

“Sunstone, you said. What on earth is that?”

She smiled. She’d been expecting that question, too. “It’s a sort of crystal, used by the Vikings to determine the exact position of the sun in the sky in overcast conditions. It’s got something to do with polarizing sunbeams. Actually, they use something similar today when flying in the polar regions, so I read. They weren’t half stupid, those Vikings.”

“Sunstones, Vikings, guldgubber.” He needed to collect his thoughts.

“So in your opinion we’ve now got a connection not only between June Habersaat and the man we’re looking for, but a connection between Christian Habersaat’s interest in occult phenomena and the man from Ølene, who took part in nightly naked dances and so on. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“You’re not as green as you look, Carl Mørck, but that would’ve been a shame. It was actually you who caught the connection with Knarhøj. And if it is the same man Alberte met, then it’s even more necessary for June Habersaat to tell us everything she knows about the man.”

Carl sighed again. “Yes, and more besides. Much more. I know where this is going, Rose, and you’re right. But you won’t get me back to Bornholm to twist June Habersaat’s arm behind her back. Do you want to go? Or you, Assad?”

You couldn’t exactly say that he emanated enthusiasm.

Rose shrugged. “Okay, fair enough. Then she’ll have to come to us.”

“How in the world will you make her do that? We’ve got nothing on her that can force her.”

“As I see it, that’s your problem, Carl. Aren’t you the boss?”

Carl put his head in his hand, and, God help him, now Gordon was there knocking on the doorframe. They might as well invite the police choir and the Salvation Army brass band. There wasn’t anywhere left to get a moment’s peace anyway.

“Sorry, Carl,” said Gordon. “I totally forgot to tell you that someone called Morten called. It’s probably the guy who lived with you once. He said that Hardy hasn’t come back.”

“What did you say?”

“That Hardy’s missing.” All the idiot was missing was to start bleating, he looked so sheepish.

“When did you find out?” asked Assad, looking worried.

“Almost two hours ago.”

Carl took out his cell phone and looked at the display. The sound was turned all the way down and there were at least fifteen messages and missed calls from Morten.

Now he stopped breathing.