The Hanging Girl

27

Thursday, May 8th, 2014

The area that Assad, Rose, and Carl had agreed to meet in front of wasn’t the sort of building you’d expect an artistic sort like Synne Veland to have settled down in. Out here in the petty bourgeois idyll of Vægterparken on Amager you weren’t met by graffiti on the walls or Christiania bikes in the bike racks. Instead, there was a local billiard club, trimmed hedges, integrated day care centers, yellow walls, and row after row of town houses.

Carl had never been there before but his colleague Børge Bak had, he knew that much. A knife attack after a party, as far as he could remember, but the reputation of the area was otherwise impeccable.

“My daughter lives down in number 232,” the woman said of her own accord, before asking them to leave their shoes by the door. When had it become acceptable to ask a man on official business to expose his faded socks? It took the sting out of his authority.

“My daughter’s divorced,” she explained. “I moved out here so that she had me at least. But otherwise it’s not a bad place to have your practice.”

Carl wondered why she called it her practice. Had he missed a sign by the door?

She smiled and led them into a living room where there was no doubt what you were letting yourself in for if you wanted to be treated by her. There were diplomas, human anatomy posters, flyers for any number of homeopathic treatments and other natural remedies, and, of course, the price list. It wasn’t exactly expensive but, seen in light of the wage bracket of an experienced policeman, it was definitely a lucrative little business.

“I only have a few clients left. There comes a time when you can’t be bothered anymore, you know,” she said with a smile, as if she’d read their thoughts. “Early retirement is calling and I’m about ready to answer. So, I just have my fifteen to twenty regular clients a month now.”

More than a few, then, thought Carl. Who on earth frequented a clinic like this?

“You call yourself a Heilkunst practitioner?” asked Rose, who was of course better prepared than Carl.

“Yes, I trained in Germany, so I’ve practiced iris analysis and homeopathy for almost twelve years now.”

“You were a schoolteacher before?”

“Yes.” She laughed. “But the need for a change of scenery makes animals and humans alike get off their backside once in a while, am I right?”

Carl scratched his eyebrow, wondering what on earth iris analysis might be. He looked at Assad’s brown irises. If you were to try to infer anything about his constitution from those almost coal-black splotches, you’d have to be eagle-eyed. No, the socks with holes and protruding big toenail said far more about the man.

“I understood from Rose Knudsen that you’ve come to talk about Alberte. It was a long time ago. You have to admire the police force. You certainly don’t give up so easily.”

“Then perhaps you know that the investigator you spoke to back then has committed suicide? That’s why we’re stuck with the case now,” said Carl.

Judging by her expression, this news had no notable impact on her. Maybe she only remembered him vaguely.

Rose also noticed the reaction, so she gave a short summary of the case and Habersaat’s interest in it and referred to it when she’d been questioned. Apparently there was nothing wrong with her memory because she nodded almost every other second and seemed so engaged that in the end Carl had to look at the floor to stop himself from nodding along with her.

“So, what do you want to ask me about? I’m fairly certain I told the policeman everything I knew back then.”

“Two things,” said Rose. “Can you remember the way she dressed? Did anything change around the time she met that man, anything come to mind?”

She shrugged as she sat looking at the raindrops running down the windowpanes. “That’s not exactly what you remember most after seventeen years.”

“Did she adopt more of a hippy style? Colorful and baggy knitwear, for example? Did she put her hair up in a different way? Any sudden preference for Rastafarian hairstyles or large African jewelry? Things like that.”

“A hippie style? No, she was actually rather normal, in my opinion.”

Rose sighed blatantly, as she always did when she was out on a limb, and Carl wasn’t any the wiser about where this was going. Of course a significant change in dress could give away that the young woman had been heavily influenced by the people down at Ølene. But would that sort of knowledge bring them any closer to the man they were looking for? Carl had his doubts.

“We’re looking for even the slightest lead that might tell us something about a man who, when it comes down to it, we don’t know anything about other than that he was called Frank.”

“Frank?”

“Yes, that was the other question. Does the name mean anything to you? Did you hear Alberte mention anyone by that name?”

“No, sorry. But going back to your first question, I can remember that at one point Alberte started wearing a badge.”

This could be the first link to the man with the VW, which also had badges on it. A bit of a long shot, and yet . . .

“What was on it?”

“A nuclear sign.”

“One of those Nuclear Power? No Thanks badges?”

“No, not one of those. It was the logo from the disarmament demonstrations. The peace symbol: a ring with a vertical line in the middle and two diagonal lines facing down this way.” She drew it in the air.

Carl nodded. It was a good while since anyone had seriously rallied around that sign.

“And she didn’t wear that badge in the beginning?” asked Rose, looking her straight in the eye. Just now you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was the one who analyzed irises, not the other way around.

“No. Only in the last few days, I think.”

“Do you think she got the badge from the man she began to see from outside the school?”

“I couldn’t say. But there wasn’t anyone else at the place wearing one, as far as I remember. But I’m thinking that she could have had it with her from home, of course.”

Carl nodded. That idea sounded particularly unlikely, but they’d have to check, of course.

“One more thing,” said Rose. “Back then, you told Habersaat that Alberte was a good singer. She didn’t happen to sing a song by Joni Mitchell called ‘River,’ by any chance? Does that ring any bells?”

“No, not that I can say.”

Rose pulled out her little orange iPod and pressed it. “This song,” she said and passed the earphones to Synne Veland.

The woman listened without moving for a moment, mesmerized by the beautiful voice. Then she began to move her head from side to side and a couple of lines around her mouth became more distinct.

“Yes, of course!” she shouted, the music still playing in her ears. “You’d better not hold me to it, but I think she did go about humming this song.”

Then Carl’s cell phone rang. He moved slightly to one side. It was his mom.

“You are coming on Saturday, aren’t you, Carl?” she said without as much as a hello.

He took a deep breath. “Yes, I’ll be there.”

“I thought I’d invite Inger.”

“Inger? Inger, who’s that?”

“It’s the daughter from the next farm. Well, I say daughter, but she’s getting on a bit now. But she’s the one managing the farm, so . . .”

“Mom, don’t invite Inger. I’ve got no idea who she is, I’ve never met her. I’m a policeman, and I’m not thinking about becoming a farmer or anything else for that matter up by you. Is this Dad’s idea?”

“Well, but you’re coming on Saturday, right?”

“Yes, yes, I’ll be there. Bye, Mom.”

There was no knowing where this nightmare would end.

Ronny, Ronny, Ronny. Couldn’t you just have stayed in Thailand?

* * *

It was an obviously exhausted Gordon who waited for them in the situation room, and judging by the color of one of his ears it would appear that the phone had been stuck to it for hours on end. He tried to liven up a little when Rose sat opposite him with her legs stretched out at a right angle, but even then he quickly gave up again.

“It seems I’m not very good at this,” he said.

Well, well, the man was displaying a sense of self-awareness.

“I’ve called at least a hundred different numbers and so far only spoken with seven to eight people from the school.”

Carl leaned forward in his chair. “And?”

“I haven’t found out anything new because they all say the same. None of them could stand Habersaat, who was evidently quite insistent. They say Alberte was a beautiful girl who flirted with the boys and then one day began flirting with someone from elsewhere. A couple of those I called said that Alberte spoke about a guy who she said was more interesting than the guys at the school, and who could do things.”

“Could do things? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. That’s just what they said.”

Carl shook his head. What did Gordon expect? That they’d shove a hand up his backside and ask for him like some sort of ventriloquist?

“Have you got a list?”

He nodded and Carl grabbed it out of his hand. There were only a very few notes in the margin.

“You check these, Rose. Knock it out of them. We need to know what that guy from outside the place could do.” He turned to Assad. “Anything new on the name front? How many people are there called Frank in the years we’re focusing on?”

“There isn’t anything registered year for year before 1989 so we have to make do with the status from each decade, from which point it all goes a bit wrong, doesn’t it.”

“Why?”

“Because you want to know how many people called Frank were born from 1968 to 1973, and there were five thousand two hundred and twenty-five in the sixties and three thousand and fifty-three in the seventies. And when you put those two numbers together and divide by four, because you only want those five years, we’re left with two thousand and seventy, but that could easily be more if he was born before 1968.”

If you were travelling to Mars, a few centimeters’ miscalculation at the beginning could mean that you raced thousands of kilometers past the planet, which obviously wouldn’t be good. Carl was well aware of that. And out of respect for the significance of alarming figures like that, he didn’t intend to put himself forward as an astronaut, if anyone had thought of suggesting it. On the other hand, if it was about the number of Franks in the kingdom of Denmark, he couldn’t care less if it was a figure of one thousand eight hundred and twelve or a few thousand more Franks who had to be sniffed out. Some would certainly be dead; others would have emigrated. But no matter how you looked at it, there were just too many.

“Thanks, Assad. Then I think we’ll let that line of investigation rest. Otherwise we’ll be at it until the cows come home.”

“Whose cows are coming home, Carl?” he said, looking puzzled.

“It’s just a figure of speech for something taking forever, Assad.”

“Whose?”

“Whose what?”

“Whose figure?”

Carl took a deep breath and shoved his hands in his pockets in defeat. “Just forget it, Assad.”

Carl hesitated. What were all these bits of paper doing among the fluff in his pocket? He pulled the mysterious bits of paper out and looked at them. That was right, they belonged to Assad.

He passed the bits of paper to his curly-haired assistant. “Here. That’s that taken care of, easy rider. You can thank the patrol police for that.”

Assad looked at the torn-up speeding ticket and smiled. “I think you’ll be happy about that, Carl. It means I can drive the car whenever you’re too tired.”

Even if it meant he had to swallow sixty-four caffeine tablets to keep himself awake, he’d make sure that he was never in that situation. Best to change the subject, and quick.

“Did you get hold of Alberte’s parents?” he asked.

“Yes. They’d never seen a badge like that in their house.”

“And the Joni Mitchell song?”

“I hummed it for them, but they didn’t recognize it.”

“What did you say?”

“I hummed it for them, but they . . .”

“Thanks, Assad. I got you.” Those poor old people definitely had the odds stacked against them. Even a wooing tomcat had more musical sense than Assad.

“Right, so Alberte didn’t have her anti-military impulses from home. Then let’s assume for now that she got the badge from the guy she met outside the school, and the fact that there were several people who went about humming that Joni Mitchell song at the same time can be put down to coincidence. Maybe it’d been played on the radio a lot. Maybe it’s back on the hit list after being in the shadows for years, who knows? Maybe Joni Mitchell toured the area. There could be many reasons why Alberte and June Habersaat went about humming that song.”

Assad nodded.

A beep came from Carl’s cell, he’d just received a text, and that didn’t happen so often. He took it out to look, butterflies in his stomach. Could it be from Mona?

It wasn’t; he saw that after reading just the first word.

Carling, when are you going to visit my mom? You’re late again, and you know it. Remember our agreement! Vigga X X

He was stunned. Not because it was from his ex-wife, not because of the message, though it was bad enough, not because he was eternally stuck with his ex-mother-in-law and her explosive and unpredictable dementia, but because of the form of the message.

He stared out into thin air for a moment, reflecting on the thought that suddenly came to him. Strangely enough, it was almost impossible to remember those sorts of things even though they were trivial.

He looked at Assad. “Can you remember when people began to send texts to each other in Denmark?” he asked. “Were people doing it in 1997?”

Curly shrugged, and he was right. Where on earth should he know that from? According to him he first arrived in the country in 2001.

“Rose!” he shouted out in the corridor. “Can you remember when you got your first cell phone?”

“Yes,” resounded her grinding voice. “When my mom moved in with her new guy on the Costa del Sol. It was in 1996, May 5th to be exact. So there were a lot of reasons for my dad to fly the flag at full mast.”

“What reasons?” he shouted back, regretting it immediately.

“Liberation Day, stupid,” she replied expectedly. “And my birthday. I got the cell from my dad that day. All us sisters did that year.”

Was her birthday May 5th? Okay, he didn’t know that. In fact, he’d never thought of his colleagues as people who celebrated special days. For six to seven years these three had plodded around down there in the basement without ever really celebrating anything even once. Maybe it was about time they did?

He looked at Assad, who appeared equally in the dark as he shrugged his shoulders. He obviously hadn’t been any the wiser about her birthday.

Carl stood up and went out into the corridor, where Rose was in full swing digging around in Habersaat’s remains.

“So it was your birthday on Monday?”

She brushed her hand through her hair like an Italian diva emerging from a pool, her eyes confirming both the answer and the stupidity of the question.

What on earth had they been doing on Monday and why hadn’t she said anything? Carl felt awkward. What were you supposed to do in this situation?

“Happy birthday to you . . . ,” came the frightening noise from behind. Carl turned to face Assad, who also resembled an opera star, flailing his arms about as he kicked out his legs, bringing back distant memories of something Vigga had said about Greek dancing.

But Assad made Rose smile. Thank God for that.

Temporarily sidetracked by his gratitude to Assad, Carl tried to remember where he’d come to.

“Yes!” he shouted, as if it was something the others had been waiting for. “What about those texts, Rose? Was it something you could do back when you got your cell, can you remember?”

She frowned, thinking. “Text? No, I don’t think so.” She stood for a moment, staring. Apparently there was nothing that could jolt her memory.

“By the way, weren’t you supposed to call back those students Gordon talked to earlier today, Rose?” asked Carl.

She just looked at him again, this time her eyes telling him that she couldn’t be bothered and had her hands full with other things.

Speak of the devil. That second Gordon came out from Assad’s broom cupboard beaming with triumph from head to toe.

“He could bend spoons,” he shouted as if he were a ringmaster. The silence was deafening in the narrow corridors of Department Q.

* * *

“Let’s sum up the events of the last hour,” said Carl while Rose passed around the brochures from the alternative therapists on the wall. “You start, Assad.”

“I’ve spoken with Alberte’s mom, and she says that Alberte didn’t have a cell phone. Then she cried a little and said that if only she’d had one, the accident might never have happened. That she might’ve spoken more with her daughter and perhaps sensed if something was wrong or if there was something her daughter should’ve been careful about.”

Carl shook his head. Those people would live with their self-reproach for the rest of their lives. Terrible.

“She could have borrowed a cell from one of the other students,” said Rose.

Assad nodded. “Yes, but I’ve been told that texting was first introduced to Denmark in 1996, and that there were only limited networks supporting it. Plus the coverage on Bornholm was bad back then, so it’s unlikely that Alberte communicated with the guy outside the school that way.”

“But she could have called if she’d borrowed a cell,” insisted Rose.

Carl considered that while she did have a point, it didn’t add up. “Then those who had cells would’ve been able to say more to the police because they would’ve been able to see the call lists on the display.”

Rose sighed. “And the police could’ve been sent lists from the provider of all the calls made from the landline at the school, I assume.”

Assad nodded rather convincingly. It seemed that Alberte and the man from outside the school must have communicated some other way, just like Assad said. The questions remained how and how often. Did they talk together daily? Did they have rituals?

Then it was Gordon’s turn, as he pointed out impatiently, going on to say that one of the girls, a Lise W., who now lived in Frederikshavn and had graduated as a high school teacher, had given three bits of information that he deemed worth pursuing.

“Firstly, she’d luckily enough taken pictures from Østerlars Church on the trip. She’d no idea what had become of them, but she’d be sure to have a look for them. Secondly, she told me that it was when they were there that they’d met a man who’d boasted that he could bend spoons. She thinks this was the man that Alberte dated. He laughed because they didn’t believe him and because he called himself Uri Geller the Second. But she still doesn’t know why. Do you have any idea?”

Carl shook his head. Couldn’t that man ever do a job right and finish it? If he’d looked the name up on Google . . . He sighed. “It was a guy who could bend spoons through the power of thought back in the seventies. He demonstrated his talent and a lot of other tricks in the media. I don’t remember if he was ever exposed as a fraud, but that was certainly his name.”

“He bent spoons? What a weird thing to do,” Assad added. It was evident that if he’d been gifted with supernatural powers like that, he wouldn’t start by massacring the spoons in the cutlery drawer.

“He held the spoon carefully with two fingers and rubbed it a little.” Carl demonstrated it. “And ta-da! It went soft right where he was holding it and bent. If our man could do that, then maybe he was actually a bit of a miracle man. But it’s odd that Habersaat hasn’t noted anything about it. Did he fail to ask the right questions or was it his insistence that made people clam up?” He turned to Gordon. “Well, what was the third?”

“She said there was also someone else who took pictures at Østerlars Church.”

“Okay, who?”

“Inge Dalby.”

They all looked at him, speechless.

“Are you sure? Did you ask her if she was positive?”

He nodded with a wry smile, as if asking them what they took him for. Maybe he was beginning to get the hang of it after all. “She was sure because she remembered that the guy had talked with Inge Dalby, almost as if he already knew her,” he added.

Carl snapped his fingers at Rose and just ten minutes later she returned with a message that Inge Dalby wasn’t home because she was on a study trip.

Carl noticed his jaw muscles tense up.

“Damn it, in what country?”

“In Denmark, actually. According to Kristoffer Dalby, she’s flirting with the idea of taking a course to be a teaching assistant over here in Copenhagen. I think all our talk about the old days opened up something that shouldn’t have been opened up, and definitely not on top of her seemingly leaving Kristoffer, too. He certainly seemed pretty down.”

“In Copenhagen? Couldn’t she take that course on Bornholm? What about all the children she normally looks after?”

“As far as I understood him, she didn’t have any more children after May 1st. That seemed to shake him just as much, as if now she was ready to leave the island. He didn’t think it could’ve been planned. But now she’s living with a brother out in the new district in Sluseholmen on Dexter Gordons Vej. The school is on Sydhavns Plads, just a ten-minute bike ride from her brother’s apartment.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Carl tried to imagine Kristoffer Dalby alone among all the toys in that little house. It must’ve been quite a shock for him.

“Okay, now she’s living with the brother, you say. And his surname is Kure, I assume, because wasn’t that Inge’s name when she was younger?”

“Yes, Hans Otto Kure. Owner of Kures Advanced Automobiles.”

“Doesn’t ring any bell.”

“It’s the biggest workshop in the city for higher-end vintage cars. Ferrari and Maserati and Bentley and so on. He’s a trained mechanic, following his dad and uncle.”

Rose looked at Carl for some time before he realized what she was thinking.

“Do you think . . . ?” he said.

“Wow,” said Assad. It’d clicked for him, too.

Gordon’s face had the usual appearance of a slapped ass.

“You’re telling me she grew up in a family where they fiddled about with cars?”

Rose raised her eyebrows a couple of times. “Yup. And of course I then asked Kristoffer Dalby if his wife could also do that sort of thing, and he answered that she was born with a wrench in her hand and could weld with the best of them. He said that until she starts her course she’s working as a mechanic in her brother’s workshop. Seems she’s made of stronger stuff than you first thought, wouldn’t you say, Carl?”

“Yes, but then the question is how much stronger. I can see you’re all thinking the same as me. We certainly can’t ignore the fact that she could’ve been capable of attaching a shovel blade on a vehicle and even driving it on a very early November morning in 1997. Do we know if the students were asked to account for their movements that morning? What do the reports say, Rose?”

“Nothing. They’ve been asked if they heard anything and if they had any specific suspicions, but not about their own movements.”

Assad nodded. “She goes on the list of possible suspects then, right, Carl?”

The lanky guy next to them stared goofily over. “Sorry, I don’t quite follow. Suspect for what? Was she at that classic car show on Bornholm you’re always going on about?”

They looked at each other.