The Hanging: A Thriller (31 page)

“Okay, I’ll give you that it seems reasonable to assume that our mysterious woman is from Gentofte. Go on.”

“Per Clausen had two connections to Gentofte in his life. In part through his own childhood and in part through his daughter’s schooling. The woman’s age indicates that the connection between the two of them originated through his daughter.”

“Sounds plausible enough, but now you are building a maybe on another maybe.”

Poul Troulsen ignored the objection and continued: “After her return to Sweden in January 1993, Helene Clausen entered ninth grade at the Tranehøj School in Gentofte. The following school year she started the first year at Auregaard Gymnasium, which lies right next door. That she was admitted in a school in Gentofte County when she lived in Gladsaxe should immediately have raised questions. It isn’t very common.”

“I know the story as well as you,” Simonsen interrupted.

Troulsen glanced skeptically at him. There were now hundreds of reports in the case files and he had realized the connections only yesterday. Simonsen caught his disbelief and said quickly and sourly, “We were inattentive, yes, but after a couple of days these connections were revealed by Arne’s trip to Sweden. When Helene Clausen came back to Denmark she refused therapy. Her father did the next best thing. He had a colleague whose wife worked with traumatized children in Copenhagen and was also tied to the Tranehøj School as a psychologist. Per Clausen looked her up and she promised to help. She talked to a friend about cross-county flexibility regarding the girl’s schooling. The friend was married to the mayor of Gentofte at the time. Unfortunately, Helene Clausen never received professional counseling. It may have cost eight people their lives. And in future, kindly refrain from doubting me when I say that I know.”

“I’m sorry, I just figured that with the volume of paper…”

“Let’s move on. Poul. Where do you want to start? We have had a team at the school and one at the gymnasium and they have done a reasonable bit of work. What can you add to the investigation?”

“Maybe nothing, but their task was primarily to shed light on whether or not Helene Clausen had been sexually abused during her time in Sweden as well as to clarify the circumstances surrounding her death. What they did not look into was any ties between Per Clausen and his daughter’s classmates.”

Simonsen nodded. “Hm, you have a point there.”

“Exactly, and the work already done gives me an excellent point of departure. It is clear from the reports that the girls in room one-A, class of 1993, at Auregaard Gymnasium had an informal leader of sorts. Today she owns a small temp agency in Hellerup and I have an appointment with her.”

Simonsen folded his hands and stared up at the ceiling. Then he made up his mind. “You are probably out hunting ghosts. Start with a renewed search for a silver-colored Porsche now that the area can be limited to Gentofte and then keep your cell phone on. Good luck.”

CHAPTER 50

The investigation had been given a longish piece in the
Nyhedsjournalen,
which was positive. What was less positive was that Monday’s preparatory meeting between the Homicide Division and the TV station almost stalled. Simonsen, Arne Pedersen, the Countess, and Pauline Berg were there from the police. The TV station sent a producer and producer’s assistant. The work took place in the police headquarters in Copenhagen and everyone was tired and irritable.

The producer had signed off from the start. First he held an unnecessarily long-winded and partly incoherent introduction in which he stressed to the police investigators the importance of a clear message. After that he said almost nothing. He looked like someone after a long weekend of drinking, his breath had a foul smell of old beer, and both chairs on either side of him were vacant. His assistant concerned herself only with the keyboard on her laptop. She wrote down every word, which made the others self-conscious even though no one said anything.

Three reconstructed scenes had been prepared for the program, each of them about one minute in length. The first depicted the transportation of the victims, the second showed the murders, and the third, which was the shortest and most fabricated, showed the minivan on its way from the school to the field in Kregme at Arresø. The only thing lacking was narration. All the film clips were computer animated with puppets as actors, which lessened the realism but had the obvious advantage that the scenes could be easily modified. After each film scene the police had the opportunity to comment and ask for witnesses of the event to come forward. The problem was, what comments and witnesses to what.

Simonsen grabbed the remote and pointed it at the television. They were still on the first scene. “Should we watch it again?”

The three others protested in a rare show of unison. The producer looked relieved, the assistant kept typing. Everyone speculated about what to say. Arne Pedersen held steadily to his opinion.

“I’m leaning most to the woman. The film doesn’t show that she’s giving injections or measuring out doses of Stesolid according to the body weight of the victims. Her presumed medical background also doesn’t emerge. Physician, nurse, nursing assistant, midwife, veterinarian, medical student—we should make sure to get that in.”

It was nothing new, merely a rewrite of his own argumentation, version twenty. Or so the Countess thought, and injected, “I still think that the minivan is a better angle. Only six adult witnesses have come forward. There must be more, and maybe we can get a make, year, or even a license plate; I mean, that minivan had to come from somewhere. It must have been sold, bought, registered, and owned. The alternative is that we wait until the technicians come up with something from Kregme and we only just received a court order. It almost seems like sabotage.”

Pauline Berg parroted the Countess’s point but used twice as many words, as if she wanted to give innocent men a headache. Or so Arne Pedersen thought while he prepared to take up his own line of argumentation again.

Simonsen asked Pedersen, “How are things going with the minivan? When can we get a forensic report?”

Pedersen gave a pessimistic answer: “There have been problems keeping people away. Someone is tossing all kinds of garbage down into the pit to get it to burn even longer but we’re finally closer to getting a handle on that. The problem is that the technicians want the fire to die down of its own accord so that they don’t destroy any more evidence. The earliest we can hope for is that in about three days they should be able to say if they will have something to say, if that makes sense. It could be weeks if not months before we get something usable and even that is uncertain. We have to assume it’s been over a thousand degrees for a number of days down in that pit.”

Simonsen shook his head as if he wanted to chase the bad news away. He was sweating, his legs ached, and he shuttled back and forth between the Countess’s and Arne Pedersen’s points of view. Now he tried to reach a compromise: “We’ll mention the minivan and call for witnesses, but concentrate on the woman.”

Everyone was satisfied, with the exception of the production assistant, who knew that she was destined for a glorious career in the media world. For a brief moment she abandoned her keyboard and involved herself in the debate. It was the first time she said something, so her thin voice attracted their undivided attention.

“Keep the messages simple.”

And then they were back to the beginning.

Berg stared speculatively at her white throat and wanted to throttle her. Simonsen wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, the producer yawned openly, and Pedersen started yet another variant of his argument.

The work proceeded at a snail’s pace. After a long time they finally agreed on the message that would follow the first video. The simple message. Simonsen had finally taken Pedersen’s side: they would focus on the woman with the anesthesia. She had been observed climbing into the minivan when it paused at the outskirts of a rest stop on the freeway between Slagelse and Ringsted. The witness had later retracted his statement but no one put much stock in that. The next sequence was played back four times and a couple of smaller corrections were made, then they tackled the question of what the message should be.

The producer disappeared for a long time and the officers grew nervous that he had become lost in the building corridors. He returned, his face flushed. He had a seasonal beer with him that he’d picked up somewhere and that he unselfconsciously started to drink. The alcohol gave him strength to join in the fray, which turned out to be an advantage. If one could see past the man’s foul smell and pedantic manner, he was a brilliant project leader. Everyone fell in line and agreed that the title should be “The Man with the Video Camera.” This was as far as they could agree and everyone knew it.

Simonsen began, “Aka Frank Ditlevsen’s secret friend? Aka the killer and tree feller from Allerslev? Aka Stig Åge Thorsen’s stranger? Aka the driver of the minivan and the executioner from Bagsværd?”

It was a question. The Countess remained firm in her belief and was quick to answer, “Yes.”

Pedersen again played devil’s advocate: “Maybe, but very much a maybe. This is much too uncertain to put this out there. We risk derailing the whole investigation. Guesses and speculations—that’s simply too thin.” Simonsen nodded thoughtfully while Pedersen continued. “Particularly with respect to Stig Åge Thorsen’s stranger, who we aren’t sure even exists. It could be one man, it could be five or ten women for that matter. That country bumpkin is not the most reliable witness, to put it mildly, and his motives are unclear in every way. He’ll probably turn out to be another media stunt. We don’t even know if the remains of the minivan are at the bottom of his pit.”

The Countess countered, “The technicians have established a match between the last film clip and the view seen from his land.”

Pedersen replied, “A preliminary match, and even if it were true it would not necessarily mean that the minivan ended up there.”

Simonsen jumped in: “Let us take this from the beginning—that is, Frank Ditlevsen’s secret friend. Pauline, give us a summary.”

Berg would have preferred that he had turned to the Countess. Her secret knowledge that Frank Ditlevsen’s secret friend was one of his so-called old boys stuck in her throat and today she would have a given a great deal for a do-over of yesterday. She sat straighter in her chair. The producer stared lustfully at her breasts and the production assistant tapped away at her keyboard.

“The only thing we have are the accounts of two neighbors, of which only one has any substance. The next-door neighbors have seen a man in his thirties visit the brothers on a few occasions over the past year. They say he has his own key. But the description is incomplete: light-haired, above average height, slender and well proportioned, always arriving on foot or by car with Frank Ditlevsen.”

Simonsen suddenly interrupted: “Give me a summary of the murder of Allan Ditlevsen and focus on the tree felling.”

His voice sounded unusually sharp and Berg looked at him in bewilderment. Neither of the two others said anything but she could tell from their expressions that they were as much at a loss as she was. She followed his order. Anything else would have been inconceivable when her boss was acting like this, but his shifts in mood were strange, almost bizarre. Luckily she knew the facts of the tree felling almost by heart.

“The perpetrator felled the tree in eight blows at around four to four fifty during the night between Wednesday and Thursday of last week, and the tree finally came down at five thirty-eight
A.M.
. Shortly before this, Allan Ditlevsen was killed by blunt trauma caused with a beech stick. The hot-dog stand was shattered by the tree. The perpetrator gathered up his things and disappeared into the front door of the building at Ved Torvet 18. Here he goes down into the basement and out through the back entrance to Garvergade. Traces of sawdust have been found all along this path but after this point we don’t know where he went. Our best find is a series of four footprints from the stairwell in number 18. As it happens, the building has no residents. It is ready to be demolished.”

The Countess finally got it. She stood up and left, while Berg continued her recap. She even managed an account of the forensic report without a manuscript. The Countess quickly returned with a disoriented Malte Borup in her wake.

Simonsen stopped Berg as abruptly as he had ordered her to start. Then he turned to the producer and said, “Your assistant is very hardworking. Tell me, what is she writing?”

The producer’s surprised, somewhat puffy face removed any suspicion of conspiracy for the moment.

“I’ve been wondering that too. Why are you writing this all down, Marie?”

The movement on the keyboard stopped and Marie instantly reached for the mouse. The Countess gripped her wrist a couple of centimeters away from it; Borup took over her keyboard.

Pedersen was the first to comment on the situation.

“Dammit.”

The meeting was adjourned and set for the following morning, at which time the producer promised to return with a new assistant. He was endowed with a truly professional spirit, and unless he was an excellent actor he had not prompted his assistant into these subversive activities. He had no idea whom she had been reporting to online. The feeling among the investigative team was depressed. It was not so much that the assistant had caused any real damage. It was of course unpleasant that their conversations were now circulating on the Internet but they could deal with that. What was so shattering was the firsthand demonstration that a part of the general public was simply working against the police. In case any of them had been harboring any doubts in this regard, they were finally set straight.

Simonsen tried to breathe some fire into his team: “The damage is negligible. The situation is constantly changing and if the media get a little more background information it isn’t the whole world. In any case we have to keep working and forget this.”