The Hanging Girl (14 page)

“I don’t know what you mean. I changed names because my wife didn’t want to be called Studsgaard, so I took hers.”

“Listen here, Kristoffer. We know that you once had a thing with Alberte, so you won’t deny it now, will you?” said Carl.

He looked across the floor with his head at an angle. “No. It’s true that Alberte and I had something together, but it was honestly perfectly innocent and didn’t last for more than a couple of weeks.”

“But you were really in love with her, right, Kristoffer?” asked Assad.

He nodded. “Yes, I suppose I was. Alberte was amazingly sweet and beautiful, so . . .”

“So you killed her when she decided she’d rather be with someone else, right?” Assad threw in.

He looked confused now. “No, not at all.”

“So you weren’t particularly sorry when she didn’t want to be with you anymore?” he pressed.

“Yes, of course I was. But it’s a little complicated, you see.”

“Complicated how?” asked Carl. “Can you tell us why you think that?”

“My wife’ll be home in a minute and we’re going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment, so I’d appreciate it if we could hurry this along.”

“Why, Kristoffer? Haven’t you told your wife everything? Or does she know something that she maybe shouldn’t. Have you confided in her, is that it? Are you scared about her reaction?”

“No, no, we’re just going through a bit of a rough patch where . . . Listen, okay, we have two kids who are away at a residential school just now and, to put it bluntly, they’re not damn well coping too good. So things aren’t so happy on the home front, can you understand that?”

“What’s that got to do with you and Alberte? Why can’t your wife hear it?”

He sighed. “Inge and I had already started dating back in spring 1997, so we’d been together for almost half a year when we went to the folk high school, and then Alberte came on the scene, so that’s why! I don’t want to dig all this up. Not just now anyway.”

“I see. So that means that Alberte bagged Inge’s guy from right under her nose?”

He nodded almost imperceptibly. “It made her feel completely miserable, and still can. I betrayed Inge back then and she’ll never forget it.”

“She didn’t just hate you then, but Alberte, too?” concluded Carl. He turned to Assad. “What does the report say? Has Inge Dalby been questioned in connection with the murder of Alberte?”

“Murder?” Kristoffer Dalby moved forward to the edge of his seat. “It was an accident. It said so everywhere.”

“Yes, but we have a slightly different theory. What about it, then, Assad, has she been questioned?” he repeated.

Assad shook his head. “There wasn’t anyone called Inge Dalby in that group.”

The schoolteacher shook his head. “Nonsense, she was there . . .” He stopped midsentence and nodded briefly. “No, that’s right. She was called Inge Kure back then, but she preferred her mother’s maiden name. There are so many called Kure, Studsgaard, Pihl, and Kofoed over here on the island, but you’ll know all about that. So we agreed that we’d rather have a less common surname when we got married; that’s all.”

Assad took out the folder, laid the yearbook with the group picture on the coffee table in front of him, and went through the names underneath. “Inge Kure, hmm. Yes, there she is. She’s up here behind Alberte.”

Carl leaned closer. A slightly plump girl with dark curly hair. Very plain, not particularly pretty. An absolute contrast to the angel sitting in the front row lighting up the whole scene.

Assad flicked through the pages. “Regardless, we’ll have to talk to your wife,” he said.

Dalby sighed and bit his cheek, offering reassurances that neither of them had anything to do with Alberte’s death. Alberte was just the girl in the group who all the boys were crazy about, and for that reason she annoyed most of the girls. Alberte was popular enough, but all the same her presence disturbed the harmony that exists if everyone has roughly the same chances, romantically speaking. That’s how he expressed it. It seemed rehearsed.

“Were you bitter that Alberte left you?” asked Carl.

“Bitter? No, I probably would’ve been if she’d found another guy at the school, but that’s not how it was.”

“Did Inge just take you back, then?” asked Assad.

He nodded and sighed. Could it be a decision that he’d since come to regret?

“So Alberte found a new guy outside the school? Who was he?” asked Carl.

“I don’t know, really, but Alberte mentioned that it was someone who lived in a commune at Ølene. I wasn’t really told anything else. I don’t think anyone at the school was.” So that was how Habersaat had found the lead about the commune. “He was apparently a bit of a Don Juan,” continued Kristoffer.

“How do you mean? Was he involved with someone else at the school?”

“Er, no. Not as far as I know anyway.”

“So how do you know that he was a bit of a Don Juan?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably just how I pictured him given that he could just run off with Alberte.”

“You never saw him?”

He shook his head.

“You’re sure? Check here!” Assad put the photo of the man getting out of the VW Kombi in front of him. “You didn’t see this guy? Maybe you saw him waiting for Alberte outside the school?”

Kristoffer picked the photo up and fumbled about for a pair of reading glasses in his breast pocket. Carl looked at Assad, who shrugged his shoulders. Yes, he’d seen correctly. Kristoffer Dalby’s reactions just now seemed both logical and understandable. His subdued manner and fear about digging up a past betrayal could explain his reaction when they rang the doorbell.

“The photo is really unclear, but no, I don’t think I’ve seen him before. But I can tell you that I often saw a VW like that parked a little way down on the highway by the folk high school. I never saw it from the front, but the one that used to be there was definitely light blue like this one, and as far as I can remember, it also had dark-tinted side windows.”

Insanely well remembered after so many years. Suspicion began to gnaw away at them again.

They heard rustling out in the corridor and Dalby’s expression changed.

“Who’s visiting?” shouted a woman’s voice from out in the corridor. “I don’t recognize the six-oh-seven out there. Has Ove been fobbed off with another old heap of junk?”

A hefty woman appeared in the doorway. Very difficult to recognize from the group picture on the table.

She frowned and let her eyes move from Kristoffer’s bowed head to the two strange men and down at the coffee table with the case folder and yearbook from the folk high school.

“Is that this old case coming up again?” She looked hostilely at her husband. “What is it
now,
Kristoffer? Will we never have peace from that bitch?”

Carl introduced both himself and Assad and explained the reason why they were on the case.

“Habersaat, you’re kidding me! The man who blew his brains out; how pathetic can you be? Even when he’s dead he’s irritating,” she snorted. “I was certain that now he was gone, Alberte would be, too.”

“You hated her, didn’t you, Inge?”

“Not like you think. And not like Habersaat thought, either. But ever since Alberte turned up at the school, things were never the same again, and if you should get the strange idea that I was happy about that, then you’re definitely very much mistaken.”

“We’d like to have your version of the story. Is that okay with you?”

She looked away, so it obviously wasn’t.

But she told it anyway.

In the beginning, everyone
liked Alberte. She’d doled out generous hugs, and she was the one who waltzed from house to house larking about, and who could make the girls scream with laughter. To begin with, that is, but then things changed. Her inconsideration for the other girls who had their own dreams about the boys at the school was ruinous. Not because anyone ever suspected her of wanting to hurt someone; she was just thoughtless.

She could say things like
Niels is so hot, don’t you think,
while one of the girls in the back of the class sighed. It was her guy’s turn.

And Alberte’s eyes could sparkle when she talked about the kisses she’d received. She could talk about the boys’ hot breath and scent without giving a thought to the fact that it might hurt other people.

She was called spoiled and accused of being used to getting whatever she pointed at. But that wasn’t true, or at least Inge knew it wasn’t.

The truth was that Alberte didn’t need to point at something to get it. It came of its own accord.

And that was the cause of Inge’s bitterness. She wasn’t going to deny that. Not because Alberte took her boyfriend from her, but because he offered himself, and that fact stayed with her, eating away at her even now, seventeen years later.

Carl glanced over at Inge’s husband, sitting passively, huddled on the sofa opposite them with his eyes lowered. Obviously, Alberte had had a magical form of sensuality that no one could match, and a dangerous form at that.

“Inge, I asked your husband if he knew the name of a guy that Alberte was seeing up until her death. Are you familiar with that name?”

“I was asked that at least ten times by Christian Habersaat back when he did his rounds at the school. We’d already told the police in Rønne, but Habersaat wanted to hear it again. He always did. I said that Alberte had mentioned it once because she thought it sounded so exotic. But I couldn’t really remember it then, and not at all now.”

“Not at all?”

“No. Nothing other than that there were several names, and that it sounded weird together. The first was shorter than the others. Something biblical about it.”

“Short, how? Like Adam?”

“No, maybe only three letters, but to be quite honest I don’t want to think about it.”

“Lot, Sem, Job, Eli, Koa, Gad, Set, Asa,” fired off Assad.

How the heck could he, a Muslim nonetheless, sit there and recite that litany?

“No, I don’t think it was any of those. As I said, I don’t really want to think about it.”

“And the other names?” insisted Carl.

“No idea. Something crazy, like I said before. Like Simsalabimkruttelutski.” She smiled. She had reason to.

“So you know absolutely nothing more about him? Are you sure?”

“Yes, nothing else other than that he apparently came from Copenhagen. He definitely wasn’t from Bornholm, or Jutland for that matter, as far as I knew. Then there was the VW of course, which Kristoffer and I have spoken about together.”

“This one?” Assad pushed the photo from the parking area over to her.

She looked at it for a moment. “The same color and shape at least. But you can’t really see it clearly.”

“Can you remember any details about it?”

“Details? I did only see it from behind and from a distance up on the road.”

“Maybe some larger dents or scratches, color of the license plate, curtains in the windows? Anything significant?”

She smiled. “The windows were matte, and I think the license plate was one of the old-fashioned types, black with white numbering, and then a sort of black curved line that looked like it came up from the roof, and I think it had white on the tires, a sort of broad streak round the hubcap, but I can’t be sure. It could also be another car I saw up on the road.”

“A curved line, you said?”

“I don’t know if it was dirt or . . .” She turned to her husband. “Can you remember anything about it, Kristoffer?”

He shook his head.

Okay, black license plates. At least they knew that the vehicle was registered before 1976, whatever help that might be.

*   *   *

“What do you say, Carl? Are the Dalbys off the hook?”

Carl changed gears a couple of times before answering.

“The question for me is who on earth Alberte was, Assad. That’s what I’m thinking about just now. I’ll have an answer to your question when we know a bit more about Alberte. Inge Dalby is definitely a very tough and angry woman, but she seems otherwise down-to-earth, so I don’t suspect her of anything particular just now. And then there’s Kristoffer. He’s a slowpoke, standing and smoking on the doorstep, and he’ll never dare to stand up to his wife. Could he be fiery enough to commit a crime of passion? I don’t really think so.”

“Don’t you think it strange that he could remember that a VW had dark-tinted windows so many years later? And that she remembered that it had white tires, a line on the side, and black license plates? Would you have been able to remember that?”

Carl shrugged. He allowed himself to believe he would.

“Just a minute, aren’t we going in the wrong direction? Aren’t we going to the nursing home in Rønne to visit June’s sister?” asked Assad.

“Yes, but I’m thinking we should find that place called Ølene first.
There might be someone who lived there at the time and who can remember the hippies.”

“Don’t you think Habersaat did what he could in that area?”

“Yes, but the question is whether or not he did it well enough. He’s sort of given us several hints that we should concentrate our efforts on the man in the enlarged version of the photo back at his house, right? So I’m trying to picture it all and work out what kind of man we’re dealing with, because I sure as hell can’t just now, Assad.”

*   *   *

The distance was greater than Carl had reckoned, and the sun was already fading. Even though there was at least an hour and a half until it set, the shadows were long and the colors had been sucked out of the landscape.

“There are a lot of trees here, Carl. Do you have any idea where we’re heading?”

He shook his head. “Call Jonas Ravnå; he’ll know where to find it.”

“It’s almost six. He won’t be on call anymore.”

“Try. You’ve got his cell number, and put the speakerphone on.”

People obviously ate early in these parts, so Ravnå didn’t exactly sound happy about being disturbed. Didn’t they have a GPS—couldn’t they use it?

Despite himself, he took pity on them and explained to Carl that they needed to find the path to Øle brook, which went from Ølenevej just across from the signpost for the national park. You couldn’t miss it. An image of a bird with the less-than-welcoming message
Zutritt Verboten
written underneath.

Ølenevej meandered up and down, but they found the sign opposite another and somewhat smaller sign pointing toward Øle brook path, a cul-de-sac with what appeared to be an abandoned house with a barn and accompanying lawn.

“Strange place. What do you make of it, Carl?” asked Assad when they’d crawled out of the car.

Carl shook his head. It was hard to imagine a hippie camp in this anemic-looking place.

“Maybe that man there can tell us something.” Carl pointed toward a blot on the path that was toiling closer.

They waited for a minute before a male figure in shorts and a good seventy-five years behind him trudged toward them at what the man himself would no doubt have described as a jog.

He didn’t look like stopping, maybe because he knew it would be difficult to get going again, but decided to stop all the same, arms at his sides and gasping, before he finally composed himself enough to reciprocate their acknowledgment.

“Well done, my man,” said Carl, referring both to the man’s age and sporting efforts.

“Yes, you have to get fit before you hit sixty,” he answered, out of breath and with a thick accent.

Only sixty? Bloody hell. They’d better send him off on his way again immediately.

“Do you live nearby?” asked Carl.

“No, no, I live in Hamburg. I’ve just strayed a bit too far from home. I shouldn’t have turned right so late.”

Assad laughed. So there were two present who understood that sort of humor.

“I assume you know a bit about the history of this area?”

“What do you want to know?”

Carl pointed to the abandoned building and let him in on their story.

“We’ve been asked about that hundreds of times before by that meddlesome policeman from Svaneke,” he answered. “But yes, some young people lived here for about half a year. The former owner didn’t look too closely at how he earned his money.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there were a load of hippies who didn’t belong here. Gaudy clothes and big hair. And they went about doing a lot of strange things.”

“Like what, for example?”

“Running about waving their arms at the sun. Lighting fires in the
evening and running around it, sometimes completely naked and in that mystical way. Not something the rest of us would do,” he said with a twisted smile.

“Mystical?”

“Yes, they painted their bodies with symbols and chanted as if they were Catholics. Some said they were Asa followers, believers in the Norse gods, but those of us here just thought they were crazy like so many other tourists.”

“Interesting. What sort of symbols?”

“No idea. Just some sort of gibberish.” His face lit up. “Almost like Indians.”

“Strange.”

“Yes, they also had a large sign hanging above the main door.
The Celestial Sphere,
I think it said.”

“But they didn’t proselytize or cause trouble in the area?”

“No, no, they were very nice and peaceful in their own way. Just a bit cuckoo, as they say.”

Carl pointed to Assad’s bag, and the photo of the man with the VW Kombi was produced.

“And this man here? Do you recognize him?” asked Assad.

“Oh yes, the policeman had this photo with him every time as well. I
have
said that they had an identical van, but that I have no idea who the man is. I didn’t see those sorts of people, now, did I?”

“So you didn’t gasp about jogging in those days, then?”

“God, no. Why do you think I need to do it now?”

They got a few additional details. Yes, the license plates were black, and yes, there was a curved line on the top of each side of the car, but otherwise nothing noticeable in terms of markings, dents, or scratches. And yes, there had been about nine to ten young people on the site, four to five of each sex. Then one day they were just gone. That’s the way it was, and since then the owner had only taken Germans. They brought more coins in to the coffers.

“Could you or others confirm the date of their departure from here? Was it around the time of the search for Alberte Goldschmid?”

“No idea, but in my case, no. I’m away a lot, and was at that time. I’m a biochemist specializing in enzymes, and was in Groningen on a research trip. It was about the manufacture of potato flour, if you must know,” he said, laughing.

Assad’s eyes popped. “Potato flour! Really, that
is
good. When you have a camel with saddle sore, you . . .”

“Thank you. I don’t think the camels are something for this gentleman right now.” He turned to face the man. “And your former neighbor who rented the house out? Surely he must know exactly when they split from the place?”

“Him! He knew damn all. He lived in a completely different part of the island. As long as he got his rent, he left people to their own devices.”

He told them his name, got himself together, and trudged on with his bellows working overtime.

“I think we need to make a start on familiarizing ourselves with the investigation team’s files and not least Habersaat’s private records. There seem to be many things we could’ve read about instead of knocking about here in the sticks.”

“What’s that about sticks?”

“Forget it. It’s just a saying.”

*   *   *

The nursing home where June Habersaat’s sister lived, Snorrebakken, was a nightmare of sparkling glass and grey plastered walls. A shiny new building in every conceivable way. Seen from the outside, it would’ve been a perfect location to house an extortionately expensive accountancy firm or a private plastic surgery clinic. Not exactly what you’d imagine to be a municipal setting for the last stop in life.

“Karin Kofoed has become a little slow on the uptake,” informed the nursing assistant, ushering them in. “Unfortunately, the dementia and Alzheimer’s have combined, but if you stick to one subject at a time, she sometimes has her better moments.”

June Habersaat’s sister sat huddled up with dancing arm movements
in her armchair. The smile seemed frozen in time, but the hands were lively enough, as if directing a symphony orchestra in a fictional concert.

“I’ll leave you alone awhile; otherwise I’ll take all her attention,” the nursing assistant said with a smile.

They sat opposite her on a narrow sofa and waited until her eyes met them of their own accord.

“Karin, we’d like to talk to you a little about Christian Habersaat and his investigation,” Carl said finally.

She nodded and was gone again. Sat for a moment staring at her outstretched fingers and turned toward them, perhaps a little more present.

“Because . . . Bjarke!” she stated.

Carl and Assad looked at each other. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“Yes, Bjarke isn’t here anymore; that’s right. But it isn’t because of him we want to talk about Christian.”

“Bjarke’s my nephew, he plays football.” She paused. “No, he doesn’t actually. What’s it called?”

“Bjarke and your sister, June, and you used to live together, we’ve been told.” Assad shifted himself to the edge of the sofa so they were closer. “It was back when June and Christian got divorced and she was seeing another man. Back when you lived together many years ago. Do you remember?”

A worried fold cut across her smooth forehead. “June. She’s angry with me.”

“With you, Karin? Wasn’t it with Christian?” Now Carl moved closer, too.

For a moment they lost her again. She looked out of the window, tilted her head up and down a little, as if answering herself in an inner monologue. Her hands shook slightly. Then the wrinkle in her brow disappeared, and her body relaxed. It didn’t seem to lead anywhere.