The Man in the Window (8 page)

    'But these motifs,' Frølich insisted, pointing to the woman and the turtle. 'They must symbolize something.'

    Jespersen, irritated: 'They don't have any significance. Either you think they're beautiful, or you don't.'

    Frank studied the figurines again. There was no doubting that they were beautiful. The sexuality was portrayed in a humorous way, emphasizing the aesthetics of the human body - however fanciful the sexual act. The ornament that Jespersen had indicated was carved from rhino horn and portrayed athletes performing group sex. A number of very happy-looking people were intertwined in sexual gymnastics that, from a physiological perspective, scarcely seemed feasible. This means, he thought, I know next to nothing about China.

    'Are they yours?' he asked Jespersen.

    'No, they belong here, to the house.'

    'Are they worth much?'

    'Of course.'

    'How much would you say?' He straightened up as a middle-aged woman opened a door and entered.

    'There you are,' she said to Jespersen. 'You'll have to look after your children, I can't…' She stopped in mid- flow when she saw the two police officers.

    Gunnarstranda proffered his hand. 'Inspector Gunnarstranda. Murder Squad.'

    The woman shook his hand. Frølich could see that she had been attractive once, and that she still looked good, even though her face was marked with tiny wrinkles and age lines. For a few seconds Frølich was unsure what it was that made her so appealing - the clean-cut face under the fashionable haircut or the figure and the terrific legs. It was the latter, he decided, her body - her back was arched like a schoolgirl's - and the dress, which was tight in the right places.

    Jespersen was about to say something. But Gunnarstranda got in first: 'Ingrid Folke Jespersen?'

    She nodded.

    'May I offer my condolences?'

    She nodded again and stared calmly into the eyes of her contemporary. Frank noticed that he did not release her hand.

    Frølich stepped forward and proffered his hand: 'Frank Frølich.'

    'We were just on our way out,' Inspector Gunnarstranda said by way of reassurance. But she didn't hear what he was saying. The two policemen followed her eyes. She was staring at Karsten Jespersen and her eyes were filling. 'Karsten,' she whispered in a quiet, sorrow- filled voice. There was despair in her almost inaudible outburst. She was staring at her husband's son, who stiffly returned her gaze. He was struggling to control his feelings. She let hers flow. Karsten Jespersen was at the centre of everyone's attention: the woman and the men hung on his lips as if he were going to say a timely word.

    'He's jealous of your Thackeray books,' Jespersen stuttered, pointing to Gunnarstranda.

    Three heads turned to the Inspector, who contemplated the widow and her stepson for a long time before he took it upon himself to bring the silence to an end. 'Right,' said Gunnarstranda, without any elaboration, angling his head towards the glass cabinet: 'I couldn't find
Barry Lyndon.'

    'I always thought the film was better,' the woman in the doorway said in response.

    The dramatic silence still hung in the air. No one said anything. Everyone was looking at her. 'Well, you're right,' she said at length. '
Barry Lyndon
is missing. To Reidar's great annoyance. He was a perfectionist, you know, and could never understand that I wanted a series of books that was incomplete.'

    'Have you got a couple of minutes?' the Police Inspector asked.

    'Reidar had very little time for reading,' she added, seemingly lost in thought.

    The silence had changed. The unspoken words and the tension between her and her stepson were no longer there.

    'I don't feel like talking very much now,' Ingrid whispered. 'I'm worn out. I hardly slept last night.'

    'We can come back tomorrow,' Gunnarstranda replied. 'Just a couple of things, though. Did your husband go to bed last night?'

    She shook her head. 'I woke up when I became aware that he wasn't there… I think. I had taken a sleeping tablet.'

    'When did you go to bed?'

    'Between eleven and half past.'

    'You rang…' Gunnarstranda tossed his head towards Jespersen.

    'Yes,' she said. 'Last night, when I woke up. But. Karsten was not at home.'

    Ingrid and Karsten Jespersen stood eyeing each other.

    'I was asleep,' Karsten said at length. |

    'I realized,' she said. Her eyes were shiny and her lips quivered. She wanted to say more, but hesitated.

    Gunnarstranda broke the silence: 'Why did you ring?'

    'I panicked. Reidar wasn't here.'

    The policeman studied her. 'Did you hear any noises from the shop?'

    'I don't know,' she said.

    Gunnarstranda let her answer hang in the air. He interlaced his fingers behind his back, but she didn't expand.

    'You think you heard something?' the Inspector asked finally. 'I don't know,' she repeated, and started to concentrate on cleaning her fingernails. She had small hands; they were pale, with chunky rings on two of the fingers. The nails had once been rust-red, but now the varnish was flaking off. 'I panicked,' she added in a distant voice. 'Can't understand what got into me.'

    'Why did you panic?'

    'Because Reidar was nowhere around.' Her lips began to tremble again - and tears were in her dark eyes. She wiped her face with her hand.

    Jespersen stepped forward and cleared his throat with authority. However, the Inspector raised his palm to restrain him.

    'After you rang Karsten Jespersen did you go back to sleep?'

    'No,' she said quickly. Something had happened to her. The police officer's questions about her deceased husband seemed to have caused her to lose composure. The apparent calm façade that commanded her face when she strode into the room had been translucent, like the shiny surface of a calm forest lake. Now, with the surface ruffled, you could discern the vulnerability which lay hidden beneath. 'I lay awake until the traffic started moving in the streets,' she said. 'This morning… early, very early, while it was still dark.' She paused and eyed her stepson, who returned her look. Frølich did not quite know how to interpret these signals between them.

    'And then?' Gunnarstranda interrupted.

    Ingrid Jespersen turned to him. 'Then I decided that I had just been having nightmares, that I had imagined all the sounds and everything. So then…'

    She closed her eyes.

    'Yes?'

    She pointed downstairs. 'I was on the point of falling asleep when…'

    'He was seen by a passer-by,' Gunnarstranda said. 'I was given to understand that you joined our colleague

    Yttergjerde in the shop and identified your late husband.'

    'Yes.'

    All three of them stared at her. She was staring at a point in the distant corner of the room and scratching the varnish off her nails.

    'The shop door was open,' Gunnarstranda said.

    She nodded.

    'Who had the keys to the shop?'

    'My father and I,' Jespersen interrupted.

    'I also have keys,' she said in a tired voice.

    Gunnarstranda turned to the son. 'Any others?'

    He reflected.

    'Maybe Arvid and Emmanuel,' Ingrid Jespersen said.

    Karsten reflected. 'It's possible,' he said at length. 'Yes, indeed,' he concluded. 'They definitely have keys, both of them.'

    'And they are?' Gunnarstranda asked the widow.

    'Reidar's two brothers,' she answered.

    'Did your husband have a habit of leaving the door unlocked when he was in the shop in the evening?'

    'No idea,' she said.

    'When the police arrived, the shop was dark,' the policeman said. 'Did he usually switch off the lights when he was in the shop after opening hours?'

    'If he had had a light on, it would have been in the office, at the back of the shop,' interjected Karsten Jespersen.

    Ingrid hurried over to the armchair beside the bookcase. She sat down and vigorously adjusted the hem of her skirt which had ridden up so far that her knees were visible as she took a seat. 'The strange thing is that I knew what had happened straightaway. Since the phone calls were from the police.'

    Frølich watched Jespersen. He was observing Ingrid with a fixed expression in his eyes.

    'I know I'm pathetic,' she went on. 'But it was so terrible…' She wiped her eyes with her fingers once again and sniffed.

    Jespersen's face was red - from anger, Frølich surmised, as the man asked Gunnarstranda: 'Had enough yet?'

    The short policeman sent him a blank look. 'Not quite,' he said.

    'I saw that he was dead,' she said. 'I don't know what I was thinking. I just wanted to get away.'

    Gunnarstranda observed her. 'Thank you,' he said. 'I have to instruct you to keep anything you saw in the shop to yourself,' he said, calmly bringing things to a close.

    'The same constraint of silence applies to you,' he said to Karsten Jespersen. 'It is regrettable,' the policeman said formally, 'but those are the rules. I'm afraid we will have to…' He paused, then said: 'We will do whatever we can not to intrude and I hope you will bear with us.'

Chapter 10

Graffiti

    In the autopsy room Frank Frølich was, as always, almost overpowered by the poorly ventilated air. He breathed through his mouth as he searched for a chair. In the end he gave up and joined the others scrutinizing the body of Reidar Folke Jespersen. The white corpse lay stretched out on a metal table beneath the surgical lamp. Frølich fixed his gaze on the other two, Dr Schwenke and Inspector Gunnarstranda.

    'And the material around his neck?' Gunnarstranda enquired.

    'Sewing thread,' Schwenke said. 'Cotton. Looks like it anyway.' In the light he held up the snipped thread with a pair of scissors and added: 'Description: red, tied in a reef knot.'

    Gunnarstranda had clasped his hands behind his back and appeared transfixed, as though reading a letter from a divorce lawyer. The lab assistant took out a scalpel and sent an expectant look from the dead man to Dr Schwenke, who was putting on plastic gloves. Schwenke winked at Frølich. 'Rembrandt, isn't it? Men in black around the corpse. Just wait and in a moment I'll be pulling red tubes out of his arms.' Schwenke parted the wrinkled skin on the corpse's stomach and poked his fingers in the relatively clean cut under the right nipple. 'A single stab wound,' he muttered and ran his fingers across the other injuries. 'Otherwise, there are superficial scratches.' The wound gaped open. In the middle of the man's chest, numbers and letters had been written with a blue pen. Blood and scratches made it difficult to read the writing.

    The Professor carefully scraped away the blood covering the writing. 'They look like numbers, don't they?' Schwenke said, running his fingers over one of the inscriptions. 'This squiggle is a number one. But the first symbol is a letter, J for Jorgen.'

    'J one-nine-five,' Frølich read out.

    'Indeed.' Schwenke was in agreement.

    'A code?' Gunnarstranda wondered, resigned, and repeated: 'J one-nine-five.' To Schwenke he said: 'What about the crosses on his forehead?'

    'Three crosses. And the same colour. Must be the same ink as on the chest.'

    Frølich stooped over the dead man's forehead.

    Schwenke straightened up. 'Same cut in the clothing which is soaked in blood. So he was killed wearing clothes,' he concluded with a wry smile, and spoke several medical terms into the Dictaphone. Thereafter he said to the policemen in a low voice: 'The graffiti was added afterwards.'

    Frølich made way for the woman who was taking photographs of the dead man on the autopsy table. Schwenke was still talking into the Dictaphone.

    Gunnarstranda stood with his eyes fixed on the dead man's chest. 'A code,' he mumbled to himself, rapt in thought. 'The perpetrator takes the trouble to undress the man, write the code on the body and display it in the window.'

    They made way for the lab assistant who was washing the corpse.

    'Satanists,' Schwenke interjected from the right. He sent Frølich a good-natured wink.

    'What are you talking about now?' Gunnarstranda asked in an irritated tone.

    'I was just joking.' Schwenke sent Frølich another wink. 'But there is something ritualistic about this, isn't there? Soon only masons and Satanists will have rituals.' He chuckled. 'Hanging from sewing thread, with three crosses on his forehead. All that was missing was a fish sticking out of his gob.' Schwenke laughed louder. 'Perhaps that's what we will find now,' he said, going over to the table where the assistant had finished. He flourished the scalpel before making the\classic cut, from the neck down the stomach, left of the navel and down to the edge of the pubis.

    He moved to the side as the assistant began to cut through the dead man's ribs. It sounded as though someone was cracking thick roots in wet mud. Frølich had to lean against the wall, as always.

    'Queasy, Frølich?' Schwenke asked, in cheery mood. At a signal from the assistant he turned round, folded back the softer tissue and took a good hold before raising the sternum.

    Schwenke lifted out the internal organs and placed them all on the organ table. The assistant hosed them down very thoroughly. Frølich avoided the jets of water and once again breathed through his mouth because of the nauseous stench filling the room.

    'Well, what do you know,' Schwenke mumbled. 'What do you know!'

    Gunnarstranda woke up: 'What?'

    Schwenke: 'The question is how long he would have lasted.'

    'Why's that?'

    Schwenke pointed to the man's intestines. 'There.'

    'And what's that?'

    'A kidney riddled with cancer.'

    'I can't see any cancer.'

    'And this?' Schwenke held up something which looked like a half-chewed, regurgitated blood orange. 'Does this look like cancer?'

    'All right. But he must have felt it, mustn't he?'

    'I don't know. This type of cancer is hard to detect. If I'm not much mistaken, it has spread to his lungs.'

    'He was dying?'

    'Looks like it.'

    'But he might not have known?'

    'Well, we don't know that. I don't have the man's records. Check with his doctor and the usual hospitals. What I'm saying is that finding this type of cancer during an autopsy is not uncommon.'

    Gunnarstranda nodded pensively. 'And the wound?' he asked at length. 'The angle?'

    Schwenke studied the passage of the weapon through the dead man's internal organs. 'It looks like it was an upward thrust from an acute angle. A punctured lung. Vital blood vessels ruptured.'

    'But just one stab?' 'A single stab wound,' Schwenke confirmed, working on the dead man's abdominal organs.

    Frølich looked away, at Gunnarstranda, who was intently studying Schwenke's hands at work. 'Is there anything else you can tell me?' the Inspector barked.

    Schwenke looked up: 'Like what?'

    'Forget it!' Gunnarstranda rummaged furiously through his pockets.

    'No smoking in here,' Schwenke said.

    'Am I smoking?' asked the policeman\in an irritated tone of voice, holding out two empty hands.

    Schwenke stood up and beamed a guilty smile. 'Sorry. Well - there must have been quite a fountain of blood as the blade cut into blood vessels under a fair amount of pressure,' he mumbled and added: 'But then you said the crime scene was surprisingly clean. I assume he fell straight to the floor. But,' he continued, 'since the clothing is drenched in blood, the perpetrator's garments must have got pretty red, too.'

    'Cause of death?'

    'Nine to one it's the stab wound. But I can tell you more in a couple of hours.'

    'Time of death?'

    Schwenke turned. 'Death is a process, Gunnarstranda. Life is not some digital mechanism that stops working.'

    'But you can say something about when…'

    'The brain might be dead, but there can still be life in the digestive wall and white blood corpuscles,' Schwenke interrupted.

    '… he was stabbed and fell to the floor, can't you?' the policeman continued undeterred.

    'We'll have to see what his body temperature was when we arrived and measure it against the temperature taken by the window, then we'll have to examine the food in his stomach, find out what his last meal was and when he ate it. The problem is the room he was in was freezing. If the temperature of the brain is the same as in the room, the thermometer can't tell us anything. Besides, rigor mortis has not subsided yet. My understanding was that your forensics people had a struggle with his limbs when they brought him in. Do you know what his last meal was?'

    'Reindeer steak,' Gunnarstranda said. 'Somewhere between seven-thirty and ten o'clock last night.'

    Schwenke looked up from the dead man's stomach. 'With chanterelle sauce,' he added. 'Washed down with red wine. I would guess Spanish, tempranillo, a Rioja.'

    Schwenke grinned when he saw Frølich's expression. 'Just joking.' He became serious and reflected. 'We don't know how cold it was in the room and that might cause problems.'