The Hanging Girl (37 page)

Monday, May 12th, 2014

“Now I’ve talked to
that Kate Busck woman!”

Carl blinked a couple of times. Had he nodded off?

He looked down at himself. One foot in the drawer, the other in the trash can. Yes, he must’ve been dozing.

“Kate Busck?” He squinted toward Assad, trying to return to reality. Had he just been dreaming about Mona? And who the hell was Kate Busck?

“Kate is the one who knew the man with the VW, Egil Poulsen. The one from the peace movement,” said Assad without being asked.

Was he a mind reader or what?

“I told her how important it is that we find the guy in the photo. I sent her a scan of the photocopy, and she was looking at it on her computer while we were talking.”

“Good idea. And . . .”

“She did remember a youngster who helped collect leaflets for the demonstrations. A handsome guy who prattled on and on about peace. And yes, he was apparently called Frank, but they called him the Scot. She didn’t know why because he spoke perfect Danish.” Assad made a long pause, allowing the information to sink in. So there was something about that name.

“She recognized him in the photo, even though she’d only seen him as a boy, you said. Does that seem very likely?”

“Well, she said she was positive he
could
be the person in Habersaat’s photocopy.”

Carl stretched. “That’s fine, Assad, thanks. Let’s just hope we’ll find something in Egil Poulsen’s widow’s house that can bring us a bit closer,” he said, fumbling with his cigarette pack. “Would you get Gordon in here?”

He took a few drags on his wake-up cigarette.

Maybe all these small steps would lead to a breakthrough for them. Maybe the man would suddenly be right in front of them.

And then what?

Gordon looked more than tired when he stood in front of Carl’s desk. So tired, in fact, that his incredibly long legs were about to give out from under him. How on earth one small heart could transport blood through that entire system was a mystery. No wonder the brain was in short supply and the legs a bit heavy.

“Sit down and shoot, Gordon. What do
you
have for us?”

He shook his head, sinking into the seat.

“I don’t really know what to say.” He took out his notes. “I could begin by telling you that I’ve managed to get hold of four or five more students from the folk school, and that they had nothing to add to what we know already. They all referred me to Inge Dalby, who they imagined would know more, given that she had the room just next to Alberte’s.”

Carl looked up toward the window. Those calls hadn’t resulted in much. Had Gordon been the right man for the job?

“And the rest of the students? How many are left on your list?”

He looked miserable. “A bit more than half, I think.”

“Okay, Gordon, we’ll stop there,” he said abruptly and maybe also a bit too harshly. “So what do you have for us now? The phone’s been ringing almost constantly today.”

The beanpole took a deep breath, trying to express something that was meant to sound like the sigh of all ordeals. “I’ve spoken to . . .” He held up his notepad, and began counting lines with the tip of his pencil.

“Never mind,” said Carl. “Any luck?”

Gordon was still talking. He didn’t even hear him. A sign that it was time to stop for the day.

“All in all, forty-six calls.” He looked around, as if expecting some kind of sympathy in return. Did he think he was the only one in the world who’d worked his socks off for a crumb of information?

“Anyway, I did manage to get hold of one person who had more to say. I have her number, so you can call her if you want to speak with her.” He handed a note to Carl. Apart from the number, it said
Karen Knudsen Ærenspris.

“She knew the man we’re after,” he added surprisingly.

“In here, Assad,” yelled Carl.

“They used to live in a commune together,” explained Gordon when Assad stood in front of the desk. “It was in Hellerup—some kind of late-hippie commune with micro-macro food and shared economy and clothes. They called it Ærenspris, and everyone took that as their surname. As far as I could understand from her, she was the only one who kept the name in the long run. The commune wasn’t particularly successful.”

“So they disbanded?”

“Of course, fifteen to sixteen years ago.”

Carl sighed. He was beginning to miss some bloody cases to do with the here and now. “And when did our man live there?”

“She wasn’t sure, because it was for such a brief period, but she believed it was 1994 or 1995. That fits in with her saying that he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday there.”

Carl and Assad looked at each other. That would make him approximately forty-five today, as they’d already calculated.

“Out with it, Gordon, what was the man’s name?” said Assad, shuffling his feet impatiently.

The beanpole pulled a face that didn’t make him look any more attractive. “Oh, the thing is that she didn’t remember. We agreed that he was called Frank, but she wasn’t sure about the surname. She could only remember that it wasn’t Danish. Perhaps something with Mac, given that they called him the Scot. But whether it was because he used an Apple computer, which none of the others did, or he actually did have a Scottish name, she couldn’t say or remember if she’d ever been told.”

“
Shit!
” shouted Carl. He looked at the note, and dialed her number. “She’d bloody well better be in.”

She was, and while he introduced himself, he put her on speakerphone. The information they got was more or less the same, so the crucial, epochal piece of information wasn’t easy to drag out of her, if there was one.

“What did the guy do, did he have a job?”

“He was a student, I think. Perhaps he lived off a state education grant. I don’t know.”

“A student of what, and where? Daytime or evening classes?”

“It certainly can’t have been in the mornings because he was usually having it off with one of us at that time.”

“What do you mean? Are you talking about sex?”

She laughed, and so did Assad. Carl waved his hand dismissively. He’d bloody well better keep quiet while the conversation was rolling.

“Of course I am. He was a pretty hot guy, so most of us girls allowed him to take us in turns.” She laughed again. “Nothing the guy I was dating at the time knew about for certain, but still it upset the apple cart. That’s why he was kicked out. And probably also why my guy left, and the commune disbanded in the end.”

Carl asked her to describe Frank in more detail, what kind of person he was, but nothing new came of that. Inge Dalby had described him in almost exactly the same way. He was a man without marks or visible blemishes, tall, beautiful, wonderful, and charismatic.

“Well, not many of them around in Denmark today, so we’ll easily find him,” said Carl caustically. “Can you tell us what kind of interests he had? What he talked about?”

“He was actually quite good at talking with us girls, which was probably what gave him such easy access.”

“About what, for example?” The woman had to give him something to work with.

“Back then, everyone was talking about the situation in the Balkan region, and many of the guys were obsessed with sport. Tour de France,
stuff like that,” she said. “But Frank would talk just as much about how terrible it was that the French were throwing nuclear bombs on Mururoa, or about girly stuff like the wedding between Prince Joachim and Princess Alexandra. That was probably cool calculation,” she said with a laugh.

Carl clicked his fingers at Gordon, silently mouthing the words “the Mururoa Atoll.” Gordon turned Carl’s laptop around, and typed.

“The Mururoa nuclear tests! Are you sure he talked about those?”

“Absolutely. He painted some banners and tried to get the entire commune to come to a demonstration in front of the French embassy in Copenhagen.”

“Nineteen ninety-six,” Gordon mouthed back.

Bingo! They had the exact year.

“I get the feeling he was into theology, is that right?”

There was silence at the other end. Was she thinking?

“Are you still there?” asked Carl.

“Well, now that you mention it, he was driving us all mental with some theories about all religions having the same origin. He’d talk about stars, and the sun, and constellations, that sort of thing. It was a holistic commune, not a spiritual center, so it ended up annoying and boring us. He probably went on about it because he’d taken a course at university that made him completely cuckoo. As far as I remember, he actually wanted us to build a sun temple in the back garden.” She laughed. “When he began to rise with the sun and chant in the garden, one of the guys who had a real job, and didn’t enjoy being woken up so early, wanted to kick his ass. That didn’t end well for him, let me tell you. Turned out Frank had a hell of a temper, thrashed the guy to pieces. Literally. You didn’t want to mess with Frank.”

“Okay. Would you say he had psychopathic tendencies?”

“What do you want me to say? I’m not a psychiatrist.”

“You know what I mean. Was he cold, calculating, self-obsessed?”

“I wouldn’t say cold. But he probably was. Who isn’t, in this day and age?”

That was the second time he’d heard that kind of answer to that question.

“You seem to think he had good reason to fight back. Do you know if he did anything similar on other occasions?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did those of you living there have leases?”

“No, we didn’t. I actually don’t know who was in charge of the tenancy. Someone who’d lived there some years before, I think. We just paid to a communal fund, and then individually transferred the money every month. People were constantly moving in and out, so that was the most practical solution.”

*   *   *

Afterward, Carl nearly asked Assad for a cup of mocha or tea to keep him going. This was such a mess. How in the world had anyone managed to drag him into this? If this was the kind of dreary nothingness they could expect, they might as well stop answering all the calls that constantly sounded from Gordon’s phone.

“Now, now, Carl, we did get a year of birth,” said Assad, sitting down on the edge of the table. “He was born in 1971, so he’ll be forty-three today.”

“Yes, that’s right. We also know that he’s about six foot one, and lots of other stuff about his description that match thousands of people out on the streets. And we also have a decent profile, and we know a good deal about what drives and interests him, so
maybe,
if we’re damned bloody lucky, we might find him despite the odds. But you know what? That leaves the big question: Then what?”

“Then what
what
?” Gordon mustered the energy to ask.

“We know a lot, we’ve got a decent description, maybe we’ll even have his name soon. And perhaps we’ll learn something in Brønshøj tomorrow that’ll give us the last nudge, but where does that leave us?”

“Nudge?” Assad had lost the thread.

“The final push in the right direction, Assad.”

He nodded, the corners of his mouth hanging down. “You’re right, Carl.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Gordon.

“That if we were so insanely lucky as to find him, what would we be able to prove?” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you. Zilch! You don’t expect him to blurt out voluntarily that he was the one who killed Alberte, do you?”

“Not unless we break his arms,” interjected Assad.

They all sighed and got up. It was time to go home.

Carl put the receiver down, and the telephone started again, of course. He looked at it for a moment before picking up.
This
particular call might be useful, his intuition told him.

It was an irritating voice. “Hello, Carl Mørck? Martin Marsk calling from
Formiddagsposten
newspaper. We’d like to know if you’ve been reassigned to the nail-gun case after today’s press conference.”

“I see. Well, I haven’t.”

“Shouldn’t you have been, given that you might contribute to ensuring justice for your friends—or that they might even get their revenge?”

Carl didn’t answer. Revenge? Who did they think he was—Clint Eastwood?

“You don’t want to answer that, apparently. So, where’s the case going from here?”

“Nowhere I’m going. You’ll need to speak to the people up on the third floor. Terje Ploug is head of the case, as you well know, Martin.”

“Maybe you can tell me how Harry Henningsen is doing, then?”

“The next time you try to exude just the slightest hint of authority and thoroughness, Mr. so-called journalist Martin Marsk, I suggest you do your homework properly. He’s called Hardy, not bloody Harry. And if you want to know how Hardy Henningsen is, ask him. I’m not an information service for people who have all their marbles, and definitely not for those who don’t.”

“So you don’t think Hardy Henningsen has all his marbles?”

“Oh, get lost, you jerk. Good-bye.”

“There, there, hold your horses, Carl Mørck. What’s happening with
that case about the guy with the VW Kombi? If you want help from the press, we’ll need some details. Is there a reward for information on his whereabouts?”

Apparently none of the others had put their receivers on the table, because now the ringing increased in volume. Just imagine if the press blew up the story, too.

“No, there’s no reward. I’ll contact you when there’s a new development in the case.”

“You know you won’t anyway, so you might as well just spit it out now.”

If it hadn’t been for Lars Bjørn, he would.

“Okay, since you insist, here are my parting words: Have a nice day, Martin.”

*   *   *

Driving up the Hillerød freeway, he thought of Hardy’s face most of the way. A face that had forgotten how to smile, furrowed by disaster and hardship. If it were to change, he’d really have to become better at listening and talking with him about the bloody case, but he didn’t feel comfortable doing that. He knew he had to, but the reality was that someone like Hardy, who was being confronted with the past on a day-to-day basis, was better prepared than Carl, who was trying to ignore it. And Carl was.