The Hanging Girl (39 page)

Tuesday, May 13th, 2014

“What on earth happened
to you, Gordon? Did you have an accident on your bike?”

Gordon automatically held a hand to his battered face. It looked like a complete massacre, a veritable orgy of colors. If his right eyelid swelled up any more, they’d be in danger of an explosion.

“No!” His good eye looked apologetically at Carl. “I’ve been in a fight,” he said, not sounding proud.

“
You
?” Carl inspected his skinny upper arms, hunched back, and hollow chest. One punch to the guy’s stomach and that fight would be over. “How in the world did that happen?”

“It began when the other guy hit back.”

Carl tried to smile at the old joke. Was the man being serious?

“The fact of the matter is that yesterday after work, I walked past Byens Bodega in Niels Brocks Gade. There were a lot of Danish flags outside, and a couple of our colleagues were hanging out around the tables, so I asked if it was anyone’s birthday.”

“Fairly harmless, you could say.”

“Yes, but only until they began to slag you off and make fun of Department Q. They said you were a prick, and that your conduct on TV was a disgrace for HQ, and that they could understand why you didn’t want to talk about the nail-gun case, considering what a coward you’d been seven years ago.”

Bull’s-eye.

“What did you do then?” sounded Rose’s voice from the door. She had her arms crossed. Her entire attitude was too relaxed, so you could only assume she’d had it off with some guy last night or had something else up her sleeve.

“Well, then I punched the man in the nose, what else could I do? It was goddamn
my
department and
my
boss he was talking about.”

“I’ll be . . .” Carl looked at Rose. She also had a cheeky smile on her face.

Gordon had entered the world of men.

*   *   *

As predicted, Rose had something up her sleeve: four sketches made by Alberte’s rather talented hand, as she put it.

“I’ve also received a copy of the list of all the drawings that should have been part of the folk school exhibition that was cancelled due to Alberte’s death. The students gave their works numbers and names. You’ll find Alberte’s numbered twenty-three to twenty-six.”

Carl skimmed the page. There were a lot of drawings with titles like
Rocks on the East Coast,
Sunshine on Gudhjem,
and
Mist in Almindingen.

“Okay,” said Carl, stressing the second syllable, when he read the titles of Alberte’s drawings. He could understand why Rose was squinting.

“Pretty erotic titles, if you ask me,” he said, picturing her parents. It must’ve come as a shock for them.

“They’re erotic drawings, too,” said Rose, placing the pile in front of him.

The one on top, titled
Gentle Touch of Skin,
showed a close-up of a tip of a tongue just touching a nipple.

“I think it’s a man’s nipple,” said Rose, pointing out a few curly hairs around it.

“Well, well. That’s not an entirely innocent situation for a young, Jewish virgin of nineteen.” He picked up the next drawing. “And neither is the next one, I’ll say.” It was another close-up. Two pairs of lips slightly parted, kissing with spit trickling from the corners. The title was
Surrender.

“There’s no doubt she was in a phase when she was being stimulated by something or other,” he said, pulling out a third drawing. This time, the motif was a nude woman looking intensely at the viewer with a sketchbook in one hand and a pencil in the other.

“Could that be Alberte looking at herself in the mirror?” he suggested. It was extremely detailed, enough to take his breath away.

“If that had been hung up as part of the exhibition, she would’ve been lynched by all the other women at the school,” he continued. He could really understand why Kristoffer Dalby, the groundskeeper, and all the others had followed her so attentively.

“Well, who’s to say that wasn’t what happened?” said Rose.

Carl gauged her expression. You never quite knew when she was being serious.

“The last drawing is the one that’s going to stick in your mind,” she said, pulling it out.

Carl held his breath, and it wasn’t because it was almost identical to the drawing of the nude Alberte in front of the mirror, but because this time a man’s face had been drawn behind her. By far the most detailed image they’d seen of Frank.

Carl turned to look at the photocopy on the wall. Finally they had a close-up of that face.

“The drawing is called
Future,
Carl. Notice Alberte’s face.”

It was true, there was a difference. The face looked gentler than in the drawing before, but the situation was also different.

“I wonder if she drew the first ones before she met this Frank.”

Rose nodded. “Yes. Here, in the fourth drawing, her expression looks kind of satisfied, and the one who has satisfied her is her chosen one, standing behind her. She seems strangely settled for someone that young.”

“Exactly. As if she’s already prepared to commit to the man.”

“Of course, we have to take into account the possibility that she could’ve drawn his face from memory, so we can’t be a hundred percent sure what he really looked like,” she said.

“Very possible. It could also be that she drew herself in front of the
mirror, adding him as a life drawing. In principle, she could’ve done that on any of their dates. In which case, I assume it looks like him.”

They both looked at the photo of Alberte on Carl’s notice board. The resemblance between photo and drawings left no doubt she was talented.

“No matter what, I think we have a really good image of that man,” concluded Rose. “I just don’t understand why he allowed her to do it. Do you think he knew it was going to be part of the exhibition?”

Carl shrugged. “There’s still the possibility he never saw it.”

“At any rate, it’s a shame you’ve already
been
on TV, Carl; otherwise you could’ve shown it. That opportunity isn’t likely to arise anytime soon, as far as I can tell.”

*   *   *

Carl and Assad only had to wait ten minutes in Terminal Three before a neat woman with poodle curls, about seventy-five years of age, appeared from customs. She fit the description exactly of the widow of the owner of the VW Kombi, Egil Poulsen.

She seemed tired out by lack of sleep and her twenty-hour flight, but she did stop when they addressed her.

“Dagmar Poulsen?” asked Carl, followed by five minutes of explaining and skeptical glances from her before she finally agreed to accept their offer of driving her home to Brønshøj.

“You could have warned me, but now you’ll just have to put up with the state of this place,” she said, letting them into a house that had a sour smell of dying houseplants and more dust on the shelves than a twenty-day holiday in Malaysia could justify.

“Egil
was
going to get rid of the wreck out there, but in the end it couldn’t even roll on its own wheels.”

She pointed out through the patio door toward an overgrown, decaying wooden fence. “On the other side of the thicket down there,” she specified.

The wreck was difficult to see in the thicket, and it was still partly covered with bits of tarp, so the woman next door hadn’t been entirely precise.

“Want to draw straws for who’s going in there to rummage?”

Assad pointed at the broken windshield, where heaps of leaves had blown in and were now rotting on what used to be the driver’s seat.

“Draw straws, Assad?” Carl smiled. “Do you know the one about the camel that thought he could fly, and threw himself off a cliff?”

“No. What about him?”

“He wasn’t very smart either.”

Assad sneered. “So what you’re saying is that I’ll crawl in to check the glove compartment, while you’ll check in the back?”

That earned him a pat on the shoulder. He wasn’t so stupid after all.

Carl struggled with the sliding door, trying to ignore Assad’s swearing and cursing as he climbed over the pile of rotten leaves.

Just as Carl was thinking that Assad’s clothes would be all right with a quick dry-clean, the sliding door went up with a cracking sound.

There wasn’t much light in there, given that the side windows were both frosted and filthy. He tried to get used to the darkness, and slowly a lot of cardboard boxes appeared. He opened a couple of the boxes, which had already been breeding grounds for generations of mice, and assessed the contents. Nothing but printed material from various peace demonstrations, similar to the posters that had been put up inside the van. Just like Inge Dalby had said.

Peace meeting
read a poster hanging above a leather bag of the kind Carl had been carrying on his very first day of school.

He opened it. The mice had been at work in there, too, but a small ring binder with pamphlets from all different kinds of events, like the World Council of Churches’ congress in Bella Center, and years of Easter Marches, was still intact.

Carl leafed through it. No names of activists.

“Finding anything back there, Assad?”

He heard a moan.

*   *   *

“So, was it any help?” asked Dagmar Poulsen back on the patio.

“No, not really, but we got some photos of the van. Apart from that,
all we found were mouse nests—and then Assad found this in the glove compartment.” He signaled for Assad to hold it up.

Mrs. Poulsen’s hand flew up to her chest in shock. A long, mummified grass snake like that was sure to scare anyone to death.

“We found it in the glove compartment. It probably fed on mouse pinkies, and then one day ate too many,” said Carl, and then changed the subject. “Do you think your husband had lists of the activists lying around somewhere? Your daughter seemed to think so.”

She shook her head. “I threw everything away when Egil died. At that point, I kind of thought the grassroots work had taken up enough of our lives.”

Assad was breathing heavily. He still hadn’t recovered from the grass-snake incident.

“Throw it into the bushes, Assad,” he said, turning to face the woman again. “You wouldn’t happen to know a young guy who borrowed the van back then? He was called Frank, but I believe they called him the Scot.”

Surprisingly, she froze, and her hand flew up to her chest for the second time.

Was she blushing?

*   *   *

“He was called Brennan, Rose. Frank Brennan. And Dagmar Poulsen almost died when we mentioned his name. She’d had an affair with him. Her, too. He definitely didn’t restrain himself as a youngster.”

“Fantastic!” she said, but it didn’t quite sound like she meant it. “Of course, you’ve checked up on him, and found him already, right?” she continued with a caustic undertone.

Carl controlled himself. How annoyingly perceptive she was. “Well, we’re working on it. Apart from that, Dagmar Poulsen confirmed everything we already know about him, both regarding his appearance and personality. She could also confirm that he used the VW from the spring of 1997. He didn’t borrow it; he rented it. She thought it was because her husband had discovered the affair, so he didn’t feel very friendly toward
the young man. But she was never completely sure. It wasn’t something they spoke about.”

“When did he give it back?” she asked.

“Around Christmas the same year, and Poulsen was furious with him because there was a dent in the fender. So they quarreled, Dagmar Poulsen told us. And after that, they never saw him again.”

“Okay, I assume you checked the front of the van. Did you find the dent?”

Carl stuck his Samsung in her face, and scrolled through his photos. Twenty images of a front that was completely corroded, and a fender lying on the ground. They’d turned it over, and there was a very small dent, but which fender in Copenhagen didn’t have one?

“We can’t use that for anything,” she said. “Lucky that Gordon and
I
have something.”

She dragged them to the man behind the desk, who currently resembled a jammed contortionist.

Gordon looked at them with a blurry expression. Rose must have seized the chance, while the others were gone, to reward him for his black eye and his fight for the honor of the department.

Shame on him who thought badly of it.

“What’s up, Gordon?” asked Assad, his eyebrows dancing a fandango. Gordon ignored it. He’d really built up some confidence.

“The man who took photos at the car show on Bornholm has called. He’s a classic car enthusiast who can talk the hind legs off a donkey and insisted on showing us his entire collection of photos of old cars.”

Carl knew they had to avoid that fate.

Rose smiled assertively. “He only took four photos on that occasion, so we have all of them. Actually, he’s been missing those photos for all these years and would like them back. He doesn’t know how they ended up in Habersaat’s possession, but he probably forgot them after an exhibition at Rønne Theatre, which the Classic Car Enthusiasts’ Club had arranged. All his photos are taken with an Instamatic camera, as we assumed, and the negatives have been thrown away. That’s why Gordon kindly declined the offer to meet him.”

Just as well, thank heaven.

“As I see it, you’ve had exactly as much luck as we have,” said Carl, but it had no effect.

“We had a far more interesting call from another man. And this one we’ve agreed to meet.”

“All right. Mr. Frank Brennan himself, I presume?”

That sarcastic remark also went in one ear and out the other.

“This man calls himself Kazambra, and we’ve looked him up.” She pushed a print of a leaflet toward him.

HYPNOTHERAPY!
was written across the front in big, bold letters.

Carl frowned, unfolded the leaflet, and read the headline.

Have you got a problem with quitting smoking? Lack of confidence? Fear of flying? Fear of heights? Involuntary urination? Nervousness?

All that was missing was bed-wetting, fear of water, arachnophobia, and a few hundred other ailments. It almost sounded like he could cure anything.

Carl read on.

Albert Kazambra has the solution to these inconveniences and many others. Two or three effective but harmless sessions, during which you will be hypnotized and your problem dealt with and blocked, will be your safe path to greater personal freedom. Get rid of your problems. Visit my clinic, where you will be received with discretion and kind attention by our receptionist.