The Hanging Girl (48 page)

“Did he look as if he knew where to go?” asked Carl. Bjarke had moved after Frank left the island, so he wouldn’t know that address.

“Maybe,” he said. “At least he had a page from a local telephone book in his hand. Maybe he found the address there.”

“We’ve got to rush,” said Carl, beginning to run to the car. Assad beat him to it.

“Damn it, there’s no GPS,” grumbled Carl, looking at the dashboard. Which way was the quickest?

“Relax, Carl, I’ll find it on my smartphone.” Assad typed away for a moment. “It’ll take fifteen minutes if we drive south toward Lobbæk and Nylars.”

Carl put his foot on it. “Call Birkedal—they need to send a car up there.”

Assad typed, obviously finding it difficult with the pain in his left hand. Then he sat for a minute, nodding, while he listened to the answer.

“Did you say that they should be discreet up there? I didn’t hear,” said Carl.

Assad wrinkled his nose. “They aren’t coming, Carl, and you don’t want to hear why. But all their cars were unavailable at the moment. Something to do with ferry and airport surveillance.”

“What?”

“He also said that we’d be there before them anyway. The Peugeot can drive pretty quickly, he claimed.”

“Then he can bloody well take the consequences if anything stops us,” said Carl, ignoring the speedometer quickly exceeding a hundred on a road with a limit of eighty.

“Take your shirt off, hold it out the window, and let it flutter,” he continued, while pressing down on the horn. “Come on, Assad. We’ve converted this tin can here to an emergency car at full throttle.”

*   *   *

Ten minutes later, through scattered built-up areas, and dozens of gaping mouths, in the little red lightning bolt with flapping green shirt, Carl and Assad reached the house in Sandflugtsvej. If they’d expected cars in front of the house, they were disappointed. There was apparently nothing here that could justify their hazardous journey.

“Call the police station and report the emergency driving, Assad, and I’ll go in and see if there’s anyone home. And take a pill or two. I can see how much that finger hurts.”

Nelly Rasmussen opened the door reluctantly. Wearing a hat, she breathed a sigh of relief when she saw who it was, and a sight for sore eyes she was when the door was finally fully opened. Not even an Italian or Greek mama in mourning could be as decked out in black as she was. A veil on her hat, ready to be pulled down. Tights, shoes, jacket, blouse, skirt, gloves, necklace, eyelids, eyelashes, and hair, everything was pitch-black. Rose would have loved her unconditionally.

“I thought you were the taxi driver,” she said, pulling a black handkerchief from her black handbag, ready to dab at her totally dry eyes. Truly a theatrical talent.

“Has June Habersaat been here?”

She nodded somewhat sullenly.

“What did she want?”

“Well might you ask. Do you really think she wanted to tell me? To collect a magazine from Bjarke’s room, I think. She didn’t show me, but that’s what it looked like when she left.”

“Have you had a visit from a man in yellow clothes?”

She nodded, this time a little scared.

“That’s why I didn’t just open. I didn’t want him in again.”

“When?”

“Just before you came. Five minutes ago. I thought it was my taxi then, too.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to get hold of Bjarke. He was crazy and pushed his way in. He started shouting:
Where’s Bjarke? Is he upstairs? He’s bound to be home on a Saturday!
It was terribly unpleasant, especially on a day like today.” She dabbed at her eyes one more time.

She stood for a moment, impatiently shuffling her feet. “Where has that taxi got to? I’ll be late.”

“For what?”

She looked totally indignant. “For Bjarke’s funeral, of course.”

“Right. Is he only being buried
now
?”

“Yes, they kept him in Copenhagen. They had to do the . . . postmortem first.” This time she shed a real tear.

“And the man in yellow, what happened to him? We’re looking for him.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me? He was really unpleasant. When I told him he couldn’t see Bjarke because he was dead and was being buried today, he turned as white as a ghost. His eyes became totally bright, looking completely crazy, and then he said it couldn’t be true. That Bjarke had murdered a girl and that he needed to confess. It was really shocking to hear such an ugly lie about someone you’ve held so dear.”

Carl looked confused. “Bjarke! Is that what he said?” He rubbed his
forehead. There were more than a few things he needed to sort out in his head.

“Yes, he very well did. And then he mumbled something about Bjarke’s mom having to help him. Then he suddenly looked extremely worried, asking me if she was still alive. I was just about to tell him that she wasn’t, but I didn’t dare.”

“She’s bound to be at the funeral. Did you say where it was being held?”

She nodded.

“Carl,” shouted Assad from the car. “The police now know he spent the night at a bed-and-breakfast in Svaneke. Our woman in Listed, Bolette, called them to say that she’d seen him this morning outside Habersaat’s house. She called you, too.”

Carl looked at his cell. Of course, the battery had died.

“Come on,” said Carl to the woman in her mourning attire. “You can direct.” It saved her that taxi fare.

Assad had to take his shirt off again to signal their emergency status. Nelly Rasmussen gasped. He did have a good deal of hair on his chest for an otherwise relatively short man.

“What church?” asked Carl, pressing down on the horn.

Carl repeated what Nelly Rasmussen had said about Atu and Bjarke, while she sat nodding in the back.

“I think he’s lying,” Assad added dryly.

Carl nodded. It was a definite possibility. Atu was doing the rounds of the people who’d known him on the island back then, and he was probably very satisfied that Bjarke was now out of the way. They’d seen what he could do with words.

“Then we need to warn June,” continued Assad.

Nelly Rasmussen was silent.

*   *   *

There were very few cars parked beside the stone wall in front of Østerlars Round Church, and a few of those were pickup trucks belonging to local builders carrying in extra-large scaffolding.

“Maybe they’re parked over at Kirkebogård. It can’t be right that there are so few cars. And where’s the hearse?” said Nelly Rasmussen, in shock as they drove into the parking lot and Assad put on his shirt.

“Why aren’t they ringing the bells?” she continued, looking at her watch. She tapped at it again and again. “Oh God, it’s stopped. We’ve come too late for the funeral.” Now she was
really
shaken.

“Look, Carl!” Assad pointed to a blue Volvo. Right enough, it had Swedish license plates.

They leaped from the car, leaving Nelly Rasmussen to be Nelly Rasmussen.

She was right. Down at the bottom of the churchyard, the internment was already coming to an end, and roughly a hundred meters in front of them a man in yellow was heading directly down to the group of mourners standing around the graveside. It was Atu. Carl and Assad picked up their speed. If they ran, they risked Atu turning around. They couldn’t risk him fleeing again, but on the other hand they had to protect June Habersaat. Who knew what the man was up to.

The vicar had already stood aside, carrying the small shovel in his hand, so they’d already thrown the earth on the coffin. Now they watched as June Habersaat went to the edge of the grave and threw something in.

There was an audible reaction from those who saw what it was.

Then she put her hand in her bag and took something out.

At the same moment, they heard Atu, aka Frank, shout June’s name. He sounded desperate. The group by the graveside hesitated in surprise, and then pulled back in one sudden movement.

Frank had almost reached the grave now. He stretched his arms out to the side and said something to her that they couldn’t hear, while they quickened their pace to approach him.

Now they saw what it was that June Habersaat had pulled out. It was a pistol of the type of caliber you don’t easily overlook.

Suddenly, she shot what sounded like four to five times. The echo sounded against the walls as Atu doubled up and collapsed at the side of the grave. It was a clear-cut execution. Premeditated murder.

Carl and Assad stopped on the spot. It was a long time now since Carl had been armed.

At the same time, she noticed them. It was clear that the events of the last few seconds had happened too quickly for her, leaving her staring alternately between the lifeless man, the bottom of the grave, the mourners, and the vicar, who was bravely approaching her with calming words.

“She’ll shoot herself now, just like her husband did,” whispered Assad, as she put the trigger up to her head. But it wasn’t just Assad who’d seen this coming, because the vicar sprang forward swinging his shovel directly toward the pistol, as if he were an elite player in Major League Baseball.

She screamed when it hit her hand, and the pistol was flung to the side. Without looking back, she ran toward a bench up against the graveyard wall. She jumped onto it, over the stone wall that surrounded the churchyard, and down toward the road beside the field boundary.

“You run after her, Assad, and I’ll take the car,” screamed Carl, turning toward the paralyzed onlookers. “One of you, call the police, okay?”

He looked at Atu for a moment, who was lying with one foot over the grave with eyes wide open. The priest checked the pulse on his neck. His fancy yellow shirt had two deep holes in the stomach and one in the shoulder. You could just make out a piece of skin where the bullet had gone through. Right where he had a tattoo saying
RIVER,
Carl remembered.

The priest shook his head. Atu was dead. Not that Carl had been in any doubt.

How symbolic that the man lying there had wanted to be the guardian of enigma and the son of the sun, and here he was having ended his days at this most fabled location on the island, in the shadow of the round church that hid the mystical secrets of the Knights Templar.

He picked up the pistol. Just like the one Habersaat had shot himself with. It must have been the second of the two pistols that had belonged to the deceased teacher from the folk high school and which had never been found. So Habersaat had taken them both, and his wife must have
somehow managed to take one of them without his knowledge. Not exactly something the ex-husband could’ve taken further.

Carl stood up and was about to rush off when Nelly Rasmussen pointed down in the grave, sobbing like never before.

There, amid red roses and three shovelfuls of consecrated soil, lay a glossy magazine with stark-naked men on the cover. Was it June Habersaat’s manner of saying that she finally accepted the way her son had lived his life?

But why?

And then he ran.

Carl picked up Assad
at the end of the road.

“June had her car parked at the farm down there,” he panted, pointing back. “It was so close that I had my hand on the door handle, but I didn’t manage. I’m still having muscle and breathing problems, Carl. I’m sorry.”

Carl understood. He had nothing to apologize for. Just the hundred meters he’d run himself had nearly knocked it out of him.

“Did you get the registration?” he asked.

He shook his head. Damn it.

“Look, I can see it driving down there,” shouted Assad, pointing forward.

Even though the car was at least five hundred meters in front of them, they could clearly hear June Habersaat putting the gears through their paces.

“That old rust bucket is being pushed right to its limit. She’s driving like a lunatic, Carl, you’ll never catch her.”

“Call Birkedal. I assume they can find a couple of cars that can help us go after her now.”

Carl put his foot down on the Peugeot as if he were trying to push the pedal out of the bottom, while trying to understand why June Habersaat would try to take her life at her son’s graveside. Was it depression due to his death or something more fundamental? Was it something lying in the back of her psyche? She’d been hiding that pistol all these years, after
all. And why had she shot Atu? Was it self-defense? But if it was self-defense, why had she run, was it rea . . .

“Watch out!” screamed Assad, cell in hand. Smashed bottles littered the road in front of them. Treacherous needle-sharp shards that could stop anything with rubber tires.

Carl slowed down, crawling along for the next hundred meters. If Assad hadn’t seen it, the tires would’ve exploded with a bang.

“Tell Birkedal, too, they’ll need to send someone out to clean up.”

Another straight stretch of road lay before them, so Carl put his foot on the gas.

When they reached the buildings in Gildesbo, the road was black with skid marks where it swung south. The sign pointed to Åsedamsvej.

“What do you reckon, Assad? Are they her tracks?”

He nodded to confirm. Now he’d managed to get hold of the duty officer in Rønne. It only took him a few seconds to relay the message, while Carl sped up to a hundred and twenty-five kilometers an hour down a road where the visibility on either side was optimal.

“
There!
” shouted Assad.

Carl had seen it. Down at the end of the road the black car took a sharp right turn.

They reached the T-junction, followed her right turn, and then found themselves unsure.

About a hundred meters farther on, there were two options: Take the left onto Almindingensvej, or straight on?

“No skid marks this time, Assad. Straight on, do you think?”

He didn’t answer straightaway, so Carl turned to face him. His head had fallen slightly down on his chest and his jaw muscles were working away. It was obvious that he was concentrating like crazy to avoid moaning.

“Shall we drive to the hospital, Assad?” asked Carl. At this moment, June Habersaat could go to blazes.

Assad screwed his eyes shut, opening them again after filling his lungs to the bursting point.

“It’s over now, Carl. Just drive,” he said. But it wasn’t true, it wasn’t over.

“
Drive!
” he shouted, and Carl sped off.

The forest cover was significant and dense now. Several small roads looked tempting but they drove straight on. No matter what, it was the right direction if you wanted to go to Rønne, and that was where they needed to go if this pursuit failed. Then Assad could get some painkillers that actually did something.

Now they heard the noise of screeching brakes up above the forest, followed by a faint muffled bang. If it was June Habersaat’s car, not only had they driven in the right direction but they were close.

They discovered the car four hundred meters farther down the road. It lay on its side, as if it had just gently toppled over, but two stripes of burned rubber in a small parking space, really no more than an appendix to the road, and a mass of churned-up grass, told a different story.

“She was driving too fast and the brakes locked when she wanted to stop in here,” suggested Assad while Carl looked around.

“Maybe she thought she could drive it out into the high grass and let it disappear.”

They stood still for a moment, looking around. She was gone.

It was a beautiful but also strange sight so close to the road. A hill in the middle of the forest in an otherwise flat and wet meadow.

Carl glanced over to some information posters showing a castle formation located on top of the hill.

Lilleborg
it said on a sign with an arrow, hanging between two red posts five meters farther ahead.

Carl looked out in the direction of the arrow. As far as he could tell, you had to go up and round the hill.

“Do you think she fled over to the other side of the road and into the forest?” asked Assad.

“She certainly hasn’t run around the hill down here, or she’d have trampled the grass down.”

Carl looked out over the meadow. It was a big open space. If she’d had a half-minute head start before they arrived, and it couldn’t have been
much more than that, it was enough time to have disappeared into the forest and also enough to disappear up the path and around the hill, but definitely not enough to have crossed the meadow.

“If she was injured in the crash, which seems quite likely, I wouldn’t choose the forest if I was her,” he concluded. “You’d get knocked all the time in there.”

Assad nodded in agreement, and so they turned toward the hill.

It was less than twenty-four hours since their bodies had been subjected to extremely harsh treatment, making their climb up the slight incline to the hill a steady challenge. Already after the first turn and a short distance over some bare rock, they were both breathing heavily and totally worn out.

“We’re crazy, Assad. We should still be in bed at Kalmar Hospital,” said Carl after reaching the top of a second incline that gave them a clear view over the parking lot twenty-five meters below.

Assad raised his bandaged hand in the air and stopped. Carl had heard it, too. In westerns, twigs snapped. Here, it was a very big one.

“I think she’s waiting for us, Carl,” he whispered.

They looked up at a granite boulder wall, which the grass and shrubs hadn’t been able to cover. It was Lilleborg, a fortress whose layout they knew nothing about.

Carl regretted that they hadn’t paid more attention to the information below, as he approached a slope going down to the lake behind the meadow area. To his left, along the edge, a path winded down, but the noise hadn’t come from that direction. To the right, the path went over huge boulders and cliffs, enclosed by a metal railing stopping people from falling down into the gorge.

Behind him, Assad was trying to suppress the effect the slope had on him, so it was good that he took the lead.

Then they suddenly found themselves at the top. Long grass, cliffs, a picnic table for those who’d brought a picnic with them, and several walls, among them one with an opening out toward a spectacular view over the lake. But no June Habersaat.

“What was that noise we heard just before, then?” asked Carl.

Assad shrugged. Right now, he was utterly indifferent, that much was clear. His hand was all he could think about.

Carl recovered himself for a moment, his hands resting on his knees. This was simply pathetic. Understandable, yes, but pathetic. He hoped the situation wasn’t one they’d have to endure for much longer.

Carl was pissed off with the whole thing because there’d been significant costs with this case. Assad’s finger, first and foremost, but also time and money. They’d worked flat out for weeks, trying to find a man who only a short while ago had been murdered right under their noses. Flat out to get answers from a woman who’d then tried to kill them and who was dead now herself. And flat out to untie the knots Habersaat had tied himself up in over the course of decades, and tried to give closure to a couple about what happened to their daughter. And where were they now? Nowhere. Just adding fuel to Lars Bjørn’s fire.

Someone would maybe find June Habersaat in time, and hopefully still alive, but Carl doubted that now.

Then they heard Assad’s phone.

“It’s Rose,” he said, putting it on speakerphone.

Damn it. Now they’d have to explain everything. Carl almost couldn’t be bothered.

“How are you?” was the first thing he said. “Yes, it’s Carl, but my cell’s dead. Assad’s listening in.”

“Hi, Assad,” she said. “But we won’t talk about me just now, okay? I’m not doing too well, but I’ll be fine, so enough about that. What’s all this I hear about you?”

“Yes, we’ve been through the mill, we don’t mind admitting. Assad, well, he . . .”

He waved at him to stop. He didn’t want any mention of his hand.

“Assad’s standing next to me waving. We’re on Bornholm, and June Habersaat has just shot and killed Atu.”

“
What
did you say?”

“Yes, so far so good, but we’re no further forward.”

“Why did she do it?”

“We haven’t spoken to her. She fled the scene.”

“Everything is complicated in this case, if you ask me. I’ve also got something that shakes things up a bit.”

“Shouldn’t you be taking some time off, Rose? It is Saturday after all.”

“Very funny, Mr. Mørck. Then what about you? Well, I’ve worked through Bjarke’s computer now, and it’s been an interesting experience, I can tell you. Forty-five percent of the memory is taken up by PC games of different sorts. Some of them are extremely old, so I don’t think he’s played them in years.”

“How old is the computer?”

“It’s running Windows 95, which seemed to be an update of an earlier version, so you can work it out yourself.”

Mamma mia! It was a wonder that the machine hadn’t been donated to an African village a long time ago.

“Fifty-two percent are image files, and two percent is made up of spam mail, and then there’s a single text file. A poem, actually.”

“A poem?”

“Yes, he’s written a poem. The title is really quite transparent:
To Frank.
The file was in among some exe-files in a
Star Trek
game from ninety-five, so it wasn’t easy to find.”

Goodness, she’d certainly been thorough.

Then she read the poem aloud, and regardless of how talentless and inept it was, the meaning was inescapable. It was about rejected love and immense anger. Anger that Frank had brought their world crashing down. Anger that Bjarke’s family had been ruined by Frank’s decisions. Anger that Frank even existed.

“So Bjarke always knew about Frank and Alberte. He just didn’t want to tell his dad. Why?” Carl shook his head; it just didn’t add up. “No, I’m totally confused now.”

“Hold your horses, Sherlock. If you’ll allow me,” interrupted Rose. “Firstly, I want to say that if there’s ever another case where someone has to stare at naked men wearing nothing other than ugly leather caps and studded belts in very compromising situations, it will
not
be me
next time. I dragged myself through more than five thousand—
five thousand
—photos of that filth before finding the one photo that makes sense in this case. You couldn’t make it up! And I think we should tell the police on Bornholm that next time they get a computer in for examination, they should bloody well check
everything,
just like I’ve done.”

She was complaining, but weren’t men in leather just up her street?

“Check out the MMS I’m sending to you—
now
!”

They waited a moment before a beep told them they had it.

A shiver went right through Carl.

It was a photo taken on a beautiful snowy day around Christmastime at a Boy Scout Christmas tree sale. The price was reasonable, twenty kroner per meter, but that was the only reasonable thing about the photo.

Assad stood next to him simply dumfounded.

“Hello, are you there?”

“Yes, Rose, we’re here,” he said on autopilot. “And you’re right. It’s an amazing photo. Well done. You’ve damn well earned the right to take the rest of the day off.”

He looked at the photo again. He was really shocked. Here he was, forced to realize in a split second that all the leads they’d followed had been misleading: the arduous search for an imaginary wooden board because of a stupid little splint Habersaat had found; the hunt for the VW Kombi, not to mention all the resources they’d used to underpin their suspicions that pointed to Frank alias Atu; and days of investigations and often misleading interviews. It’d all been for nothing from the beginning, and here was the evidence.

Bjarke stood in the photo with a big grin on his face in his Boy Scout uniform. His cap was pulled well down over his forehead, wearing his shoulder cord, the knife in his belt decorated with various small shields. He was as proud as a peacock: proud of his troop assistant distinctions, proud of his small enterprise, which was probably for charity, and proud of the four-wheel drive he was leaning up against. And he seemed just as pleased with the idea that he’d probably come up with all by himself. Because onto the four-wheel drive he’d mounted a plow, and written on the plow in large white capitals:

BOY SCOUT GRAND CHRISTMAS TREE SALE—MERRY CHRISTMAS

It was shocking. They’d come to Bornholm to protect June Habersaat from Frank, and in reality it should have been the other way around.

“What are you thinking?” asked Rose.

“We’re thinking that we could’ve done with this photo before. And, Rose, it’s the same old Toyota that June Habersaat escaped in twenty minutes ago, and which is now lying on its side in the meadow fifty meters farther down. Damn it!”

“You said
we
could have used this photo before now?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think Habersaat could’ve? Or, to put it another way, do you really think he didn’t know his son had that plow?”

“He was a policeman, Rose. He sacrificed seventeen years of his life for this case. Of course he didn’t know.”