The Hanging Girl (49 page)

“Listen to my theory. Habersaat had suspected his own son for years. That’s what I think, and that’s why he worked so insistently on the case. He had a suspicion, and he wanted to remove it no matter what. Wouldn’t the most convenient thing be to place the finger of suspicion on the person he hated most? His wife’s lover. What do you say to that?”

“Why did he put us on to the case, then? It would’ve been forgotten with his suicide.”

“He left the dirty work to us, hoping we’d bring it to its conclusion. Habersaat had hit a wall, but maybe we’d find Frank, and if we didn’t or if we discovered the real context of the case, then it would be
us
who’d have to do the heavy work of getting his son arrested.
That
was Habersaat’s dilemma. He wanted to cover for the boy but realized in the end that it was wrong. Bjarke was guilty. That’s why he chose to stand down.”

“That’s one hypothesis, Rose. A well-grounded and reasonable one, but still a hypothesis. If you’re right, I’ll feel terrible. Several people have died in this course of events. Remember that, Rose.”

“That’s life,” she said, correcting herself straightaway. “That’s death, I meant, of course.”

Assad threw his hand up in warning, looking over his shoulder.

“Brilliant work, Rose, thanks very much. We’ll leave it there for now, okay? The battery is about to go.”

She just managed to say, “Men! Can’t they ever look after . . .” before Carl ended the call.

Assad raised both hands, pointing toward a couple of steps in the cliff, which many years ago had led to yet another floor that had long since crumbled away.

Now Carl heard it, too.

“I’ll just go over here and pee,” said Assad, tiptoeing to the right while he directed Carl to the left.

Then they jumped out at the same time.

There, up the stone wall, June Habersaat was lying in a bed of grass about a meter down. The second she saw them, she swung a thick branch at them, hitting Assad on his disfigured hand. His scream blended with hers and was so intense that it caused her to drop the branch, retreating to the corner of the wall.

Fuming, Carl lunged at her, dragging her up and pulling her arms behind her back to cuff her.

She screamed with pain straightaway, and Carl realized she was injured. Her left shoulder was hanging and several fingers on her left hand were sticking out, dislocated.

“Are you okay, Assad?”

He was holding his hand, but nodded.

“Then call an ambulance for her,” he said.

Carl led her carefully over to the picnic table, directing her with his hand to sit down.

She’d lost a lot of weight since the first time they’d met almost three weeks ago. Her eyes looked big in her hollow face, her arms like a child’s.

“I heard everything that witch said on the phone,” she said after a few minutes’ silence. “And she’s totally wrong.”

Carl nodded to Assad. He’d already activated the recorder on his smartphone.

“Now’s your chance to tell us how it was, June. We won’t interrupt if you don’t want us to.”

She closed her eyes, presumably to block out the pain. “I was glad you hunted Frank or Atu, or whatever you call him, back to the island. It was a gift for me to see him suddenly standing there. Don’t you realize that?” She tried to laugh but her shoulder stopped her.

She opened her eyes and looked Carl straight in the eye. “I wanted to shoot myself. Bjarke and I had drifted too far from each other over the years, and it was all my fault. After Bjarke’s death, all I had left was guilt and it was too much to bear.”

“Guilt about what, June?”

“That I allowed Frank to have the influence he did over my family. That he ruined my life and the lives of everyone in my family. Bjarke couldn’t deal with it anymore. Not after his dad had given up.”

“Your son committed suicide because he was jealous of Alberte and killed her. We’ve seen the car and the snowplow. What more is there to say?”

“That it wasn’t Bjarke who killed Alberte. It was me.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re covering for your son,” said Assad.

“
No!
” She thumped the table despite the pain. Then she sat for a long time in silence, looking out over the hill and the forest on the other side of the lake.

When you get to the point where a suspect has opened up only to clam up, patience is the only thing that will help to get them going again. Carl had often sat that way for hours, and just now there was nothing else for it. Assad understood this, too.

After a few minutes, she turned her head toward him and caught his eye. Her eyes seemingly begging him to ask her a question.

Carl thought for a moment. The question had to be exactly the right one, or she’d seize up forever.

“Okay, June. I believe you, and I know Assad does, too. Tell us everything now from the beginning, and in your own way.”

She sighed, momentarily crying before looking down at the table and beginning to speak.

“I fell in love with Frank and thought we’d end up together. We used to meet up here, where you found me, and made love in the grass. My husband, Christian, couldn’t do what Frank could, so I fell passionately in love.”

She pressed her lips together.

“We saw each other for a couple of months.”

Carl realized it must’ve been the same time Frank was seeing Inge Dalby.

“And then he broke up with me despite all the promises, which there were plenty of. Why would I cheat on my husband otherwise, who I had a son with and lived with? Why?”

They both shrugged. Yes, why?

“He promised that I’d have a new life, get away from the island, and that the age difference didn’t matter. But he lied, the swine.”

She raised her head. The bitterness was visible.

“I knew full well that he’d found a younger woman. I could smell the cheap slutty perfume. He was stinking of it when he came to dump me, and when I thought about it, I’d noticed it several times before. I worked out that he’d been seeing her at the same time as me—
that
was the worst of it.” She snorted. “So I followed him to keep an eye on what he was up to. My God, those two lovebirds thought they were so clever! I saw how they kept in touch with one another, how they left small notes for each other out by the boulder in front of the school. Frank and I did the same thing, only our notes were left where he made love.”

So that was where Alberte and Frank had left their messages. By the big rock they’d passed at least ten times. How ironic.

“Just the once, I went to find Frank out at the commune at Ølene, where he told me straight that he was in love with Alberte and was taking her back with him to Copenhagen. I hated him for that, but I hated her just as much.”

She sat for a moment, chewing her words. It was easy to see how she was recalling the hatred at full strength.

“I wanted Alberte out of his life before that happened. She needed to be mutilated, her perfect looks destroyed. She just had to be out of the
picture. Maybe then Frank would take me back. I actually believed that for a long time afterward. I waited for him to come back for years; it was crazy and naive. Since then, I just didn’t want to hear about him. Not from my ex-husband, not from my sister, and not from you. Frank was just wiped out of my life.”

Carl thought that he ended up paying for it anyway when he turned up again.

“I borrowed my son’s car—the one lying down in the ditch—while he was at work at the workshop in Aakirkeby. He always left it in front of my sister’s house because he got lunch there every day. It was really sweet actually.”

She smiled for a second.

“To make sure that the impact wouldn’t leave a mark on the car, I took the snowplow he’d welded together himself, which was lying at home in the garage in Listed. I put it in the back of my own car and drove to Jernbanegade, where I attached it to the fender on the Toyota, just like it’d been constructed to fit.”

“Excuse me for saying something just now, June, but I
have
to know. How did you know that Alberte was going to meet Frank out there by the tree that morning?”

She smiled, as if she was about to present her test piece. Maybe she was.

“I left a note under the boulder very early in the morning before I drove to Aakirkeby. I could forge Frank’s handwriting completely. It was very simple.”

“Yes, but how could you know that she’d see it so early in the morning?”

“She went out there every morning before everyone got up, even if there wasn’t anything. She was just a stupid young girl. It was a game for her.”

“And Alberte was so stupid that she just allowed herself to be run down, is that what you’re saying?”

There was that smile again. “No, she was standing at the roadside and I made it seem like I was going around her. She smiled at someone driving
a snowplow with that inscription when there wasn’t even any snow, and it was over a month until Christmas. But she soon stopped when I jerked the steering wheel and drove into her. First her and then the bike.”

“And nobody saw you apart from her?”

“It was very early in the morning. We take things slowly over here on Bornholm.”

“Then you drove back to Aakirkeby and parked Bjarke’s car in front of Karin’s house where it’d been parked before? We spoke with her at the nursing home but she couldn’t help us.”

“Yes, that’s right. But Karin saw me put the plow back in my trunk. For years she threatened to report me, so it wasn’t me who was angry with her, like she always says. It was her who was angry with me.

“Afterward, I drove back to Listed and put the plow back. The day after, I found out that Karin had told Bjarke I’d borrowed the car and that she’d seen me with the plow. By that time the search for Alberte had already begun.

“All three of us were sitting around the dinner table that evening when Christian told us that he’d found her in a tree, and that it had left a terrible impression on him. I could tell that Bjarke had worked it out. It was just awful. My Bjarke wasn’t stupid, unfortunately, you might say now. And he hated me for it, but he never let me down. He never told his dad. So it was him he let down instead. That’s why he couldn’t live under the same roof as his dad when I moved out a few months later. He lived with Karin for a while and with me in Aakirkeby, but then found his own place.”

“Did you ever talk about it?”

She shook her head and wiped away a tear from the tip of her nose.

“No, we didn’t talk so much. He also drifted away from me because of his sexuality. It got too weird for me.”

“It was hard for you to accept?”

She nodded.

“And then you threw one of his magazines down in the grave for him, to show that you’d accepted it now after all this time?”

She nodded again. “There was so much that had stood between Bjarke and me. It needed to stop there. Everything needed to stop there.”

“So you knew full well why he wrote sorry to his dad and not to you?”

She nodded, rubbing the back of her hand on the other with the poor fingers, pressing her lips together for a moment before answering.

“Well, how could he live with his dad committing suicide over a case he could’ve solved for him? I think his apology was his way of asking his forgiveness,” she said, while the tears slowly dripped from her eyes, leaving dark marks on the dried-out table.

“Do you think your ex-husband suspected Bjarke, like Rose suggested just now?”

She shook her head. “No, he was too stupid for that. That Rose . . .”

All three of them heard the sound at the same time: loud whirling tones thrown above the treetops rising above them. First one and then another. Slowly but steadily they increased in strength, dropping in pitch before finally coming together. Help was on the way.

“There are two sirens,” she said, looking confused. “Is there a police car, too?”

“Yes, I assume so. There tends to be when things like this happen.”

Her large eyes grew smaller. “What’ll I get?” she asked.

“I don’t think you should worry about that now, June,” he tried.

“How many?” she asked Assad directly now.

“Probably ten to life, I imagine. Life is usually fourteen years,” he told her straight.

“Thanks. Now I know. I’ll be seventy-six then, if I’m still alive. I don’t think I’ll have the will to be.”

“A lot of people have their sentence reduced for good behavior,” said Carl to soften the news, while the sirens caused the birds to the west to fly away from the trees.

“I wish I had a river I could skate away on. But it don’t snow here, it stays pretty green . . .

“Do you remember that? I quoted that song in Jernbanegade the first time you were there. It’s from a Joni Mitchell song, did you know that?”

She smiled a little to herself. “It was Frank who taught me that. He was the one who taught me to dream myself away to another place where
I’d rather be. It means that you’re no longer happy to be where you are. He taught me that, too. Do you know what I mean?”

They both nodded very slowly. The sirens were close to the parking lot now. In a moment she’d be in an ambulance under police escort. Of course she ended up thinking about that song.

She stood up so suddenly that they were caught off guard. Ran the four steps toward the opening in the wall, jumped four steps down, and then took the big leap over the wall and out into eternity.

They lunged forward, reaching the outer wall at the same time.

Far below, they saw her mutilated body. She’d hit the cliff hard and had probably been killed on the spot before she slid out over the last edge, hanging now from a tree with her head facing down.

Exactly like Alberte seventeen years earlier.

They stood for a
few minutes, following the flashing blue lights until they faded away in an ocean of green trees.

Carl inspected Assad’s chalk-white bandage. It was tight and secure.

“What did the doctor say to you, Assad?”

“I showed him that I can bend my thumb, and then he gave me a shot of antibiotics.”

“And?”

“I could bend it, Carl, what more is there to say?”

Carl nodded. In a couple of hours Assad would be sitting on a scheduled flight to Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen, and the burn unit at Rigshospitalet was only a fifteen-minute drive from there. He’d talk Assad round in the end.

“Are we agreed about what to do now?”

“Yes, we drive to Listed.”

They’d hardly driven halfway before they heard Assad’s cell, and he put it on speakerphone. The person on the other end introduced herself as Ella Persson, police secretary from Kalmar, saying that she was calling on behalf of Criminal Inspector Frans Sundström.

“We’ve found out who sent for the police and ambulance at the Nature Absorption Academy on Öland,” she said. “By listening to the tape again from the emergency dispatch center, it appears that it was the leader of the center, Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi’s voice. We also have reason to believe that it was the same person who cut you free. There’s certainly nobody else willing to take credit for it. Criminal Inspector Sundström
thought you’d be interested. He thought it would put Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi’s actions in something of a different light. He just wanted you to know before you arrest him.”

Carl looked out over the landscape that the same Frank Brennan had trawled all over many years ago. And while he thought about that, Assad answered the police secretary that she could report that Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi had passed away and that they’d presumably receive a report from the local Bornholm Police.

They spent the remainder of the journey in silence. That information would take a while to sink in.

*   *   *

There was an aura around Christian Habersaat’s house in Listed that hadn’t been there before. The house was suddenly in the past. The estate of a deceased, a DIY offer, one man’s monument of a failed life. There were still secrets in a way, of course, but the mystery was gone.

They looked in the windows and noticed how effective Rose’s efforts had been. Apart from a few packing materials and furniture that had been used as shelf space, there was nothing left to remind anyone that there’d been a complete manifesto of a crime collected here.

They looked over at the double doors of the garage and noticed that the authorities had fitted it with a padlock.

“Shall we wait for a locksmith so we can come in via the house entrance to the garage, or shall I just open it?” asked Assad.

Carl was about to ask how he intended to do it without tools but before he could, Assad put his good hand in between the doors and jerked them. The padlock was still hanging where it had always been, but the fitting wasn’t, so the doors flung open to reveal a darkness that their eyes had to adjust to.

The sight was the same as before: tire tracks, old inflatable water toys, and tins of paint on the shelves, empty cardboard boxes here and there.

They leaned their heads back, looking up at the beams with the Windsurfer sail, skis, and ski poles.

They went back to the entrance, trying to get a better angle to see what might be lying on top of the other stuff. And when they still couldn’t see anything new, they walked right out of the garage. And just there, standing at a very specific angle, it looked as if there might be something lying on top of the sailcloth, pushed right back toward the end wall.

“We won’t get up there without a ladder, Carl,” said Assad.

“Come on, I’ll give you a leg up.”

He put his hands around Assad’s shoe and pushed him up. Amazing how Pirjo, slight as she was, had managed to shift him. He was heavy enough to give you a crook in your back.

“Yes” was all he said from up there.

“Yes, what?”

“Here’s the shovel blade. About one and a half meters long with white capital letters on it. I can’t see what it says, but we already know that.”

Carl shook his head. How absurd could it be? If only there’d been a ladder back then, the search for Frank would’ve ended there.

“Take a photo of it. Put the flash on,” groaned Carl. It didn’t feel very comfortable standing like this anymore.

There was a flash and Carl prepared to bend his knees to help his friend back to the ground again.

“Just a second, Carl,” he said. “There’s something hanging on the wall behind the shovel. Give me an extra push up.”

Carl struggled. It was the sort of maneuver that could go wrong, so he braced himself and pushed him up as well as he could.

“Yes!” he shouted from up there. “You can let me down now.”

“What is it?” asked Carl, straightening his back.

Assad passed it to him. It was a crisp white envelope. No dirt or dust and no cobwebs. Just as untouched and unused as if it had come straight out of a drawer.

To the investigators
was written on the front in Habersaat’s unmistakable handwriting.

They looked at each other.

“Open it,” said Assad, and he did.

It was a compact and handwritten page of paper, which had been used before because there was something printed on the back.

To the investigators
written again at the top, finishing with Habersaat’s signature.

“Read it aloud, Carl. I can’t read his crawl.”

“Scrawl, Assad, but never mind!”

He read:

You worked it out, then, and the mission is complete.

My suspicion of Bjarke was strengthened when sometime after Alberte’s death I found this thing, which Bjarke had apparently used to sell Christmas trees. I thought I remembered him working on something of the sort and found it up here while the whole island was looking for it.

But even though a lot pointed to my son, my suspicion of my wife’s ex-lover was also strong. Yes, I knew full well about their relationship. My network on the island has many mouths, and through which I also received strong indications that the man with the VW Kombi was the same man who met up with Alberte.

Then I found the splint at the crime scene, and several other things gave me hope that I was wrong about Bjarke. The desire for revenge and the ingrained urge to protect go hand in hand too often, unfortunately. And I couldn’t find a motive for Bjarke. Why should he kill a totally unknown girl? It didn’t make any sense. I knew he wasn’t interested in the opposite sex. That was a subject June and I argued a lot about. She found it really hard to take in. But I think that in the police we have a broader moral compass than so many others.

So my investigation pointed toward the man in the VW. And it continued that way until I found the crucial evidence that, despite everything, Bjarke did have a weighty motive.

I found it when one day, a month ago, I annexed Bjarke’s old room for my investigation material, and found this in a box with old PC games.

That’s what you can see if you turn the paper over.

Carl turned it over.

It was an old print of shortcuts to the
Star Trek
game, with notes in pencil, and at the bottom in very small capitals was written:

TO FRANK

It was the poem Bjarke had written about his fascination with him. They knew what it said.

“Read the rest of what Habersaat wrote, Carl,” said Assad.

It was only after finding this poem that I seriously understood it all. Bjarke was in love with the same man as my wife. And he killed Alberte because he’d been pushed aside to make way for the young girl. Bjarke must’ve written it sometime afterward. Probably just before he moved out from here. It’s now so clear and logical to me, and it’s breaking my heart.

I apologize with all sincerity for being so insistent in my determination to pin a crime on an innocent man, when all along it was my son who’d committed the terrible crime.

Now I’m leaving his fate in your hands. I can’t find it in me to go after my own son. So it stops here.

Christian Habersaat, April 29th, 2014.

They stood for a long time without saying a word.

They thought the same.

“He wrote this the day before he called you, Carl,” said Assad finally.

Carl nodded.

“He’d already made the decision to kill himself before that.”

“Yes. Of course it’s a small comfort, what with everything else.” Carl shook his head. “If only we’d seen that letter a bit earlier. Rose was right. Habersaat knew that his son was involved somehow or other.”

“Yes, but not that it was his wife who did it. We’d never have found that out if we hadn’t investigated in the way we did, Carl. June Habersaat would’ve taken it to the grave.”

He nodded. “We should call Rose and tell her she was right in connection with Habersaat, and that June Habersaat has confessed to everything.”

Assad gave him a thumbs-up with his remaining healthy thumb, selected Rose’s number, and activated the speakerphone.

It was a while before someone answered. They were just about to hang up.

“This is Rose’s phone, you’re speaking with Yrsa,” said the voice. It certainly wasn’t Rose.

“Er, is that you, Rose?” asked Carl. Had she fallen back into the role-play?

“No, I said it was Yrsa. I’m Rose’s sister. Who am I speaking with?”

Carl was still unsure, but if she wanted to play, then she could play.

“Carl. Deputy Police Superintendent Carl Mørck, Rose’s boss, if I can put it that way.”

“Oh,” she said, as if it was bad news. “I’ve tried calling you, Carl Mørck, but your cell doesn’t pick up.”

“I apologize, the battery has died. What—”

“Rose isn’t good,” she interrupted, her voice sounding worried. “I arrived here an hour ago. Rose and I meet once in a while on a Saturday for a cup of tea, you know, and I found her in the bedroom. She didn’t recognize me at all. She kept saying that she’d done what she had to and now she just wanted out of it all.”

“Out of it all?”

“Yes, she’d cut one of her wrists with a pair of scissors. She also claimed to be Vicky, our other sister. She said she’d been hypnotized to believe she was Rose, but that she didn’t want to be her because she was a bad girl. That the hypnosis had gone too deep. She said he told her that he couldn’t help her because she was a cup that was already full.”

“That’s awful.” Carl looked at Assad, who was standing shaking his head.

This couldn’t be true.

“She’s been admitted to Nordvang Hospital, so you shouldn’t expect her anytime soon, if she ever comes back.”

It was Assad’s idea that they should drive down to Aakirkeby and order flowers for Rose and have them sent by Floragram. Then they could buy a bunch to put by Alberte’s tree at the same time.

“You are aware that we can take the same route to the tree that June Habersaat took?” said Assad, when they were finished in town.

“Yes, I’m well aware of that,” answered Carl. “But this time we won’t drive quite like last time, okay? I don’t think this car is up for it either.”

Assad sent him a grateful smile.

*   *   *

They stood for a long time watching the branches and the tree and the small bunch of flowers at the bottom of the trunk. The first time they’d stood in front of this tree, the leaves had barely come out. Now they were already dark green.

“I hope that her parents can finally find some peace,” said Carl.

Assad didn’t comment. He probably doubted it.

They bowed their heads for a moment out of respect for the far too beautiful and naive young woman who never had the life she dreamt of. And then they drove off.

They were speaking about Rose and what they could do for her, when the folk high school suddenly appeared on their right-hand side.

“Stop the car, Carl,” said Assad when they reached it.

He jumped out, crossing the road toward the boulder with the school name engraved on it.

“Are you going to give me a hand?” he shouted after he’d pushed a couple of stones aside that surrounded the base of the boulder.

Carl only just reached him when Assad rolled a dark stone to one side, which was covering a small hole.

“Here it is!” he said triumphantly. “This is where they exchanged messages, Carl. Where June Habersaat left the false note.”

Carl nodded and bent down. It was seventeen years ago, and yet the little hole was still there. He scratched down in the earth in the hole. It was strange to think.

Then the tip of his finger touched something smooth. Was it plastic or just a small stone? He took his pen from his breast pocket and poked it down in the earth, jostling the object free. It was a small clear plastic pocket of the type often used for stamps or recipes. The plastic was totally
opaque after so many years in the ground. Strange that it hadn’t been covered more.

“There’s something inside,” said Assad.

He was right. Carl opened it carefully, pulling out a small piece of folded paper. It was in reasonable condition, although the paper had yellowed and become damp.

Carl unfolded the piece of paper and held it so they could both read it.

Dear Alberte,
it began.

Forget what I said yesterday. I really want to see you again when you get back to Zealand from the school. My number at the commune is 439032**

It was no longer possible to read the last two numbers. But the writing underneath was clear enough:

Until next time. I love you boundlessly.

Frank

Assad and Carl looked at each other. Frank must have left the message on the same morning Alberte had cycled out to meet her terrible fate.

Assad held his bad hand while Carl put his hand to his neck.

If only he’d left his declaration of love a few minutes before, none of this would ever have happened.

Carl sighed, but felt a little pat on his shoulder.

He looked into a pair of bright brown eyes, framed by smile lines.