Bogman (6 page)

Jolene pointed to YES.

“Jolene Karlsson says yes,” said Nils Soderborg.

“Fuck me,” said the nurse.
 

Pernille, Peter Lundquist and Nils Soderborg had breakfast in the hospital café.
 

“Poor bloody cow,” said Nils Soderborg. “I came in thinking it would be the usual drunken fight outside a club. A couple of young lads. Maybe an assault on a policeman or bouncer. I’ve not had something like this before.”

“You’re not long qualified,” said Peter Lundquist. “Give it time.”

Pernille smiled to herself. She was older than both of them.
 

“Will she have any visitors, do you think? Has she anyone at all looking out for her?” asked Nils.

“Her pimp, I suppose,” said Peter.
 

“We don’t even know her real name,” said Pernille. “Whatever it is, it’s not Jolene.”
 

“People give their children all sorts of names,” said Nils. “I acted last week for a shoplifter whose child was called Nike.”
 

“That’s a Greek name,” said Peter. “Meaning Winged Victory.” He was the star of a pub quiz team.
 

“It was Greek to the shoplifter anyway,” said Nils. “Why would you call your child after a shoe?”

“Jolene is a Dolly Parton number,” said Pernille. “It wasn’t recorded until 1974. Our victim is forty-two. That’s what she told them in casualty, before they wired her jaw.”

“I bet you didn’t know that Pernille is a singer,” said Peter. “She sings with the Police Swing Band.”
 

“Sounds offbeat.”
 

“Arresting, even,” said Peter.
 

“The next bad pun is going to cop it,” said Pernille. “I’m off.”
   

She was playing back the recorded interview with Jolene when Tobias telephoned.

“Tobias Lange. What a surprise. I haven’t spoken to you in, well, I don’t know how many years.”

“It must be at least ten,” said Tobias, who remembered clearly his last glimpse of Pernille slipping into a bedroom in the Thon conference hotel in Oslo with a Swedish academic who had earlier given a paper on Crime and Ethnicity.
 

“Oslo, 2002, I think,” said Pernille, whose memory was equally clear. “We bumped into each other at a conference. I saw you on television last week, looking much the same I have to say. I assume this call is something to do with the body in the bog?”
 

“Correct,” said Tobias. “You were the investigating officer in the case of,” Tobias glanced at his notebook, “Bruno Holst, aged 23, reported missing in July 1998.”

“Remind me,” said Pernille.

“He worked for a technology company. He lived in Randers. His partner reported him missing when he didn’t come home from visiting a friend.”

“I remember,” said Pernille. “It was the first case I worked on after I was made Inspector. They had a child.” She paused, remembering the claustrophobic flat, the angry girlfriend and the crying baby. “We never got anywhere with the case. It turned out he never went to his friend’s place. As I recall, the friend wasn’t expecting him. My feeling at the time was he felt trapped and did a runner. They’d only been together a couple of months when she got pregnant, and...” She stopped. “Well, that was my impression anyway.”

Tobias had a memory flash. A tender, drunken encounter with Pernille in a club in Copenhagen after an exam at CEPOL, when he’d confessed to her he’d abandoned university and joined the police solely to support his girlfriend and his soon-to-be born daughter. She had disentangled herself and slipped away to rejoin a noisy group of cadets at the bar.

Now she said, “We made extensive enquiries. He had no criminal record. He had no debts. He didn’t do drugs. There was no suggestion he was seeing anyone else. He seemed like a typically introverted tecchie. You think he might be your victim?”

“It’s possible. He fits what we know. Male and aged between 18 and 29. He went missing around the right time. Between 1997 and 2000. We’re hoping to get a bit closer on the date.”
 

“Good luck,” said Pernille. “You can call up the file on the case. If you want anything more, just let me know.”

“It would be a lot easier if he was our victim,” said Tobias. “He disappeared in the right area.”
 

There was a pause. Tobias found himself reluctant to end the conversation. He wasn’t sure if what he was feeling was nostalgia, or residual tenderness for a woman he had fancied but couldn’t have.
 

“So what’s keeping you busy these days, Pernille?”

“A bugger of a case,” said Pernille. “We had a body washed up on Saltholm. A female. Although you couldn’t have told at first. She’d been in the water for weeks. There was no one reported falling overboard from a boat. We checked with the coastguards and got an oceanographer to plot the tides and currents. He worked out she’d been dumped into the sea at Hamburg.”
 

“Dumped?”

“That’s what we assumed. She had a lot of head injuries which we thought were from buffeting in the sea. Then our pathologist found there was no water in her stomach, no foam in her airways. She was probably dead when she went into the water. We finally identified her as a prostitute. Her fingerprints were on file in Hamburg. She was Russian. Ludmila Akulova. She’d been arrested for shoplifting. We got in touch with the police in Moscow. She came from a small town, but nobody had reported her missing. Not in Germany. Not in Russia.” She fell silent for a few seconds. “What a life.”
 

“What a death,” said Tobias.

“Plus I’ve just been interviewing an assault victim,” said Pernille. “Another prostitute. Beaten up by a client. A really nasty piece of work. He gagged her with her panties and beat her to within an inch of her life.”

There was a pause.
 

“How’s Karren? And your daughter? She must be grown up by now. She was a year old when you were at CEPOL, as I recall.”

“Agnes is nineteen,” said Tobias. He cleared his throat. “Karren and I divorced eight years ago.” Without being asked he added, “there was nobody else involved, on my part anyway.” He hesitated. “What about you, Pernille?”
 

 
“I married Erik Gunnersen. Do you remember him? He was a year ahead of us.” She paused. “We were married for six years and all that time he was seeing someone else.”

“Idiot,” said Tobias. “Him, I mean. Not you.”

There was a longer pause.

“Well,” said Pernille. “If there’s nothing else I can help you with, I’d better be getting along. I’m meeting someone for dinner.”

The gently bantering tone of their conversation changed to something more formal. Tobias thanked Pernille for her help.
 

“I’ve just remembered one thing,” she said. “It might not be important. I saw a plane go over just now and that reminded me. Bruno Holst flew model aeroplanes in his spare time.”

Tobias sat up. “The guy who found the bones flew model airplanes. Do you have DNA?”

“There didn’t seem any point. We didn’t have a suspect or a body.”

“We do now,” said Tobias.

Thursday: Week One

East Jutland Police District

9.
 

If Bruno Holst was the body in the bog, who killed him?
 

Tobias ruled out Torben Skov, the teenage flyer of model planes. Torben was eighteen, which would make him six, or younger, when the body was dumped in the bog. His uncle, Kenneth Skov, on the other hand, would have been in his early twenties. Tobias knew it might only be a coincidence that Bruno Holst was a model plane enthusiast and that his remains had been found by another enthusiast of approximately the same age. But he thought coincidences should always be explored. Which is why on Thursday morning he and Katrine Skaarup spent an hour with Kenneth Skov going over exactly how he had found a mummified foot while searching for the missing tailfin of his crashed glider.
 

“We started over by the hut,” said Kenneth Skov. He spoke quickly. “It’s about a kilometre from where I found the foot. Torben landed his Supercub and then I got my Tigermoth airborne. It’s a flat field glider so I can fly it with planes. You can’t always fly both together. I got it up with a tug plane. It caught a thermal and rose very high. It flew well for about five minutes. I did a loop. Then I did a couple of somersaults. I was flying it east. Almost out of sight. Then it went into a cloud and I shouted to Torben could he see it and he said no. Then I thought bloody hell, I’ve lost it and it’s going to crash.”

“How far away was it?” asked Katrine.

“I already told you. About a kilometre, at least. I wouldn’t normally go over there. The ground is marshy and most of the bushes have thorns.” Kenneth here displayed hands covered in scratch marks. “But the tailfin was missing and I thought it might be in the bushes so I scrabbled through them. Nothing. But when I got through the bushes to the other side, I saw the foot. Dark brown. Like a big lump of liquorice. At first I thought it was a piece of bog wood, you know the way they have funny shapes sometimes? But when I looked more closely I saw it was a foot. I texted Torben and he came over. It took him a while because he had to go a long way up the bank of a stream to cross over to me. And when he saw it he said it was a bog body like Tollund Man in the museum at Silkeborg. So we called the police.”

“You called the television people first,” said Katrine. She was enjoying herself. Tobias was allowing her to lead the interview. Her first formal interview, with video recording, of a possible witness in a murder investigation. She couldn’t wait to tell her parents.

“We thought he was going to be another Tollund Man. We didn’t know the poor bugger had been done in.”

“How do you know he was done in?”
 

“Because it said so on the television.”

“We haven’t released any statement yet,” said Tobias.

“They were speculating. I definitely heard them speculating he was murdered.”

“How do you know it was a he?” asked Katrine.

“There aren’t many women flying model planes.”
 

“So you think he was a member of your club,” said Tobias.

“Maybe. I don’t know. Until I know who he is I won’t know if he was a member or not, will I?”

“Has any member of the club gone missing?” asked Katrine.

Kenneth shrugged. “Not that I know of. I’ve been a member for ten years. People come and go all the time.”

“How many members are there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe about forty? There isn’t a formal club with meetings and agendas and stuff. People just turn up. It’s usually a mixture of the same faces. I’ve told you everything I know. If I remember anything else, I’ll tell you. All right? Can I go now?”

Katrine glanced at Tobias.
 

“Yes. You can go,” said Tobias. “When you’ve given us all the names and addresses of everyone you know in the club.”

“I don’t know their addresses. I fly with Torben and a couple of mates. I know where my mates live. But I don’t know about the others. You can’t keep me here.”

“So who knows? Isn’t there a club secretary or someone?”
 

Kenneth Skov looked blank for a few moments. “There might be names and addresses on the petition,” he said.
 

Tobias sat forward. “What petition?”

“About ten years ago. Before I started flying there. They were going to put restrictions on people who used the bog. The club sent a petition to the Regional Council. But I told you. That was before my time. Now can I go?”

 
“Yes, yes,” said Tobias. “But tell us if you’re planning to fly off anywhere.”

Kenneth Skov gave him a look. But Tobias had a straight face.
 

When he left the interview room, Katrine said, “Do you think it’s possible Bruno Holst killed someone in the model airplane club and that’s the real reason he disappeared?”

“Motive?”

“Maybe they committed a robbery together. Maybe they used model planes to smuggle stuff?”

“You wouldn’t fly stuff far in a model plane.”
 

“You know what I mean. Where do they buy the planes? Maybe stuff comes through customs in a model plane.” Her shoulders slumped. “No. That doesn’t work. Those things are expensive. They wouldn’t be buying them all the time.”
 

“Check the details of the other missing males who match the victim’s description,” said Tobias. “Could any of them have known Bruno Holst? Were any of them model plane enthusiasts? And get a copy of the petition the model airplane buffs sent to the planners.” He smiled. “Imagination is a good thing in a detective, Katrine.”
 

There were two petitions about Roligmose. One from the model airplane club and one from a hunting club. The Planning Department emailed the documents to Katrine. She was checking the names and addresses on the petitions against the list of missing persons when Eddy tapped her on the shoulder.
 

“That can wait, Skaarup. Get your coat. We’re going to the hospital. The Sexual Assault Centre.”

Katrine snatched her jacket from a hook on the wall and hurried after him.
 

10.

They were met by the doctor on duty, Josefine Bro. She had round glasses and a ponytail. Eddy thought she looked about the same age as his daughter who was sixteen and still at school.
 

“I’ve worked here for the last three years,” she said. “I’ve seen victims of rape and domestic violence. But I’ve not seen anything like this. She has serious, multiple bruising. Nearly all her ribs are broken. She has a black eye.” Dr Bro suddenly looked and sounded a lot older. “She has internal injuries as well.”

“Has she said who did it?” asked Eddy.
 

Doctor Bro shook her head. “She was left at the door of the Emergency Room. Dumped like a sack out of the back of a van, according to the ambulance driver who saw it. She was naked, except for some kind of kimono. She won’t say who beat her. It was probably her husband or boyfriend. It usually is. But at least she consented to photographs. We always take photographs in case there’s a prosecution. Come and take a look.”