The Hanging: A Thriller (12 page)

She smiled brightly without opening her eyes.

“I tell you that I am going to let your pants fall and now you find yourself in a dilemma. You are holding on to the railing with one hand, the other is around me, and you don’t have another one around to hold your pants up so that they don’t end up around your ankles. In front of the eyes of all your superiors and all of your co-workers, who will talk about you for all time to come so that your reputation, your career, your modesty—all is at stake. When I let go of your pants you have already escaped me and I put my arms around your back as far as I can while I focus. I’m thinking about what I have learnt again and again in ballet class.
Flexibility, power, posture, control,
these are the four key words. I loosen my hold on you and slowly let my body glide around in tiny circles. You call out my name even though we are so close, though not as close as before. Our bodies parted. Almost. Now it is all or nothing. The rotation gets bigger and bigger.
Flexibility, power, posture, control.
I get braver and braver, centimeter by centimeter until at last I find the outermost unstable balance. Then I hold up my arms in triumph toward the stars while I alternate between stretching on my tippy-toes and falling back onto my feet.”

She was speaking more loudly.

“
Flexibility,
up on my toes,
power,
down again,
posture,
up,
control,
down.”

Suddenly she opened her eyes and her voice changed.

“Oh, we’re there.”

They had reached the parking lot in front of the Langebæk School. They had been there for quite a while.

She took her bag from the floor. Pedersen protested.

“No, wait a minute. What happened then?”

“Happened? Happened where?”

“Well, in your dream, of course.”

“Oh, that. I can’t remember exactly. I think I turned into an angel and flew away.”

“An angel?”

“Yes, an angel. When I was little, my dad often used to called me angel and when I was naughty I was an angel with dirt on my wings—isn’t that poetic? But it may also be that I woke up.”

She released the buckle on the seat belt.

“Don’t get mad, Arne darling, dreams can’t last forever.”

Without blushing she reached down between his legs.

“But I think you need your wife.”

CHAPTER 18

The two men across from the Countess looked like what they were, namely shamefaced lugs, whose careers were hanging by a thread. In their defense, it had to be stated that they had not tried to make themselves look better and that they had related the facts of Per Clausen’s disappearance precisely and without elaboration, just as they had not offered any stupid excuses. It was a sensible approach, as the Countess would have skewered them for the slightest attempt at such a thing. Now she’d been given no reason. She inspected them from head to toe as if she were about to grade their performance. Both hunched under her gaze but said nothing and then she let mercy go before right.

“If you hurry up, you’ll be able to get away before a very large and very angry man comes in, someone you absolutely do not want to meet.”

To her surprise, they didn’t move. She waited a couple of seconds for a question that never came. Then she held her thumb and pointer finger in front of her eye and said, “I see in my crystal ball two colleagues sorting through the lost-and-found because they did not get to safety in time.”

That helped.

Simonsen did not share the Countess’s penchant for mercy and his enthusiasm was limited when he had to settle for hearing the story secondhand. In the absence of a better alternative, however, he sat down in a chair, ready to listen.

The Countess looked down at her notes and then related the distressing news.

“At about twelve o’clock Per Clausen was buying groceries at the local supermarket, where he filled his cart with everyday items as well as wine. After checking out he put his items back into the cart and started walking down toward Bagsværd’s main street. At another shop he bought four sandwiches and two beers that he also placed in his cart, and at the kiosk he bought a box of cigarettes. Before he goes into these shops he covers his cart each time with his raincoat so that passersby can’t easily view his purchases. The next stop is the hardware store at Bagsværd Hovedgade 266A. The business is located in the ground floor of a residential building with three floors and eight entrances. At this point he is under surveillance by five officers as well as a backup unit in a car.”

Arne Pedersen and Pauline Berg entered the room and Simonsen shot them a sour look. They handily avoided making any eye contact; it was very clear to them that the boss was in a foul mood and that it was best to mind their own business. The Countess filled them in quickly before she continued.

“At the hardware store he inspects some shelves at the very back, then he suddenly walks into a back room and slams the door shut, having first stuck a match into the lock. From the store there is an exit to a parking lot behind the building but also—by way of a staircase—access to a storeroom in the basement, and before he heads down he jams the door shut with a wedge. The storeroom has an emergency exit to the basement corridor under the building and he walks through the basement, which, as I mentioned, is connected to eight different entrances. At the very end of the corridor there is a bicycle room where he has planted a stroller with a change of clothes, a kind of black, Muslim whole-body covering, easy to throw on over his regular outfit.”

“Shit.”

Simonsen sighed.

“Simple, but effective. With a stroller and his new outfit—I think it is called a niqab or a chador—he walks around the building and past the noses of his pursuers. Many of them remember him very well. Then he walks calmly up the main street and turns down toward the Bagsværd Station. With the stroller, he takes the S-train at twelve thirty-nine toward Copenhagen, but he gets off at Buddinge Station. He leaves the outfit and the stroller in an elevator and from the taxi stand he gets a ride to the Ballerup mall. Here we lose all trace of him.”

Simonsen hit the flat of his hand against the wall and said, “I should have held him yesterday; his behavior was so odd that it was irresponsible to let him go. And even more irresponsible to turn him over to a couple of chumps who can’t manage a simple job.”

The Countess, who still feared the worst, watched him apprehensively.

Pedersen tried to be constructive: “We should be able to get a search warrant to his home.”

His boss latched on to this with a spark of hope in his voice: “That’s true. The pizzas and his disappearance are enough. Follow up on it, Arne. Go!”

But the Countess extinguished all light: “Unfortunately, his house is in flames. A fire truck is on the scene but can’t quell it. I got the news ten minutes ago. You can see the fire from the window, if you like.”

No one did. The atmosphere was dark and depressed; Simonsen appeared almost groggy and said nothing. Again it was Pedersen who rallied. He tried to gather up the remnants: “At the very least we can put out an alert for him for suspected arson.”

Berg picked up this thread, trying to sound optimistic. “With the kind of press coverage we’re getting at the moment, we’re sure to be able to get his picture in the papers.”

Pedersen said, “That’s right. He doesn’t have a lot of chances if we keep surveillance at the airport and the major stations, because I think we can safely assume he’s not going home again.”

The Countess raised her palms into the air. “Just a moment. Unfortunately, there’s one more thing.”

They grew silent and let the bearer of bad news have the word.

“He left a message for us in the stroller. Or rather, to you, Simon.”

The envelope was the kind that accompanies bouquets, and on the front it simply read “Konrad.” The card inside was white without additional decoration. Simonsen read aloud, “‘
The little children who weep, give them light and songs of joy.’
What does that mean?”

The Countess answered sadly, “I’m not entirely sure but I have a bad feeling about it.”

“And that is?”

“The line is from a Grundtvig psalm called ‘Evening Sighs, Night Tears.’”

Simonsen pressed the note into the table like a weak playing card that had to capitulate to a higher trump and thereby unconsciously mimicking the Countess’s note of alarm even before she came out with it.

“It is a funeral psalm. I don’t believe we will ever see Per Clausen again.”

CHAPTER 19

Per Clausen burrowed deep into the cushions and smiled sadly up to the ceiling while he let his whole body relax. It had been a delightful day. First there had been some unexpected work to take care of. The reasons behind Konrad Simonsen’s having brought a young woman to his interrogation session the day before instead of a seasoned colleague was not so easy to interpret, and he intended to repay in kind. He had purchased a camera and been successful in capturing his subject without a significant wait. He printed the pictures at a library and sent the papers with instructions to the Climber. The rest of the day he had been able to devote to himself.

He had been home. He had visited his childhood one last time.

Much had changed, but for those eyes that could really see, the street was the same as fifty years ago. The asphalt was still smooth and flat, and the coating just a little bit finer than anywhere else in the world, which is why it had always been the preferred gathering place whenever there was going to be a game of marbles or hazing. Kids of all ages came wandering from near and far and in the light summer evenings it had swarmed with life. A horde of children shouting and yelling, winning and losing, smiling and crying, as they quarreled over the rules or formed fleeting alliances. Boys in knickerbockers and long harlequin-patterned stockings, crewcuts with dirty ears and eternally runny noses, the girls in plaid skirts with elastic waistbands that could be pulled down to reveal their pink underpants.

He crouched down with his left knee against the ground and his right leg sticking out behind him, and ran his fingers along the street in a long, sweeping motion one last time.

For a while he kept his eye out for a cat; just one little straggly kitten to help him relive the past, but he didn’t see one. Back in his day the apartment buildings had been swarming with cats. In the daytime they sat on garbage cans or lay on steps lapping up the sun as they patiently kept watch for the cat mother, who turned up faithfully three times a week with sweet words and fish scraps. In the night they rent the silence with their mating yowls and territorial fights. When the cat catcher was on the street, all animosity fell away and everyone knew their role. The girls gathered together in small groups and chased the cats away; the boys attacked them with blow straws and slingshots. The little kids ran from apartment to apartment and called for assistance, while others peeled celluloid from handlebars and used their magnifying glasses to light stinking fires under the animal catcher’s car. He usually left with unfinished business. Furious and cursing but without a catch in the back of his vehicle.

The last window on the second floor of the yellow building was his mother’s. From it, she called goodbye to him when he went to school in the morning and called him up in the evenings when it was time for bed. The glass in the window was cracked and only his mother knew why. He had been sitting in the window at the time. The cornice of the building was cracked with frost and posed a hazard, so a scaffolding was erected and a large, jolly plasterer got to work. He sang beautifully while he worked, sang the sad song of the wild duck as well as any street singer. Housewives rewarded him with coffee—some even with beer—served straight out of the window. He had stood there on the scaffolding, singing and swinging his mortar and trowel, and caught sight of his mother in the window. He had made a cheeky comment about how the prettiest woman in the building deserved some extra mortar. The clump clung to the window and slid down over the glass pane. She had scolded him for his foolishness and secretly thrilled at the traces of it for the rest of her life.

He stood there for a long time, his mind attuned to the past, his reflection in his mother’s window, before he quietly returned to his starting point.

*   *   *

Now he was at journey’s end.

He removed his belt and tightened it around his left arm so that his veins stood out. He took the syringe out of his inner pocket, attached the needle, and filled it from two ampules. There wasn’t much light—he was grateful for that, slid the needle in between the thumb and pointer finger, the student’s comfort. He calmly pressed the plunger, loosened the belt, and closed his eyes.

He noticed with a tinge of irritation that someone had entered the room and he was a bit surprised that he could see the door from his vantage point under the cushions. Then he heard her voice and forgot everything else. She was wearing the pretty, white ruffled skirt he had bought for her when she was six years old and that he liked so much. She stood before him shining, happy, full of health, and he felt the tears stream down his cheeks; then he spread out his arms and ran over to meet her. She had been away from him for so many years and now he held her in his arms again. His wonderful little girl.

CHAPTER 20

Alma Clausen had been pigeonholed ahead of time by her guest. Widow of a farmer, a woman in her midfifties. Pious and from Tarm—all data that in Poul Troulsen’s view stank of the cowshed, thickened sauces, narrow-mindedness, and plenty of room for intellectual improvement. Reality, however, proved quite different.

His expectations were initially met, however, in that Alma Clausen was a kindly, unassuming person, short and with a clothing style that he could describe only as drab. Her home was modest and nondescript. Flowery wallpaper, embroidered bell strings, and Amager shelves with porcelain figurines from Salzburg. Liver-pâté-colored mediocrity. Only at an embarrassingly late stage did Troulsen finally realize that the woman was incredibly sharp. This as he slowly and loudly asked her about her life.