The Hanging: A Thriller (23 page)

“A stranger turned up.…” The piece was delivered exactly as before.

“You’re coming down to the station with me.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Nah, no, I was thinking you could come of your own accord.”

“Absolutely not.”

The policeman scratched himself so hard that one would have thought he had fleas. “Can you repeat that part about the bonfire?”

Just as before, he recited the piece word-for-word, and the officer got into his car while Stig Åge Thorsen waited patiently. Through the window he saw that the man was talking. A certain amount of time went by, then the car window was lowered.

“Stig Åge, I’m placing you under arrest. It is Saturday, the twenty-eighth of October, and the time is two fifty-three
P.M.
Please be so kind as to get in.” He scratched his head again, then added, “Up here next to the driver’s side.”

Stig Åge Thorsen obeyed, without saying a word.

CHAPTER 39

The Countess was awakened at quarter past five Saturday morning, when the night receptionist called and announced unceremoniously that the police were at the front desk with mail for her. The time of day was most clearly a little act of revenge from all the people that she had whipped into working overtime the day before, which she couldn’t really hold against them. She therefore did not complain when she staggered downstairs and received the envelope from the motorcycle officer. Otherwise she might have questioned the fact that the packet was addressed to her while Berg was allowed to sleep.

The report was exhaustive and extremely detailed, almost sixty pages about the Ditlevsen brothers’ lives, so there was some work in separating the wheat from the chaff. A bath rid her of sleepiness and two packets of peanuts stilled the worst of her hunger. She sat down to read.

A couple of hours later, in the car, her head start was massive. Berg sat beside her, in the passenger seat, and skimmed the material.

“Good work, don’t you think? Are you almost done?” the Countess teased her.

“Done? Are you out of your mind? It’s impossible to absorb all this in fifteen minutes.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s so hard. Just concentrate on the essentials and forget the rest.”

Berg nodded and leafed defeatedly through the papers.

The Countess came to her aid: “Should I go over it with you? Then you can follow along at the same time.”

“Can you remember it?”

“Of course not, only the main points.”

“How can you? I just don’t understand.”

“I had peace and quiet to concentrate before you came down to breakfast. You’ll pick it up along the way.”

“You mean, if I supplement my magazine reading with a trip to the library now and then.”

The Countess shrugged, somewhat uncertain of where the conversation was headed. Her colleague’s confession was not part of the plan. Nonetheless, she kept her three hours of work to herself and hurried on.

“It wouldn’t hurt you, but all right, let’s get started. Frank Ditlevsen was born in 1952 in the village of Ullerløse in Odsherred and his younger brother three years later. They had no other siblings. The mother left the family in the summer of 1956. She emigrated to start a new life in Leeds, in England, where she had a childhood friend. Perhaps she was fleeing from the father. It’s not clear.”

Berg confirmed this. She was following along in the papers and felt inadequate.

“Life in the home was austere. The father, Palle Ditlevsen, supported himself as a worker, a hired hand, if you will. Did some work under the table here, some small things here, seasonal harvesting, temporary positions for the county. Repaired bicycles, once also selling them—stolen bicycles. There are two police reports but no prison sentence or fines, so matters were probably settled amicably. The boys are neglected and occasionally the father enjoys the bottle too much. The county checks up on the family and things are not good. The file is brutal reading, there are five reports. The first from 1962, the last one from 1967. The boys ought to have been removed, but the need of the children takes second place to that of the taxpayers. The county takes their time and the brothers grow up.”

The Countess gave her passenger time to confirm the details. Berg turned the page and read, this time purposefully. When she had finished, she said, “That is all correct, go on.”

“Frank Ditlevsen gets an apprenticeship position and in 1971 he is a full-fledged lithographic printer. His life appears stable. The same employer until 1986, when the business might as well hang up the keys as new technology is devastating the industry. Ten years earlier, Frank Ditlevsen got married. The bride was a housecleaner from Rørvig. The couple’s only child was born later that same year. That was our singer from yesterday. Allan Ditlevsen follows his father’s footsteps, if I can call it that, apart from the fact that he doesn’t drink. From 1971 to 1993 he has records at the tax authorities with no less than forty-six different employers. Unfortunately, positions such as ‘teaching aide’ and ‘day-care assistant’ are on the list.”

“Smashing—that’s it, almost word-for-word. You are amazing.”

“The father dies in 1985. That same year, Frank Ditlevsen becomes an independent instructor and earns a degree in languages in record time, namely the time it takes him to falsify his educational credentials. He builds a solid little enterprise with a firm client base within larger companies in the Copenhagen area. No one questions his background.”

“Right. As far as I can tell, it’s only come out now during the course of the investigation.”

“Yes, his clients did not doubt him, or else they were simply satisfied. He appears to have been good at his job. Now, on with the report. In 1994, Frank Ditlevsen buys the house in Middelford and two years later he gets divorced. Mother and daughter move away. After he gets out of prison, Allan Ditlevsen gains more stability in his professional life by getting a job selling hot dogs and delivering newspapers in Allerslev, and the past few years there is not much to report. People who knew the brothers all describe a quiet life, but we haven’t been able to track down any close friends as of yet. They may not have had any.”

The Countess stepped abruptly on the brake and a fox barely escaped with its life. It disappeared into a thicket.

Berg had finally put two and two together. She asked skeptically, “When did you get this report?”

“At five this morning. I’ve had it for three hours, so you don’t have to feel stupid.”

“It’s impressive regardless of whether you’ve had time to prepare. I mean, you remember all those dates.”

“Perhaps I don’t. You can’t check everything.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“And wake you up? Why should I? But listen to this. We’ll be there soon.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“If you disregard Allan’s two charges and Frank’s unfortunate predilection for acquiring borrowed feathers, the brothers appear to be a genuine social-success story. Their start in life was far from promising, but little by little they got on solid financial ground and stable employment. The only red flag is that the two men’s finances don’t quite add up. Three experienced accountants have compared the contents of the house and the brothers’ bank statements with the household incomes. Going by Danish tax laws, the accounts make more sense if the two of them had additional income that the income tax authorities knew nothing about. But this is guesswork. We don’t have any concrete evidence.”

*   *   *

The assumptions about black-market activity were strongly supported during the course of the afternoon, when the search of the house revealed one hundred sixty thousand kroner in cash. The officer who had discovered the money proudly displayed it to Pauline Berg and said, “The bills were stored in four boxes of frozen ground fish, stuffed into the very back of the freezer. The ground fish didn’t fit in with the rest of the contents, which could all go straight into the oven. The money lay at the very bottom of the boxes in packets of forty-one-thousand-kroner bills. The top layer was frozen fish and the cartons were carefully glued back together. The fish cartons were without a doubt selected because their width so perfectly fits the length of the bills.”

Pauline Berg wasn’t sure if she was expected to praise him. The officer was twice as old as she was, so it felt strange. She looked in vain for the Countess.

“That’s clever, very clever.”

She felt ridiculous, but the man’s face lit up and he said, “This find, combined with the fact that most of the videos contain child pornography, makes the case obvious.”

“Yes, completely obvious.”

“If you ask me, they got what they deserved.”

But Berg was not asking. She set about counting out the money, until he left. The bills were freezing.

The next development in the investigation came that afternoon, and as fate would have it, the two women from Copenhagen were responsible for them both, which was extremely unfair to the horde of hardworking officers, but the great detective in the sky clearly did not feel in the mood to reward classic police work this time around.

Most of the credit had to be attributed to the Countess in that her discovery came from a series of excellent conclusions. There was hardly any doubt that the brothers sold child pornography. The amount of cash in the freezer, their videos, Frank Ditlevsen’s electronic equipment, and the charges filed against Allan Ditlevsen all pointed in this direction, and the most promising channel of distribution was the Internet. A brief but skilled examination of Frank Ditlevsen’s Internet transactions, however, eliminated the possibility of the electronic distribution of illegal material. The brothers must have used a more traditional method of sale that would have been slower but more secure, and in this light the hot-dog stand emerged as a three-star disguise.

The Countess assigned four officers to the matter and they drove to Allerslev, where the remains of the stand had been tossed into containers. With the ground-fish cartons in mind, she told the men to look for objects that had earlier been stored in the commercial freezer and two black plastic bags were recovered and opened. The Countess was pleased. She encouraged the men with a short pep talk and then removed herself from the smell. The upshot was uplifting—almost thirty foul-smelling CD-ROMs.

Pauline Berg’s contribution to the investigation was an itch and felt like a complete accident. When the Countess drove to Allerslev, Berg felt superfluous. That she was expected to discover this or that was a given, she just didn’t know how. In the absence of a more brilliant idea she walked around the garden without discovering anything except a persistent itch under her boot in a particular place. She tried to mitigate the situation by kicking herself in the heel a couple of times but to no avail except that the irritation claimed more of her attention and soon appeared unbearable. On her way up the stairs to the main entrance she stopped and pulled her zipper down with one hand while with the other she leaned against the mailbox, bolted into the wall to the left of the door. It was awkward but better than sitting down on the wet stone steps. After having scratched herself thoroughly she realized that the bottom of the mailbox felt wrong. The mailbox was constructed so that the sides extended a few centimeters past the bottom. She bent down and peered up at it. A special holder was glued to each end to enable the convenient concealment of two hard-disk drives.

CHAPTER 40

Saturday became a frustrating day for Konrad Simonsen and his investigation. Arne Pedersen’s pessimistic prophecy about a flood of false information, in reaction to the publication of Arthur Elvang’s posthumous photographs of the victims of the mass murder in Bagsværd came true to an unfortunate degree.

Already on Friday evening the calls had started to pour in to police stations around the country, especially to the police headquarters in Copenhagen. The majority were from people who tried to impress on their listeners all kinds of nonsense about the murder victims. Many were easy to weed out, but not all, so the work of identifying the deceased went on. The exception was Mr. Northwest, who was confirmed as Thor Gran, a fifty-four-year-old architect from Århus. Two architecture students had walked into the Lyngby police station with a newsletter,
The Architect,
from April 1999 with an article about landmark buildings and restoration techniques by Thor Gran. Even a layman could have established a connection between the picture in the newsletter and Arthur Elvang’s facial re-creation. With the identification of Mr. Northwest, all that was missing were the names for Mr. Northeast and Mr. Southeast. Simonsen had gone home convinced that both of these would be established by the time they met the following day. This optimism was perhaps justified since he did not know that the two architecture students had been rejected three times and that only their determination had secured the investigation’s results.

Simonsen was back at work at eleven on Saturday morning, since he had used the morning to address a series of personal matters that he had been putting off because of his workload. Once he arrived at his office, armed with a cup of coffee and a bag of croissants, he sat down at his desk and started the day by calling his daughter. He and Anna Mia were going to the movies that evening and he wanted to find out where and when they should meet before he threw himself into the tasks of the day. His telephone was dead. He tapped on the switch a couple of times without hearing anything, then took his cell phone out of his inner coat pocket. It was turned off because he had received several calls from random people that night who apparently wanted nothing more than to wake him up, and he had forgotten to turn it on again in the morning, which was a mistake. He activated it, waited for a signal, and immediately received a call. A young woman or girl told him, giggling, that she had recognized her brother among the published photographs. He heard shouting and laughter in the background. He ended the call without reply, then immediately received another call. This time it was a man who claimed to have seen one of the victims during a soccer game at Brøndby Stadion. He turned off his cell phone again and went to Arne Pedersen’s office, where a note on the door directed him to Poul Troulsen.