The Hanging: A Thriller (35 page)

Emilie Mosberg Floyd glanced at the tape recorder and managed a nod. They let it stay at that.

Simonsen said, “It’s hard to imagine that the two of you never talked about how things were going with his therapy. The two of you, as well as your husband and you.”

“We did but only a little. Per preferred to keep those two things separate. Jeremy did too. He hated the fact that I was talking with Per but he had no choice but to accept it. When I told him about it he was furious and threatened to stop Per’s treatment but then for the first time I stood up for myself. I told him in that case I would take the children and leave. He backed down at that and it was my first victory. Later there were others.”

“But from time to time his name must have come up.”

“Yes, it did. When the one-on-one sessions between Jeremy and his patients were over he liked to place them in self-help groups. How long it took for a patient to be paired with that kind of group could vary a lot from case to case. It could be anything from six months to a year. Jeremy was very very careful about constructing groups that he thought would be successful, including taking geographic locations into account if he could. His patients often came from far away, some even from Jutland. A group usually consisted of four to six individuals and in the beginning they met with Jeremy under his direction. After a while they were supposed to continue on their own without him; they were—so to speak—kicked out of the nest, a process that took a couple of months but could also vary from group to group.”

“And Per Clausen joined this kind of group?”

“That was the problem. I talked with Jeremy a couple of times about it. He had some reservations about ending Per’s treatment in that way. For his part, Per very much wanted to join a group. He told me so at several different times and I put a lot of pressure on Jeremy to give him what he wanted.”

She stared sadly out into the room, then parted with her last bit of information.

“Yes, I forced him to do it, I’m afraid, and Jeremy probably also wanted to be done with Per. Push him out of our lives, so to speak. It was hard for him to separate the personal and professional in Per’s case.”

“Why did he have reservations? Was it because Per Clausen had not been abused himself?”

“No, it was something else. In part he was afraid that Per would dominate the group and there was some ground for his apprehension. As I mentioned, Per had an incredible manipulative strength, but that wasn’t the problem. It was more that Per … Per just hated pedophiles. With a red-hot, glowing hatred. We talked about Helene’s stepfather once, that he was seriously ill. Per told me that and was overjoyed. I don’t know where he had heard it. Another time there had been one of those terrible cases where a child had been killed. Per’s reaction was pathological. Not that he seemed beside himself, it was more the opposite. He was very … controlled, and at the same time he managed to frighten me without really saying very much. It’s difficult to explain. He was … I don’t know how to explain so that you will understand. He was … creepy. It was a side of him I didn’t like but perhaps it was his real self if we have something like that. Jeremy said once that there was not enough coal in the world to paint a true picture of Per’s soul, but it was during an argument so he was exaggerating.”

Neither of her listeners was convinced of this detail but both refrained from comment. On the other side of glass, Troulsen shook his head in vexation. Her story was substantially different from the one she had told only a short while ago.

Simonsen asked, “So the result was that Per Clausen joined a group?”

“Yes, he did, and Jeremy gathered together a group of people that he felt could offer Per a certain resistance, who had strong personalities themselves. The whole thing was quite an undertaking for him.”

“But you never got the names? Either from your husband or Per Clausen?”

“No, no, I never did.”

She hesitated.

There was something else and the Countess gave her the classic opening: “But…”

“But … there were some … some episodes. Per commented one time that one could say a lot about pedophiles but their victims spanned the social spectrum. Something like that, and then he added,
a nurse, a farmer, an advertising executive, a janitor, and a climber.
That was right after his group was formed.”

“A climber. What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know. I wondered that myself when I had time to think it over. In that situation I figured he meant Jeremy, who was a mountain climber in his spare time, but he probably meant someone else. Per would hardly refer to Jeremy as a climber but paradoxically enough I think that that’s the reason I can recall the phrase at all, indeed, that I can remember the order. Of course, I have no idea if he mentioned all of them.”

“You never saw them?”

“Never, none of them, apart from Per, of course. He always came a little early and sat with me in the kitchen and had a cup of coffee. That is to say, those times when I didn’t pick him up. After that he would go down to Jeremy. The others used the basement entrance.”

The Countess let her arms fall helplessly to her side. The woman misunderstood this gesture and preassumed it indicated a lack of respect for the patient’s right to anonymity. She suddenly sounded sharp and professional.

“A violation of anonymity at the wrong time can often mean the difference between success and failure in this kind of therapy. I don’t think you really understand what sexual abuse in childhood does to people and how deeply it scars their souls. Did you know that some victims have to go to special dentists for the rest of their lives because they have such an intractable resistance to opening their mouths for others?”

This was a side of her they had not yet seen. It was the cardiologist commanding the nurse. The Countess didn’t bother to explain herself, she simply apologized. That was the easiest. Simonsen brought the conversation back to the matter at hand.

“Is there anything else you can tell us about Per Clausen’s group? Anything at all, regardless of what you think it means. You must understand that we are very interested in these five people.”

“Yes, I do. There is one other thing. One of the members of the group was called Helle.”

“The nurse?”

It was the Countess who made her second misstep in less than a minute.

“I guess that would be a rational choice, if you don’t believe a woman can be a farmer or a climber, for that matter.”

Simonsen hid a smile. The Countess did not try to cover her mistake.

“I’m sorry. Why don’t you just go on and tell us.”

“She had left a sweater in the basement and I was about to drive Per home. We were sitting in the kitchen when she rang the main doorbell. My oldest son opened the door and he couldn’t have been more than three years old. I remember that he came to me proudly and said,
That one’s name is Helle and it forgot its sweater.
Per and I smiled a bit at his words even though the meaning was clear. Jeremy may have heard it because he took over and so I never saw her.”

She made one of her long pauses. They waited, but this time in vain as it turned out.

“Unfortunately there isn’t anything else. At least nothing else that I can think of.”

Simonsen shifted the conversation to more practical matters: “Your husband’s archives?”

“I destroyed them after Jeremy died. I burned the files in our fireplace without looking at a single one. There were a couple hundred and it took several evenings. Before I did it I talked with some of his colleagues and they agreed it was the right thing to do.”

“What about the accounts? How did your husband get paid by his patients?”

“Always cash, and always at the time of each appointment. He made a big production about the act of handing over physical bills. He felt it motivated his clients to make more of their sessions.”

“You don’t sound like someone who shares that view.”

“It was his department, his practice, not mine. Personally, I suspect that part of this conviction stems to tax considerations or rather tax-avoidance considerations. At any rate we always had a lot of cash lying around. Sometimes Jeremy bought me expensive jewelry without any regard for the fact that I hate fussy accessories like that, and when he died I found almost six hundred thousand tucked away. Some of this was in our safe, but other packets of bills were spread in all kinds of places all around the house. It isn’t very long since I found an envelope and I don’t hesitate to call it pathological even though he was my husband. But before you get any ideas, I want you to know that I went to the tax authorities myself and after a long investigation they decided that I could keep the money.”

The Countess and Simonsen nodded approvingly, although they didn’t have the slightest intention of reporting her for tax evasion. Then they asked her half a dozen other questions without getting anywhere. The name Stig Åge Thorsen didn’t mean anything to her and a picture of the man also got no response. They did learn that all of Jeremy Floyd’s appointments were handled through the National Hospital, so any telephone records would be difficult to trace.

And that was that. They did not get further in this round. The interrogation had lasted for more than two hours and all three wished it would end. It fell to Konrad Simonsen to make that decision. After digging in vain into the woman’s relationship with her younger sister and having ignored the Countess’s pleading looks, he finally decided that enough was enough. He glanced at his watch, read the time aloud to the tape recorder, and formally concluded the session. The two detectives stood up. Emilie Mosberg Floyd remained seated.

“Have you stopped the tape?” The question was directed at Simonsen, who answered in the affirmative. “I have something that I’d like to tell you but that I don’t want to have recorded.”

They sat back down again.

“First I want to say—as strongly as I can—that I absolutely do not belong to the camp that claims it is a legitimate act to murder pedophiles. It isn’t right either legally, morally, or in any other way, and I feel betrayed by Per even though I still love him. It’s strange and it confuses me and I don’t understand it, but there it is. And this even though I believe he was behind the burglary that took place in our house last March, and who may have planted the idea of Aconcagua with Jeremy. A mountain he was definitely not ready for, as I see in retrospect.”

She struggled with her emotions and said straight out into the air, “Cerebral edema.” Then she explained, “Acute mountain sickness.”

Simonsen injected a soft, “The burglary.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll get there. So we were in Canada with Jeremy’s brother when someone broke in and rifled through his files. The basement window and the filing cabinet had been forced open but there was nothing missing and we didn’t report it, even though it weighed on Jeremy’s mind. He talked about moving the files into his office but didn’t get to it before he died. Per knew that we were going to Canada and as I said, I believe he was the one who was behind it.”

“What do you think he wanted with the information?”

“What do you think yourself? It would have been an excellent place to start if he wanted to find followers—if I can put it that way—and remember that Jeremy had already introduced him to some of them. He wouldn’t arrive as an unknowing stranger when he one day looked them up.”

This time she was the one who stood up first. On the other side of the glass, Troulsen followed her example. He had an urgent need to go to the bathroom. On his way there he pounded his fist angrily against the doorframe. This time, however, his outburst was not directed to the woman but to her late husband. For careless, stupid, idiotic oversight of the storage of confidential materials.

CHAPTER 55

Like all nurses at the nursing home, Helle Smidt Jørgensen was an expert in counting pills. She had lined up all ten kinds in front of her: seven were taken out of bottles with screw tops, the three others were popped out of foil packets.

She pointed to the last three and explained to her student, “You’re going to hate these. They’ll cause permanent damage to the right thumb.” The student looked down at her thumb as if she wanted to say goodbye to it. Helle Smidt Jørgensen added wearily, “It’ll take a while. But now listen. First you take the tops off the dosing cases that are for fourteen days. Then you order them systematically with the morning pills first, then lunch, then dinner, then the sleep aids. That comes to twenty-two pills per day for Signe Petersen, so as you can see, if she isn’t already sick the pills will do their best to make sure she does.”

While she explained all this she herself started to feel ill. She of all people shouldn’t talk about substance abuse. The room grew fuzzy at the edges and her speech became incoherent.

“… Sleeping aids and psychopharmaceuticals are alarmingly prevalent and have been so for years. It is dangerous to drink at the same time but I can’t get through the day otherwise. Before it was only at night, but now it is also the voices in the hallways—that is if there is any police.”

She focused on the student, who looked like she was far away and didn’t quite understand. They never did. She explained patiently, “The pulse quickens and the hands shake. That is the stress hormone adrenaline that affects the sympathetic nervous system when you are hunted around the clock. All day, every day. Uncle at night and the police by day, you see. A little pick-me-up and an extra Stesolid takes the edge off. Around and around.”

Something was wrong but she didn’t know what. She left her office and walked unsteadily down the corridor and sat down on the back-entrance steps of the nursing home. Here she could get some fresh air and recover. The cool wind felt good on her forehead and a single ray of sun braved the gray weather and shone down on her. She inhaled deeply a couple of times and noticed that the world immediately grew smaller, as if anything other than sitting there were of no importance. An unfamiliar feeling came over her, a feeling that was faraway and now close-by. She was a child, she was playing ball, and it was important.
Karen, Maren, Mette bam, Anni, Anne, Anette bam, Kylle, Pylle, Rylle bam, Bente bam.
The rhymes were easy, also the new one:
Alekto, Megaira, Tisifone bam, Nemesis bam,
but it was hard to aim the balls. Especially overhand. From time to time she dropped one and had to start from the beginning. That was the rule. She did so, determined to get as good as the big girls. A ball fell from her hands and she had to make every effort to find it, so she opened her eyes and looked. There were people around her, people who wished her well.