The Hanging: A Thriller (4 page)

A car drove past on the road behind the cemetery and a few isolated snatches of a car radio broke the peace for a moment or two. He waited until the quiet descended again.

“When Per said goodbye he said something that I have thought a lot about: ‘goodbye, foam guy.’ That was his last word to me: ‘foam guy.’ Said with that crooked little smile that is so typical of him. He was obviously referring to the fact that I used to chew on foam as a child because I thought it could absorb the darkness inside me. I had almost forgotten about it, I mean, that I had told him about it. How I used to pick little bits of foam from all manner of places: cushions and seats, balls from gym class, the sweat band in my riding helmet, yes I even tore little pieces from my mother’s shoulder pads. When I speak of it, I can recall the taste, even though one wouldn’t think foam tastes like anything. But it does. It tastes of wrongdoing, of wrongness and guilt.”

He shook his head to rid himself of his thoughts, and added thoughtfully, “It is unpleasant to remember and … well, perhaps Per captured it perfectly. When everything is said and done, that is probably what I am—the foam guy.”

CHAPTER 5

Professor,
medicus,
forensic pathologist, and medical examiner Arthur Elvang was a churlish man. Konrad Simonsen steeled himself, determined to keep his focus and not let himself be distracted by the professor’s sharp tongue. They met in front of the gymnasium, where Elvang sat absorbed in a newspaper in approximately the same place where the little Turkish girl had been sitting some seven hours earlier, and he, too, was reluctant to give up his reading material. After an eternity, he laid the pages aside and returned his awareness to his surroundings as his small, peering eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses flew critically up and down over Simonsen, as if he were taking measurements for a suit.

“You have enough fat stores to last you through the winter, my little Simon. Too bad about your vacation. Where were you then? At a halfway house?”

He stretched out a twisted hand, and Simonsen, who thought he wanted to underscore his observations by sticking a finger in his stomach, drew back.

“Now don’t be sulky, give me a hand to get up.”

Simonsen gingerly helped him to his feet.

“I’m not upset. My daughter is always commenting on my girth so I am used to it, but it is many years since anyone called me ‘little Simon.’ That stopped when Planck retired.”

Planck had been the head of the Homicide Division before him.

“Yes, time flies. Have you told your daughter about your diabetes?”

Simonsen stiffened.

“How in all the world do you know…”

He stopped and regained control of himself. The professor’s medical expertise was legendary, although he might simply have been making a stab in the dark. A guess he had now unwittingly confirmed by his exclamation. He hurriedly left the subject.

“Is the room free?”

“Yes, the technicians left about a quarter of an hour ago, but keep away from the back entrance as well as the bathroom. I hear that you have free hands in this matter. Is that correct?”

“Apparently.”

“Then you should bring Planck in, unless he is senile. The two of you bring out the best in each other. And as it happens, he is more talented than you.”

“He is far from senile. Shall we go in?”

“Yes, of course. Good idea, little Simon.”

The corpses of five men were strung up in the middle of the room, each with a noose of a sturdy blue nylon rope around the neck. The ends were fastened around sturdy hooks screwed into the beams about seven meters above. The men’s feet were about half a meter from the floor, and the bodies had been placed at least two meters apart in such a way that the four outermost bodies formed a square, the sides of which ran parallel to the walls. All the bodies were missing hands but the lower arms were intact from the elbow down to the wrist. The faces had been disfigured to the point that most of the human elements were gone; also the genitals, which had either been mutilated beyond recognition or removed. Death and the injuries gave the men a similar look, as if their physical differences no longer existed. Simonsen recognized the phenomenon and knew that when he had studied the dead a little longer, their individuality would return.

“Chainsaw?”

Elvang confirmed this. That was one of his positive attributes. He wasn’t afraid to express an immediate opinion, in direct contrast to most other pathologists that Simonsen knew, who seldom wanted even to confirm the sex of a corpse before it had undergone a CT scan. And physicians were even worse.

“While they were still alive?”

“No.”

The answer was a relief; the whole thing was horrific enough as it was, even though he surprisingly did not react physically when he saw the bodies. Perhaps because the room had been aired out, or perhaps because he had had time to prepare himself for the sight, or perhaps because he was mentally desensitized and had already seen more than was good for him. Who could know what the reason was, and who cared? Not he, at any rate. He continued his slow circle around the men.

In view of the fact that each of them must have bled a great deal, there were not a lot of bloodstains. Under each of the dead was only a small, viscous pool about the diameter of a tennis ball. The neck, the top of the chest, and the thighs were bloody, and there were also red clumps in their hair. Otherwise there was no trace of blood, but he could clearly discern the sickly sweet smell of blood that mingled with the stronger stink of excrement and bodily fluids. The temperature, and the three open windows, kept the stench at a minimum. The yellow-white swollen bodies led his thoughts to hanging sides of pork on a slaughterhouse assembly line, a disrespectful image that, to his vexation, he was unable to shake.

He focused on the heads of the men as he slowly moved in among the bodies and examined each of them. The wounds varied from person to person. Three of them had had their entire faces sawed off. The blade had been drawn straight down from the crown of the head to the jaw so that brain, mouth cavity, and throat were exposed. The rest had been slashed in a crisscross manner with the blade held perpendicular to the face. Two had retained their tongues and some teeth. One had an almost-undamaged eye.

The same destructiveness had dominated the removal of the genitals. Two had lost their penises and testicles, two others only the penis. On one the cut was so deep that the bladder had fallen out and was hanging out over the crotch. The remaining victim had lost only the foreskin. The man in the middle had emptied his bowels; sticky black excrement covered his buttocks and the backs of his thighs, and a handful of flies had found their way there. The wounds at the wrists, however, were clean and precise. Simonsen could see the marrow in the two bones of the lower arm and started randomly wondering which one was the ulna and the other radius. But which was the large and which was the small he could not remember.

He started over and walked another round, this time looking for identifying markers. A rough estimate put the men’s ages between forty and seventy years. One had a gold ring in his left ear as well as a faded eagle tattooed on the right shoulder, and two had scars from appendix or hernia operations. One was bald and had an unnaturally dark complexion, probably from a tanning salon. The corpse in the back left corner had long, unclipped toenails that were infected with fungus and resembled pork rinds. In the right ear canal was a tooth with a gold filling.

A last round was devoted to inspecting the ropes that had been hung with mathematical precision parallel to the walls. If he lined them up diagonally and looked down the series of ropes with one eye, he was unable to see the final one. That was true of both diagonals. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble inserting the screws into the ceiling.

Simonsen concluded his inspection and walked back to Elvang, who had displayed only a fleeting interest in the bodies and now looked extremely bored.

“Your initial assessment?”

The professor did not hesitate.

“Hanged here, weren’t moved. Wednesday or Thursday. Look like ethnic Danes. But don’t ask me how it was accomplished or why there isn’t blood everywhere.”

“When will you have something firm on the time of death?”

The old man sighed. He was no longer a spring chicken and the thought of the evening’s work that awaited him held no pleasure.

“I’ve had to call for reinforcements. On overtime hours, which you are paying for.”

“Absolutely. Bring in as many as you like.”

“Call me after midnight.”

“Roger that.”

Simonsen had only one more question. It was, however, somewhat controversial. Strictly speaking, it also fell outside the professor’s line of work, but in view of the man’s enormous experience and preeminent expertise it was not an unreasonable question.

“Terrorism?”

It took a couple of seconds for Elvang to grasp his meaning, then he grew impish. He flapped his hands by the side of his head like a hysterical teenager and said sarcastically, “Ooooh, ooooh, the monsters are coming. And they’re not coming out of the forest, they’re coming from the water.”

Simonsen ignored this odd outburst and said coldly, “Nine/eleven, Bali, Beslan, Madrid, London. Was that also paranoia, Professor?”

Their gazes locked, then the old man finally shrugged.

“If you are thinking of holy crusaders with curved sabres and dreams about the caliph, well, there isn’t anything here that I can see that points to such an interpretation. But I don’t know what that would be in any case. Your question is ill conceived.”

“Perhaps, but it’s a question I will have to answer for the rest of the day.”

Elvang did not reply. He glanced at the bodies and shook his head thoughtfully. With his bald, age-spotted crown, his thin ruffled hair and sunken chest, he most of all resembled a baby bird.

Then he said, “I was in Rwanda in 1995.”

“I didn’t think you liked to fly.”

“I only do it in cases of genocide. For four months I traveled literally from one mass grave to another. There were so unbelievably many murdered people that it defies description, and I discovered a degree of depravity and excess that you could not imagine in your wildest nightmare. It was indescribably awful, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst thing was to come back home and realize that no one was interested. The victims were simply the wrong color to sell news and to refer to the catastrophe was almost in bad taste, so I apologize if I have a somewhat cynical attitude to the concept of terrorism.”

Simonsen felt empty.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s no one asking you to say anything. Forget it, everyone else does. But tell me, how do you know I don’t like to fly?”

“That’s just what I’ve heard.”

“It wouldn’t by any chance be from that story about how the city’s hotel chains have pulled strings to keep me in my job as long as possible because my fear of flying has brought international conferences to Copenhagen?”

Simonsen felt a faint warmth in his cheeks.

“Something along those lines.”

The door at one end of the gymnasium opened. Arne Pedersen, the Countess, and Pauline Berg walked in, immediately followed by Poul Troulsen.

“You are a fool. To think that the country supports a homicide chief who believes that kind of nonsense. It is frightening. Shame on you. Get a bucket while you’re at it.”

“What do you want with a bucket?”

“Your latest recruit has not yet learned to suppress her instinctual human reactions.”

The observation came too late. One second later, Berg collapsed and vomited onto the floor without making use of the plastic bag that she had been holding in her hand for that very purpose. Pedersen glanced down at his vomit-spattered shoes and took out a handkerchief. It was made of raw silk and had been rather expensive. He managed to lift one foot before the Countess snatched the handkerchief and held it out to Berg, who looked gratefully up at him before she retched again.

CHAPTER 6

The corpses in the gymnasium were gone and all the windows were open, and yet it seemed to Pauline Berg, when she walked in the door, that the smell was unbearable. But it was most likely a deception of the senses and thus possible to verify. Konrad Simonsen was sitting in the middle of the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He reminded her of a monk in a pagoda and she had trouble guessing what he was up to.

“Arne said you wanted to talk to me.”

She could hear that she sounded like a nervous exam taker. Normally she dealt well with men, who often found her attractive and intelligent, but her boss was the exception that proved the rule, and apart from the fact that her choice of clothing was sometimes criticized by his puritanical gaze, he seemed mostly to ignore her. That is, on a personal level. She obeyed his gesture and sat down next to him.

“Did you see the bodies?”

“Yes, the sweet old doctor showed me around. I’ve forgotten what he is called but he carried on a running explanation of everything while we were looking and it wasn’t so bad.”

“The sweet old doctor is Arthur Elvang, and all of us have gotten sick from time to time. You are definitely not the only one who has thrown up today but you’ll find that you toughen up over the years. I don’t know if that is good or bad.”

“It will definitely be more practical.”

She tried a smile but did not set much of a response, and the situation struck her as strange. She shifted uncomfortably.

He must have noticed her restlessness, or else he read her thoughts. At any rate he said, “There is a reason why we are sitting here—I’ll come to that later. Tell me how the janitor reacted when you found him.”

“It was actually a canine unit that tracked him down, or rather, the dog. It was down by the shed for the athletic equipment by the soccer field, and he claimed he had only just woken up. I don’t know … there’s not much more to say. He mostly ignored me, apart from saying that he would tell my teacher about the rain poncho. Arne was very thoughtful…”