The Hanging Girl (22 page)

“What’s wrong, Carl?” asked Assad as he came in with the report. “Was there too much ginger?”

*   *   *

Just as Police Superintendent Birkedal had told them, the autopsy upheld that Alberte’s body showed both fractures and internal bleeding, though not so severe that any single injury could be deemed to have been the cause of death.

Carl summed up: “We can conclude from the autopsy that Alberte was still alive when she was flung up in the tree, and that she was alive for a good while afterward. The shinbone and calf bone were broken in both legs, as well as additional fractures elsewhere, but the lesions weren’t individually so serious that they could be fatal. Not immediately, at least. She hung in the tree with her head down the entire time, so she lost blood. Not liters, but enough.”

Carl put the report down on the table. Alberte Goldschmid had hung there for a long time before she died. Poor girl.

“What do you say to that, Carl?” asked Assad.

“Nothing other than that Habersaat’s drawing may well be correct. She was shoveled up there and during the collision sustained fractures and internal lesions, and a couple of deep wounds on her shinbones, from which she bled. So it’s a collection of injuries that took her life. And time, of course.”

“Awful,” said Rose, standing in the doorway. “If only someone had seen her hanging there a bit earlier, she might have been saved.”

She stood there thinking for a moment, as if a new possibility had come to her.

“What is it?” asked Carl.

“I’m not sure. Maybe there is something, then, that suggests it could have been an accident.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, if it was a premeditated murder, the murderer would surely have made sure that she wasn’t still alive afterward and able to testify against him. If it’d been one of you who wanted to get rid of her, wouldn’t you have made sure of that?”

“Yes, I would,” came the prompt reply from Assad.

Carl frowned.

“Well, just speaking hypo . . . Oh! You know, just if I had to imagine it, Carl.”

“Thank you, Assad, we get it. But, Rose, the vehicle didn’t stop at the scene. So a lot could’ve happened that we don’t know about. Maybe the driver parked the car on the main road and walked back to check that she wasn’t moving. Maybe the driver observed it from the rearview mirror. Maybe the killer was in a situation where logic went completely out of the window. Killers don’t often think rationally, Rose, you know that. So we can’t allow ourselves to conclude that this one did.”

He collected Habersaat’s drawings together. “Assad, scan these drawings and send them to the technicians, and tell them that Laursen will call tomorrow and follow up on it all. Talk with Laursen; he can make things happen quicker than others. Over and above those questions already asked, the technicians should check what there is in their archives on the analysis of the wooden board. And we’d also like to know, insofar as Habersaat’s theory about the shovel blade holds, how thick the board would need to be to ensure it wasn’t completely smashed up during the collision. We’d also like to know if a board like that could be securely attached on the hood of a vehicle like the pictured VW Kombi, and without leaving marks on the body of the car. At the same time they can probably tell us, using Habersaat’s drawing and the probable speed of the vehicle, whether it’s possible that Alberte’s body was thrown up toward the vehicle’s windshield and subsequently broke it. And finally, ask if they can do anything to make our photo sharper of the man with the VW. Of course, we’ll keep trying to find the photographer and perhaps
the negative, but they shouldn’t count on it, tell them that. Laursen is already acquainted with most of it, but we’ve got a bit more to go on now, so bring him up to speed on where we’re at.”

He turned to Rose. “You still there? Do you have something else for me?”

“I’ve found what you’re looking for, Carl.”

She looked so damn sure of herself.

“Found what? A sworn statement from the murderer and an admission of guilt?” He laughed.

“The thing about Knarhøj!”

“Good, what was it, then?”

“It was where the young scout Bjarke Habersaat went digging together with a man. You remember, the odd guy on the bench in Listed mentioned that June Habersaat met a man up there on the same occasion. Up by the maze, isn’t that what he said?”

Assad nodded like crazy, but then he had written it in his notebook.

“Right, that was it. But you look like you don’t think they were digging a fire pit. Let me guess. You think it’s the man from Ølene they met? Perhaps you’ve found his diaries?”

“Funny, Carl. I just know that it
could
be the same man, nothing else.”

Carl pulled himself in over the edge of the table. “And how do you know that?”

“I googled Knarhøj, and I didn’t get any hits. However, I found out that there are a lot of mazes on Bornholm, one of which should be situated just west of Listed. So I called a gallery out there, and they were able to tell me that it was actually the owner who made the maze, but that wasn’t until 2006. The mound this maze is built on is called Knarhøj. And the gallery owner had chosen to put it there because of the interesting history of the area. There was a Bronze Age settlement there actually, called Sorte Muld, and there have been a lot of good finds, including several thousand guldgubber, indicating a cult center.”

“Guldgubber?”

“Yes, thin pieces of gold embossed with figures, used as offerings. And the gallery owner had found a sunstone, and that type of find had
never been heard of before. I’ve investigated it and it squares up. So it really is a special place.”

“Sunstone, you said. What on earth is that?”

She smiled. She’d been expecting that question, too. “It’s a sort of crystal, used by the Vikings to determine the exact position of the sun in the sky in overcast conditions. It’s got something to do with polarizing sunbeams. Actually, they use something similar today when flying in the polar regions, so I read. They weren’t half stupid, those Vikings.”

“Sunstones, Vikings, guldgubber.” He needed to collect his thoughts.

“So in your opinion we’ve now got a connection not only between June Habersaat and the man we’re looking for, but a connection between Christian Habersaat’s interest in occult phenomena and the man from Ølene, who took part in nightly naked dances and so on. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“You’re not as green as you look, Carl Mørck, but that would’ve been a shame. It was actually you who caught the connection with Knarhøj. And if it is the same man Alberte met, then it’s even more necessary for June Habersaat to tell us everything she knows about the man.”

Carl sighed again. “Yes, and more besides. Much more. I know where this is going, Rose, and you’re right. But you won’t get me back to Bornholm to twist June Habersaat’s arm behind her back. Do you want to go? Or you, Assad?”

You couldn’t exactly say that he emanated enthusiasm.

Rose shrugged. “Okay, fair enough. Then she’ll have to come to us.”

“How in the world will you make her do that? We’ve got nothing on her that can force her.”

“As I see it, that’s your problem, Carl. Aren’t you the boss?”

Carl put his head in his hand, and, God help him, now Gordon was there knocking on the doorframe. They might as well invite the police choir and the Salvation Army brass band. There wasn’t anywhere left to get a moment’s peace anyway.

“Sorry, Carl,” said Gordon. “I totally forgot to tell you that someone called Morten called. It’s probably the guy who lived with you once. He said that Hardy hasn’t come back.”

“What did you say?”

“That Hardy’s missing.” All the idiot was missing was to start bleating, he looked so sheepish.

“When did you find out?” asked Assad, looking worried.

“Almost two hours ago.”

Carl took out his cell phone and looked at the display. The sound was turned all the way down and there were at least fifteen messages and missed calls from Morten.

Now he stopped breathing.

They’d looked everywhere, Morten
said, when he stood outside the terraced house with flushed cheeks that showed clear evidence of tears. Hardy had driven off in his electric wheelchair while Morten had been inside checking the weather forecast, and now he’d been out wearing only a shirt in the pouring rain ever since.

In spite of his confusion, nerves, and chattering teeth, he just about managed to tell them where he and Mika had looked. “We’ve been everywhere within a kilometer and a half of the house, Carl. He’s just disappeared.”

“What about the cell? He can activate it, right?” asked Assad.

“He hasn’t got it with him. We always go out together, so mine was enough,” answered Morten.

“Is he in the Kvickly supermarket or maybe at Expert Radio? He’s always listening to music, so maybe he’s out looking for something new.”

“He’s got an iPod, Carl. He uses Spotify. I pop the headphones in for him, and then he can easily while away a couple of hours before he asks me to take them out again.”

Carl nodded. Spotify? He’d heard the name before but had no idea what it was.

“What about the wheelchair battery?” asked Assad.

“It’s enormous,” answered Morten. “He can get right out to Frederikssund and back on a single charge.” He began to snivel again just at the thought.

“I was thinking more about the rain.”

“It doesn’t matter, Assad, a battery like that is well protected,” answered Carl. He turned to Morten. “It’s been more than three hours, and the wheelchair has a cruising speed of twelve-point-five kilometers an hour. He could be thirty-five kilometers away. Have you called his ex-wife?”

“You don’t think he’s driven all the way into Copenhagen?” Now his whole body was shaking.

“Go in and ring; we just need to check. And ring Hillerød Hospital, too. Ask if he’s been brought in.”

Never before had Rønneholtparken witnessed so many fine small steps run so quickly. Morten was gone before the sentence was even finished.

They decided to do a circle of the neighborhood; maybe someone had seen him. Maybe he’d said something to someone.

“We need to split up, Assad. I’ll take the car and . . .”

“What about me?”

“You can take that, but you’d better put a raincoat on. There’s one in the trunk. I can’t believe how bloody cold this spring has turned.”

He pointed to Jesper’s moped. A well-oiled example of fifty cubics, which Jesper hadn’t ridden since he’d left home.

Assad gave a short contorted smile.

*   *   *

Since the public care system had been set in motion, and day-to-day life in Rønneholtparken home had been turned upside down, Carl hadn’t had the same long talks with Hardy as before. Morten was his day-to-day caretaker, Morten’s partner Mika was Hardy’s mental coach and physiotherapist, municipal home caretakers covered relief, and the wheelchair enabled him to get out. So Carl was suddenly on the sideline, and that’s where he was standing now, wondering if it’d been in Hardy’s best interest.

As the window wipers went back and forth, he asked himself where the old boy might have got to, as the glories of Allerød sped past.

Hardy had his thumb and a little movement in his wrist and neck, and
with these extremely limited tools, a different life and an immense freedom compared to the years of bed rest he had left behind. In the beginning, he’d been totally ecstatic about his newly won movement opportunities, but lately he’d developed a greater and greater understanding of their limitations.

“Before, I felt sorry for myself, but I also felt I was something special, because I endured my life. Now I just feel like a deadweight for those I’m closest to,” he’d said, explaining that he was well aware how heavy the work with him was, and how little he could give back.

But while he’d spoken of suicide when he was at the back pain clinic every time Carl had visited him, he hadn’t mentioned it since he’d moved into Carl’s living room. The question was, whether those thoughts had begun to haunt him again.

“Have you seen a man in an electric wheelchair go past in the rain?” he shouted once in a while out of the window. People had an ability to look amazingly indifferent.

He stopped in the parking lot at the bottom of Tokkekøbvej and looked at the area of woodland with a worried expression. All things considered, they were on an impossible mission. People did disappear if they didn’t want to be found, and is that what Hardy wanted?

He called Morten’s number.

“What about you, anything new?”

He heard a snivel through the receiver. “He isn’t at any of the places I’ve called. Mika’s asked the police to send out a search party. They wouldn’t normally do it so soon, but when they heard it was a colleague who’d been paralyzed in service, they made an exception.”

“Good. Say thanks to Mika.”

He closed his eyes and tried to recall something or other that might give him a clue about where Hardy might have gone. He simply had no idea.

There came a humming sound from his cell, and Carl lunged for it. It was Assad.

“Yeah!” he shouted. “Have you found him?”

“No, not quite.”

“What do you mean?”

“Up where the town hall used to be, I met a cyclist who’d seen a wheelchair on Nymøllevej out toward Lynge. So I stepped on it.”

“Why didn’t you call me straightaway?”

“Well, that’s it. I’ve been pulled over by the police. They’re standing here next to me on Rådhusvej, claiming that I was doing a hundred and fifteen on the cycle path. Will you come out here?”

*   *   *

It took a while for Carl to convince his colleagues to release Assad. Actually, it was totally without precedent for the two uniformed men to see a moped, which had a limit of forty kilometers an hour, get up to those speeds. And there were no mitigating circumstances however you looked at it, as they said. The result would be legal action and that would undoubtedly have consequences for Assad’s driver’s license, said one of the officers.

Carl considered the consequences. Assad was about to lose his driver’s license! He could’ve almost been grateful.

“Who owns the moped?” asked the officer.

“It’s mine,” said Assad courageously.

Jesper didn’t deserve it.

“We’ve just had a call radioed in,” his colleague said from the patrol car. “The man you’re looking for, Hardy Henningsen, has been located by a couple of employees at Lynge Drive-in Cinema. Go straight on past the gravel pit and over the highway, and you’ll find your friend in the cinema parking lot sitting in his wheelchair looking at a white screen.”

They let Assad go, but confiscated the moped. And even though Carl was impressed with his stepson’s technical talent and knowledge when it came to tuning a vehicle, it was only fair that he should pay for his illegal activities.

Then one of the officers tapped Carl’s shoulder. “Here,” he said, slamming a couple of bits of paper in his hand. Carl looked at him. It was the ticket with Assad’s name on it. “We know Hardy Henningsen’s case, so
the man looking for him shouldn’t pay for it. But don’t tell him straightaway. Let him sweat a bit.” Then he put a finger up to his cap to say good-bye.

It took less than five minutes to get there.

A drive-in cinema without cars, and especially in the pouring rain, is an extremely dismal sight. This was Europe’s largest outdoor cinema, and in front of the enormous screen, Hardy’s wheelchair and the figure in it appeared immeasurably small.

Despite the blanket they’d thrown over him, it was a long time since Carl had seen a living being so drenched.

“What’s going on, Hardy?” was the first thing Carl could think of to say.

Hardy’s eyes didn’t lose focus at all, but the mouth shushed them. So they stood there a further five minutes and stared at him before Hardy finally turned his head around saying: “Oh, so here you are!”

They got him home with disability transport and rubbed him so that his pale skin glowed copper red.

“What happened there, Hardy? You need to tell us.”

“I’ve decided to live my life again, as much as I can.”

“Okay, I’m not sure exactly what you’re thinking about now. But if you continue in the way you did today, it’ll be a short-lived affair.”

“Yes, don’t ever do that again, Hardy,” Morten agreed. A stout being like him wasn’t cut out for that kind of excitement.

Hardy tried to smile. “Thank you. But you interrupted me reliving a film I saw out there thirty years ago with my Minna. I sat imagining that I was holding her hand like I did back then. Do you understand?”

“I do,” said Assad, more subdued than usual.

“You’re saying that you saw a film that wasn’t on and held a woman’s hand who wasn’t there and who is living a different life now. That’s a dangerous path, Hardy.”

He banged his head against the neck rest on the wheelchair a couple of times. A bad habit he’d adopted after he started sitting up. “Easy to say, Carl. But what would you rather have me do? Just wait for death?
I’ve got nothing to do.” He turned his eyes to one side. “When I was lying over there on the bunk, at least I had your cases to speculate about. You never tell me anything anymore.”

*   *   *

An hour and a half after the sun had set behind the heavy, grey, overcast sky, Assad and Carl had remedied what Carl had neglected. And when they turned the light on in the living room, it was possible to see clearly what effect the review of the Alberte Goldschmid case had had on their disabled friend. As always, his body was like a pillar of salt in the wheelchair, but his eyes were present and more than ready to overlook all his limitations.

“So this June Habersaat, now Kofoed, is perhaps your key to getting a name and a description of your prime suspect, or maybe even more than that?”

“Maybe, yes. Rose thinks so anyway.”

“Yes, and me, too,” Assad said, nodding.

“But she wouldn’t talk with you, so she isn’t likely to next time either.”

“Rose thinks we can threaten her but I don’t think so.”

“And now you’ve more or less reached a stumbling block in the story.” He smiled. “What is it they say when a story’s reached a deadlock? You just need to introduce a unicorn, and then things take off again. Or a flying elephant, for want of something better.”

Assad nodded. “Where I come from, we say that if you can’t do anything else, then you have to ride your camel in the fifth way.”

At that, Carl lost the thread for a moment. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear an explanation of either the first four or the fifth.

“Something to do with at the front, in the middle, at the back, or on the humps,” said Hardy. “I’ve heard it.”

Assad nodded. “And the fifth is with your foot firmly in its backside. Makes the animal run like crazy.”

Carl was somewhere else altogether. “Say again what it was June Habersaat reeled off out on the road in Aakirkeby, Assad.”

He flicked through his notebook. “I didn’t manage to get it written down straightaway, but something along these lines:
Wish I had a river that I could skate away on. But it don’t snow here, it stays pretty and green.
” He looked up at Hardy with a puzzled expression. “Does that sound right?”

Hardy’s face twitched. “Just about,” he said. “It’s Joni Mitchell.”

Carl gaped. “You know it?”

“Can you come and help me, Mika?” said Hardy.

Morten reluctantly let go of his muscular partner. Everyone was together, so the large ex-mama of the house was happy again.

“What was the title, Hardy?” asked Mika.

“The song’s called ‘River.’ You can find it on the playlist on the iPod. Put it in the docking station so everyone can hear.”

Carl googled it while Mika scrolled through the playlists with thousands of songs.

“I’ve got it,” said Mika after scrolling for a moment. “Joni Mitchell, ‘River,’ 1970.”

“Yes, that’s the one,” said Hardy. “It starts a bit strange.”

A few seconds passed and then came the first few bars of “Jingle Bells,” a bit jazzy, a bit discordant, but “Jingle Bells” all the same.

Carl and Assad listened intensely. When they came to the right part of the lyrics, Assad thrust his thumb in the air.

Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on . . .

It was sung by a crisp voice to a melancholy piano accompaniment. A whole four minutes on longing and loss.

Carl nodded to himself. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that Hardy knew that song.

“Try and find one of those websites that analyzes songs, Carl. There are loads of forums that do,” said Hardy.

Carl typed in the title and looked down over the page of links. The fifth one was a hit.

He read out what was written.

“Joni Mitchell is Canadian but moved to California to be a hippie and follow her musical career. The song ‘River’ is about spending Christmas
far from home in a strange place with strange traditions—without snow or ice-skating. To put it briefly, the song is about a desire to put the present behind you and return to more simple and innocent days.”

They looked at each other, until Hardy broke the silence.

“She sings beautifully, and it expresses a lot. It hits me right in the heart when I hear it, you’ll understand. I just don’t know what it means in this situation. I don’t know this June Habersaat. What had you just spoken about when she quoted it?”

Carl pushed his lip forward. How on earth should he be able to remember that?

“She’d just said to me that I didn’t know her dreams or how much she’d fought to fulfill them,” said Assad. “When she said that, it was easy to understand why she’d recite something like this.”

It went silent again. None of them knew what they should make of it. It would’ve been a different story if Rose had been there.

“Would anyone like some soup?” Morten sang from somewhere in the region of the kitchen. It brought Carl to.

“If you think carefully about it, June Habersaat probably hasn’t seen so many of her dreams fulfilled in life.”

“Not many, no. But, then, who has?” asked Hardy. “But the affair with that young man, don’t you think that was one of them?”

“Probably, yes. But it just doesn’t add up for me that she’d suddenly blurt out those lyrics. I don’t think June Habersaat is the Joni Mitchell–listening type.”