The Hanging: A Thriller (10 page)

His good mood lasted less than ten minutes. When the meeting was over but before he had left the building, his cell phone rang. The Countess’s message was brief and to the point, in direct contrast to his exclamation, which echoed in the institute’s corridors.

“That is a lie; that is a damned lie.”

But it wasn’t.

CHAPTER 14

The Climber sized up the tree that stood in the square in Allerslev, a small provincial town outside Odense. It was a European beech; he estimated that it was about one hundred years old. The trunk was at least one meter in diameter and the canopy stretched out far above his head like an enormous red-violet bell; a couple of branches had been pruned here and there but on the whole it had been allowed to grow as it liked. It was not really in proportion to the square—it was simply too tall—but it had probably been there before most of the shops that lined the square were built. He let his gaze travel around and concluded with some satisfaction that there were no residential buildings nearby, which was key, because however carefully he tried to proceed, some noise was inevitable.

Coolly and soberly, he then surveyed the nearest hot-dog stand. The construction quality was low and the materials were cheap. Chips of concrete had crumbled onto the floor, the sliding door and the window to the right were Plexiglas, and white-painted plywood covered the counter under the window as well as the three outer walls. The lumber was simple pieces of pine hardly thicker than five-by-ten centimeters and the insulation was nothing to write home about—a single layer of rock wool held in place with faux tiles in hard Masonite. The roof was flat and sloped to a plastic gutter behind the building. One-half consisted of charcoal-colored roofing tiles, most likely fastened directly onto inexpensive veneer, and the other half—where the customers stood—was covered with translucent corrugated panels littered with leaves and insects and in rather desperate need of cleaning.

From the bench where he sat he could see the hands of the staff as they worked and from time to time also a face, reflected in a stainless-steel panel. White-yellow like a bulging abscess, bloodless, with dull eyes, as repulsive as a cadaver. Unfortunately, he would have to kill him first or else his chances of survival would be too great. There was also the matter of the tree—he had known that as soon as he saw it, even though it would make the work more difficult. Perhaps an unnecessary complication, but the symbolic value it would carry for the chosen was magnificent, and would certainly provide a couple of days of nervous stomach for the many regulars of the hot-dog stand. And a beech was so fitting … so wonderfully fitting.

He again turned to the tree with an expert’s gaze and felled it in his thoughts. The hot-dog vendor had a side job delivering newspapers and started his days at an ungodly hour. It gave him a golden opportunity—he could work on the tree all night. If he set the chainsaw on low so that the blade ran as slowly as possible, the noise would be reduced to an acceptable minimum. The slow speed would mean his work would take longer but he had time. First a Humboldt fore cut. The blade on his chainsaw was shorter than the diameter of the tree, so he would have to work from both sides. Then the felling cut, parallel to the fore cut, sawn with an alternately pulling and pushing motion. A pair of sturdy plastic wedges were placed so that the blade would not get stuck, and then finally the heart cut, which he would do only at the very end. Twenty seconds more at a regular speed and then the tree would fall.

He glanced up one last time into the branches and then at the hot-dog stand, then he smiled and said a single word into the air: “Bam.”

CHAPTER 15

Poul Troulsen walked into the reading clinic at the Langebæk School in high spirits, and the Countess used his entrance as a welcome opportunity for a break. She was in the middle of her second review of the failed interrogation session with Miss Lubert earlier that morning. This time, the woman had brought along her own lawyer—a well-meaning, competent, and most likely highly stressed fellow, since he was her brother-in-law. The Countess knew him well and she hoped for his sake that the sisters were very different. He deserved as much. Not that anyone deserved Ditte Lubert. Despite Pauline Berg’s insistent questions and the lawyer’s indirect assistance, the session turned into one long march in place, where every single word was turned, measured, defined, and redefined eight times by the psychologist until no one remembered the original question and no reasonable answer was possible. After almost one hour of this, Berg threw in the towel.

“What are you doing?”

“A lot of things at the same time. I have six teams going around the school rooms, plus two with neighbors. Mostly the teams take care of themselves, of course, apart from the fact that they call in every once in a while to say that they have nothing to report. At the same time, I’ve been gathering information on Per Clausen. Our operations leader calls me every half hour, so that is also something I have to contend with.”

“Where is he now?”

“Right now he’s shopping at a local grocery store.”

“What’s that? Our friend Lubert?” He pointed to the tape recorder in front of the Countess.

“Yes, good guess. Pauline didn’t get anywhere. She’s also a bit of a mouthful.”

Troulsen grinned. “Play some for me.”

The Countess rewound the tape.

“You’re pretty debonair now that she’s no longer your problem.” She started the tape and turned up the volume. School psychologist Ditte Lubert’s scathing voice filled the room.

“I’m sure I had some work to do.”

“You have told us that you were on vacation last week. Isn’t that correct?”

“One of you already asked me that once. You really should coordinate your information.”

“But is that correct?”

“If I was on vacation or if I said that I was on vacation?”

“If you were on vacation.”

“If I said I was on vacation, then I was.”

“So you were, then.”

“Is this really relevant in any way?”

“I don’t know, Ditte.”

The Countess pushed the Pause button and briefly explained: “She came in dragging a lawyer. He’s an otherwise reasonable man who has the misfortune of being married to her sister.”

“What did you do on your vacation?”

“Should I answer that? Do the police need to know what I did on my vacation?”

“No, you don’t have to answer anything. We’ve been through this, Ditte.”

“Does she actually have the right to ask me how I spend my time?”

“Yes, she has that right. But, as we’ve established, you don’t have to answer.”

The Countess rewound further and played another short bit.

“… It may improve the communications if you tell her.”
The legal council’s voice was tired.

“I agree with that.”
Pauline Berg’s voice was even more tired.

“Then first she has to define exactly what she means by ‘unusual.’”
Ditte Lubert sounded well rested.

The Countess sighed and turned it off. She said, “And it goes on and on and on. I have seen many extraordinary witnesses but she takes the cake. She’s worse than the janitor.”

“What do you think about her?”

“What I think? I think that Ditte Lubert is looking for a bit of a ride. Single mother, a kitchen-sink existence, envious of her colleagues’ successes, querulous and puffed up, but I agree with you, if you push all that rubbish aside there is something she’s hiding. Right now I just don’t want to think about her. Tell me how things have been going for you. Have you found the happy pizza-delivery person?”

Troulsen sat down on the table next to her, ready to tell. The Countess sniffed a couple of times when he was closer.

“You smell terrible.”

“There’s a reason for that. I’ve been standing in pizza garbage up to my ankles for an eternity. But listen. When the joint opened this morning I was on the spot and had a long chat with the pizza mama herself. At first she didn’t understand a single thing and when she answered it was eighty percent Italian. I’m telling you, it was hard work, but then luckily her son came out and after that it turned out that the woman actually spoke reasonable Danish but was hiding behind a fake language barrier as a defense mechanism when she realized she was dealing with the public authorities. The son managed to talk her into a more reasonable state of mind and after some back and forth they agreed that the pizzas had been ordered last Monday, by a man, whose order was specified on a note.”

“Interesting. So, you were right.”

“Yes, I guess so. Next time we’ll try to get her to describe the man, something that was completely impossible today. After endless variations of the same five questions we concluded that the customer had been between the ages of twenty and eighty, was most likely neither a dwarf nor someone confined to a wheelchair and who was most definitely male. At that point I actually believed she was the victim of an undiagnosed dementia. In hindsight, this is clearly an unfair assessment but under the circumstances it was unfortunately more than justified.”

“You searched the garbage for the note?”

“Of course. We turned three containers upside down in the back and started right in. The son helped me, while the woman directed, which was a joke. Finally we found it—a small, light-blue Post-it, where the delivery date and the number of pizzas were elegantly written in a strikingly rounded hand. A graphological gift, even if most of it was numbers. Everyone was happy and they gave me a coffee on the house so the whole thing ended on a nice note. Until I accidentally happened to glance above the counter where the various orders in the restaurant were hanging, written in—well, take a guess.”

“A strikingly rounded hand.”

“Bingo! It was just bad luck and the son was as annoyed as I was. He apologized for his mother’s faulty memory but it was too much for his mother and she flew into a state. She poured out the worst vindictives over our sinful heads—a fine mixture of Danish and Italian—and in the middle of this abuse she calls out to us why we don’t just go and ask the man himself. We just sit there gaping until the son pulls himself together and demands an explanation: does she know him or not? But no, she doesn’t know anyone. He and his father are always the ones who get out and meet people, while she has to stand there selling pizzas. She just knows that the man is a janitor at her son’s old school.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Apparently not. She distinguished between knowing someone and knowing who someone is, which you have to admit is not a crazy thing. She claimed that was where her description got hung up, because she thought we meant his personality and not his appearance.”

The Countess nodded thoughtfully.

“God only knows how Per Clausen will explain the order. It’ll be an interesting afternoon. Won’t you call Simon right away? He’s probably done with Forensics by now.”

“Can’t you do it? I have to use the restroom and I also have to deliver these before they get too warm. Where is the new guy?”

Poul Troulsen proudly pulled two sodas out of his briefcase.

“Impressive. I really didn’t think you could manage the whole texting thing.”

“If the truth be told, I got some help.”

“Malte is programming in the next room. He wants to set up a cross-referencing system for our reports. It was his own idea, and don’t bother asking him for any details.”

Malte Borup gratefully received his sodas. While he was digging for his money, Troulsen at first glanced idly at his work, but took a closer look when something caught his eye.

“Tell me, what are you doing exactly?”

“A cross-referencing system. It’ll save you a lot of time. Automatic free text searching for connections. Inductive and asynchronic. I found a great AI-class library online. For starters I’m integrating with hospitals and telecommunications. Am done with the big hospitals with the exception of Herlev. They’re a hard nut to crack but I’ll try again this evening.”

His listener did not look like someone who could appreciate the depth of this information so he added helpfully, “AI means ‘artificial intelligence.’”

Troulsen laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and said calmly, “Maybe you should try to express yourself in sentences as opposed to acronyms. I’m having trouble understanding what you’re saying—tell me, don’t you know that it’s illegal to break into other people’s computer systems?”

Borup didn’t reply.

“Aren’t we the police, for God’s sake?”

Troulsen’s large mass so close-by made him nervous and when the subject changed he felt completely spun around.

“Malte, who is the prime minister of Denmark?”

He thought hard while his fingers scratched at the keyboard. The question could be answered by Google in a split second, but that would probably be cheating.

“Isn’t it someone from Jutland?”

“It’s always someone from Jutland. Give me more.”

He crossed his fingers and took a guess.

“From Århus?”

Troulsen decided to postpone his bathroom visit. The last thing they needed was a first page headline about a police hacker. He returned to the Countess, recounted the situation, and ordered her to give her protégé a lesson in social studies, starting with the laws of the land. Not that the boy seemed to have any objections to any of it, but it appeared that he took the relationship much less seriously than seemed suitable.

“Okay, I’ll have to talk to him. In the meantime you should see how well you remember your geography. Or you can take out a map of Denmark.”

“What do you mean?”

“Simon wants one of us to go to Tarm and talk to the janitor’s sister, and if I remember correctly I was the one who…”

She let the sentence hang in the air unfinished and he capitulated at once.

“I’ll go. Can I take your car?”

The Countess’s phone rang, so she simply nodded. The message was brief but serious, which she confirmed upon hanging up.