The Hanging: A Thriller (16 page)

She formed her hand like a cell phone and cleverly mimed a bad connection. Then she smiled briefly.

“When I went through everything one more time, he wanted to be sure that he had understood me correctly, that what I had said was that this kind of unauthorized use of county telecommunications could mean that his sister-in-law could be demoted from senior to junior school counselor unless she rectified the situation by cooperating fully with the police, which I could find no fault with. Ditte Lubert turned up twenty minutes later. Without the lawyer.”

Troulsen commented again: “Very entertaining.”

“Like a dentist appointment. She was sulky enough but she came crawling back on her knees and admitted that she called her sister last Wednesday. To save money, she walked over to the school and used the speech therapist’s office phone to cover her tracks. The call ran from one twenty-one to one fifty-four, which we know from the account invoice, and on her way home she saw a white van that was turning out from the school’s back entrance. It was around two o’clock but unfortunately that is all that she saw. No matter how hard I pressed her after that, she was unable to elaborate on her answers. This time there was no resistance, she simply had nothing more to contribute.”

Pedersen asked, “But is she sure that it was a minivan?”

“Completely sure. Unfortunately, that hardly narrows down the field. The smallest are eight-passenger but they range all the way up to twenty for the largest. I’m sending a vehicle expert to her home tomorrow, but I doubt it will give us anything.”

Simonsen took over.

“At least now we know how the victims were transported to the school. Who they are, why they were killed, and why no one misses them are still unknown. Of course, there have been numerous inquiries, but as yet none that we can use. The best guess is that they are all thought to be on vacation and won’t be missed until later. Countess, can you organize a new door-to-door round regarding the white minivan? Ideally this evening. Sorry.”

The Countess agreed, and Berg also volunteered. She felt she owed something.

The meeting was over and Simonsen stood up and paused in the middle of the floor. His co-workers followed him with their eyes as he swayed from side to side for a moment as he gathered his thoughts. Then he took a deep breath and took on Kasper Planck’s role of posing questions of his co-workers, although he hated being in that position.

“What is the difference between an execution and a murder?”

No one made a motion to answer, as the question appeared rhetorical.

“An execution is legal, a murder illegal. The state retains the right to kill its citizens. Citizens do not have that right in relation to each other. The act itself is fairly similar and for the person who is affected the difference is negligible. For the victim, the outcome is the same if an executioner cuts his throat or if he is strangled by his neighbor, but from a judicial and sociological viewpoint there is a world of difference. The executioner maintains the social order. The murdering neighbor breaks it down.
Order
is the key word in this context.”

His words grew many and the point was oversold. Perhaps because he was a man who cared about right angles and logical relationships. When he finally finished, none of his listeners could have had any doubts about the social-order-building aspect of executions.

The Countess summed it up in a friendly way: “The execution ceremony sets this act apart from a mass murder. But…”

She hesitated, and Simonsen took over again.

“No buts. It is the difference that’s interesting. But let me take the opportunity to remind you not to use the word
execution
in this context. And then on to our big question: why the mutilation? It doesn’t fit the pattern. It goes against everything I’ve mentioned, so either I’m mistaken with regard to the words and the legitimacy or else this step has been so desperately necessary that the perpetrators have had to accept it as a kind of sloppy side effect.”

“Identification?” the Countess chimed in.

“Yes, that is the most obvious explanation, but the ones who are behind this must know that we will secure the identities of the victims sooner or later, however much they have mutilated the bodies.”

This time Pedersen jumped in: “They’ve given themselves time.”

“Yes, that may be. In any case it raises a number of interesting questions. If you are right, why do the perpetrators need time? And anyway—it is logical to destroy the men’s faces and to remove their clothes, but why remove their hands? It would only be necessary if their fingerprints were registered, that is to say, if they had a history with law enforcement. And what about their genitals, which have no role in identification at all? Think this over, discuss it among yourselves in your free time, and let me know if you think you have found an answer or—which is of equal importance—if you have found any good questions.”

Over the course of the last few words, Simonsen had moved toward the door. His intention was to slip away as soon as he was done with his little lecture. But this backfired completely. Malte Borup was standing outside with a piece of paper. He had been standing there for a while without daring to interrupt, and his waiting time only increased when Pedersen rushed over and waved him away.

Simonsen snapped, “Can it wait, Arne?”

The question was ignored and thus received its answer.

“She called me about an hour ago. Just as you predicted.”

“Who called?”

“Anni Staal from the
Dagbladet
.”

“And what did she say?”

“Well, it took a while. She was very careful and naturally I played along and was guarded … yes, it was a bit of theater—”

“And what was the conclusion?” Simonsen interrupted.

“That I will pass along any news when I have any, and she … what shall I say … will compensate me for my troubles. Dammit, Simon. It’s like a bad American TV series; this kind of thing isn’t like you at all. And what will I do with the mon—”

Again Simonsen interrupted, this time with his palms raised defensively in front of him. “That last bit—I don’t know anything about that.”

“Okay, okay, I get it. It was Planck’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, for the most part.”

“It’s illogical, almost amateurish.”

“He has a feeling it may come in handy.”

“Illogical. Dare I say, idiotic.”

Finally, Simonsen allowed himself some time to talk. He said quietly, but intently, “You are right, but I have worked with Kasper Planck for over twenty years, and as I stand here I can give you at least two occasions when his illogical and perhaps silly feelings have saved a person’s life. Not to mention the many times these illogical and silly feelings have solved a case. But you are naturally welcome to back out of the arrangement, if you don’t—”

This time it was Pedersen’s turn to interrupt. He wrapped up the conversation in a conciliatory way: “No, it’s fine. I just wanted to let you know.”

Pedersen stepped aside; Malte Borup was next in line. The young man hurried up to his boss as soon as he saw that the coast was clear.

Simonsen unfolded the piece of paper he handed him, scrutinized it, and then asked, “What do I do with this?”

“It is everywhere, and it’s spreading as we speak. Blogs, newsgroups, sites, even the really big ones. Fox TV has it as a top story, as well as MTV. It’s like a supervirus but people are taking it home themselves and sending it on, and you can already buy T-shirts from…”

He fell silent, looking at his new boss’s face, and wrapped things up with a “that is, maybe.”

Simonsen listened with forced patience. Impatience was a bad habit with him when he was involved in a big case, but in opposition to the rest of his staff, this young man read him poorly. In any case, he was convinced that he was up in the red-alert area, sure that what he had to tell was urgent. For his part, Simonsen lacked the command of the details in this matter to determine its urgency. He glanced at the paper again. It was hard to let it be.

The sketch was disarmingly simple with its few striking black lines. The artist had captured a dark, relentless gravity with sureness. The perspective followed the line of sight that one of the final victims might have had, immediately before the trapdoor opened. The viewer of the sketch looked, so to speak, through the eyes of the victim. Slightly ahead and to the side one could see the backs of the heads of his already executed companions. Some bars drawn on the right indicated that the events were taking place in a gymnasium, but what primarily drew one’s interest were the spectators. At the top was a judge enthroned as a slightly moth-eaten heavenly father, half god, half clown, with a dusty accoutrements next to his limp hand. The law book, a thunderbolt, and scales. A tragicomic relic from the storeroom of antiquity with a vacant stare and dead flies sprinkled in his wig. Below him were children of all ages sitting on the floor, staring with sad eyes at the convicted; present in the moment, as dozens of small alternatives. Patient, just, without mercy. One could almost feel the rope tightening around his neck, and Simonsen shivered. The title was “Too Late.”

CHAPTER 26

“Even though many of you know me well, there are significant events in my life that you do not know anything about and that unfortunately continue to haunt me. I will never be able to shake free of them even if I were to live to a hundred.”

Erik Mørk was nervous. His beginning faltered and lacked conviction, and he felt an unfamiliar lack of control. Despite his low voice, he had had the full attention of his audience from his very first words. Most of them were employees in his small business and a handful were his personal friends. The remainder were strangers that Per Clausen had rallied. From where and how he did not know, only that they were one hundred percent loyal. And it was in a long look by one of these unknowns that he found the support to continue—an unusually pretty girl with blond curls and supportive blue eyes. He raised his voice slightly and launched into what he had to say.

“When I was five years old, my father died, and my stepfather moved in. From that day forward until I went to an orphanage at age ten, I was raped three, four, or five times a week. Summer and winter, weekend and weekday, morning and evening, year after year after year. Sexual abuse became such an integral part of my childhood that I believed for a long time that it was the way things were, that all kids went through what I did. It was simply not something one talked about, in the same way we don’t talk about shitting. We do it, but we rarely mention it. As an adult I realized that I had been both right and wrong. Right in that this is not something we talk about, wrong in thinking that the rape of a child is normal. It is rather more common than most people imagine, or rather bother to imagine, but it is not, of course, completely normal either.”

He avoided cliché-laden words such as
taboo
and
a sense of guilt.
The connections were simple and immediately understandable. To bring psychology into it would be a mistake.

“As a ten-year-old I tried to murder my mother, which was illogical since in my eyes my childhood had been normal. Why I did not target my stepfather is another question. He was my tormentor, not her. In fact she warned me when he was on his way—by screwing up the volume on the television. I tried to crush her skull with a cast-iron pot that I threw from the window of my room one day when she was in the yard with the laundry. We lived on the third floor and I missed the mark by several meters but the intention was unmistakable so I ended up at the Kejserstræde Home for Children. The first day I was there I was beaten up. Everyone received that welcome. When I crawled into bed that evening—black-and-blue like one giant bruise—I was the happiest child alive.”

He looked out at his audience. The atmosphere was intense. No one drank or ate or looked at one another. Everyone was following him intently—motionless, with bated breath, as he confided in them. He felt tears pressing at the back of his throat. Not because of his childhood but because they were listening and giving him respect, solidarity. His voice remained steady when he spoke again.

“Many people other than me have been abused and perhaps I belong to the lucky ones, however damaged I have been. A more tragic example is my little sister. She replaced me when I went to the children’s home, but unfortunately she was more frail than I and she never got over her wounds. One morning she sat down on the coastal railway line, a cloth over her head. She was twenty-two years old. The train driver was granted early retirement. He only lasted three years. Evil metastasizes.”

He regretted the expression as soon as it left his lips. It was too medical and the image too stilted. It had sounded good in his head. He continued, somewhat irritated.

“I’ve often wondered what she was thinking about when she heard the train come screeching, its brakes on full. My stepfather? Nothing? Herself? Me? I will never get an answer but I keep asking the question, and the day she died I promised her that when I got the opportunity I would write her obituary. Not by telling her story—it is too banal and will be forgotten—but by asking a string of questions. Today I have the financial means and I intend to use them. The moment is right. The five executed men in Bagsværd were all active pedophiles, each with numerous abuses on their conscience. As you know, the rumors have been swirling for a while and my source in the homicide unit tells me that the police will confirm them in the next few days but that the information is being temporarily withheld. There is subsequently no doubt that the sexual abuse of children will soon become a dominant topic in the media. My questions will line up in the wind, show another truth, give another perspective.”

He turned on the projector with rehearsed timing to avoid too much of a focus on the dead men, and everyone naturally looked up at the image.

“This advertisement was in all the papers this morning, big and small.”

He gave them a minute while they read with amazement, then he tossed out his calculation.