The Hanging Girl

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Assad was the first to hold out his hand. “My condolences,” he said.

  Birkedal shook his hand awkwardly, turning toward Carl with a look that seemed familiar.

  “Hiya, Carl, long time no see,” he said as Carl attempted to suppress an instinctive frown.

  The man in front of him was in his early fifties, so almost the same age as Carl, and in spite of the moustache and heavy eyes he seemed like someone he ought to know. But where in the world had he seen him before?

  Birkedal laughed. “Of course you can’t remember me, but I was in the year below you at the police academy out on Amager. We played tennis together and I won three times in a row, I might add. Then you suddenly didn’t want to play anymore.”

  Was that Rose grinning behind him? He hoped not, for her sake.

  “Yeah . . .” Carl tried to smile. “Actually, I wanted to, all right, but wasn’t there something about a dodgy ankle?” he said without the least recollection of the episode. If he’d ever played tennis, then the error had been well and truly buried.

  “Well, that was quite a shock with Christian,” continued the superintendent, thankfully of his own accord. “But he’d been depressed for some years, even though those of us at the station didn’t notice it so much day to day. I don’t think we can criticize his work as a uniformed policeman, can we, Peter?”

  The police commissioner shook his head in the appropriate manner.

  “But at home in Listed, it seems things were different for Habersaat. He was divorced and lived alone, extremely bitter about an old case that he’d turned into his life’s work to solve, despite not working in criminal investigation. It was a very trivial case concerning a hit-and-run driver, some would say, but as the accident cost a young girl her life, it wasn’t quite so trivial after all.”

  “Okay, a hit-and-run driver.” Carl looked out of the window. He knew this sort of case. Either they were solved in a flash or else they were archived. It was going to be a short stay on the island.

  “And the driver of the vehicle was never found, is that correct?” asked Rose as she held out her hand.

  “Correct, yes. If we had, well then, Christian probably would’ve been alive today. But I’m afraid I have to run. I’m sure you can imagine that we have a certain amount of internal formalities to take care of in connection with what happened today, not to mention dealing with the press, who we need to try and send on their way first. Couldn’t I come over to your hotel a little later and answer your questions then?”

  * * *

  “You must be the police over from Copenhagen,” assumed the receptionist at Sverres Hotel without further niceties, selecting the keys to those rooms that were without doubt the least appealing she could offer. Rose, as usual, had haggled on the price.

  A little later they found Police Superintendent John Birkedal in one of the imitation leather chairs in the lounge above the dining room. Up here on the first floor, there was a good view out over both the industrial harbor and the back of a Brugsen supermarket. It wasn’t pretty. If only the view had included a couple of freeways, then the overall impression would have been perfect. Probably not the best place to write a travel guide on this otherwise fairy-tale-like island.

  “I’ll be honest with you. I couldn’t stand Habersaat,” began Birkedal. “But to see a colleague shoot himself in the head because he felt insufficient in his work is something that really hurt. I’ve experienced a lot in my police career but I fear this will stay with me. It’s quite horrible.”

  “Definitely,” Assad interrupted. “Excuse me, but I just want to understand correctly. He shot himself in the head with a pistol, you say. It wasn’t his service weapon, was it?”

  Birkedal shook his head. “No, that was done by the book. He left it down in the weapons depot just before handing in his ID badge and keys to the station. We aren’t exactly sure where he got the pistol from, but it was definitely a 9mm Beretta 92. A real nasty piece of work to be carrying about. But you’ll know it, of course, from the Lethal Weapon films with Mel Gibson?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Right, well, it’s a relatively big and solid fella, which I thought was a fake at first when he pulled it out and aimed at the police commissioner and myself. It isn’t a weapon he had permission for, but we know that a similar Beretta disappeared from the estate of a deceased person near Aakirkeby five or six years ago. Whether or not it’s the same weapon, we’ve got no way of checking because the former owner didn’t have any papers.”

  “A deceased estate? In 2009?” asked Rose, smiling with pouting lips. Was John Birkedal really her type?

  “Yes. One of the teachers at the folk high school died midsemester. According to the autopsy, it was death by natural causes as the result of a weak heart but nevertheless, Habersaat was especially interested in the death when the property was checked. The deceased, Jakob Swiatek, according to some former students and teachers, had been tremendously interested in small arms, and on several occasions had shown some of the students a pistol which, according to their descriptions, could be a match with the pistol Habersaat used this morning.”

  “Yeah, you don’t see a semiautomatic like that every day, so I just have one question,” Assad interjected. “Was the Beretta the basic model or was it a 92S, 92SB or 92F, FG, or FS? Because it can’t have been a 92A1 seeing as that series is from 2010.”

  Carl slowly turned toward Assad. What on earth was the guy talking about? Was he also an expert on Berettas now?

  Birkedal shook his head slowly. So he didn’t know damn all about that either. But no doubt he’d dig up an answer before the sun went down over Rønne harbor.

  “Hmm, maybe I should sum up briefly what Habersaat stood for and what he’d been through,” continued Birkedal. “Then later on you can have the keys to his house and take things from there. They’ll be left in reception later tonight. I’ve conferred with the police commissioner and he’s giving you a relatively free hand. I also think our colleagues are about ready with the house now, so you can get started. We just needed to check the property first. There could’ve been letters or something similar that indicated why he took the drastic action he did. But you know all that. It is you, after all, who have the most experience with this sort of thing.”

  Assad was nodding, holding up his index finger ready to speak, but Carl checked him with a look. Whether it was one pistol or another the idiot had blown his brains out with was totally irrelevant. As far as Carl was concerned, they hadn’t travelled to this godforsaken place specifically to uncover why Habersaat had committed suicide, but more importantly to make Rose understand that the case she thought Carl should have done everything in his power to take on for Habersaat didn’t actually have anything to do with them.

  * * *

  For the approximately fifty students from eighteen upward enrolled at Bornholm Folk High School for the winter half year, taking courses in music, glasswork, painting, or pottery, November 20th, 1997, had been another typical day with good humor and certainly no sense of danger, explained Birkedal. A totally normal group of mostly happy young students who got along well.

  They didn’t know yet that Alberte, the gentlest, prettiest, and probably also the most popular girl at the school had been killed in a car accident that morning.

  A little more than a day went by before she was found hurled so far up in a tree by the roadside that it was almost impossible to see her. And the man who happened to look up at precisely the moment his car passed the tree, to his own misfortune, was a uniformed police officer from Nexø by the name of Christian Habersaat.

  The sight of the fragile, limp body hanging from a branch burned itself into him, exactly like the inscrutable look that had forever attached itself to the girl’s face.

  Despite only the slightest of leads, it was determined that she hung in the tree as a result of a serious car accident. A rather unpleasant episode t
hat didn’t resemble any other hit-and-run cases in the more recent history of Bornholm.

  Skid marks were searched for but never uncovered. There had been hope that paint flakes would be found in her clothes, but the vehicle had slid past without leaving any trace. Those who lived by the road were questioned, but no one and nothing pointed toward anything or anyone specifically. Only that one person on the stretch of road had heard a car at a terrible speed disappear off in the direction of the main road.

  After that, perhaps due to the death being suspicious or because there were no other cases, a systematic hunt was instigated for vehicles with dents to the front carriage that weren’t immediately explainable. It was probably a day too late but, regardless, all cars on ferry departures to both Sweden and Copenhagen were closely monitored for the whole week, and all twenty thousand vehicles on the entire island were called in for inspection by motor vehicle diagnostics in Rønne and Nexø.

  Despite the obvious disruption, the locals were surprisingly understanding and actively helpful to the extent that no tourist could move on four wheels without the hood being scrutinized by hawkeyed locals.

  Birkedal shrugged his shoulders. “And in spite of all the efforts, the result was zero.”

  The Department Q staff looked tiredly at the police superintendent. Who wanted to tamper with an equation where the end result, regardless of what you did, was always zero?

  “And you know with certainty that it was a traffic-related death?” asked Carl. “Couldn’t it have been something else? What did you learn from the injuries at the postmortem? And what did you find at the collision scene?”

  “That she was probably alive for a time after she was hurled up there. Otherwise: fractures, internal and external bleeding, all the usual. And then we found the bike Alberte had cycled on quite a distance in the thicket and mangled almost beyond recognition.”

  “So she’d cycled there,” Rose said. “Do you still have the bike?”

  Police Superintendent Birkedal shrugged. “It was seventeen years ago and before my time, so I’m not sure. Probably not.”

  “It would be wonderful if you could do me the favor of finding out,” said Rose in a sweet voice and with bashful eyes.

  Birkedal pulled his head back. A handsome married man tends to know when he’s on thin ice. “Why are you so certain that she was thrown up into the tree?” Assad quietly asked. “Couldn’t she have been hauled up there? Was there a search for any sign of cordage on the branches above the body? Could a hoist have been used?”

  Did Assad say “cordage”? A very specific word coming from him.

  Birkedal nodded, as there was certainly nothing wrong with the questions. “No, the technicians found nothing to indicate that.”

  “You can refill from the thermos in the dining hall,” came the message from the hotel proprietor standing in the doorway.

  It took no more than a split second before the coffee flowed dark in Assad’s cup while he poured sugar directly from the bowl. How could his poor hardworking taste buds survive all his strange challenges?

  The others shook their heads when he offered to pour the coffee for them.

  “How can it be that there weren’t any leads from the collision?” he asked, turning around. “You’d expect some skid marks or at the very least some tire marks. Had it been raining?”

  “No, nothing to speak of, as far as I know,” answered Birkedal. “The report mentions that the state of the roads had been reasonably dry.”

  “Then what about the direction the body was thrown up in?” Carl continued. “Was that properly investigated? Were there visibly broken branches from where the body had been hurled up? Or was it possible to infer anything from the position of the body on the branches or the position of the bike in the thicket?”

  “Based on a witness statement from an elderly married couple who lived on a farm on the bend a little farther down, it was concluded that during the morning a vehicle came speeding from the west outside their house. The old couple didn’t see the vehicle but they could hear the car revving up beyond all reason just outside the house and driving at full speed toward the last bend before the place where the tree stood.

  “We’re quite convinced that it was the hit-and-run driver that the old couple heard and that the girl was hit head on near the trees, and that the vehicle then drove off in the direction of the highway intersection without slowing down.”

  “What’s that based on?”

  “On the witness testimony and the experience of the technicians from previous hit-and-runs.”

  “Aha.” Carl shook his head. All these known and unknown factors. He was already tired just thinking about it. Suddenly the desk back home in the cellar of the police station seemed far away.

  “Who was the girl, then?” The unavoidable question was asked from which there was no turning back once an answer had been given.

  “Alberte Goldschmid. Despite her rather flamboyant surname she was an ordinary girl. One of those who suddenly felt freedom far away from mom and dad and reacted accordingly. You couldn’t call her directly promiscuous but she was into a bit of this and that now that she had the freedom to do so. Everything certainly indicates that she took advantage of the couple of weeks she was over here, quite intensely.”

  “Intensely? What do you mean?” asked Rose.

  “A couple of partners here and there.”

  “Okay, did the girl become pregnant?”

  “The autopsy said no.”

  “And it would be superfluous to inquire after foreign DNA on the body,” she continued.

  “The year was 1997, need I say more? Three years before the central DNA register was set up. I don’t think there was an intensive search. But no, there were no traces of semen in her or foreign skin under her nails. She was as clean as someone who’d just stepped out of the shower, which she probably had, seeing as she took her bike before the other students had even assembled for breakfast.”

  “Let me get this right,” said Carl. “You know nothing, is that correct? This is the story of a locked-room murder and Habersaat was the local Sherlock Holmes, who for once fell short.”

  Birkedal shrugged his shoulders again. He couldn’t answer that either.

  “Right, then,” said Assad, draining the remainder of the hot coffee in one gulp. “Let’s call that a wrap, then.”

  Did he really just say that?

  Rose turned unfazed toward Birkedal, again with her sugar-sweet eyes. “All three of us will sit down together now, quietly and calmly, and read all this material you’ve brought for us, and that’s probably going to take an hour or two. And when we’re done with that we’ll probably want to ask a bit more about this and that in Habersaat’s investigation, and life and death.”

  A hint of a smile creased Birkedal’s stoical mask. It was clear that as far as he was concerned they could do just as they pleased, so long as he wasn’t involved.

  “Do you think we’ll find something that you should have found long ago? Something that might shed some light on the mystery of the girl in the tree?” Carl said stubbornly.

  “I don’t know but I certainly hope so. The essence, I suppose, is that as far as Habersaat was concerned, Alberte’s death wasn’t just negligent manslaughter and a case of hit-and-run. It was murder,” he said. “And Habersaat tried with all his might not only to substantiate that theory but to find the perpetrator. I don’t know what he had to go on but there are no doubt other officers that can tell you more, not to mention Habersaat’s ex-wife.”

  A plastic case was slid across the table. “I have to get back to the station now but take a look at this DVD. Then you’ll know roughly what you need to know about his death,” he said. “It was filmed by one of Habersaat’s friends invited to the reception. His name is Villy, but over here we call him Uncle Sam. I assume you have your own PCs with you so you can play it on one
of them. Enjoy, if that’s the right word.” And then he stood up suddenly.

  Carl noticed how Rose’s eyes were glued to his well-toned backside as he left. Hardly a look his wife would have appreciated.

  * * *

  So radically had Habersaat’s wife put the past behind her that she discarded not only the man’s name but also everything else imaginable that could bring forth memories of him, a fact she didn’t try to hide when Carl attempted to get a telephone conversation going with her.

  “And if you think that just because the man is dead now that I have the least desire to dredge up his and our mutual problems for anyone, you’re mistaken. Christian didn’t choose his family during some difficult years when I—and especially his son—really needed his attention, and now all his bad choices have ended with a cowardly suicide. You’ll have to go elsewhere if you want to hear about his life’s biggest passion; you won’t hear it from me.”

  Carl looked at Rose and Assad, who both gesticulated to him to stay firm. Yeah, what else?

  “Do you mean that he was in love with the Alberte case or perhaps even the victim?”

  “You cops never let up, do you? I’ve told you to leave me in peace, so good-bye.” There was the sound of the receiver being put down and that was that.

  “She knew the speakerphone was on, Carl,” said Assad. “We should have gone out to her, like I suggested.”

  Carl shrugged his shoulders. Maybe he was right, but it was late and the way he saw it, there were two types of witnesses to be avoided unless absolutely necessary: those who said too much and those who kept their mouths shut.

  Rose looked in her notebook. “Here’s the address for Habersaat’s son, Bjarke. He’s renting a room at the northern end of Rønne, so we can be there in ten minutes. Shall we get going, then?”

  The decision was made. Rose was already standing.

  4

  The house on Sandflugtsvej was situated back from the road with a French balcony and the feeling of the good life emanating from it. Everything had been arranged down to the last detail, from the door knocker to the brass nameplate and well-mowed lawns. This was a place where you drove in newly washed VW Polos, French cars, or, for lack of something better, SUVs. All status symbols of the first degree in provincial Denmark.