The Hanging Girl

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  So right there she overstepped a boundary from which there was no turning back.

  Strictly speaking, the upshot of that confrontation was an accident, but ending as it had, it was nevertheless the best thing that could have happened.

  That was all a good few years ago, and now it was the turn of this Wanda Phinn.

  Pirjo looked up at the academy and chose the gravel path that went around the buildings through the plantation. It was a longer route than the more direct road up to the highway, but this path was secluded, so no one from the academy would know which road she’d taken or when.

  If somebody asked her later where she’d been, she would say that she’d taken a drive north to clear her head and give herself space to think. That she was in the process of developing some new ideas for her telephone line and just needed to get them in order.

  It was important that her absence was understandable and believable, and as long as she could avoid mentioning Wanda Phinn to anyone, then she wouldn’t exist in anyone’s consciousness but her own.

  When today was behind her, and she’d neutralized and eliminated this woman, then the time would be right for Malena’s turn.

  She hadn’t yet worked out how she would even the score with that woman without Atu needing to know about it, but if it didn’t happen relatively quickly, it could develop into a nasty affair.

  —

  The journey had first really begun for Wanda when she boarded the train in Copenhagen. The flight had been as flights are prone to be, but this final leg of the journey by train through landscapes unlike any she had ever seen before felt like a fairy tale. The language alone was like that in the world of the sagas: magical, exciting, and from a vanished past.

  She saw extensive flat areas of farmland, broken by bedrock and mile-long dry stone walls that had seemingly been built and repaired since the dawn of time. And then suddenly red wooden houses and endless pine forests. Here, in this strange and wondrous Swedish peasant country, she’d find her kingdom and her throne. Here she’d be able to escape herself and her past and live with Atu for the rest of her life. She was more certain of this than anything else in the world.

  And Wanda was well prepared. Since she hadn’t been invited, she had to anticipate resistance and reluctance that could drag things out. But if that was the case, she had no intention of backing out, even if she met with point-blank refusal. She had announced the time of her arrival in yet another e-mail and if there was someone to meet her at the station, then good. If there wasn’t, she’d booked a hotel and had enough money to last several weeks. She was certain to get her audience then; she was sure of it.

  “Is this your first time here?” asked the man opposite her when she began turning around in her seat. They’d passed Karlskrona now, so there was only half an hour to go until they reached Kalmar.

  She confirmed that yes, it was her first time.

  He smiled. “And where are you headed?”

  “I’m heading out to Öland. I’m meeting my husband-to-be out there,” she heard herself say.

  A look of disappointment came across his face. “A lucky guy. Dare I ask who he is?”

  She noticed that strangely enough she was blushing. “His name is Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi.”

  The lines on his forehead were visible as he nodded, turning his face out toward the blurred light that had cast itself over yet another country town.

  When they reached the station he helped her off with her suitcase.

  “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?” he asked, setting the suitcase down on the platform.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked. He was probably one of those bigots who could only see the world through the lens he’d inherited at his mother’s breast.

  “I’m a journalist working here in Kalmar. I’ve been out to the center on Öland to interview the guru over there and it was a mixed experience. I’m sorry, and this is just my opinion, but I didn’t see anything other than fraud and manipulation. The leader, Dumuzi, wanted to captivate me but I have to say that it was far from a successful attempt. But you’re sure about what you’re doing?”

  She nodded. She was, and more than ever before.

  “Thanks for your help,” she said without further comment and headed for the square in front of the station.

  She stood for a while, leaning up against a flagpole, squinting at the sun. It was just as she’d imagined. There was no one to meet her.

  She thought she might as well go down to the hotel and drop off her luggage, where no doubt they’d also order a taxi for her.

  Then she’d be out there in three quarters of an hour.

  She was just about to bend down for her suitcase when a woman came around the corner at full speed on a scooter. Covered in white from head to toe, clenching her teeth.

  It was because of that expression she was able to recognize her. And it was for the same reason that she instinctively clenched her fists.

  12

  Thursday, May 1st, 2014

  Habersaat’s house had initially appeared to be an extremely chaotic place. The guiding rule here seemed to be that if there was space, and this included the floor, then piles would be put there. If there was any free wall space, then clippings or printouts were put up, all of which meant that there wasn’t any semblance left of normal homeliness or personal objects apart from a couple of photos of a family in a glass frame. It was clear that only the initiated were allowed access to this part of Habersaat’s life, which was more important than the daily grind of police work in Rønne.

  But if you took the time to go carefully through the apocalypse that marked the end of a normal existence, there was rhyme and reason in each little measured area.

  A painstakingly built-up collection spanning almost two decades of research into the one thing in life that Habersaat seriously seemed to care about: Alberte’s tragic end.

  If you were to observe this hotchpotch of material through the experienced eyes of a police officer, then there was a clear sense that the living room was Habersaat’s distribution center for all incoming material, before it was allocated according to subject to the other rooms in the house. In this room the physical papers were organized in chronological piles, while the folders on the shelves contained a register of the collective contents of the house. The dining room seemingly functioned as a sort of final station for all leads and hints that couldn’t be outright dismissed, and the remainder of the house was divided into subtopics. The utility room, for example, housed the inquiries that the police had conducted parallel with Habersaat, and that material didn’t take up much room. The room behind it was propped full of interview transcriptions from different local residents in the weeks following the collision. The boy’s bedroom upstairs contained piles requisitioned from National Police Headquarters with connections to other hit-and-run cases, and then there was an entire bookcase that had the short and sweet heading Alberte, and which in turn was divided into different statements about her background. Folders and piles even for those friends pre-dating her time at the folk high school.

  Habersaat’s own bedroom on the first floor was more tightly packed than all the other rooms. The window had long since been covered, the air persistently stale and close.

  “Have you ever stood downwind from a camel with colic, Carl?” Assad asked after sniffing the air a few times.

  Carl shook his head but understood what he meant. A place where an older man had lived with himself and his pent-up gases for decades.

  He looked around. Apart from the neatly made bed and a small area of floor in front of the bed and wardrobe, the entire room was crammed full of material. In front of the window, there were two bookcases with more piles of general information about the folk high school, and of course folders on the students and teachers who’d been at the school at the same time as Alberte.

  But it was also in t
his room that Assad and Carl came across the material that seemed to fit in least with the bigger picture.

  “Why do you think you’d have this lying about?” Assad pointed to the floor.

  Carl scanned the rows of beautifully arranged brochures and leaflets about occult phenomena and groups that lay closest to the bed. There was almost no form of mysticism that wasn’t included: contacting the dead, aromatherapy, astrology, aura paintings, aura transformation, Bach therapy, clairvoyance, dream interpretation, freedom techniques, energy balancing, healing in all its forms, house cleansing, and so forth. Dozens of different areas, sorted alphabetically, and all with alternative thinking, lifestyle, or treatment in common.

  “Do you think he tried to find comfort in some of this stuff here, Carl?”

  Carl shook his head. “I don’t know. But no, it doesn’t seem to make sense. Have you seen any sort of indication apart from this stuff here? Tarot cards, for example, or pendulums, astrological divinations? Bottles with aromas?”

  “Maybe down in the bathroom on the ground floor. We skipped that.”

  They went down the corridor, typically decorated with coat hooks holding jackets on the one side and opposite, a row of worn-out shoes, together with a shoehorn with a bamboo shaft on a hook. From this room, one door opened out onto a vestibule with the obligatory umbrella stand in the corner. Apart from that, there were four other doors: one door to the living room, a door to the kitchen, and then two narrow doors, behind which, Carl reasoned, must be the toilet and the bathroom.

  He glanced out into the kitchen, where Rose was at the sink washing her hands with a rare thoughtful look about her. She simply wasn’t herself just now.

  With a sixth sense she felt his eyes on her and turned around in one move. “We can’t have all this in Gordon’s room in the cellar, Carl,” she said. “But if we incorporate the wall in the hallway, we might manage. A few bookcases here and there, and it’ll be fine. If you book a removal firm, maybe they can take some of Habersaat’s bookcases with them, if that’s all right with June Habersaat.” She dried her hands on her sides. “Because she’ll inherit it all, right? Technically, Bjarke inherited from his dad for a few hours, but seeing as he’s also dead now, it must be his mom who’ll take over. What do you think?”

  “I say that you’ve got it all worked out, Rose. So you just get on with it. But if I were you, I wouldn’t ask anyone about those shelves.”

  She looked at him, surprised. “Wow, was it that easy? I hadn’t reckoned on that.”

  “No, but there’s quite a lot about the things in this house that you—and I for that matter—hadn’t bargained on.”

  “Me neither,” Assad said from behind. He’d thrown wide open the two narrow doors, but there was light coming from only one of them.

  “The toilet and bathroom are in the same room, and there’s nothing strange in there. The other door here leads out to a narrow corridor that goes to both the garage and down to the cellar. There’s a staircase.”

  Sod the garage and the cellar with all their rubbish, thought Carl.

  They opened the door from the house to the garage. The smell of tar and the stench of gasoline, and just a glimpse of light from two dusty windows left little doubt as to what the main use was of this annex. There were still tire tracks in the sand but the car was gone. It hadn’t been parked at the community hall, but the police had probably collected it and parked it in the police parking lot.

  “Garages are eerie, Carl,” said Assad, emphasizing this with clenched fists at the end of his otherwise loosely hanging arms.

  “Why? Are you worried about spiderwebs?” Carl turned around; there really were a lot of spiderwebs in every direction. No doubt whatsoever that his red-haired cousin would go into a coma if she was forced to stay in here. He couldn’t keep count of the number of summer holidays where she stormed through the farmhouse to squash spiders or scream hysterically because they were too big. But here everything looked homely. A few shelf units with bits and bobs from a bygone era. Roller skates and deflated beach animals, tins of paint with bulging lids, and all sorts of sprays that had clearly been banned for years. Up on the rafters a sail from a surfboard, skis, and ski poles. Nothing eerie as far as he was concerned.

  “It says something about all the hours that have passed by, and all the hours that have been used incorrectly,” philosophized Assad.

  “Used incorrectly?”

  “All the hours where the things in here should have been used but weren’t.”

  “We don’t know anything about that, Assad. And why eerie? More pitiable, I think.”

  He nodded. “And garages are separate from the house and its life. When I’m in a place like this, it’s like feeling death.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t need to, Carl. We can’t all feel the same way.”

  “Suicide and that sort of thing, is that what you mean?”

  “Yes, that too.”

  “Hmm. Well, there isn’t much in here at any rate. No boxes containing hidden secrets, no notes on the walls. No mystical pyramid constructions and crystals or occult paraphernalia like the stuff in the bedroom. Agreed?”

  Assad’s eyes circled the room a couple of times. He appeared to agree.

  The cellar didn’t seem to contain any noteworthy surprises either, appearing both tidy and orderly. It consisted of a laundry room without laundry, a pantry without any food, and a workshop without any tools. However, right in the middle, there was a newish photocopier and a collection of ancient developing equipment that only few in Denmark today would remember how to use.

  “He’s made a darkroom down here,” said Carl. “I just don’t see any developer liquid or that sort of thing.”

  “Maybe it was a hobby from his past, Carl. In fact, I think he used this most,” he said, banging the top of the photocopier. “He probably used it to make the enlargement of the Volks Kombi.”

  “Probably.”

  Carl picked up the wastepaper bin at the side of the photocopier and emptied out the scrunched-up contents, smoothing them out on the desk. It wasn’t hard to see how Habersaat had worked with that photo. First, he’d increased the size of the photo up to a quarter of an A4. From there he’d doubled it, continuing up to A4 size and finally up to A3. Not exactly an ideal route for a good-quality end result.

  “Have a look at the first enlargement here, Assad. You’re looking across the hood of another car, and it’s a very old car if you ask me, with all that chrome on the hood. Far, far behind, you can see the man and the car. I think it’s a parking lot, what do you think?”

  “But there’s also grass. So it could be something else.”

  “It could be, you’re right. But look how this enlargement actually shows a bit of another photo on the side. What does that tell us?”

  “That there were several photos on the same page.”

  “Precisely. Our photo has presumably been in a photo album. It tallies with the structure of the paper the photos are pasted onto. It’s often something a bit coarse and cardboard-like. Judging by its square shape, I think it’s taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera.”

  “I bet the original is still lying in the photocopier,” said Assad, lifting the lid. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

  Assad rubbed his stubble. It sounded almost like the rhythm section of a salsa band. “If only we could see more of that photo album so we could find out where it was taken. Or maybe even identify who took it.”

  “Habersaat wasn’t a detective, so that sort of logic and systematic way of thinking isn’t something we should assume he understood. And anyway, he must’ve noted where he got it from somewhere or other, for goodness’ sake. There’s probably something up there in one of the folders.”

  “Look, Carl. There’s another pile of photocopies here.” Assad pulled them out of a wooden box that Habersaat had screwed i
nto the wall, passing them down to Carl with a smile. “Maybe some of the last stuff he worked with on the case.”

  “Very funny, Assad.” Carl threw the photocopy of a naked woman in rather precarious positions away from him across the table. The paper was completely yellowed. It was definitely many years since Habersaat had had any pleasure in that area.

  * * *

  “I managed to access his computer, Carl,” said Rose when they came back up. “The password was Alberte, of course. How hard can it be?” Rose smiled mockingly. “All the summaries of his research material, which you can also find in the folders, are on the computer. The difference being that inside the plastic wallets in the folders there’s sometimes been added a small clipping or something else in support of the entry. I’ve had a bit of a look in them, but they’re really nothing special. It seems to me that Habersaat gave up on the folder system and just stuck with the piles. But I could be wrong.”

  Be wrong! Did she really say that?

  “Is there any data that might explain something about the photo of the Volkswagen, Rose?” Carl put the smallest enlargement in front of her.

  “Maybe,” she answered. “It’s very unclear. A photocopy, right?”

  Assad nodded.

  “Of course. I haven’t seen any evidence of a scanner anywhere. He apparently only had that little printer there.” She pointed to an inkjet printer under a pile of papers. “But don’t worry, Mr. Mørck. I’ll trawl through the computer and maybe we’ll find something about the origin of the photo. There’s only a 60-megabyte memory on the old box after all, so it won’t be an insurmountable task.”

  Okay, finally the irony was rearing its head.

  She turned back to the screen with a sigh, already in her own world. That was their Rose.

  “Come here, Carl,” shouted Assad.

  He was staring at the enlargement, his face tense with concentration.