The Hanging Girl

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

“And?” he said impatiently.

  “I got lucky twice this time: an esoteric astrologer and an Aura-Soma therapist, who both remembered Frank and his sunstones and keen interest in sun cults.”

  Carl clenched his fists. Finally, they were off. “Do we have a name or address?”

  “No.”

  “Thought as much.” He relaxed his hands and stroked his neck. “So what have you got?”

  “The description matches Inge Dalby’s. They both agreed on that. And they added a number of other characteristics. For example, this Frank guy was totally disconnected from modern technology.”

  “No cell phones?”

  “No cells, no PCs. He wrote everything by hand, and with a fountain pen. The car he drove around in was borrowed. He didn’t use a credit card, always cash.”

  “And for the same reason, he hasn’t left any traces anywhere, right?”

  She pointed directly at him. “Not directly, no, and yet, yes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of them thought that his special knowledge about the cults on Bornholm was just the tip of the iceberg. That he also had an extensive and more general knowledge about astrology, theology, astronomy, and ancient history. He was very interested in the religions of different ages, and what had been passed on from them. So he was always open to a good discussion about such things. The esoteric astrologer also thought that his theories were very epochal.”

  “How does that help us? And what the hell is an esoteric astrologer?”

  “It’s something to do with finding the power to reveal the soul’s hidden intentions in the current incarnation. Something with helping the soul to fulfill its full potential with the incarnation.”

  Carl tried to find a suitable grimace for the occasion. This was apparently outside his comprehension. “But again, why’s it important that his theories were . . . what did you say, epochal?”

  “That means that his enthusiasm was infectious. The people living at the Ølene camp were one way or another part of his spiritual family, a sort of disciple, and that included the Aura-Soma therapist. Once, when Frank was with her to strengthen his aura, one of the other disciples was with him.”

  “Disciple how? I mean, how could anyone know that’s what they were?”

  “Relax, I’m getting there now, Carl. The reason that Frank contacted so many of these alternative therapists was because he wanted to learn from them, of course, to know their secrets. It was as if he wanted to merge all the alternative knowledge and techniques in the world and try to find a common denominator for them. For healing, for religion, for all the ancient sciences: alchemy, astrology, channeling, electromagnetic therapy, clairvoyance, and so on and so on. Don’t ask what it was he was striving for; that was a whole science in itself, and that was the crux of it.” She pointed tellingly at him again.

  “What?”

  “That Frank was in the process of establishing his own spiritual philosophy. He wanted to collect everything useful and combine it, and the man he had with him was a witness of truth, as he put it.”

  “Damn it, that’s some really weird stuff. But did he establish himself?”

  “Yes, they both thought so. And what’s more, the Aura-Soma therapist could remember the name of the man who was with Frank. His name was Simon Fisher, which they all laughed about because it couldn’t really be more symbolic, could it? So Frank was a messiah and the man just a follower. And then one of the therapists said that Simon Fisher showed a keen interest in her garden with medicinal plants and said that he’d like to have a garden just like it. And now comes the final thing, Carl!” Again, the pointing finger. It almost made you want to find a pair of scissors and cut a bit off it.

  “Well, fire away, damn it. What next?”

  “The man called Simon Fisher got his garden center. It’s in Holbæk in an area called Tempelkrogen.”

  “Tempelkrogen? Yes, of course. Why doesn’t that surprise me? One final question: What’s an Aura-Soma therapist?”

  “That’s a bit of a weird one. I didn’t want to ask her, so I looked it up. Partly, it’s something with bottles that contain healing color vibrations, but I didn’t quite understand it.”

  Carl fumbled for his cigarettes. This was really a long detour on the road to finding out something that might lead them to the right track.

  * * *

  “Wasn’t it wrong that we didn’t bring Rose with us, Carl? It was her after all who found the man,” said Assad as his jaw tried to get the better of the chewing gum he’d shoved in his mouth fifty-five kilometers back.

  “Have a look at the GPS, Assad. I think we need to go down past Eriksholm when we pass Munkholm Bridge, what do you think?”

  “I think it was wrong that we didn’t bring Rose along. And yes, when we’re over the water, you need to take a left.”

  Carl looked out south over the glistening fjord, winding in and out between small islands and headlands. As far as he could see, it must be over on the other side of the water where a white house on a peninsula in lonely majesty almost seemed to lean down over the low-lying pasture.

  “You’ll see, she’ll be fine as long as she has Gordon to . . .” He turned his attention to a kiosk where he and Vigga had so often stopped when they travelled by motorbike out in the countryside on the weekends. They were good times when they couldn’t afford anything else. How far had he come in life since then?

  “I’m beginning to think about quitting the service, Assad,” he said after a sudden impulse. “It would make Lars Bjørn’s day, but still.”

  He didn’t need to look at Assad to find out if it had caused him to stop chewing. He could hear it.

  “That would be absolutely the worst thing that could happen for me,” said Curly in a flawless accent, prompting Carl to turn to face him instantly.

  “You need to turn here, Carl,” he said. The accent had returned. “I don’t understand. What’ll you do?”

  “I’ll open a Syrian café with you, Assad. And we won’t serve anything other than sticky mint tea and pastries. Sticky tea and Arabic music blaring out.”

  Now the guy began to chew again. He didn’t believe he was being so serious anymore. Good, it would’ve been a shame.

  They took a few small roads past farms and turned to go through a village and farther down toward the house.

  “Deep in the countryside,” observed Assad, when the scenery opened up in all its rain-soaked splendor. He’d never been in Vendsyssel, it would seem.

  Carl had yet another impulse. “Assad! Would you come to my cousin’s funeral up in Brønderslev? You’d be able to meet my parents, too, and the rest of the not-so-merry band.”

  “Band? Will there be a band?” he asked as the house appeared at the end of the road. Water on two sides with the bridge in the background, and forest and road on the other two. A golden vision in the landscape. A rarity on earth.

  It all seemed so accessible and friendly, but the Holistic Garden Center wasn’t just quite so easy to conquer. Two growling devils—the kind that’d been set on the unfortunate Christians in the Colosseum in ancient Rome—stood pawing at the floor as if they could jump over the fence at any second.

  A small sign stated: Birtemaja & Simon Fisher. Ring first. Observant, thought Carl, as he pressed the bell right down and held it there.

  “Hate and Skoll, down,” shouted a voice over the courtyard. A man, his trousers tucked down in his clog boots and wearing a baggy smock shirt, danced over a couple of deep puddles and edged toward them.

  “Customers in the shop,” he shouted back toward the house.

  Carl put his hand in his pocket to get his ID, but Assad put a hand on his arm to stop him.

  “Nice place you have here,” Assad said to the man, giving him his hand over the fence. “We’ve come to get some help with a few things.”

  He opened the
lock while the dogs began to growl at Assad.

  “They’re not used to dark skin.”

  “No problem. I’ve got them under control,” answered Assad, at which the dominant dog lunged toward him ready to bite.

  Carl jumped to the side but Assad stood his ground and that very second, as the gardener tried to stop the beast, he let out an infernal yell that made both dogs sink to their knees like puppies and piss themselves like they’d never pissed before.

  “That’s it,” said Assad, slapping himself on the thigh and calling the dogs to heel.

  When they crept over to him and let him pet them, both the gardener and Carl stood speechless, watching.

  “Where did I get to?” said Assad, the dogs on either side of him, as if they’d found a new master. “Yes, we need a little assistance. Firstly, we need to buy something or other that can help me sleep.”

  Carl couldn’t believe his own ears. If Assad slept any deeper than he had in the hotel in Rønne, he’d damn well never wake up again.

  “And then we need something that can revitalize my friend here. Afterward, we’d like to ask you a couple of questions, if that’s okay with you.”

  The ID card never materialized from Carl’s pocket.

  31

  “That looks fine. Those herbs will do the trick with your sleeplessness,” Simon Fisher said to Assad. “And now your friend here.”

  He went over to the corner of the room, a bomb crater of the impacts of time, where nothing matched. Furniture that a flea market would reject, rugs consisting equally of dog hair and old coffee stains, and last but not least, a myriad of colored posters with Hindu gods among pictures of Danish nature in gold frames. In this corner he opened a drawer in the exact copy of the bureau Carl’s granddad had had in the tailor shop in Risskov.

  He was just about to ask him where he’d gotten the bureau when the man passed Assad a pendulum and briefly instructed him in how to use it.

  “Do the same as your friend,” he said to Carl. “Hold the pendulum still in your hand, and calibrate it with your energy. Afterward, hang it over the plants you’ll make your tea from, and then we’ll see if I’ve chosen the right herbs.”

  Carl took the chain and tried to stop himself from frowning. Now the pendulum just needed to damn well behave so they could get on.

  He pulled the chain up and down to help it along.

  “No, no, you have to sit totally still, and it’ll decide for itself. It will detect the energy around you,” said the man as a woman in grey glided in behind him. They nodded to her but weren’t so fortunate as to get any acknowledgment.

  Carl looked down skeptically at the dead-still pendulum. Apparently there wasn’t so much energy in the plant stuff he’d selected.

  “No, it won’t do. We’ll have to calibrate the pendulum again. Now, do what your friend here did so well. First, hold your other hand under the pendulum, and ask it to respond to a movement for yes.”

  Carl turned his head to face him. Was he crazy, or what?

  “Come on.”

  Carl let the pendulum hover a few centimeters above his free hand. “Respond to a movement for yes,” he said, almost whispering, but still nothing happened. Of course not.

  “Give it here,” said the gardener, at which he pulled the pendulum up to his mouth and began to suck in the air around it in short bursts. He did this a few times in deep concentration, then raised it in front of his eyes and blew out hard after an extra-large intake of breath.

  “There. Now it’s cleansed,” he said. “Try again.”

  There was one other time, when he’d dived from the five-meter diving board at an outdoor swimming pool to impress Lise, only to end up with his trunks around his knees midair, that he’d felt more stupid than just now. Was he really sitting here trying to convince a cone that it should make a start and move?

  And then it did.

  “Okay, good,” said the gardener. “Now hold it over the herbs and ask the pendulum if they’re good for you.”

  He only did it because Assad poked him in the leg under the table.

  “Thought as much. They’re no good for you. You need something a little less potent, or we’ll have you running around like crazy.”

  Carl nodded and said that was exactly what he needed. That way he could be free from playing Dr. Mesmer again.

  “Okay, but you’ve been warned,” he said.

  Did the man think that he’d ever consider making soup from his stinking crops?

  “Put the pendulum in your pocket. It’ll help you another time when you need it most. I’ll put fifty kroner on top of the price of the plants. That should keep us straight.”

  Carl tried to smile and thanked him. “But actually we’re also here to talk to you about that time you were over on Bornholm with Frank in the Ølene camp. We mustn’t forget that.”

  He looked thoughtful. “Frank?”

  “Yes, that’s the name we know best.”

  “And why are you asking?”

  Assad took over. “We’re interested in his philosophy about sun cults and the like. We’d like to talk to him ourselves but we don’t know where he’s gone. Do you know maybe?”

  The grey lady in the background took a few steps forward, which didn’t go unnoticed by the man.

  “How did you find me?” he asked with his eyes fixed on the woman.

  “From one of the alternative therapists that you visited together. She remembered your name, and she’s been a customer of yours.”

  He nodded when Carl said her name. “Yes, that’s right enough. I lived in the Ølene camp for the whole summer; they were good times. We had a difference of opinion, Frank and me, but our conversations were actually really fantastic.”

  “What did you discuss?” asked Carl. “Sun cults, religion, and that sort of thing?”

  “Yes, and a whole lot more besides. Frank and I were both part of the excavations at Rispebjerg, but Frank in particular felt a special affection for the place because of the sun offerings and extensive evidence of strong cultures that had been there thousands of years before. Actually, he stole one of the sunstones we excavated, but we only talk about that under our breath.”

  He laughed for a moment but stopped again when he caught his wife’s eyes.

  “Do you know how he got this interest?”

  “I think it was just something he’d always busied himself with. And the Open University, of course. He took a couple of courses the year before while he was working in Copenhagen, so he told me.”

  “What courses, do you know?”

  “There was a lecturer from the theology faculty in Copenhagen, a visiting lecturer. I don’t know his name but he was a professor, Frank said. It was apparently quite epochal, something to do with the origin of archaeoastronomy and religion.”

  “Archaeo-what?”

  “Archaeoastronomy, the significance of the zodiac for prehistoric peoples.”

  Assad noted it down. “Do you have contact with any friends from Ølene?” he asked.

  “No, not apart from Søren Mølgård. But he’s really gone to the dogs of late.”

  “Søren Mølgård. Can we have his address?”

  “It’s a while ago and, to be honest, I’ve dropped him. Too many drugs, you understand. It’s not really compatible with what we work with here, is it, Birtemaja?”

  She shook her head, lips pinched. Just as well it wasn’t her they were trying to squeeze something out of.

  “I seem to recall that he moved to a commune with some Asa followers, just south of Roskilde. Probably what was needed if he didn’t want to go totally under.”

  “And who is this Søren character?”

  “Nobody special. Just one of the people who lived at Ølene for a while. As far as I’ve heard, quite a few of us from there have ended up in the alternative world and made a good
go of it, but Søren lacked the talent. He was just a hippie who happened to come past. He apparently tried to become a numerologist just like Birtemaja, but didn’t really understand what lay at its core. We like some sort of order in our worldview, you understand, and that wasn’t something for him.” He laughed.

  Carl nodded. As far as he could tell, the order of the worldview hadn’t quite made it into this room here.

  “And what about you? Where are you two from?” he asked.

  Now Carl pulled his ID card from his pocket, in spite of Assad’s intense look.

  “We’re from Copenhagen Police, and we’d really like to talk with Frank about an accident that took place when you were living on Bornholm. We believe him to be the only one who can help us reach an understanding of what happened.”

  Simon Fisher’s eyes fixed on the card. He hadn’t seen this coming. “What accident?” he said with a look of distrust. “While we were there? I don’t know anything about an accident.”

  “No, but then that’s not what we’re here to talk to you about. We just hope you’ll be able to tell us Frank’s surname and what name he’s using at present. Do you know where he’s based at the moment?”

  “Sorry,” he said briefly.

  * * *

  “Honestly, Assad, can’t you just hurl those plants out the window? It stinks so much it’s making me sick.”

  “I paid fifty kroner for them, Carl.”

  Carl sighed and pressed the passenger window down.

  “It’s too cold and it’s pouring down, Carl. Can you shut it again? The seat’s getting soaked.”

  He ignored him. Either the plants went or Assad would have to put up with it. And when they got back, he’d be keeping well clear of everything Assad might think to conjure up from the stuff.

  Carl pressed Rose’s work number on his cell and asked her to find a man who’d taught at the Open University in Copenhagen in the years just before 1997, a theologian whose passion was apparently comparing religions and constellations.

  Afterward, there was silence in the car for the next twenty kilometers. Really nice atmosphere when you were driving on a motorway where it seemed like half the population of Zealand had decided to head off in the direction of Copenhagen.