The Girl in the Ice

by Lotte Hammer

  “You know what I mean . . . ”

  He looked at his boss.

  “ . . . and I still think it’s unfair they put all the blame on you.”

  Simonsen stuck out his lower lip.

  “Yes, it’s cruel, the world is so mean . . . mean.”

  Troulsen shook his head.

  “I’m starting to look forward to retirement.”

  “Hmm, we have to talk about that at some point, Poul. There are a number of different arrangements, that if you stick around a couple more years—”

  “Forget that.”

  “Okay, well, no need to decide right now. How far are we with the Finnish girl, Arne?”

  “We’ve got her data, but you know that, and otherwise not much has happened since Friday. The narrowest time frame we can establish in which she disappeared is between the seventeenth of April and the third of May, 1992, presumably from Hässleholm Central Station. Falkenborg’s old farm was a few kilometres south-west by Finja Lake, but Elizabeth Juutilainen was never seen with him. The Swedes are working on the case.”

  “I’m hearing that you don’t expect we’ll get any further with her.”

  “It’s hard. The witnesses we’ve managed to trace are not the sort to go talking to the police. What they have to say is extremely limited . . . basically nothing.”

  Troulsen commented, “Actually it’s a paradox: one form of criminality shouldn’t overshadow the other, if I may say so. I mean, narcotics circles have just as much interest in getting serial killers behind bars as ordinary law-abiding citizens.”

  Simonsen said, “In theory you’re right, but they don’t think that way. Or very rarely in any—”

  Pedersen jumped up from his chair.

  “Say what you said again, Poul. Right away, it’s important.”

  “The thing about the narcotics smugglers?”

  “Yes, damn it, what was it you said?”

  “That they ought to be just as interested that we catch serial murderers as anyone else, and that it’s a paradox they aren’t.”

  “No, not that, the other thing you said.”

  Simonsen recited calmly, “Actually it is a paradox: one form of criminality shouldn’t overshadow the other, if I may say so. I mean—”

  He got no further.

  “Yes, that was what she said! Exactly that.”

  “Who said, Arne?”

  “The new teacher at the parents’ evening. She said that she always spoke softly to the children, because she did not believe that too much noise should be drowned out with even more noise. Now it also has a logical sense, yes, obviously—what an idiot I’ve been! If we have the transcript of the questioning of Andreas Falkenborg you’ll see it. Yes, and the conversation in the car between Poul and him, that’s the same.”

  Both of his listeners gave up trying to make immediate sense of his outburst. Simonsen found the printouts. Pedersen browsed eagerly, almost feverishly, through them after which he read out loud to them.

  “This is from the interview. Simon, you are asking him about Annie Lindberg Hansson.

  K.S.: She resembled the other women to a T.

  A.F.: So it must be me. Yes, I would think that.

  K.S.: Where did you bury her?

  A.F.: I didn’t.

  And this is from the car. Poul, you are also pressuring him in relation to Annie Lindberg Hansson.

  P.T.: . . . so it’s Annie now—where did you bury her?”

  A.F.: But I haven’t done that.

  P.T.: Why drag this out?

  A.F.: But it’s the truth, I haven’t done that.

  Stop right there, can’t you see it?”

  They could. It was Troulsen who answered.

  “You mean the pig?”

  “It was a gigantic sow that stank for months, while it rotted. That is, rotted outside on the tree. Now you haven’t seen it, of course, but I have, it’s an old poplar, and I would bet that at the same time the pig rotted, Annie Lindberg Hansson was sitting inside the tree. The poplar resembles an upturned, giant-sized shaving brush. The trunk must be a metre-and-a-half wide and no more than four metres up to the thin branches that stretch out in all directions. When I was a kid, there was a poplar like that on waste ground near us, and it was hollow, rotten from above and down inside, but outside the tree seemed healthy enough and put out leaves and branches every year. We kids climbed up and squeezed through the branches so we could lower ourselves down into the hollow trunk with a rope, almost all the way to the ground. I’m damned certain—she’s in there.”

  Simonsen held his men back. Both of his subordinates were full of enthusiasm and wanted to go to Præstø immediately. It was extremely tempting, but the trip was postponed until the next day, and the chief was unyielding.

  “No, I don’t want any more surprises in court. This time it will go precisely by the book. We will arrange the legalities today and get permission to cut down that poplar tree, if we have the slightest suspicion. But in that case it will be the technicians who do the job. You’d better find a good corpse dog for early tomorrow morning!”

  Troulsen tried one last time.

  “But we could at least go down and look, we can easily do that.”

  “Tomorrow, Poul, tomorrow.”

  Both men should have known their boss better and realised that it was pointless to pressure him. They tried anyway. At last however they accepted the postponement. Pedersen asked searchingly, “Can’t we take Pauline along? She and I have been there before.”

  “Fine by me, but she’s sick, she called last night. Said we shouldn’t count on seeing her until at least the middle of the week. A summer flu, she said.”

  “Oh, good Lord—yes, there’s a lot of that in this heat. What about Falkenborg? How much surveillance do you have on him?”

  “I have two teams that change three times every twenty-four hours.”

  Troulsen asked, “Isn’t it a mistake not to keep as much control over him as we possibly can? It would be unbearable if he gives us the slip, just when we can nail him on Annie Lindberg Hansson. Keep in mind that Ernesto Madsen could not understand that episode with the pig, it fell outside the pattern, and suddenly it doesn’t any more. I don’t like the fact Falkenborg’s withdrawn so much cash either. That sounds like he’s planning to disappear.”

  Simonsen said regretfully, “In an ideal world without budgets, I’d throw all the resources we have at him. But now the situation is obviously different, I’ll add two more teams.”

  They went their separate ways, feeling considerably more uplifted than when they’d arrived. Simonsen called the Countess and told her about Arne Pedersen’s hypothesis. She too urged him to drive to South Zealand right away. For once she was flatly rejected.

  That same evening Andreas Falkenborg slipped away from police surveillance. It happened in the heart of Copenhagen, where Frederiksborggade runs into Nørre Voldgade. Four unmarked police cars took part in the shadowing, so that two were responsible for staying ahead and two behind Andreas Falkenborg’s easily recognisable blue Mercedes the whole time it was apparently driving aimlessly around in the city. The other two were held in reserve, ready to intervene when the lead car missed the route. The job was easy, on the verge of boring. The man they were following drove calmly and sensibly, more often too slowly than too fast, and the officers were thus not particularly attentive when their subject, in complete accordance with traffic regulations, stayed in the inside lane at a red light alongside Nørreport Station. It was the second time within five minutes that they’d found themselves at this exact spot, which ought to have sharpened the officers’ attention. The last time however the light was green, so they’d followed the traffic and glided past the station. In contrast to now. One of the two officers in the following car said tiredly, “God, how long does he intend to drive around here?”

  “We’ll see,” said his colleague in a bored voice. “At least this is more fun than sitting staring at the entry to his apartment. Here there’s a lit
tle variety, and . . . what the hell!”

  The officer reacted quickly. He opened the car door without looking and it banged into a bus that had pulled up alongside the police vehicle. He squeezed out, wriggled past the other motorists and ran the fifty metres to the station as fast as he could. When his colleague saw that the Mercedes was empty, he understood and followed. But Andreas Falkenborg’s head start on them was too much, and both men arrived too late.

  They conferred briefly, after which one ran down the stairs to the platforms while the second officer called the other surveillance teams. Soon eight officers were gathered at the scene, but to no avail. After a hectic fifteen minutes they gave up, and the leader of the surveillance operation reported the depressing news to the officer on duty at Glostrup Police, who promised to inform the Homicide Division immediately.

  But the news arrived at the worst imaginable time.

  While the desk sergeant was receiving the information about Falkenborg’s disappearance, his commissioner showed up alongside him wearing a serious expression. Kindly but firmly, he took the desk sergeant’s phone from him and interrupted the call. The explanation followed immediately.

  “Your daughter just called.”

  Anxiety came in waves. The desk sergeant nodded, he was in no condition to do otherwise.

  “It’s your grandson. He’s been admitted to Herlev Hospital with meningitis. It’s serious, Mads. The boy is in a coma. She’s asking for you to go there.”

  The commissioner drove him.

  Almost twelve hours passed before Konrad Simonsen was notified that Andreas Falkenborg was beyond the supervision of the authorities and had been so for almost half a day.

  CHAPTER 43

  The evenings were getting darker, without anyone really noticing it. It was not all that long ago that the lilacs were blooming, the summer holidays lay ahead, and the light nights only got longer and longer. The woman in the S-train observed her reflected image in the window beside her. Without vanity, although she was quite pretty. She shrugged to herself. At the end of every summer she had a melancholy feeling of not having achieved what she wanted to, in the good part of the year. The time ahead of her always appeared longer than the time behind. Perhaps that would change when she grew old.

  The S-train rolled into Nørreport Station, and many passengers got off and on, faces drawn and harassed. Endlessly trying to snatch back a second or two. She observed the new arrivals. It was an art she had mastered completely—looking at people without them realising it. And then drawing them, if the opportunity presented itself. But she was choosy about that. Not all faces were equally interesting, there had to be something particular about the ones she chose, and none of the newcomers found favour in her eyes. A young girl sat down beside her, not even noticing her, absorbed in a phone call. She moved her backpack slightly so the girl would have room. The doors whistled, and the S-train pulled out.

  Shortly after that a man in his fifties came into the compartment. He seemed restless, constantly looking back and forth, as if someone were following him. He took a seat a little farther forward, still wearing a hunted expression. She studied him thoroughly, and her pulse raced.

  It was his ordinariness that excited her. A face that could only be described by what it was not, by its very lack of distinguishing characteristics. As if he were created neutral. He could be a refuse collector, he could be a bank manager, in both cases he would pass unnoticed. At the same time there was something confidence-inspiring about him; this was a man you could feel safe with. What was ordinary was never dangerous. She took the sketch pad out of her backpack and decided to herself that when she was through drawing, he would be called the Middleman.

  “Shut up! Those are beautiful. Can I take a look?”

  The young girl had finished her phone call. The idiotic comment did not impress the artist, but nevertheless she handed over the pad. She did not like to reject people. Not even this evening, although basically she would rather go home. He wanted to pick her up at Grimstrup Station, a carefully chosen, deserted place where no one would see her getting into his car. Like a forbidden plaything.

  “What is that?”

  “A wall in England.”

  “That looks boring. It’s nothing but stone. Why’d you draw it?”

  It was hard to explain, she barely knew herself. Why had she saved for five months to go to London for just two days? Two days when for hours she had drawn a Roman wall in the middle of the world’s biggest financial district. A peeling ruin, dominated on all sides by luxurious, blue-glass facades. Forms, contours, surfaces, angles—she had enjoyed every minute.

  It was as if the girl guessed her thoughts. The date under the drawing combined with the stickers on her backpack probably betrayed her.

  “Did you go to London just for that retarded wall?”

  “I want to be an architect someday. But take a look at this.”

  She took back the sketch pad and leafed past the wall drawings.

  “He was a guide on a horror tour. His name is Patrick.”

  The young man had walked past her, leading a small group of tourists. With a booming voice and exaggerated gestures, he told lurid stories. She was intrigued by his larger-than-life presence, the confidence with which he wore his over-sized tweed jacket. She followed on behind the group. In the beginning she stayed on the edges, she hadn’t paid for the tour after all, then her confidence increased as she saw that she was welcome anyway.

  “He was talking about Jack the Ripper, a serial killer in the 1880s, who terrified the East End of London. He murdered prostitutes, cutting them up horribly with a knife. He killed five women. At the time the Ripper roamed its streets Whitechapel was a slum. Today it’s an ultra-modern neighbourhood.”

  She and Patrick had coffee together when the tour was over. They laughed together and acted silly. He told her he was going to drama school; recited Shakespeare just for her. It stayed at that.

  The girl said, “I hope they hanged the murderer.”

  “He was never caught, and since then there have been lots of theories about who he was. Every conceivable type of fine, highly educated gentleman, but I think he was more anonymous. The quiet type, someone no one would ever dream of suspecting.”

  At Hillerød Station she took leave of the girl and joined up with a handful of people waiting for the local train toward Frederiksværk. Suddenly the Middleman was standing behind her, without her having heard his approach. She turned and smiled casually at him. Maybe she would have another chance to draw him.

  CHAPTER 44

  In Præstø Arne Pedersen’s theory that the poplar tree contained the earthly remains of Annie Lindberg Hansson was given reliable support in the form of a young, black female German Shepherd who answered to the name of Cathy, as long as it was the dog handler who said it. Cathy scratched at the tree and barked, while her owner meaningfully gave the detectives the thumbs up. Pedersen pointed to a rusty plate and said, “It sounds strange, but at one time there was a dead pig nailed up here until it rotted away. Could that have affected your dog’s behaviour?”

  The handler patted the animal and answered, “I really don’t think so, but we can try from the other side, just to be sure.”

  He ordered his dog around the tree, shouted an unintelligible command, and the animal’s reaction was repeated from the opposite side.

  “And that means?” Poul Troulsen enquired.

  “That there is a body inside the tree, unless Cathy is wrong.”

  “Is she often wrong?”

  “She’s never wrong.”

  Pedersen set up a ladder which he had borrowed from the teachers, who were following the course of events tensely from their kitchen window not far away. He climbed up and with difficulty swung through the many unpollarded branches, aiming his powerful flashlight down into the trunk. Troulsen asked from below, “Is there anything to see?”

  “Nothing, only detritus and withered leaves, but it’s hollow, like we thought. Should I t
ry to go down? It won’t be easy.”

  “No, let’s leave the rest to the technicians. If anyone is going to destroy evidence, it should be them and not us.”

  A few hours later a chainsaw was powering into the old poplar. A technician dressed in what looked like a spacesuit operated the saw. The branches quickly disappeared, the trunk itself put up more resistance, but block by block the tree was cut down. The process was slow. Every time a piece of trunk was sliced off, two other technicians carefully removed twigs, leaves and humus from the hollow space. Only towards afternoon, when the tree was barely two metres tall, did anything finally happen. One technician said quietly, “Okay, now we have her. I can see a hand.”

  Gently, almost solemnly, he gathered a portion of composted leaves, which he let fall behind him, then said, “Yes, she’s in a plastic bag, the poor girl.”

  Pedersen already had his cell phone out. It was the news he and Troulsen had been waiting for all day. He called Konrad Simonsen and was connected immediately. With triumph in his voice, which he made no effort to conceal, he said, “She’s been found, and there is no doubt that it’s him. Same murder method.”

  Then he listened for a long time. After a while Troulsen began to feel worried. Something was wrong, his colleague’s facial expression had lost every trace of optimism. Pedersen ended the call, looking unhappy.

  “What’s happened, Arne? You’re completely pale.”

  “Falkenborg is gone. He fooled his surveillance team yesterday evening, but we only found out this morning because some blockheads from Glostrup made a total mess of it. Since then everyone has been searching for him, but with no result.”

  “Shit.”

  “There’s more. Jeanette Hvidt has disappeared, and several witnesses saw Falkenborg at her uncle’s house in Helsingør.”

  Troulsen took hold of Pedersen’s arm and turned him around, shouting, “What the hell are you saying?”

  “He overpowered her in a bicycle shed in her uncle’s garden. That was the only thing Simon told me. You’ll have to wait to hear more until we get to Copenhagen.”