Jesper squeezed his wife’s hand.
“Lennart went a bit wild after his mother died. He stopped going to school. He said he wanted to find his father. He lived in a squat. He came back a few times, usually when he needed money. But he was a good boy at heart.”
Hanne began to cry. Tobias produced a clean white handkerchief and gave it to her. She dabbed her eyes.
“Did he find his father?” asked Katrine.
“If he did, he never told us,” said Jesper. He opened the photograph album and turned over the pages. He showed Tobias and Katrine a full-page photograph of a dark-haired smiling young woman with a baby.
“Mette and Lennart. That was taken at the christening.”
He turned over more pages.
“This is the most recent photograph we have of Lennart. I took it one day he came to visit and helped me in the garden. He was seventeen.”
Jesper fell silent.
Tobias and Katrine studied the full-length photograph of an intense-looking, dark-haired teenager, leaning on an upright spade.
“We didn’t see him often after that,” said Hanne. “He came every six months or so. He would turn up without warning and stay for a day or two. We would come down for breakfast in the morning and he would be gone again. Without a word,” said Hanne.
“Once he didn’t turn up for nearly a year,” said Jesper. “He didn’t even telephone. Then he just appeared on the doorstep one day.”
“It was his twenty-firstst birthday,” said Hanne. “He was here for his twenty-first birthday. He brought a girl.”
“They came over on the ferry from Helsingborg. They had a van,” said Jesper. “A blue van. They were living in it. They showed us. It had a bed and a folding table and chairs and a little gas stove for cooking. It was cosy. They were proud of it.”
Katrine produced the photograph of Emily. “Was this the girl?”
Hanne and Jesper studied it.
Hanne sighed. “It was so long ago. But she was blonde and pretty, like this girl. Her name was Emily.”
“Emily Rasmussen,” said Tobias. “We know she was with Lennart in Lapland 1997 and 1998.”
“I’d like to speak to her,” said Hanne.
“So would we,” said Tobias.
Hanne looked puzzled.
“She left home around the time Lennart was killed,” said Tobias. “We’re trying to contact her. So if you remember anything, anything at all that might help us find her, we’d like to know.”
“She seemed a nice girl,” said Jesper. “They stayed for one night. We had a lovely time. We had twenty-one candles and twenty-one flags on the birthday cake. We drank champagne. I gave Lennart one hundred kroner for his birthday. They left the next morning.”
“We didn’t take a photograph,” cried Hanne. “Why didn’t we take a photograph? We were so happy to see him.”
Jesper put his arm around her shoulders. “Lennart came to see us a few months after that. With the girl. I asked if him if he needed money. He said no. But I gave him some anyway.”
“Did they still have the van?”
Jesper nodded. “I think so. They only stayed a few hours. We had a brief telephone call from him. I don’t remember when exactly. Maybe a week later. After that, we didn’t see or hear from Lennart again. We waited for about a year. Then we went to the police.”
“We waited too long,” said Hanne. “We shouldn’t have waited so long. Always hoping to hear from him.” A sob escaped from her.
“The police told us they had no reports of any one of his description being injured or killed. They said Lennart was an adult. He was twenty-one. They said sometimes people, especially men, left home and didn’t return,” said Jesper.
“As soon as we mentioned Christiana, they seemed to lose interest,” said Hanne. “We mentioned the girl but we didn’t know her second name. The police said they had no reports about a girl of that description being injured or missing either. We went back to the police a year later, when we still hadn’t heard from Lennart. They told us the same thing.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tobias.
“If only we’d reported it sooner,” cried Hanne.
“Maybe he was already dead by then,” said Jesper. “And we didn’t know. All those years hoping, hoping…..and all the time….”
“They could have looked for the girl,” said Hanne. “That might have helped.”
“Without a name, or a photograph, there wasn’t much to go on,” said Tobias. “We’re having difficulty finding her now. Do you have a photograph of Lennart which we can release to the press? Perhaps Emily will see it and come forward. We hope she might be able to tell us something.” Such as whether or not she killed him, he added silently to herself.
“You can take this,” Hanne detached the photograph of seventeen-year-old Lennart from the album, kissed it, gave it to Katrine. “Promise you will bring it back.”
“I promise,” said Tobias. He slipped the photograph into his briefcase.
“We can provide grief counselling as well,” said Katrine. “Is there anyone we can call or fetch? A relative, or a neighbour perhaps?”
Hanne and Jesper looked at each other. They shook their heads.
“We’ll call our priest,” said Jesper. “We need to organise everything the funeral. We want to say goodbye in the proper way.”
“We’ve had fourteen years of sorrow,” said Hanne. “Missing him. Hoping that he was alive. What fools we were.” A tear ran down her cheek. “You can do one thing for us. Take away the cake. I can’t bear to see it again.”
Katrine sat in the car with the cake in a box on her knee. She turned an anxious face to Tobias. “I checked the missing males,” she said. “I didn’t find a Lennart Praetorius. I didn’t include him in the list. I’m sorry,” she said.
“It made no difference,” said Tobias. “If we’d come here at the beginning, we still wouldn’t have learned much about Emily. We need to find her. I’m convinced she’s the key to everything.”
“What will we do with the cake?”
“Take it back to the office. Remove the flags and candles and offer everyone a slice with their coffee tomorrow,” said Tobias. He glanced at Katrine. “Has this job not hardened your heart yet?” He put the car into gear and accelerated away from the sorrow-filled house. “It will, Katrine, it will.”
Monday: Week Three
31.
Karl Lund called Eddy to tell him the contents of the underground bin in which the first bones had been found were now bagged, labelled and ready for inspection.
“They’re in nineteen clear plastic bags,” said Karl. “We can’t keep them in the lab so we’ve put them in the garage. I’ve emailed you a list. Call me if you need me. Good luck.”
Katrine had already printed off the list. She waved it at Eddy. They went down to the garage.
The forensics team had sorted the rubbish into categories – animal, vegetable, paper, plastic, glass, tin, cloth, miscellaneous. Paper, plastic and glass should have been in re-cycling bins, and to be fair to the inhabitants of the housing blocks nearest to the bin, the bags containing these materials were small and the contents easily checked against the list provided by Karl Lund. The uncooked vegetable waste, such as potato peelings, onion skins, carrot scrapings and banana skins, could have been composted, but since the inhabitants of these same housing blocks did not have gardens, the waste went to the bin along with scraps of cooked, left-over meat and fish. The bags of food waste did not smell as bad as Katrine had feared. What she took at first to be hard-boiled eggs in a separate bag – hard-boiled eggs in dustbins? And people complained about poverty? – on closer inspection turned out to be golf balls whose covers had split to reveal a yellow inner-core.
“A dead cat. Ugh,” said Eddy, gingerly putting to one side a plastic bag containing the feline corpse and picking up a smaller bag. He glanced at the label. “This one’s a dead budgerigar. The cat killed the budgie. The budgie’s owner killed the cat in revenge
. That’s my theory.”
“Three sets of dentures, two pairs of spectacles and a broken riding crop,” said Katrine, putting a tick beside them on the list.
“A torn jacket with a swastika on the sleeve.” Eddy shook his head. “The things people get up to in Gelleruparken.” He held up a pair of pink silk panties in one gloved hand. “These look as though they were gnawed through. Ripped off by somebody’s teeth.” He thrust the panties towards Katrine. She wrinkled her nose in distaste.
Eddy replaced the panties and picked up a bag of letters, envelopes and wrapping paper. He handed the bag to Katrine.
“Get names and addresses from these. Check how many of them were questioned in the door to door. Uniform spoke to seventy-five people. There must be at least five hundred living in the block nearest the bin. I’ll stay and finish checking this lot.”
When Eddy returned to the office, Katrine was so absorbed she didn’t hear his approach.
“I’m going to take a break,” he said. “Fancy a coffee?”
Katrine didn’t reply.
“I’m going to open the window and piss into the courtyard,” he said.
Katrine granted him a quick smile before turning back to the screen. “I’ve made a list of the addresses. They were nearly all checked in the door-to-door. Here they are,” she tapped a file on her desk, not taking her eyes from the screen. “I’m looking for Lennart Praetorius. I want to know when he was reported missing. I searched only for males aged twenty to twenty-eight missing between 1996 to 1999. That’s what Brix said. I was worried I’d left him out of the list by mistake. The grandparents told us they didn’t report Bogman, I mean Lennart, missing until a year after they’d last seen him.” She shook her head. “I still think of him as Bogman.”
“Me too.”
Katrine scrolled down a list of names. “I can’t find him in 1999.”
“The wrinklies probably left it more than a year,” said Eddy. “The older you are, the faster time passes.”
“It must be flying past you, then, Eddy,” said Katrine. She flashed a smile at him and continued scrolling.
“I’ve found him.” She clapped her hands. “February 2nd 2000. Lennart Lars Praetorius. Helsinger. Reported missing by Jesper and Hanne Hedegaarde.” She smacked her forehead. “I should have extended the search into 2000. But we got sidelined by Bruno Holst. The guy who turned up alive in Germany.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” said Eddy. “We wouldn’t have identified him without the bracelet. Unless the grandparents mention it in the report.”
“I’ll ask Helsinger to send over the file,” said Katrine.
“Tell them it’s urgent,” said Eddy. “Or you won’t get it for ages. The boss is still waiting for the file on Emily’s stepfather.”
Tobias was in the library at Jyellands Posten, settling himself at a machine which magnified microfiches. The librarian had organised the newspaper’s reports of the protests at Skovlynd golf in date order. The room was dark and quiet. The only sound was the click of the machine as it moved the microfiches into the frames.
There were ten brief stories – each two paragraphs at most – about the demonstrations at Skovlynd. The first report was from April 1996. The last was dated September 1998. There was a statement from the protesters, who called themselves the Green Brigade. The ten signatories to the statement included Emily Rasmussen, Nicholas Hove and Gudrun Pettersen, but not Lennart Praetorius and not anyone named Aksel Schmidt, or Aksel anything. None of the reports mentioned him.
One report quoted Kurt Malling: “I too am concerned about the environment. My company is developing several green energy projects. This club will bring jobs to the area. It is supported by local businesses and services. Most of the forest will still be in place. Bechstein’s Bat will not be affected.”
The newspaper had printed a letter in reply from Nicholas Hove: “Our concern is not only about protecting the habitat of Bechstein’s bat but about the widespread use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers on golf courses, the excess use of water for irrigation and the impact on the wetlands around Skovlynd.”
Tobias stood up and stretched. He began to think rooting through rubbish might be more interesting. All the roads to Emily seemed to finish in dead-ends. He sat down again and squinted into the viewing machine. A centre-spread about the protests clicked into view. This was better. There were ten paragraphs with names and quotes, and four large photographs.
Tobias zoomed in on a black and white photograph of Emily and Lennart – easily recognisable now – in the rain, hair plastered against their faces, holding up a dripping banner: TREES NOT TEES: SAY NO TO GOLF. No caption. The photograph said it all.
The second photograph, also in black and white, was a sideways view of Emily and Lennart, facing a tall man sheltering under a golf umbrella and flanked by police. It was captioned ‘Stand-off’.
The third photograph was a reverse of the previous one. Kurt Malling, under the umbrella, stiff with anger. ‘Skovlynd developer Kurt Malling unmoved by protests’, was the caption.
The fourth photograph showed three protesters dragging a sodden and muddy tent to the side of the road. ‘Weather more effective than police. Storm sweeps away camp of the eco-warriors’. Tobias enlarged it. Emily and Nicholas Hove. Who was the third man in photograph? Could it be Aksel?
Tobias printed the stories and the photographs and marked the date on each report. He wrote, “Aksel?” on the back of the fourth photograph and booked a motorbike courier to take it to Nicholas Hove.
Tuesday: Week Three
32.
“She can’t have vanished into thin air,” said Larsen. He stared at the photograph of Emily on the board in the Incident Room. “She must have done something, somewhere.”
“The story was on television last night, and in the evening papers, with Emily’s photograph,” said Tobias. “And Lennart’s photograph as well. Last seen with Emily Rasmussen and so on. It was on television and in all the papers, local and national, this morning. It was on radio last night and again this morning.”
“Fifty-three people telephoned last night,” said Katrine. “Three were mediums, offering to get in touch with Emily through the spirit world.”
Larsen rolled his eyes.
“One caller was sure Emily was living next door to her in Ribe. West Jutland sent three squad cars at midnight and wakened a kindergarten teacher who looked a bit like the photographs but was definitely not Emily.”
“She looks like half the women in Denmark,” said Larsen gloomily. “At least she’s not a kiddy. We’d have thousands of calls and they’d all be useless.” He waved at Katrine to continue.
“Ten callers wanted to know if there was a reward,” said Katrine. “They didn’t have any information.”
“We haven’t the budget for a reward,” said Larsen.
“Fifteen callers thought they’d seen Emily in the last few days. Every location was different. She was spotted in ten different places on the same day at roughly the same time. Never at an address.” Katrine glanced at her notes. “She was seen walking on the beach, in a café, in a cinema. One woman said she was with Emily at a bus stop when she vaporised in front of her eyes.”
“These appeals always bring out the nutters, the chancers and the snoopers,” said Renata. “Did any sane people call?”
“Fourteen women and two men called to tell us they’d met Emily in environmental groups at least ten years ago,” said Katrine. “They were vague about dates but they all mentioned the Skovlynd protest. Ten of the women and one of the men remembered Lennart as well. All of them thought Emily had gone to join another protest somewhere. Lapland was mentioned, but also Germany, England and Estonia. None of them had anything concrete to add to what we already know.”
“Nicholas Hove and Gudrun Jeppessen both mentioned an activist called Aksel. Possibly Aksel Schmidt, but Gudrun isn’t sure,” said Tobias. “Did anyone called Aksel get in touch?”
Katrine shook
her head.
“Either she’s dead, or she wanted to disappear,” said Eddy. “It’s not that difficult. You can buy a false identity online. Or she could just use cash, not buy a mobile phone in her own name. The things that trace you are mostly electronic.”
“Any progress on the Hotmail and Facebook front, Renata?” asked Tobias.
“The request is with the US State Department. I’m still waiting for an answer.”
“Can we hurry them up?”
“Only if we suggest she has some kind of terrorist link. That gets them moving double-double quick.”
“Tempting,” said Eddy.
Larsen stared stonily at him.
“Only joking,” said Eddy.
“Emily was arrested at the Skovlynd protest,” said Tobias.
“September tenth, 1998,” said Eddy. “There’s no video of the interview. She was released without charge.”
“That’s a pity,” said Renata. “That might have helped with the Americans. They’re jumpy about eco-terrorists.”
“With good cause,” said Larsen. “Nutters, all of them.”
Tobias thought about Agnes. Passionate, naïve perhaps. But not a terrorist, and definitely not mad.
“Emily’s fingerprints are on file. That’s useful,” said Eddy. “She can be identified even if she’s changed her appearance.”
“No sign of the blue van?” asked Tobias.
Eddy shook his head. “Even Khazakstan has automatic number plate recognition. But the van hasn’t been seen anywhere. It’s vaporised as well.”
“Her mother got an email from her on the 24th September 1998, saying she was going away with Lennart,” said Tobias. “We must find out where those emails are coming from.”
Bogman Page 15
