‘If you report me, then you won’t get anything, Thelma. Did you consider that? I’ll let the fucking business go bankrupt while I’m in prison.’
‘You’ll sign. Don’t you think I know that?’ Her laughter resounded with contempt. ‘You know as well as I do that things don’t move so quickly. I’ll still get my share of the spoils before you go broke. Maybe not as much, but enough. But I know you, Ditlev. You’re a practical sort. Why throw away your business and sit in jail when you can afford to rid yourself of the wife in a normal fashion? So you’ll sign. And tomorrow you’ll admit Frank to the clinic, understand? I want him as good as new in a month. Even better than new.’
He shook his head. She’d always been a devil. Birds of a feather flock together, as his mother used to say.
‘Where did you get the pistol, Thelma?’ he asked calmly, taking the documents and scrawling his signature on the top two pages. ‘What happened?’
She stared at the papers, waiting until she had them in her hand before responding.
‘It’s too bad you weren’t here tonight, Ditlev, because then I don’t think I would have needed your signature.’
‘Is that so? And why is that?’
‘Some filthy, dirty woman smashed the window and threatened me with this.’ She waved the weapon. ‘She was asking for you, Ditlev.’
Thelma laughed, and the strap of her negligee slid off one shoulder. ‘I told her I would gladly let her in the front door next time she passed by. Then she could do whatever she wished without all the bother of smashing windows.’
Ditlev felt his skin grow cold.
Kimmie! After all these years.
‘She gave me the pistol and patted me on the cheek as if I were a little child. She mumbled something and then she went out the front door.’ Thelma laughed again. ‘But don’t despair, Ditlev. Your girlfriend will pay you a visit another day, she said to tell you!’
13
Homicide Chief Marcus Jacobsen rubbed his forehead. This was a bloody awful way to start the week. He’d just been handed his fourth request for leave in as many days. Two men from his best investigation unit were off sick, and then this bestial attack right in the middle of a downtown street. A woman had been beaten beyond recognition and then tossed in a rubbish container. The violence was growing more and more raw and, understandably enough, everyone was demanding immediate action. The newspapers, the public, the police chief. If the woman died, all hell would break loose. It was a record year for homicides. One would have to go back at least ten years to see statistics this high, and because of that, and because so many officers were leaving the police force, the brass were calling meetings all the time.
It was one pressure on top of another, and now Bak had also asked for leave. Bak of all people, for Christ’s sake.
In the old days, he and Bak would have lit fags and walked round the courtyard, and they’d have solved their problems right there – of that he was convinced. But the old days were gone, and now he was powerless. Simply put, he had little to offer his personnel. The salary was shit, and so were the working hours. His officers were worn out and their work had become practically impossible to carry out satisfactorily. And now they couldn’t even soothe their frustrations with a smoke. A hell of a situation.
‘You’ve got to prod the politicians, Marcus,’ said his deputy, Lars Bjørn, as the office movers blustered about in the hallway so that everything would appear organized and efficient, as the reforms demanded. But it was merely camouflage, window dressing.
Marcus raised his eyebrows and looked at his deputy with the same resigned smile that had been plastered on Lars Bjørn’s face the last few months.
‘And when will you be asking me for leave, Lars? You’re still a relatively young man. Don’t you dream of landing another job? Wouldn’t your wife like you around the house more, too?’
‘Hell, Marcus, the only job I’d prefer to mine is yours.’ He said it so drily and matter-of-factly it could make a man nervous.
Marcus nodded. ‘OK. But I hope you have time to wait, because I’m not getting out of here before my time. That’s not my style.’
‘Just talk to the police chief, Marcus. Ask her to put pressure on the politicians so we can have tolerable working conditions.’
There was a knock on the door, and before Marcus could react, Carl Mørck was halfway into his office. Could that man do something by the book, just for once?
‘Not now, Carl,’ he said, knowing full well that Mørck’s hearing could be surprisingly selective.
‘It’ll only take a moment.’ Carl nodded almost imperceptibly to Lars Bjørn. ‘It’s about the case I’m working on.’
‘The Rørvig murders? If you can tell me who almost killed a woman last night in the middle of Store Kannikestræde, then I’ll listen. Otherwise you’re on your own. And you know what I think about the Rørvig case. There was a conviction. Find another case, one where the perpetrator is still on the loose.’
‘Someone here at this station has a connection to the case.’
Marcus let his head fall resignedly to his chest. ‘I see. Who?’
‘A detective by the name of Arne Jacobsen removed the case file from Holbæk Police ten to fifteen years ago. Does that ring any bells?’
‘Fine surname, but I don’t have anything to do with it.’
‘He was personally involved in the case, I can tell you. His son was dating the girl who was murdered.’
‘And?’
‘And today the son works here at the station. I’m bringing him in for questioning. Just so you’re aware.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Johan.’
‘Johan? Johan Jacobsen, our handyman? You’re pulling my leg –’
‘Hang on, Carl,’ Lars Bjørn interrupted. ‘If you’re going to bring one of our civilians in for questioning, it’s best if you call it something else. I’m the one who has to speak with the union if anything goes wrong.’
Marcus saw a quarrel emerging. ‘That’s enough, you two.’ He turned towards Carl Mørck. ‘What’s this all about?’
‘You mean, apart from the fact that an ex-employee removed case materials from the Holbæk Police?’ Carl straightened up so that he covered an additional foot of wall. ‘The fact is that his son put the case on my desk. Furthermore, he broke into the crime scene and deliberately left clues that point back to him. I also believe he’s got a lot more material in his goody bag. Marcus, he knows more about this case than anyone else between heaven and earth – if one can put it that way.’
‘Good God, Carl. That case is more than twenty years old. Can’t you just conduct your showdown in the basement nice and quietly? I imagine there are plenty more open-and-shut cases to work on other than that one.’
‘You’re right. It’s an old case. And it’s the very one that I, at your request, will be presenting on Friday to a team of dimwits from the land of brown cheese. Remember? So, please, Marcus, be so kind as to make sure Johan stops by my office in no more than ten minutes.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘As far as I know, Johan is off sick.’ He looked at Carl over his glasses. It was important he understood the message. ‘You’re not to contact him at home, do you understand? He had a nervous breakdown over the weekend. We don’t want any trouble.’
‘How can you be so certain he was the one who put the case file on your desk?’ Lars Bjørn asked. ‘Did you find his fingerprints on it?’
‘No. I got the results of the analysis today and there weren’t any fingerprints. I just know it, OK? Johan’s the one. If he’s not back by this afternoon I’ll be going over there. Then you can say whatever you like.’
14
Johan Jacobsen lived in a co-op flat on Vesterbrogade, across from the Black Horse Theatre and the now defunct Mechanical Music Museum. In fact, he lived right where the decisive battle between the anarchist squatters and police occurred in 1990. Carl remembered
those days all too well. How many times had he donned riot gear and beaten up girls and boys nearly his own age?
Not exactly the best memories from the good old days.
They had to ring the buzzer on the brand-new intercom a few times before Johan Jacobsen let them in.
‘I didn’t expect you this soon,’ he said softly, showing them into his living room. From here there was a view of the old tiled roofs of the theatre and adjacent inn.
The room was large, but not a very pretty sight. Clearly untouched by a woman’s expert hand and critical eye for quite some time. Gravy-caked plates were stacked on the kitchen worktop, Coke bottles were strewn on the floor. It was a dusty, greasy pigsty.
‘Please excuse the mess,’ the man said, removing dirty clothes from the sofa and coffee table. ‘My wife left me about a month ago.’ His face made the nervous twitch they’d seen so many times at the police station. As if sand had blown in his face and he’d just managed to keep it from getting in his eyes.
Carl shook his head. It was too bad about the wife. He knew the feeling.
‘You know why we’re here?’
He nodded.
‘So you admit straight away that you were the one who put the Rørvig file on my desk, Johan?’
He nodded again.
‘Why didn’t you simply give it to us, then?’ Assad said, thrusting out his lower lip. If he put on a military-style cap, he would resemble Yasser Arafat.
‘Would you have accepted it?’
Carl shook his head. Hardly. A twenty-year-old case with a conviction? No, he was certainly correct on that score.
‘Would you have asked me where I got it? Would you have inquired why I was interested in the case? Would you have bothered to take the time to have your interest aroused? I’ve seen the piles on your desk, Carl.’
Carl nodded. ‘And so you put the replacement Trivial Pursuit box in the cottage as a lead. It couldn’t have been very long ago, since the lock on the kitchen door opened so easily. Am I right?’
Johan nodded.
Just as Carl thought. ‘OK, so you wanted to know whether we’d get properly hooked on the case. I can understand that. But you took quite a risk doing it that way, didn’t you, Johan? What if we hadn’t noticed the game? What if we hadn’t discovered the names written on the cards?’
He shrugged. ‘You’re here now.’
‘I don’t understand it so well.’ Assad sat down in front of one of the windows facing Vesterbrogade. With the light cascading in behind him, his face turned completely dark. ‘So you’re not satisfied that Bjarne Thøgersen admitted he’d done it?’
‘If you had been in the courtroom during sentencing, you wouldn’t be satisfied, either. Everything was predetermined.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Assad said. ‘Hardly strange when the man turns himself in –’
‘What do you find unusual about the case, Johan?’ Carl interrupted.
The man avoided Carl’s eyes and looked out of the window, as if the grey sky might calm the storm inside him.
‘They were smiling the whole time,’ he said, ‘every single one of them. Thøgersen, the defence lawyer. The three arrogant bastards sitting in the public gallery.’
‘Torsten Florin, Ditlev Pram and Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen. Are they who you’re referring to?’
He nodded while stroking his quivering lips in an attempt to still them.
‘They sat there smiling, you say. That’s a very weak basis for pursuing the case, Johan.’
‘Yes, but I know more now than I did then.’
‘Your father, Arne Jacobsen, worked the case?’ Carl asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And where were you at the time?’
‘I was at Holbæk Technical College.’
‘Holbæk? Did you know the victims?’
‘Yes.’ He said it almost inaudibly.
‘So you also knew Søren?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, a little. But not as well as Lisbet.’
‘You listen now, you,’ Assad broke in. ‘I can tell from your face that Lisbet had told you she wasn’t in love with you any more. Isn’t that right, Johan? She didn’t want you after all.’ Assad’s eyebrows formed a frown. ‘And when you couldn’t have her, you killed her, and now you want us to figure it out so we can arrest you, so you don’t have to commit suicide. Isn’t that right?’
Johan blinked rapidly a few times, then his face hardened. ‘Does he need to be here, Carl?’ he asked in a measured tone.
Carl shook his head. Assad’s outbursts were unfortunately becoming a habit. ‘Go into the other room, Assad. Just for five minutes.’ He pointed at a side door behind Johan.
At this Johan jerked like a jack-in-the-box. There were many indicators of fear, and Carl knew most of them.
So he looked at the closed door.
‘No, not in there. It’s too messy,’ Johan said, standing in front of the door. ‘Go and sit in the dining room, Assad. Or have a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I just made some.’
But Assad had also noticed Johan’s reaction. ‘No thanks, I prefer tea,’ he said, squeezing himself behind Johan and throwing the door wide open.
Behind the door was another high-ceilinged room. There was a row of tables along one wall, covered with stacks of files and loose papers. But most interesting was the face hanging on the wall, staring down at them with melancholy eyes. It was a yard-high photostat of a young woman, the girl who’d been murdered in Rørvig. Lisbet Jørgensen. Unruly hair on a cloudless background. A real summer snapshot with deep shadows across her face. Had it not been for her eyes, the size of the photo and its unusually prominent position, he would hardly have noticed it. He did now.
As Carl and Assad entered the room it became clear to them that this was a shrine. Everything in here was about Lisbet. There were fresh flowers beside one wall with clippings about the murder. Another wall was adorned with characteristic square Instamatic photos of the girl, plus a few letters and postcards, even a blouse. Happy and cruel moments, side by side.
Johan didn’t say a word. Simply stood in front of the photostat and let himself be drawn into her eyes.
‘Why didn’t you want us to see this room, Johan?’ Carl said.
He shrugged, and Carl understood. It was too intimate. His soul, his life, his broken dreams – all was laid bare on these walls.
‘She broke up with you that night,’ came Assad’s accusation again. ‘Tell it like it is, Johan. It would be best for you then.’
Johan turned and glared at him. ‘All I will say is that the girl I loved most in the entire world was massacred by people who right now are looking down on us from the highest ranks of society and laughing. The fact that somebody as fucking insignificant as Bjarne Thøgersen is the one paying the price comes down to one thing, and that’s money. Judas money, cold hard cash, filthy lucre, for God’s sake. That’s what it boils down to.’
‘And now it has to stop.’ Carl said. ‘But why now?’
‘Because I’m alone again, and I can’t think about anything else. Can’t you see that?’
Johan Jacobsen was just twenty when Lisbet said yes to his marriage proposal. Their fathers were friends. The families had visited one another often, and Johan had been in love with Lisbet for as long as he could remember.
He had been with her that night, while her brother had made love with his girlfriend in the next room.
They’d had a serious talk, and then they’d made love – as a parting gesture, as far as she was concerned. At dawn he’d left in tears, and later that same day she was found dead. In just ten hours he’d plummeted from the highest peak of joy into deep lovesickness and finally into hell. He had never really recovered from that night and the following afternoon. He’d found a new girlfriend whom he’d married, and they’d had two children, yet it was only Lisbet he thought about.
When his father, on his deathbed, told him that he’d stolen the case file and given it to Lisbet’s mother, Johan had driven up to see her the ver
y next day and retrieved the folder.
Since then, these papers had become his most cherished possessions, and from that day forward, Lisbet filled more and more of his life.
Finally she simply filled too much. And so his wife left.
‘What do you mean by “filled too much”?’ asked Assad.
‘I talked about her constantly. Thought about her night and day. All the clippings about the case, all the reports. I simply had to read about her all the time.’
‘And now you want to get rid of it all? That’s why you got us involved?’ Carl asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And what have you got for us? All this?’ Carl spread his arms out over the stacks of paper.
He nodded. ‘If you read all of it, you’ll know that it was the school gang that did it.’
‘You’ve made a list for us of other assaults. We’ve already seen it. Is that what you mean?’
‘That’s only a partial list. I’ve got the full one here.’ He leaned over the table, lifted a stack of newspaper clippings and pulled out a sheet of paper from underneath.
‘It starts here, before the Rørvig murders. This boy went to the same boarding school, it states in the article.’ He pointed at a page in Politiken from 15 June 1987. The headline read: ‘Tragedy in Bellahøj. Man, 19, Falls to Death from Ten-Metre Diving Board’.
He ran through the cases, many of which Carl recognized from the list that had been delivered to Department Q. Three or four months separated the different incidents. A couple of them had resulted in deaths.
‘It’s possible they’re all accidents then,’ Assad said. ‘What do they have to do with the boarding-school kids? They aren’t necessarily connected with one another at all. Do you have any proof?’
‘No. That’s your job.’
Assad swung his head dismissively. ‘Honestly, there’s absolutely nothing in this. You’ve just become sick in your head because of this case. I feel sorry for you. You should see a psychologist then. Can’t you go to that Mona Ibsen at headquarters instead of sending us on a wild duck chase?’
Disgrace Page 10
