by Lotte Hammer
Svend Lerche’s garage was large with space for three cars. It was located as far from the house as possible in the eastern corner of the plot, right up against the neighbouring property. An extension of around forty square metres had been added to the back of the garage, where three men who worked for him hung out – that was when they weren’t out delivering cash to the poker players or collecting money from the au pairs’ night-time work.
The room was neatly decorated with wall-to-wall carpet, designer furniture and two workstations kitted out with computers and telephones. Right inside the door was a coffee machine and a fizzy drinks vending machine. A small table had been squeezed in between the two machines with plastic cups, cream, sugar, teaspoons and a bowl with tokens for the vending machine.
Benedikte Lerche-Larsen visited only rarely. Partly because she had no dealings with the men, and partly because she didn’t like how they spoke to each other. Lowlife types, poorly educated, with limited interests and the vocabulary of a Neanderthal.
However, this Tuesday she had left university early and was back in Rungsted after lunch, where she had gone straight to the office to get to grips with Jan Podowski’s computer.
After a few days’ pause for reflection, her father had finally made up his mind and, as she had expected, taken Bjarne Fabricius’s advice and given Benedikte a more central role in the business. As a part of this expanded role, Jan Podowski’s computer was a good place to start. She could gain a better financial insight while tidying up his files, transferring anything that needed hiding onto a USB stick, and deleting other information once she had familiarised herself with its contents. It was a good idea – it had been her father’s – but the reality proved to be different.
She had spent her first hour looking for Jan Podowski’s password in his desk and in his files in order to unlock the computer. She finally found what she was looking for in the form of a scrap of paper glued to the back of the mouse pad. The password was sesamesesame, as unoriginal as the man himself. After the word he had carefully drawn a small recycling logo with three arrows pointing at each other. She didn’t know what they meant. She turned on the computer, accessed the files and decided to help herself to a cup of coffee before she got stuck in.
The coffee machine was playing up or, rather, produced no coffee no matter which button she pressed. A red display at the top confirmed the problem by flashing capital letters summing up the issue with the information NO DRINK. She swore irritably and turned to the only other person in the room – a man in his thirties, sitting at the desk behind her, listening to music on his iPod. He had put up his feet on another chair, and his eyes were half closed. He was a skinny rake of a man with filthy tattoos on both arms and long, unwashed hair scattered with dandruff. She shouted at him:
‘Can you fix this crap?’
He took out his earplugs, and she repeated her request. He answered her slowly, as if speaking was a great effort for him:
‘You need to empty the bottom tray. It’s probably full.’
‘Wrong. You need to empty the bottom tray, and then fix me a mocha.’
To her surprise, he didn’t stir, merely flashed her a smarmy grin.
‘Do it yourself, you’re the one who wants coffee.’
She glowered at him.
‘Tell me, just who do you think you are?’
‘I’m the guy whose last day of work is this Friday, and you’re the one who’ll empty the tray, if you want coffee.’
He grinned again; she decided to go up to her own flat.
The letter was waiting for her in the hall along with a pile of junk mail. It was in a white envelope with her name and address drawn ruler-straight, the letters reminding her a little of runic writing. The postmark was 3660 Ganløse, no sender was listed. She opened it with a knife from the kitchen; it contained a smaller envelope as well as two pieces of A4 paper. She recognised the first. It was the cover of the most recent issue of Poker Player, where she was smiling invitingly at the photographer. The other was a colour printout of a photograph, grainy but recognisable. Most of the picture showed a forest, but two people could be seen among the trees. She herself was clearly visible at the front; at the back – where you could really only see hands and a little bit of the arms – was Henrik Krag. Between them, tied to two spruce branches, they carried a stone. She opened the enclosed envelope, tearing it open with her finger, although the knife was lying right next to her. It contained a piece of cardboard with a SIM card taped to it. On the cardboard it said in the same runic letters as before 24.04, 10.00, nothing more.
She sat down at her desk and carefully reviewed what she had been sent, the papers, the envelopes and the cardboard separately, before she calmly returned everything to the big envelope and locked it in her desk drawer.
She was soon back in the office. Her lazy, dandruff-laden friend from before was sitting where she had left him. She yanked out his ear plugs and, as he spun around angrily to confront her, showed him a banknote.
‘I need your help.’
The man stared greedily at the five hundred kroner she was holding between her fingers.
‘What do you want me to do? By the way, my name is Jørgen.’
He offered her his hand, she ignored it.
‘That’s great, Jørgen. Were you around back when Henrik worked here?’
‘Henrik Krag? Yes, I was, but only for a week, then he stopped coming.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘Not really, why?’
‘I need his address or his phone number.’
‘And for that you’ll give me five hundred?’
‘Almost. I also want you to carry Jan’s computer upstairs to my flat and plug it in. I’ll show you where it goes.’
‘Sure, what do you want me to do first?’
‘The address and telephone number.’
‘You’ll find that on Jan’s computer in the Human Resources folder. But I don’t think that phone number works any more. There’s an access file, but the password for that is the same as when you log on.’
‘Sesamesesame.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you say so sooner? I’ve wasted over an hour looking for it.’
He threw up his hands in an apologetic gesture, then asked:
‘Do you want the computer taken to your flat now?’
‘Yes, but first I have another question.’
She showed him the scrap of paper on which Jan Podowski had written his password and pointed to the recycling logo.
‘What does that mean?’
‘There are two hard drives. If you want to access the D drive, you need to spell the password in reverse.’
‘And what’s on the D drive, which is so secret, that it would take someone almost ten minutes to guess how to access it?’
He smiled half-heartedly before replying.
‘Jan’s pension pot. That’s what he used to call it, but he never got round to cashing it in.’
Dry laughter followed the observation.
‘And what’s in that pot?’
He extended his fingers and bumped the forefinger and thumb together to simulate a vagina, accompanying the obscene gesture with a leer. Benedikte Lerche-Larsen looked daggers at him. Then she let the banknote drop to the floor. He followed it with his eyes without commenting on the humiliation.
‘In Danish, if you can manage it?’
‘Video footage of a lot of important white men getting a lot of good, black pussy.’
CHAPTER 19
The car was quiet, only the muffled cries of the girl in the boot, whimpering and heart-breaking, at times panicky, would sometimes reach the men. Frode Otto turned on the radio and found a station he liked. Then he checked his watch.
‘When is kick-off?’
It was 1992 and that night Denmark was playing the Netherlands in the European championship semi-final. Jan Podowski didn’t reply, instead he asked:
‘What the hell are you go
ing to do with her?’
‘Just give her a kiss, it won’t do her any harm, bloody German. You heard for yourself how she dissed us in the shop.’
They had stopped outside some shop earlier, Jan Podowski couldn’t remember the name of the village, nor did it matter. Frode Otto had pushed in front of her to pay for their stuff. Six lagers and two packets of Prince cigarettes, not that that mattered either. The girl had taken offence, which was odd, really – she could barely be more than fifteen. The shop assistant had served the girl first, and Frode Otto lost his rag. They had drunk a beer each in the car before driving on; a few kilometres outside the village they came across the girl again. She was cycling with her groceries and ignored Frode Otto’s shouting as he slowly drove up alongside her and called to her. Eventually she had stuck out her tongue. That made him see red, and now she was lying in the boot. Jan Podowski turned down the music, it irritated him.
‘What do you have against the Germans?’
‘I hate all foreigners who come up here and don’t know how to behave themselves properly.’
‘You don’t know what she said to you, you don’t speak bloody German!’
‘That’s her problem, not mine.’
Frode Otto laughed at his own joke, while struggling to remove the signet ring from the ring finger of his right hand. It was stuck; he spat on his finger and tried again without success. Eventually it came off, and he slipped it in his pocket.
Jan Podowski considered the situation. He had taken the wheel when Frode Otto attacked the girl, although he was fairly drunk. They passed a junction, and he had time to read a road sign: Hald 3 kilometres. Hald . . . please let that be some sort of town. From there he could call a taxi and get back to the hotel; after all he had plenty of money. He finished his deliberations and stopped the car. The girl whimpered behind them. He shouldn’t have hit the brakes so hard, he thought, and said:
‘I don’t want to get involved with this crap, Frode. Either you let her go or I’m off.’
‘You would walk?’
‘Yes, anything but this.’
‘How are you going to get home? You’ve no idea where you are.’
Jan Podowski took the four remaining beers, which were in a carrier with a paper handle. Then he got out.
‘I’m in Jutland, and they speak Danish. I’ll find my way home.’
‘OK, see you tonight.’
‘Make sure she gets some air.’
‘She has plenty of air. This old rust bucket is full of holes.’
Frode Otto edged across to the driver’s seat.
‘Can I count on you not to tell?’
He didn’t get a reply, only a headshake that could mean anything.
CHAPTER 20
The Countess spoke, slowly and gravely.
‘She had turned fifteen two days before, poor girl. Hannelore Müller was her name, and she and her parents were on a camping holiday in Jutland. They lived in Altendorf, a suburb of Essen, ordinary people, her father was a bricklayer, her mother a lab assistant, I remember. They were staying at Erikstrup campsite between Viborg and Hobro.’
Konrad Simonsen, Arne Pedersen and Klavs Arnold were stony-faced. Even Malte Borup, the department’s student intern and computer genius, narrowed his eyes and tightened his lips. Only Pauline Berg appeared unmoved, and Konrad Simonsen decided that he would tell her to go to hell if she started acting up. They were sitting in the Countess’s office around her desk. Space was tight, and the only one sitting comfortably was the Countess herself, with the rest huddled together as best they could. She passed around a photograph, the first in a pile on the desk in front of her.
The girl was naked and lying on her stomach, she had a bandage on her left hand. Her slim back was covered in bruises, the right side worse than the left. At the top of each buttock were two bruises the size of a thumb. Each officer looked, looked away and passed on the photograph in silence. When they had finished, the Countess asked:
‘Do you want to see more?’
Given what they had seen in the first picture, the question sounded almost like a threat. Everyone shook their head.
‘It’s the worst sexual assault case I’ve ever investigated. He broke two of her fingers, presumably out of pure sadism. Her jaw was also broken, as was her left cheekbone. Her right eardrum had burst, and she was in just as bad a state on her front as you’ve seen on her back, indeed almost worse. She was penetrated orally, anally and vaginally, and he took his time. Afterwards he or they threw her in the water and scoured her from top to bottom with seaweed.’
Arne Pedersen asked darkly:
‘Semen traces?’
‘No, sadly, nor any other DNA evidence.’
‘Did he use a condom?’
‘No, he pulled out before he ejaculated.’
Konrad Simonsen grunted.
‘Can we have the whole story?’
The Countess continued:
‘It was very difficult to interview the girl. She was in shock, so her statement cast only sporadic light on the assault. But we’ve established that she was attacked and forced into a car around one o’clock in the afternoon on a main road two kilometres north-west of Vammen, as she rode her bicycle back to the campsite with groceries she had bought at the local village store. In the shop she’d had a row with two Danish men in their thirties, and they may have been the ones who kidnapped her. Most of us believe that. Unfortunately, the shop assistant was old and short-sighted, so his description of the men was inadequate, to say the least.
‘The girl herself couldn’t remember whether she was attacked by one or two men, only that she was thrown into the boot of a car. Nor was she sure about the colour of the vehicle. The next thing we know for certain is that she was found at nine o’clock that same evening on a forest path in Lundø, a peninsula that sticks out into Skive Fjord, by a man out walking his dog. She was naked and deeply traumatised. We don’t know exactly where the rape took place, only that at times during the assault he forced her across the bonnet of the car, and that it happened close to water, possibly Limfjorden, but we can’t even be sure about that. We never found her clothes. I travelled to Essen eighteen months later to talk to her. We thought she might be able to remember more once some time had passed since the event, but . . .’
Pauline Berg interrupted her angrily.
‘Event? You make it sound like a birthday, why don’t you say the rape? I recognise that I use cowardly paraphrases myself, but—’
The Countess refused to let herself be derailed.
‘My apologies, you’re right, of course. The bottom line was that Hannelore Müller remembered barely anything about her rape. The doctor I spoke to thought her mind was suppressing it. Mentally she has paid a huge price, and I don’t think that she’ll ever fully recover, but of course I’m no psychiatrist. Perhaps she has learned to live with the assault, in spite of everything, as the years have passed.
‘As I’m sure you can imagine, every resource was deployed to find the perpetrator or perpetrators, and I was summoned from Copenhagen to assist Viborg police. The case attracted considerable media interest, as you would expect, and I was on the front page of the local newspapers on several occasions where I was hailed as the expert from Copenhagen and in charge of the investigation. Both of which were untrue.’
‘So that’s how Frode Otto might have seen your face.’
Malte Borup wanted to be quite sure that he had grasped the connection.
The Countess nodded affirmatively.
‘The only useful description we had of the perpetrator was that he was either missing the little finger on his left hand, or that he might have damaged or broken it, possibly during the attack on the girl. Of course we searched high and low, especially the campsite where the Müller family had stayed, but we found nothing, and eventually the investigation petered out and the case was shelved.’
‘Do we know where Frode Otto was on 22 June 1992?’ Klavs Arnold asked the Countess.
‘No,
but we know where he was three days earlier, because he and a mate robbed a savings bank in Struer, seventy kilometres as the crow flies from Erikstrup campsite. They got away with just under two hundred thousand kroner. They threatened a cashier with a toy gun, and Frode Otto left a clear print of his middle finger on the counter next to the till. However, he wasn’t caught until almost two years later, when he was arrested following a simple break-in of a corner shop. He was sentenced to three and a half years in Ringe State Prison, but he never gave up his mate – or accomplice, if you prefer.’
Konrad Simonsen wondered out loud:
‘Surely someone, as a matter of routine over the years, must have checked if any men with nine fingers have been added to our registers? The sexual assault case is still unsolved.’
The Countess pulled out a photocopy from a file behind her. It was awkward, Klavs Arnold was in the way and had nowhere to move to. He had to stand up, holding his chair. It looked ridiculous, but no one was laughing. The Countess tossed the photocopy on the desk with an irritated gesture. Everyone recognised the traditional fingerprint form. All of the ten squares had been filled out, but if they looked closely, the left little fingerprint deviated strongly from the norm. The Countess explained.
‘Some total imbecile from Odense police used the joint that remained on Frode Otto’s little finger for the print, and the Central Bureau added it to the database without questioning it.’
Arne Pedersen rapped a knuckle against his temple to show his opinion of that. Then he made the obvious suggestion
‘Why don’t we head to Simon’s office? This is making me claustrophobic, and when Malte brings up Frode Otto’s records,’ he pointed to the laptop, which the intern was balancing on his lap, ‘it’ll be impossible for all of us to look at them at the same time.’
