The Chestnut Man

by Søren Sveistrup

  Hess places the weapon and the Hartung case file on the steel table next to Genz before taking down one of the aprons from the row of pegs. Genz looks at the report then back to Hess.

  ‘But why? I thought the Hartung case wasn’t relevant. Thulin told me –’

  ‘It isn’t relevant. If anybody asks, we’re just butchering a Christmas pig for the freezer. Will you start, or shall I?’

  This time last week, Hess would not in a million years have pictured himself dismembering a pig, but then something happened that gave him an entirely different perspective on the Laura Kjær killing. It had nothing to do with the unease he’d felt after visiting Magnus at Glostrup Hospital. If a chestnut man with Kristine Hartung’s fingerprint had been left at the crime scene around the same time as the murder, then it had to be an extraordinary coincidence, but on the train on the way home from Glostrup he’d found himself reviewing the case again. He wasn’t questioning that the Hartung girl had been killed and dismembered a year earlier, as Thulin had told him. Working on the Danish police force wasn’t the easiest job – he knew that from his own experience – but the murder squad’s thoroughness and clear-up rate had been among the European elite for years. Human life still meant something in this country – especially when it came to children – and most of all when it came to the child of a prominent MP. The fact that Kristine Hartung was the daughter of a minister would have meant a full-scale, meticulous investigation, with detectives, Forensics techs, geneticists, SWAT teams and intelligence services working round the clock. The crime against the girl had probably been seen as a potential attack on democracy, so they would have pulled out all the stops. Fundamentally, Hess did have confidence in the investigation and its results. Yet there was still that random coincidence, and the unease that niggled even after he got back to his Odin hideout.

  As the days had passed, suspicion logically fell on the boyfriend, Hans Henrik Hauge, and Hess resigned himself to that. The investigation was in Thulin’s hands, and she seemed both thorough and persistent, clearly on her way out of the department and up the career ladder. She also came across as distinctly chilly, but on the other hand his efforts – apart from the spontaneous visit to Magnus Kjær – were negligible, and he took every opportunity to make himself scarce. He spent most of his time crafting a report to his boss at Europol, which he’d shared with François. After a few adjustments, both submitted their reports to Freimann, and while Hess awaited the judgement of his German boss he began to do up his apartment. Given that he’ll be back on the treadmill soon – he hopes – Hess even contacted an estate agent. Several, in fact. The first three he called didn’t want the apartment on their books. The fourth did, but he warned Hess not to expect a speedy outcome. As he knew, the area didn’t have the best reputation. ‘Unless you’re an Islamist or generally sick and tired of life,’ he added. The overzealous caretaker, of course, inveigled himself into the redecoration, and the little Pakistani man gave Hess an earful while he painted the apartment, but the project was nonetheless going reasonably well.

  Then, last night, something happened. First he had a call from the Hague. A cold-voiced secretary told him in English that Freimann wanted a telephone meeting with him at 3 p.m. the following day, and the prospect of communication made Hess more cheerful. He used the positive development to perk himself up into painting the ceiling, which he wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with. Unfortunately he’d run out of cardboard, so instead the caretaker gave him a pile of old newspapers from the basement to spread out on the floor, but just as Hess was finishing off the ceiling in the kitchenette he glanced down from his ladder to find Kristine Hartung gazing up at him from one of the pages.

  The temptation was too much, and he picked up the page with paint-spattered fingers. ‘Where is Kristine?’ the headline read, and he soon found himself searching for the continuation of the article, which turned out to be among the pages on the floor by the toilet. It was a feature piece dated 10 December last year, summarizing the case and the still-fruitless search for Kristine Hartung’s body. Though by that point the police had established what had happened to Kristine, the article took a mysterious and lurid tone. The killer, Linus Bekker, had confessed to her sexual assault, murder and dismemberment during interrogation a month earlier, but the body parts still had not been found, and the article was accompanied by atmospheric black-and-white photographs of officers combing the woods. Various anonymous police sources were quoted as saying it was possible that foxes, badgers or other animals had dug up the body parts and eaten them, which might explain why nothing had been found. Nylander, however, had sounded an optimistic note, although he also remarked that the weather might put a spanner in the works. The journalist had asked him whether it was possible that Linus Bekker’s confession was false, since they’d had no luck with the search, but Nylander had dismissed the idea: in addition to Bekker’s confession they had clear proof of the murder and dismemberment, although Nylander wouldn’t offer any details.

  Hess tried to keep painting, but at last he was forced to accept that a visit to the station might be required. Partly to fetch a squad car, which he needed in order to pick up a floor-sander at the DIY store the following day, but partly to put his mind at rest.

  The corridors were empty – it was nearly ten on a Sunday – and he was lucky to catch the last member of the administrative staff on duty. On a screen at the far end of the dimly lit department, he logged on to the database, explaining that he needed to read up on the Laura Kjær case, but as soon as the staff member disappeared he looked up Kristine Hartung instead.

  The material was exhaustive. Nearly five hundred people had been questioned. Hundreds of places had been searched and countless items sent for forensic examination. Hess, however, was seeking only the summary of the evidence against Linus Bekker, and that made his search easier. The only problem was that reading it did not give him the peace of mind he was after. It had the opposite effect.

  The first thing that stuck in his craw was finding that Linus Bekker had only become a person of interest off the back of an anonymous tip. As a convicted sex offender, of course, he’d already been put through a routine interrogation, but it hadn’t led anywhere until the anonymous tip came in – and they’d never determined who was behind that. The other thing still troubling Hess was Bekker’s insistence that he couldn’t remember the exact locations where he’d buried the girl’s dismembered body, apparently because it had been dark and he’d been in a seriously disturbed frame of mind at the time.

  As for proof against Bekker, they had found the weapon apparently used to dismember Kristine Hartung during a search of the garage at his residence, a ground-floor apartment in Bispebjerg; evidently this was the conclusive evidence Nylander had alluded to in the article. The weapon, a ninety-centimetre-long machete, had been examined by forensic geneticists, and – confronted with the fact that blood found on the weapon was a one hundred per cent match to Kristine Hartung – Bekker had confessed to the killing. He described following the girl in his car into the woods, where he’d overpowered, molested and strangled her. After wrapping the body in black plastic bags from his boot, he’d then driven home to fetch the machete and a shovel from the garage. He insisted, however, that he’d had blackouts, and could only recall the event in flashes. Darkness had fallen, he told them, as he was driving around with the body, until he ended up at a forest in North Zealand. There he’d dug a hole, cut up the body and buried some of it, probably the torso, before continuing through the forest and burying the limbs elsewhere. On top of the forensic geneticists’ analysis, which left no question that the machete had been used to attack Kristine Hartung, the case was solved.

  Yet it was the analysis of the weapon that had sent Hess to the meat market that morning. On his way through the city he’d stopped at a hunting and fishing store near Gammeltorv, which he remembered from his time with the murder squad. The shop still sold exotic weaponry, and Hess couldn’t help wondering whether it was legal.
There he found the machete, which though it wasn’t precisely identical to the one from the Hartung case did have roughly the same blade length, weight and curvature and was made from the same material. He’d dithered about which forensics expert he ought to ask for help with his experiment, but because he knew Genz had a good reputation – acknowledged, even, among Europol’s own experts – the choice had fallen on him. As an additional upside, it meant Hess could avoid talking to any of his old acquaintances.

  They have nearly finished dismembering the pig. Once Hess has separated another leg, this time the front one, with two hard, precise blows to the joint beneath the shoulder blade, he wipes his forehead and steps back from the steel table.

  ‘What now? Are we done?’

  Genz, who has been holding the pig for Hess, releases the front leg and body and looks at his watch, while Hess holds up the blade to the light to assess the effect of contact with the bone.

  ‘Not yet. We just need to scrape it clean, then I hope you’ve got a really strong microscope.’

  ‘For what? I still don’t get what we’re doing here.’

  Hess doesn’t respond. Gingerly, he runs the very tip of his index finger along the machete’s blade.

  30

  Thulin scrolls in frustration through the material on the flatscreen in front of her, watching Laura Kjær’s electronic remains zoom past. The computer techs from Forensics have prepared three folders for her with Kjær’s texts, emails and Facebook updates. Over the past week she’s already gone through the material several times, but Hauge has just been released, and the investigation lacks direction. On coming into the office a moment earlier, she asked the two male detectives assigned to help her to summarize the alternatives to Hauge so that she can present all the information to Nylander.

  ‘The boy’s learning-support teacher is a possibility,’ says one. ‘He had plenty of contact with Laura Kjær because the boy swings between total withdrawal and sudden aggression and violence. He says he suggested to the mother at several meetings that the boy should be put into a special school, but it’s possible their relationship developed from there.’

  ‘Developed how?’ Thulin wants to know.

  ‘Maybe Mummy started spreading her legs for the teacher, but then one evening he turns up unannounced at her house looking for another ride, and we’ve got trouble.’

  Thulin ignores the suggestion, and tries to focus on the myriad letters and sentences swarming furiously past on her screen.

  The computer techs were right that Laura Kjær’s network traffic during the period up to the killing was uninteresting in the sense that it didn’t provide the smoking gun. Just lots of trivial junk, especially between her and Hans Henrik Hauge. So Thulin asked to see her texts, email inbox and Facebook updates from all the way back to her husband’s death two years earlier. From her screen at the police station she logged into the cache of data using the code Genz had given her over the phone, and he took the opportunity to ask how the astonishing discovery of Kristine Hartung’s fingerprint had affected the case. Although Genz was well within his rights to enquire, the reminder annoyed Thulin, and she informed him curtly that since there was a logical explanation it wasn’t worth them spending any time on it. Afterwards she regretted her response. Genz was one of the few techs who bothered to follow up on cases at all, and she decided to reconsider going on a run with him.

  Thulin didn’t read through the entire cache of data, but spot tests were enough to form a picture of the deceased woman. The problem was that this didn’t help much, so she visited Laura Kjær’s workplace. But at the sterile dentist’s office located on one of the city centre’s polished pedestrian streets, her dismayed and mournful co-workers had merely confirmed that Laura was a family-orientated woman primarily concerned with her son, Magnus. After losing her husband a couple of years ago she’d been unhappy, particularly so because the death had turned her previously cheerful seven-year-old into a virtually mute and highly introverted child. She hadn’t been good at being alone, so a young, female colleague had introduced her to various dating sites where she might find love again. She’d tried dating several men, initially via hook-up apps like Tinder, Happn and Candidate, which Thulin already knew from her emails. Yet Laura had been unable to find a man who was interested in a lasting relationship, so she’d turned to the dating site My Second Love, where after a few frogs she’d stumbled across Hans Henrik Hauge. Unlike the previous candidates, Hauge had been flexible enough to accept her son, and Laura had apparently been very much in love and very pleased to settle back into family life. As Magnus’s difficulties with social interactions grew more pronounced, however, that had become the main topic of water-cooler chat between root canals and tooth-bleachings, and Laura had become increasingly obsessed with finding specialists who could help the boy, whose condition had by then been diagnosed as a form of autism.

  It was impossible to get Laura’s colleagues to say a bad word about Hauge, who had occasionally picked her up after work. Hauge had apparently been a huge support, patient and dedicated to the boy’s wellbeing, and several colleagues believed Laura would have fallen apart without him. That said, over the past few weeks she’d been a little less communicative about her son than usual. The Friday before the murder, she’d asked for the day off so she could spend some time with him, and she’d also cancelled plans with a few colleagues: an overnight trip to Malmø for a training course.

  Thulin knew all that from Laura’s texts. Hauge had messaged her from work, worried that she was isolating herself and pushing people away to be with her son, but Laura had only replied sparingly or not at all. Yet Hauge showed no signs of anger. In his repeated attempts to get her attention via text, he stoically continued to call her ‘the love of my life’, ‘darling’, ‘cutiepie’ and other things that made Thulin want to vomit.

  Thulin had been expecting, and probably also hoping, that her warrant to check Hauge’s network traffic during his stint in custody would reveal a different side to him; but there, too, she was disappointed. The material painted a picture of a man dedicated to his job, a valued employee at the tech company on Kalvebod Quay, whose primary interest – apart from Laura and Magnus – was his house and garden, including the garage. He’d evidently dug the foundations and built the structure himself. Hauge’s Facebook page was largely neglected, displaying little more than a picture of himself wearing overalls in the garden, standing next to a wheelbarrow with Laura and Magnus. Nothing about it seemed suspicious. There weren’t even the usual porn searches on the web. Thulin had asked Hauge about his lack of interest in social media during one of the initial interrogations, and the man had countered that he got plenty of screen time at work, so much preferred to focus on other things in his free time. This general impression of harmlessness was backed up by his co-workers and small circle of friends, none of whom had noticed anything amiss, either at the trade fair or beforehand.

  Next, Thulin put her faith in Genz and the forensic examination: Hauge’s car, plus various items of his clothing and footwear, were seized and scrutinized for traces of Laura Kjær’s blood or other evidence from the night of the murder. Nothing. And when Genz assured Thulin that neither the gaffer tape over Laura’s mouth nor the cable ties around her wrists matched the kind found on the shelves in Hauge’s garage, she began to lose hope.

  The bludgeon, as well as the saw used to amputate the woman’s hand, were still missing – as was the amputated hand.

  Logging off, Thulin makes a decision: Nylander will just have to cool his heels. Rising and picking up her coat, she interrupts the two detectives, who are still swapping theories about the support teacher.

  ‘Drop the teacher, stay on Hauge. Go through the traffic-cam footage again and see if you can find Hauge’s car on the route between the convention centre and Husum between ten that night and seven the next morning.’

  ‘Hauge’s car? But we’ve already done that.’

  ‘Then do it again.’

  ‘Di
dn’t we just release Hauge?’

  ‘Call me if you find anything. I’m going to talk to Hauge’s employer again.’

  Thulin is striding away from their protests when Hess suddenly appears in the doorway.

  ‘Got a minute?’

  He looks hassled, and shoots a glance at the officers in the background. Thulin walks past.

  ‘No, not really.’

  31

  ‘Sorry I wasn’t there this morning. I understand you’ve let Hauge go, but it might not matter. We need to talk about that fingerprint again.’

  ‘The fingerprint isn’t important.’

  As Thulin stalks down the long corridor, she hears Hess behind her.

  ‘The boy said the doll wasn’t there before the murder. You need to investigate whether anyone else can confirm that. People who live out there, people who might have seen something.’

  Thulin has nearly reached the spiral staircase leading down to the central courtyard. Her mobile rings, but she doesn’t want to lose speed, so she lets it ring as she swings down the stairs with Hess on her heels.

  ‘No, we’ve already explained that. In this department we generally take the view that time is best spent on cases that aren’t solved rather than on ones that are.’

  ‘That’s what we need to talk about. Hang on a minute, for Christ’s sake!’

  Thulin has reached the bottom of the stairs and emerged into the deserted central courtyard when she feels Hess grab her shoulder, forcing her to a halt. She twists free and glares at him, while he jabs his finger at a folder she recognizes as a case summary.

  ‘According to the original analysis, there was no trace of bone dust found on the weapon Linus Bekker used to dismember Kristine Hartung. It had traces of her blood, and they assumed that that plus Bekker’s statement was enough to make dismemberment sound plausible.’