Hess finds his way back to the site where the body was found, to the heavy floodlights illuminating the copse and throwing long shadows behind the Forensics techs milling among the trees. Anne Sejer-Lassen’s body was taken down several hours earlier and driven to the coroner for examination, but he’s looking for Thulin. He sees her coming back from the western edge of the woods, her hair tousled and damp, wiping smears of mud from her face as she finishes a phone call. Noticing Hess, she shakes her head, indicating that nothing has been found to the west.
‘But I did just speak to Genz.’
When Genz appeared in the woods after the discovery of Anne Sejer-Lassen, Hess drew him aside and asked him to take the chestnut man straight back to the lab. Hess looks at Thulin through the rain, and he knows the result of Genz’s examination before she says a word.
46
It’s mid-morning. From the window in the task-force command centre on the second floor of the police station, Nylander can just make out the free-speech vultures with their phones, cameras and microphones hovering by the entrance to the main courtyard. Despite Management’s repeated admonitions to everybody on the force, it’s often brought home to him that the system is about as watertight as a sieve, and today is no exception. Only twelve hours after the body was discovered in the woods, the press has started speculating about a connection between this murder and the killing of Laura Kjær in Husum, apparently on the basis of anonymous ‘sources in the police’. Then, as if being besieged by the media weren’t enough, Nylander’s also had the deputy commissioner on the phone, although he temporarily dodged that bullet by saying crisply that he’d call back soon. What matters right now is the investigation, and he turns impatiently to Thulin, who is in the middle of updating the group of detectives on the case.
Most have worked all night long with only a few hours’ sleep, but given the seriousness of the situation they have no trouble paying attention to Thulin’s summary.
It has been a long night for Nylander, too. The call about Anne Sejer-Lassen came during a dinner with the Management Society at a restaurant in Bredgade. The meeting had been full of big-wigs, and it was a great networking opportunity, but when the call came in he abandoned the meal mid-tiramisu. He isn’t technically required to visit crime scenes in person. He has officers for that, but he’s made it a principle to do so anyway. It’s important to show a good example – and to run a tight ship. Once you start letting things slide, you leave your flank open to attack later on, and Nylander is too canny for that. He’s seen countless bosses and civil servants get caught with their trousers down and botch up their careers because power has made them arrogant. In the case of Laura Kjær, however, he skipped going to the crime scene because of the budget meetings, so when he got Thulin’s call about the fingerprint it had seemed like a judgement. Yesterday evening, then, Nylander had left the restaurant immediately without any annoyance at all. In any case, dessert always marked the point by which the worst of the suits were so plastered they started basking in their own achievements. Nylander knows he will probably outstrip the lot of them, but to do so he needs to keep a clear head and his finger on the pulse if the red light starts flashing, as it did last night. Since his trip to the crime scene in the forest he’s been running the various scenarios in his head, but he still hasn’t come up with a strategy, for the simple reason that it’s all too incomprehensible. He’d personally dropped in on Genz and the Forensics Department that morning in the hopes of having the fingerprints declared a mistake after all, but found himself out of luck. Genz had explained that there were enough points of comparison in both cases to justify a match with Kristine Hartung, and now the only thing Nylander knows for sure is that he has to navigate carefully if he wants to steer clear of the rocks.
‘– and both victims were in their late thirties and were surprised in their homes. According to the coroner’s preliminary examinations, the women were assaulted and killed with a weapon that was rammed through their eye sockets and into their brains. In the case of the first victim, the right hand was sawn off, while in the second case both hands were amputated – and both women were alive when the amputation occurred.’
The assembled detectives stare at the photographs of the corpses that Thulin has passed around the tables, and some of the newer ones frown or turn away. Nylander has seen the pictures too, but they don’t affect him. When he first started as a policeman, it disconcerted him that he was left unmoved by that sort of stuff, but now he merely sees it as an advantage.
‘What do we have on the murder weapon?’ He interrupts Thulin’s summary tetchily.
‘Nothing conclusive. Some sort of club fitted with a heavy metal ball with small spikes. Not a mace, but the same principle. If you’re talking about the amputations, we’re looking at a kind of battery-powered saw with a diamond blade or similar. The preliminary examinations indicate that it was the same tool used in both –’
‘What about the text message sent to Laura Kjær’s phone, then? The sender?’
‘The text was sent using an old Nokia phone with an unregistered prepaid card that you could buy anywhere. The phone itself, which was taped to Laura Kjær’s right hand, didn’t give us anything. There’s no other data on it besides the text, and the serial number has been burned off with a soldering iron, according to Genz.’
‘But the courier who delivered the package, the one you were tracing via the phone signal, presumably they’ve got information about who sent it?’
‘They do, but the problem is that Laura Kjær is listed as the sender.’
‘What?’
‘Their customer service department says that a person called around lunchtime yesterday and ordered a courier to pick up a package from Laura Kjær from the front steps at 7 Cedervænget in Husum. Which is Laura Kjær’s address. The package was ready for pick-up along with the shipping fee when the messenger arrived just after 1 p.m. He drove it to the department store and delivered it to the 7-Eleven on the ground floor, which Sejer-Lassen’s company uses for deliveries. That was all the messenger could tell us, and we could only find his fingerprints on the package, as well as the 7-Eleven clerk’s and Sejer-Lassen’s.’
‘But the person who called them?’
‘The customer-service agent couldn’t even remember whether it was a man or a woman who called.’
‘Cedervænget, then? Someone must have seen who left the package there?’
Thulin shakes her head. ‘Our first suspect was Laura Kjær’s boyfriend Hans Henrik Hauge, but Hauge has an alibi. The coroner says Sejer-Lassen was killed sometime around 6 p.m., and according to his lawyer she and Hauge were in the carpark outside her office at that time, discussing whether to complain about us not letting him back in the house.’
‘So we’ve got fuck all? No witnesses, calls, nothing?’
‘Not yet. And it doesn’t seem like there’s any connection between the victims. They live in completely different places, move in completely different social circles, and apparently have nothing in common besides the two chestnut men and the fingerprints, so we’re going to start –’
‘What fingerprints?’
Nylander glances at Jansen, who asked the question. As always, he’s seated beside his faithful companion, Martin Ricks. Nylander senses Thulin’s eyes on him: he told her beforehand that he wanted to break that particular news himself.
‘Someone had placed a chestnut man in the vicinity of both victims. In both cases there was a fingerprint on the doll, and according to the dactyloscopic analysis they’re most likely identical with Kristine Hartung’s.’
Nylander’s voice is deliberately dry and undramatic, and for a moment nobody speaks. Then Tim Jansen and a couple of the others burst into animated conversation. Their astonishment spreads, turning into baffled incredulity, until Nylander wades in again.
‘Listen up. Forensics are still conducting various tests, so I don’t want anyone jumping to conclusions until we know more. Right now we don’t know anything
. Maybe the prints aren’t relevant at all, so if anybody makes so much as a peep about this outside these four walls, I will personally make sure that person never works again. Is that understood?’
Nylander has been considering how to handle the situation. Two unsolved murders is plenty to be getting on with. They might even have been committed by the same person – although Nylander has trouble accepting that bit, too. And so long as there is still a trace of uncertainty about the identity of the fingerprint, he doesn’t want it muddying the waters. The Hartung case was one of Nylander’s finest achievements. At one point he’d thought it was going to scupper his career, but then came the breakthrough and the arrest of Linus Bekker.
‘But you need to reopen the Hartung case.’
Nylander and the others look around for the source of the voice, and their eyes land on the man from Europol. Until now he’s been mute and invisible, engrossed in the photographs being passed round. He’s still wearing the same clothes as in the woods and his hair is matted and dirty, but although he looks like something that has been lying on the forest floor for a week he is quick and composed.
‘One print could be a coincidence. Two prints can’t be. And if they are Kristine Hartung’s fingerprints, the previous investigation into her disappearance could have reached the wrong conclusion.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Tim Jansen has turned around and is eyeing Hess warily, as though he’s just been asked to hand over a month’s salary.
‘Jansen, I’ll take this.’
Nylander can tell which way the wind is blowing, and this is precisely what he wanted to avoid, but Hess speaks up before he can continue.
‘I know no more than you do. But Kristine Hartung’s body was never found, and the forensic tests they conducted back then were clearly not enough to establish her death beyond any doubt. Now these fingerprints have turned up, and all I’m saying is that it raises some questions.’
‘No, that’s not what you’re saying, Hess. You’re saying maybe we didn’t do our jobs well enough.’
‘It’s not personal. But two women have been killed, and if we want to stop it happening again we need to –’
‘I’m not taking it personally. And I’m sure the three hundred other officers who helped solve the case won’t either. But it’s kind of funny getting aggro from someone who’s only here because he was kicked out of the Hague, don’t you think?’
A few of Jansen’s colleagues snigger. But Nylander looks at Hess without expression. He registered what Hess said, and hasn’t listened to the rest.
‘What the hell do you mean, “if we want to stop it happening again?” ’
47
The station’s female communications consultant is eager to help him plot a course of action, but Nylander cuts her off and says he’ll manage by himself. Normally he’d have taken the time, because he’s been attracted to her ever since she turned up for work and started waltzing in and out of his department dispensing good advice. But right now, as he heads down the stairs to the courtyard, he wants to use the rest of the walk to clear his head before meeting with the press, and her Media Studies degree – probably three years of caffè lattes and casual sex – isn’t going to help him there. Certainly not after the disconcerting meeting he’s just had with Hess and Thulin in his office.
Before Nylander steps out into the porticoed courtyard, he’s informed that Minister Rosa Hartung has found a gap in her calendar and is on her way to the station. He gives strict instructions that she and her husband should be brought in through the rear entrance and are not to be interviewed except by him personally.
It was Hess who suggested that he, Nylander and Thulin take a moment in Nylander’s office after the briefing so that they could continue their conversation in private. Hess had placed the crime-scene photos of Laura Kjær and Anne Sejer-Lassen on Nylander’s desk.
‘The first victim is missing a hand. The next one’s missing two. It’s possible the killer would have mutilated Anne Sejer-Lassen even more if we hadn’t disturbed him, but what if he intentionally arranged the victims exactly as we found them?’
‘I don’t understand. Spell it out, I don’t have all day,’ Nylander had said.
Thulin, who had evidently been taken into Hess’s confidence before the meeting, had shown him two close-up photos of the chestnut men, which Nylander was already fed up of looking at.
‘A chestnut man consists of a head and a body. The head has eyes, which are made with an awl or some other sharp implement, and the body has four matchsticks, which are supposed to be its arms and legs. But a chestnut man doesn’t have any hands. Nor does it have any feet.’
Nylander had fallen silent, staring at the chestnut men and their truncated arms. For a second he’d felt as though he were being read to at a kindergarten, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
‘You’re not saying what I think you’re saying.’
It was a sick thought. You’d almost have to be sick yourself to come up with it, but suddenly Nylander twigged just what Hess had meant during the briefing about trying to prevent it happening again. Neither of them replied, but the notion that the killer could be making his own chestnut man of flesh and blood had been difficult to shake off.
Hess had insisted again on the necessity of reopening the Hartung case. He’d kept saying ‘you’ when referring to the investigation – ‘you need to’ and ‘you’ve got to consider the possibility that’ – until Nylander had given him to understand two things. One, Hess was now a member of the department on exactly the same footing as the other investigators, and as far as Nylander knew nobody was agitating to get him back to the Hague. Quite the opposite. Two, reopening the Hartung case was flat-out unthinkable. No matter what the fingerprints signified, the Hartung case was closed. They had a confession, they had a conviction, and no power on God’s green earth was going to start all that up again. For the same reason, Nylander had decided that he would conduct the interview with the Hartung parents personally and inform them of the new fingerprint himself. The discovery shouldn’t be overdramatized, and anyway, the intelligence services had just told him that the minister had already had a rough week – one or more unknown persons had been harassing her, most recently smashing the window of her ministerial car and smearing the bonnet with animal’s blood.
Nylander didn’t deem it necessary to get Hess and Thulin involved in that side of things, and he’d kicked Hess out of his office so he could speak to Thulin alone. He asked her straight out whether Hess was sharp enough to be on the case. From an old personnel file he already knew the tragic reason Hess had originally left the department, and although the man had plenty of experience at Europol, he also had a serious problem with authority, which on the face of things made it seem like his best days were behind him.
Although it was clear Thulin didn’t like the man, she’d answered in the affirmative, so Nylander had told her he wanted her and Hess to stay on the case – on the condition that if there was any hint of trouble from Hess he wanted to know about it immediately. Of course, Nylander had added a remark about how the NC3 recommendation would have to wait until things had calmed back down, and he knew Thulin would interpret this exactly as it was meant – that loyalty was a condition of the recommendation.
Turning out of the station, Nylander approaches the vultures, who are hovering in the hopes of someone falling out of the window. It was Nylander’s own idea to meet them head-on here instead of holding a press conference, because outside the building it’s easier to wrap things up and withdraw into his hidey-hole again. Yet as the flashes begin to go off, he finds his face settling back into its familiar expression, and it strikes him that he’s missed the attention. This is what he does best. True, his arse is on the line, but there is also plenty to be gained. Over the next few days he will be the one everybody wants to talk to, and given the notoriety of the case it might just prove to be the opportunity Nylander is looking for. If it all goes
tits up, it might even be useful to have Mark Hess up his sleeve.
48
The sound of the two girls crying upstairs filters into every corner of the vast house. Even into the kitchen, where Erik Sejer-Lassen is sitting at the imposing table made of Chinese timber, still in the suit he was wearing when Laura Kjær’s hand was found at his office the day before. It’s clear to Hess, who is sitting beside him, that the man hasn’t even gone to bed. His eyes are bloodshot and swollen, his shirt grubby and crumpled, toys are scattered across the floor, and the stove behind him is stacked with dirty pots and pans. Hess can see Thulin trying to catch the man’s eye from her chair on the other side of the table, but without success.
‘Please take another look at the photograph. Are you sure your wife didn’t know this woman?’
Sejer-Lassen looks down at the photo of Laura Kjær, but his eyes are absent.
‘What about her? The Minister for Social Affairs, Rosa Hartung. Is she someone your wife knew or spoke about, or someone you both met, or …’
But Sejer-Lassen shakes his head apathetically at the picture of Rosa Hartung that Thulin has slid across the table. Hess can see she’s trying to suppress her irritation, and he understands. It’s the second time inside a week she’s sat face to face with a widower who seems completely blank when confronted with her questions.
‘Mr Sejer-Lassen, we need your help. You must be able to think of something. Did she have any enemies, was there anyone she was afraid of, or was there –’
‘But I don’t know anything else. She didn’t have any enemies. She was only interested in the house and the kids …’
Thulin takes a deep breath and continues asking questions, but Hess senses Sejer-Lassen is telling the truth. He tries to ignore the sound of the children crying, and regrets not simply telling Nylander it wasn’t his problem when the chance presented itself at the station earlier that day. But there’s no way back now: he woke up that morning after three hours’ sleep with the image of chestnut men and severed limbs burned into his retinas. The caretaker showed up moments later with a reprimand – he’d left painting tools and a floor polisher in the middle of the walkway – but Hess didn’t have the time to deal with it. On his way to the station he’d phoned the Hague and done his best to apologize for missing the telephone meeting with Freimann, which had slipped his mind the previous afternoon. The secretary’s coldness was unmistakeable. Hess had given up trying to explain the reason for his oversight and instead jostled his way hurriedly through the busy morning rush at the train station so he’d have time to look in more detail at the photographs of Anne Sejer-Lassen’s body. He’d decided in advance that he would stop worrying if he could find cut marks elsewhere besides her wrists. If there were several other concrete amputation marks left by the tool used to amputate her hands, then there was probably no reason to pursue the sick thought he’d woken up with. But there had been no indication that the killer had tried to amputate any other parts of Anne Sejer-Lassen. Hess had even rung the coroner’s office to be sure: in both the first and second killing, the tool had been used solely to amputate the hands, confirming Hess’s fears and making him seriously uneasy. He couldn’t know whether he was right in predicting further victims, but his concern was growing. Ideally he would have liked to press pause and immerse himself in the Kristine Hartung case before committing himself to a new direction, but Nylander had put his foot down, and so he and Thulin had gone to the Sejer-Lassens’, where they still hadn’t got anywhere.
The Chestnut Man Page 13