The Chestnut Man

by Søren Sveistrup

  FRIDAY 16 OCTOBER

  * * *

  63

  It’s early morning, but Erik Sejer-Lassen doesn’t know the time. His 45,000-euro TAG Heuer watch has been locked inside a box on the second floor of the police station since late last night, accompanied by his belt and shoelaces. Erik himself is sitting in an underground cell, and when the heavy metal door opens an officer informs him that he is going to be interviewed again. He gets to his feet, walks through the basement and up the spiral staircase towards daylight and civilization, and prepares to vent his rage.

  The police showed up unannounced at his home last night. He’d been talking to the crying children in their beds when the au-pair called him to the front door, where two officers were waiting to take him in for questioning. He’d objected that he couldn’t possibly leave home just then, but the officers had given him no choice, and it had wrong-footed him that they’d brought his mother-in-law to look after the kids. Erik hadn’t spoken to her since Anne’s death. He’d known she would ask worried questions about her grandchildren and offer help that Erik didn’t want. But then she’d been standing on the stone step behind the officers almost like a co-conspirator, staring at him with timid eyes as though he were the one who’d killed her daughter. As Erik had been led to the waiting squad car, she’d crossed the threshold into his house and the girls had rushed to meet her. They’d clung to her legs.

  At the police station he had been questioned, without explanation, about the reason for the girls’ frequent accidents and injuries. He had understood nothing. Certainly not the relevance of it, and he’d yelled that he wanted to speak to their superior or be driven home immediately. Instead he’d been kept in custody for ‘withholding information pertaining to the murder of Anne Sejer-Lassen’ and had had to put up with being caged inside a basement cell like some common delinquent.

  The first time Erik Sejer-Lassen hit his wife was their wedding night. They had barely got through the door to the suite at the d’Angleterre before he’d grabbed his bride’s arms and dragged her through the rooms as he shook her, hissing hatred through his gritted teeth. The wedding had been lavish. Erik’s family had footed the bill, paying for the world-renowned chef, the twelve exotic courses, the rooms at Havreholm Castle and all the other trappings, because Anne’s family were as poor as church mice. But how had Anne thanked him? By talking too long and too intimately with one of his old boarding-school chums. It had humiliated Erik so much that he’d been seething with pent-up fury until the moment they’d left and driven to the d’Angleterre, where they were alone. Anne, in tears, had protested that she’d only talked to the schoolfriend to be friendly, but in a fit of violent temper he tore her dress to shreds, hit her repeatedly, and raped her. The next day he apologized for his behaviour, insisting that he loved her deeply. At the breakfast table the guests ascribed her flushed red cheek to the passion of their wedding night. That exact moment was probably where it began, his hatred of her – because she’d taken it; because she still looked at him adoringly as she batted those long lashes.

  Their years in Singapore were the happiest. He was a rising star, making a few smart investments in biotech firms, and he and Anne were rapidly accepted into the jet set among the English and American expats. He only lost his temper with her occasionally, usually because she didn’t meet the standards he’d set for loyalty, which included telling him everything she did. In return he sweetened the deal with trips to the Maldives and mountain treks in Nepal. With the arrival of the children, however, life changed. At first he’d opposed Anne’s greatest wish, but gradually he’d come to see something patriarchally appealing about reproduction, which he’d spoken about so often himself and heard discussed at various management meetings at biotech companies. It had upset him that his sperm was such low quality they’d had to consult a fertility clinic – Anne’s suggestion; in fact, he’d smacked her around in their penthouse for bringing it up at all. Nine months later he felt no joy at the birth of their little girl at Raffles Hospital, but he assumed it would come. Only, it didn’t. Nor did it when kid number two was born. Definitely not when number two was born. The doctors had had to cut Lina out, and Anne was so badly damaged that it put the kibosh on any hope of having a boy, as Erik wanted – as well as on their sex life.

  During their remaining years in Singapore he comforted himself with numerous affairs and the fact that his business instincts were still intact, but because Anne wanted the kids to go to school in Denmark they’d moved back from Asia and into the large, luxurious apartment on Islands Brygge, where they lived for a year until the house in Klampenborg was ready. The Hobbity social world of Copenhagen was restrictive and claustrophobic and obviously a radical adjustment from the international atmosphere and freedom he was used to in Singapore. He was soon bumping into old friends in Bredgade, which he despised as the chickenshit little backwater it actually was – all those petty status symbols and trophy wives jibber-jabbering about their homes and kids. Adding to his disappointment was the realization that his daughters were turning more and more into carbon copies of Anne, coarse, ungainly clones whose naïve drivel aped their mother’s slushy, sentimental cast of mind. Worse still, they displayed the same lack of backbone as the woman he’d married.

  One evening at bedtime they’d been crying hysterically over some trivial nonsense, and because both Anne and the au-pair girl were out, he was the one stuck with the two little millstones. At last he gave them a slap, and the crying had stopped. A few weeks afterwards the older girl had been unable to keep the food on her plate, despite being asked several times and shown how, so he hit her hard enough that she flew out of her chair. At A&E, where she’d been treated for concussion, he’d made it clear to Judith that she’d better keep her mouth shut unless she wanted to end up on the first flight back to the paddy fields. When Anne rushed back from visiting her mother it surprised him how easy it was to invent some story about the little girl’s clumsiness, and despite her limited intelligence the child knew enough not to tell her mother the truth.

  There were many accidents at Islands Brygge, maybe too many, but they helped. Occasionally Anne eyed him with suspicion, but she never asked – at least, not until the caseworker from the local council suddenly turned up just before they were due to move. The council had received an anonymous tip that the girls were being abused, and for a while Erik had to put up with the caseworker nosing around. With his lawyers’ help, however, he sent the man packing, making it clear he’d better not come back, and Erik promised himself he’d show more self-control in future. At least until he figured out who had dared send in the tip.

  Afterwards, Anne asked him for the first time outright whether he was responsible for the accidents. He denied it, of course, but after the move to Klampenborg and the episode on the hall stairs she stopped believing him. She cried and blamed herself and said she wanted a divorce. Naturally he was prepared for that. If she initiated a divorce, he’d set his lawyers on her and make sure she never saw her kids again. Ages ago she’d signed a postnuptial agreement that guaranteed he would keep everything he’d earned, so she could look forward to a life of government handouts on her mother’s sofa if she wasn’t satisfied with her gilded cage in Klampenborg.

  The atmosphere had never been good again, but he’d thought Anne had given up until the police told him she hadn’t actually been going to visit her mother – she’d been running away instead. She’d been planning to leave him, leave him looking like the arsehole, but then, as if by magic, she was taken out of commission. That part was still incomprehensible, but it gave Erik a feeling of justice. The relationship with the kids, which was now entirely his, would probably also be easier from this point on. He wouldn’t have to take anyone else’s opinion into account.

  Erik Sejer-Lassen enters the interrogation room at the Major Crimes Division full of self-confidence. The two detectives present are the ones from before. The guy with the mixed-up irises and the little piece with the doe eyes. In a differe
nt context he’d have given her a ride she’d never forget. They both look like shit. Tired and worn out, especially the man, whose face is blue and yellow as though from a recent beating. Erik knows instantly he can ride roughshod over them. He’ll be let go straight away. They don’t have shit on him.

  ‘Erik Sejer-Lassen, we’ve spoken to your au-pair again, and this time she has explained to us in detail how she saw you hit your children on at least four occasions.’

  ‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. If Judith is saying I laid a hand on the girls it’s because she’s lying.’

  Erik imagines they’ll argue back and forth a little, but the two idiots take no notice of what he’s said.

  ‘We know she’s telling the truth. Not least because we’ve spoken on the phone to the two Filipina au-pairs you employed when you lived in Singapore. All three of them are telling the same story, independently of each other. The prosecution service has therefore decided to charge you with assault and battery against your children for the incidents described in the seven hospital reports from your time in Denmark.’

  The guy keeps talking, as Sejer-Lassen feels the doe-eyed girl’s cold stare.

  ‘For the time being we have requested a forty-eight-hour extension of your custody. You have the right to a lawyer, and if you cannot afford one then one will be assigned to you by the court. Until a judgement has been passed, the social authorities will look after your children’s interests in close conjunction with their grandmother, who has already offered to be their guardian. If you are found guilty and sentenced, a decision will be made as to whether you may retain parental rights and whether you will be allowed to see the children during supervised visits.’

  All sound vanishes. For a moment Erik Sejer-Lassen gazes into empty space. Then he looks down. Spread out on the table in front of him are the hospital reports with doctors’ descriptions, images and X-rays of the girls’ injuries, and suddenly he thinks it looks bad. Far away he hears Doe-eyes telling him that Judith also said they’d received a visit from a local-authority caseworker after an anonymous tip-off shortly before the move from Islands Brygge. That’s all they want to discuss with Sejer-Lassen on this occasion, before his case is passed to someone else.

  ‘Do you know who sent it in?’

  ‘Do you have any idea who it could have been?’

  ‘Who besides the au-pair could have known you were hitting your children?’

  The detective with the blue and yellow swelling emphasizes how important it is that he answer, but Erik Sejer-Lassen can’t get out a word. He merely stares at the images. A moment later he is led out, and as his cell door slams shut behind him he crumples, missing his girls for the first time in his life.

  64

  Hess feels like his head’s about to explode, and he regrets not staying in the cold wind outside the walls of City Hall. The acute numbness in his skull after his fight with Hans Henrik Hauge has in the course of the week been replaced by an insistent headache. It doesn’t help that Hauge still hasn’t been found, or that this morning he’s had to sit in on the interrogation of Erik Sejer-Lassen at the station before rushing over to City Hall and interviewing the caseworker, Henning Loeb, and his boss, with whom he’s now sitting in an overly warm office at Children’s and Young Adults’ Services. The stiff atmosphere and mahogany panelling aren’t exactly kid-friendly.

  The caseworker is busily defending himself, probably mostly for the benefit of his departmental head, who’s fidgeting nervously in his chair.

  ‘Like I said, the system went down. That’s why I couldn’t help you.’

  ‘That isn’t what you said when we spoke on Tuesday. You told me there was no report about Anne Sejer-Lassen’s children, when in fact there was.’

  ‘I think maybe I said the system couldn’t show me right then.’

  ‘No, that’s not what you said. I gave you the girls’ ID numbers, and you said –’

  ‘Okay, look. I don’t quite remember how the words –’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me the truth?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t my intention to hide anything …’

  Henning Loeb keeps squirming, casting apprehensive glances at his boss out of the corner of his eye, and Hess curses himself for not having gone to see the man several days earlier, as he’d first thought to.

  Their suspicions about the anonymous tipster in the Laura Kjær case were dismissed for a while after the discovery of the basement room in the garage, because there was apparently no corresponding report for Anne Sejer-Lassen. Hess already had the caseworker’s statement that no such tip had been received by City Hall while the family lived on Islands Brygge, so he and Thulin focused instead on Gentofte Council, which was responsible for the Klampenborg area. At Gentofte they claimed no knowledge of a report about Anne Sejer-Lassen, so the theory that the two killings might be connected by child abuse began to fizzle out: nobody in the Sejer-Lassen family’s circle thought the girls’ injuries were anything but accidents. The au-pair’s answers were the most hesitant, but it wasn’t until late yesterday afternoon – when Hess and Thulin assured her that they would protect her from Erik Sejer-Lassen’s wrath – that she broke down in tears and got the whole thing off her chest. She took the opportunity to add that a caseworker from Copenhagen Council had shown up a while back at their old Islands Brygge address – he’d started asking questions because an anonymous tipster had accused Anne of not taking proper care of her children. Hess swore to himself, realizing they’d wasted precious time.

  Hess’s impression of the caseworker wasn’t exactly stellar after their phone conversation on Tuesday, and nor has it improved during the interview. He’s conducting it alone because Thulin and the IT techs have started scouring the department’s computers for digital evidence of the tipster. The caseworker has defended his lie as a ‘technical error’, but on reading through the two anonymous reports against Laura Kjær and Anne Sejer-Lassen Hess has formed another theory about why Loeb was so evasive on the phone.

  The tip about Anne Sejer-Lassen was received by the whistle-blower scheme approximately two weeks after the one about Laura Kjær, and shortly before the Sejer-Lassen family moved to Klampenborg. It’s unusually verbose, taking up nearly a whole side of A4. In essence it demands that Anne Sejer-Lassen’s two girls, Lina and Sofia, be removed from her care, on the grounds that the girls are being abused. But the email is rambling, almost devoid of commas, written like one long stream of consciousness, in sharp contrast to the succinct missive about Laura Kjær, which is chilly and matter-of-fact. Anne Sejer-Lassen is described as an upper-class airhead who is more concerned with herself than with her girls. She’s obsessed with money and luxury, and it will be obvious to anybody who bothers to check the injury reports from various hospitals that the children need to be taken into care. The font and size of the two messages are also dramatically dissimilar, but if you read them one after the other it’s impossible not to notice that in both cases the sender uses the phrases ‘selfish whore’ and ‘ought to know better’. Several times, in fact, when it comes to Anne Sejer-Lassen. It suggests that the senders are one and the same person, and that the differences might have been feigned. Hess surmises that this is what made Henning Loeb uneasy, prompting him to lie about the Sejer-Lassen girls.

  Loeb is hiding behind the rules, defending his handling of the cases: everything has been done by the book, and the parents have denied all knowledge of abuse. He says so repeatedly, as though it’s to be expected that the parents will show all their cards as soon as the council come knocking.

  ‘But the police investigation sheds new light on these cases. Naturally I’ll be recommending an immediate and thorough internal review,’ interjects the departmental head.

  The caseworker falls silent at this remark, while his boss continues to babble assurances. Hess feels the skin tighten again across his skull. He realizes he ought to have got checked out himself when they visited A&E on Tuesday evening, but instead he returne
d to Odin and the self-inflicted mess of painting supplies. He fell asleep thinking about the man waiting for Thulin with a bouquet and a bottle of wine, and for some reason it irritated him that he was surprised – of course she has someone waiting for her when she clocks out. Not that it’s any of his business.

  The next day he woke up with the world’s most excruciating headache, and just then his mobile began to ring. It was François, who didn’t understand why Hess hadn’t done more to speak to Freimann after their abortive telephone meeting. Didn’t he want his job back after all? What the hell was he thinking? Hess said he’d call him back, then hung up. It was as though the officious Pakistani man from 34C had heard him wake up, because he was soon standing in the doorway and eyeing the shambles inside while he informed Hess that the estate agent had made a fruitless visit the day before.

  ‘What about those paint pots and the floor polisher in the walkway there? You’ve got to think of the other residents, you know.’

  Hess made every promise under the sun, but he didn’t keep them; he and Thulin were too busy cooking Sejer-Lassen’s goose.

  ‘But what can you tell me about the tipster? Did you find out anything when you went to visit the families you claim you visited?’ Hess tries again.

  ‘We did go and investigate. It’s not a claim. But as I said –’