‘Just stop it. The boy was being raped in a basement room and the two girls had been patched up so many times the whole thing stank to high heaven, but you clearly have a bloody good reason why that wasn’t discovered. All I’m trying to establish is whether you know anything about the person who sent in the tip.’
‘I don’t know anything else. And I don’t appreciate your tone. As I said –’
‘That’s fine. Take a break.’
Nylander has arrived. He’s standing in the door of the office, and with a nod he makes it clear to Hess that he wants a word. Hess is glad to escape the hot room for the stairwell, where staff bustle past, glancing at them curiously.
‘It’s not your job to evaluate how the council are doing.’
‘I’ll try and give it a rest, then.’
‘Where’s Thulin?’
‘Next door, in there. She and the IT guys are trying to trace who sent the two tip-offs.’
‘We’re thinking it’s the killer?’
Hess tries to ignore the stab of irritation at his boss’s use of ‘we’. Freimann talks in the same way, and Hess wonders whether he and Nylander have been on the same management course.
‘That’s the idea. When can we interview Rosa Hartung?’
‘Interview her about what?’
‘Well, about –’
‘The minister has already been interviewed. She has no knowledge of either Laura Kjær or Anne Sejer-Lassen.’
‘But the fact that we’re standing here means she has to be interviewed again. Both victims were anonymously reported with the aim of having their children taken into care. Or maybe that wasn’t the killer’s aim at all. Maybe he was just pointing the finger at a system that doesn’t work, but either way you’ve got to be an idiot not to see that it could have something to do with Rosa Hartung. She’s the Minister for Social Affairs, after all, and the more you think about it the more remarkable it is that the killing that started all of this happened more or less the same time as her comeback as a minister.’
‘Hess, you’re doing a good job. And I’m not normally one to go after somebody because his reputation is slightly against him. But it sounds like you’re calling me an idiot.’
‘Then you’ve misunderstood, of course. But when you add to that the fact that the fingerprints on the two chestnut men found at the crime scenes belonged to Rosa Hartung’s daughter –’
‘Now you listen to me. Your boss at the Hague has asked me for an evaluation of your professional competence, and naturally I want to help you get back in the saddle. But that means you need to focus on what’s important. Rosa Hartung is not to be interviewed again, because it isn’t relevant. Agreed?’
The information about his boss at the Hague catches Hess off guard. For a moment he’s too surprised to answer. Nylander shoots a look at Thulin, who’s emerged from the room with the department’s desktop computers.
‘Well?’
‘Both tip-offs were sent via the same server in the Ukraine, but the people running it aren’t known for their cooperation with the authorities. Quite the opposite. We may be able to get an IP address in a few weeks’ time, but by then it won’t matter.’
‘Will it help if I ask whether the Justice Minister would be willing to get in touch with his colleague in the Ukraine?’
‘I doubt it. Even if they want to help, it will take time we don’t have.’
‘You’re telling me. There were only seven days between the first killing and the second. If the killer is as sick in the head as you say, then we can’t just sit here twiddling our thumbs.’
‘Maybe we don’t have to. Both tip-offs were sent to the council via the whistle-blower scheme. The first one three months ago, the second two weeks later. If we assume both came from the killer, and if we assume he’s going to try again –’
‘– then he’s already sent an anonymous message about the next victim.’
‘Exactly. There’s only one problem. I’ve just been told that the whistle-blower scheme gets an average of five anonymous tip-offs per week addressed to Children’s and Young Adults’ Services alone. That’s a yearly total of two hundred and sixty. Not all of them are about having children taken into care, but there’s no system, so we don’t know how many we’re actually dealing with.’
Nylander nods.
‘I’ll speak to the head of department. They’ve got good cause to help us out. What do you need?’
‘Hess?’
His head’s throbbing, and the news about an alliance between Freimann and Nylander isn’t helping matters. Hess tries to think clearly so he can answer Thulin.
‘Anonymous reports of neglect and abuse of children within the last six months. Especially against mothers between twenty and fifty, and demanding that their children be removed from their care. Cases that have been handled, but where no reason was found to intervene.’
The head of department has emerged through the door in the background and is watching the little group expectantly. Nylander takes the opportunity to explain what they need.
‘But those cases aren’t filed in any one place. It’ll take time to find them,’ replies the departmental head.
Nylander looks at Hess, who’s begun to walk back towards the hot room.
‘Then you’d better get your whole department on it. We’ve got bugger all else to do, so we’ll need them within the hour.’
65
Anonymous reports to Copenhagen Council about women with children have turned out to be rather popular. Certainly there are quite a number of them, and as the staff are assigned to bring in the red case files and add them to the growing stack on the table, Hess begins to worry whether their plan is the right one. But after the conversation with Nylander there isn’t much else to do besides pick a spot and make a start. While Thulin prefers to read through the cases on an Acer laptop in the large open-plan office, Hess settles down in the meeting room, where he sits turning pages, some of them still warm from the printer.
His method is simple. He opens the relevant case file and scans only the anonymous message. If it doesn’t seem relevant, the file is chucked on to a pile to his left. If it does – if it demands closer attention – the file goes on to a pile to the right.
Very quickly it becomes apparent that this rough sorting process is more difficult than he’d reckoned with. All of the files simmer with the same rage against the mothers that he recognizes from the accusations against Laura Kjær and Anne Sejer-Lassen. They’re often written in a fury, some with such obvious give-aways that it’s relatively easy to guess they’ve come from an ex-husband, an aunt or a grandmother who’d felt compelled to send in an anonymous message listing the mother’s deficiencies. But Hess can’t be sure, and the pile to his right is growing. The emails themselves make for appalling reading. Most are evidence of the civil war in which the children are caught up – in which they might still be caught up, because all the cases Hess has requested are ones where the accusations have been dismissed. The department was, however, obliged to investigate, and although it doesn’t absolve Henning Loeb of responsibility, Hess now has more understanding for the caseworker’s cynicism. Often the tip-offs are motivated by far more than the children’s wellbeing.
By the time Hess has got through the forty-odd reports from the last six months anonymously suggesting intervention, he’s fed up to the back teeth. It’s been altogether more time-consuming than he’d imagined, taking nearly two hours, partly because he’d kept having to flip through the original case file in order to compare. Worse still, the killer could in principle have written most of them. And not a single one used the phrases ‘selfish whore’ or ‘ought to know better’.
An employee explains that there are no more cases matching the criteria Hess has given them, so he begins going through the stack again. By the time he’s finished the second go-round, darkness has fallen outside the flag-adorned windows of City Hall. It’s barely half past four, but the street lamps have been lit on H. C. Andersen Boulev
ard, and motley bulbs glow among the dark, skinny trees along the gardens of Tivoli. This time Hess has, with difficulty, selected seven reports – but he’s far from certain the right one is among them. In all seven cases the tipster urges the council to remove one or several of the woman’s children. They’re all vastly different. Some short, some long. In one case, on further reflection he realizes the email has to have come from a family member, while another seems to be from a teacher, because it contains internal information from a meeting that took place at an after-school club.
The last five, however, he can’t decipher. He discards one because it uses old-fashioned language, as though written by a grandparent, and another because it’s littered with spelling errors. That leaves three: a Gambian woman whom the writer has accused of exploiting her kids as child labour. A handicapped mother accused of neglecting her children because she’s on the needle. An out-of-work mother accused of having sex with her own child.
All three are appalling claims, and it strikes Hess that if one of the reports is genuinely from the killer then the accusation is probably true. It had been in the cases of Laura Kjær and Anne Sejer-Lassen, at any rate.
‘You getting anywhere?’ asks Thulin, walking into the room with the Acer laptop under her arm.
‘Not really.’
‘There are three that stick out. The Gambian mother, the handicapped mother, and the out-of-work mother.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Unsurprising that Thulin has nosed out the same ones he has. In fact he’s begun to wonder whether she might not be able to solve the case better if she were single-handed.
‘I think we should take a closer look. Maybe at all three.’
Thulin gazes at him impatiently. Hess’s head is aching. Something about this whole exercise feels pointless, but he can’t work out what it is. It’s getting dark outside, and he knows they have to reach a decision if they’re going to get anything done that day.
‘The killer must be assuming that at some point we’ll figure out that the victims were reported to the council. Right or wrong?’ asks Hess.
‘Right. It might even be part of his objective, us figuring it out. But he can’t tell how quickly we’ll figure it out.’
‘So the killer also knows that at some point we’ll read the two tip-offs about Laura Kjær and Anne Sejer-Lassen. Right or wrong?’
‘This isn’t Twenty Questions. If we don’t get a move-on, we might as well go and interview the neighbours again.’
But Hess continues, trying to hold on to his train of thought. ‘So if you were the killer and you’d written the first two messages – and you knew we’d find them and feel tremendously clever – how would you write the third one?’
Hess can tell she understands. Her eyes leap from him and back to the screen in her arms.
‘Generally speaking, the readability score isn’t high. But if we play with the idea that we’re being deliberately thrown off track, then there are two that stand out. The one with all the spelling mistakes and the one written in old-fashioned Danish.’
‘Which one is the stupidest?’ asks Hess.
Thulin’s eyes skim the screen while Hess fumbles for the two folders on the table and flips them open. This time, when he reads the report with all the spelling mistakes, his instincts are roused. Maybe it’s his imagination. Maybe not. Thulin turns her screen towards Hess, and he nods. It’s the same one he’s selected. The tip-off about Jessie Kvium. Twenty-five years old. Resident at the Urbanplan Housing Estate.
66
Jessie Kvium marches off with her six-year-old daughter, but the young Pakistani teacher with the kindly eyes catches her in the hallway before she rounds the corner.
‘Jessie, can I speak with you for a moment?’
Even before she can finish saying that oh, unfortunately she and Olivia are just rushing off to dance practice, she can tell from his determined face that she isn’t going to escape. She’s always trying to dodge him – he’s so reliably good at pricking her conscience – but now she has to try and charm her way out. She bats her lashes coyly and brushes the hair from her face with her long, freshly painted nails so that he can see how good she looks today. She’s been at the hairdresser’s for two hours. Only the Pakistani one on Amager Boulevard, mind you, but they’re cheap and they do make-up and nails if you wait a while, like she did that day. Tight around her hips is her new yellow skirt, a recent purchase from H&M in town for only 79 kroner – partly because it’s a thin summer thing that was on its way off the shelves and partly because she was able to show the sales assistant it was coming apart at the seams. Which doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to what she needs it for.
But her smile and batting eyelashes bounce off the teacher. At first she thinks she’s going to get another earful about picking up her child dangerously close to the after-school-club closing time at five, so she’s ready with a quick answer about how people are still allowed to get something for their taxes. Today, however, Ali – probably what he’s called – asks about Olivia’s lack of rainclothes and wellies.
‘The shoes she has are absolutely fine, of course, but she says she’s cold when they get wet, and they may not be so practical for autumn.’
The teacher glances discreetly at Olivia’s hole-riddled trainers, and Jessie feels like screaming at him to shut his mouth. She doesn’t have 500 kroner for that kind of stuff right now, and if she did have that kind of money she’d rather whisk her daughter far away from a classroom where fifty per cent of the kids speak Arabic and every single word has to be translated by three different interpreters at parents’ evenings. Not that she attends them herself, but that’s what she’s heard.
Unfortunately there are a few other teachers hovering in the background, so Jessie chooses Plan B.
‘Oh, but we have bought rainclothes and wellies. We just forgot them at the holiday cottage, but we’ll remember them next time.’
Total bollocks, of course, from start to finish. There are no rainclothes, no wellies, and certainly no holiday cottage, but the half-bottle of white wine she’d downed back at Urbanplan before she got dressed and drove over help the words on their way, as it always does.
‘Right, that’s fine then. And how would you say things are going with Olivia at home?’
Jessie senses the eyes of the passing teachers as she explains how swimmingly things are going. Ali lowers his voice and says he’s a bit concerned, because there hasn’t been much improvement in Olivia’s relationship with the other children. He’s afraid she seems very isolated, so he thinks it might be good for them to have another little chat soon, and Jessie hastens to accept with the same friendliness as though he’s offered them a trip to the theme park with all expenses paid.
Afterwards she sits in the little Toyota Aygo while her daughter changes into her dance gear in the back seat and she smokes a cigarette out of the open window. She tells Olivia that the teacher was quite right about what he’d said, and that they’ll buy those rainclothes for her soon.
‘But it’s also important that you pull yourself together and play more with the others, okay?’
‘My foot hurts.’
‘It’ll stop once you’ve warmed up. It’s important to go every time, sweetheart.’
The dance studio is on the top floor of Amager Shopping Centre, and they arrive barely two minutes before the beginning of class. They have to run up the stairs from the parking level, and of course the other little princesses are all standing ready on the varnished wooden floor in their expensive, trendy outfits. Olivia’s wearing her supermarket-bought lilac dress, the one she had last year too, and despite being a tad tight across the shoulders it’s still a passable fit. Jessie tugs off her daughter’s coat and sends her out on to the floor, where the teacher greets her with a kind smile. All the mothers are lined up along one wall, a row of stuck-up bitches deep in conversation about wellness, autumn getaways to Gran Canaria, and how their kids are doing in school. She greets them politely and smiles, although she
wishes they’d all go to hell.
As the girls begin to dance she glances impatiently around, adjusting her skirt, but he still hasn’t come, and for a moment she stands exposed beside the mothers, feeling let down. She had been sure he’d come, and the fact that he isn’t there makes her unsure of the relationship she thought they had. She feels embarrassed in the other women’s company, and although she’d planned to keep quiet she begins to prattle nervously.
‘Gosh, don’t they look lovely today, the little princesses. I can’t believe they’ve only been dancing for a year!’
With every word she feels herself more engulfed in their pitying glances. Then, finally, the door opens and he comes into the studio. Also with his daughter, who scurries over to the others and joins the dance. He looks at her and the mothers, gives a friendly nod and an effortless grin, and she feels her heart begin to pound. His movements are confident, and he’s casually swinging the keys to the Audi she has come to know so well. As he exchanges a few words with the other mothers and makes them laugh, she realizes he hasn’t even properly looked her way. He’s ignoring her, even though she’s standing beside him like a fawning dog, and it prompts her to blurt out that oh, by the way, there’s something she’d like to discuss with him. Something important about the ‘classroom culture’ at the school – a word she’s just picked up from one of the other women. He looks surprised, but before he can answer she starts walking towards the exit. Shooting a glance over her shoulder, she notes with satisfaction that it was too odd for him to refuse her invitation to talk about something so important, so he has to excuse himself to the other mothers and follow.
As she comes down the stairs and pushes through the heavy door into the corridor beneath the studio, she can hear his footsteps behind her. She pauses and waits, but as soon as she sees his face she can tell he’s angry.
‘What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t you get that this is over? You’ve got to leave me be, for Christ’s sake!’
The Chestnut Man Page 19