All that is over. The only thanks Ricks will get is his name engraved beside all the other names on the memorial wall at the station. Jansen isn’t sentimentally inclined, but when he came to work yesterday morning it affected him to walk through the columned courtyard with that knowledge. For two days he’d stayed at home. On the night of the killing he’d been too shocked to make any contribution besides informing Ricks’s better half of what had happened, and later that night his own wife had woken to find him sitting apathetically in the unlit conservatory in Vanløse. The next day his family had gone to a birthday party while he’d begun putting together the Ikea bookcase waiting in a box in the boys’ room. But the instructions were incomprehensible, and around half ten he’d started on the white wine. By the time his wife got home with the kids that afternoon, he’d staggered out into the shed in the back garden, moving on to vodka and Red Bull, and when he woke up later on the floor he knew he needed to get back to work pretty quick.
Monday was his first day back. The station was a hive of activity and purpose, and people nodded sympathetically at him. Nylander refused to let him back on the case, of course, so instead he gathered together a handful of colleagues in the changing room and made it clear that as soon as anything important came up in the hunt for the killer he wanted to be told. Some seemed to disapprove of the idea, but others shared his view: that Ricks had died because Hess and Thulin weren’t up to the task. On top of that it must have been one of them, probably Hess, who’d talked to the press, and his continuing doubts about the Hartung case were an even bigger slap in the face now that Ricks had been murdered.
Unfortunately things were still stalled when his colleagues were dispatched to the minister’s office that morning. Jansen’s own assignments were unimportant, so instead he drove out to the suburb of Greve, bought a six-pack at a kiosk on the way, and drank a few before knocking at the little ground-floor apartment by the subway station, where Ricks had lived. His girlfriend had been in floods of tears. He’d been invited in and had just accepted a cup of tea when one of the detectives called from the ministry. They’d come up with a few possibilities – people with good reason to loathe the state, the system, the Ministry for Social Affairs and the world at large. Jansen listened to the options, and one of the cases seemed to promise a stronger motive than the others. After making sure Hess and Thulin hadn’t yet been informed, he’d hung up, made his excuses to Ricks’s girlfriend and driven straight to the address in Sydhavnen.
‘Who is it?’ comes a voice from behind the door.
‘Police! Open up!’
Jansen knocks impatiently, his hand gripping the gun in his pocket. The door opens and a furrowed face peeps anxiously out. Jansen suppresses his astonishment. It’s an old woman, and behind her he can smell cigarettes and spoiled food.
‘I need to speak to Benedikte Skans and Asger Neergaard.’
Jansen had been given the names by his colleague at the ministry, but the old woman shakes her head.
‘They don’t live here any more. They moved out six months ago.’
‘Moved out? Where to?’
‘I don’t know. They didn’t say. What’s this about?’
‘Live here alone, do you?’
‘Yes. But I don’t recall saying you could take that familiar tone with me.’
Jansen hesitates a moment. He hadn’t been expecting this. The old lady coughs and draws her cardigan more tightly around her against the chill.
‘Is there something I can help with?’
‘Forget it. Sorry to disturb you. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, goodbye.’
Jansen steps away from the door, and the old lady shuts it. For a few seconds he isn’t sure what to do. The woman’s response has caught him off guard. He’s about to return to the warmth of his car and ring his colleague at the ministry when his eye suddenly comes to rest on a first-floor window. It dawns on him that he’s looking at a mobile hanging from a ceiling. A mobile with small birds, the kind that usually hangs above a crib, and Jansen knows instantly that it shouldn’t be there if the old lady is right that Benedikte Skans and Asger Neergaard have moved.
He knocks again, harder this time. When at last the old lady opens the door, he pushes past her, drawing his gun. The woman shouts in protest. He walks purposefully down the narrow corridor, into the kitchen and through to the front room, which once served as the shop floor. Assuring himself that it’s empty, he makes for the stairs, which the old witch is now blocking.
‘Move!’
‘There’s nothing there! You can’t just –’
‘Shut up and move!’
He barges her aside, bounding up the stairs with the woman still whining behind him. Gun at the ready, his finger rigid on the trigger, he shoves open door after door. The first two are bedrooms, but the last is a child’s room.
The mobile hangs peacefully above the crib, but otherwise it’s empty, and for a heartbeat Jansen thinks he’s made a mistake. Then he notices the wall behind the door, and immediately he knows he’s solved the case that killed Martin Ricks.
88
Darkness has come, and by this time the last vehicles are usually departing Sydhavnen, leaving the streets deserted. But not today. Outside the ramshackle buildings that were once one of Copenhagen’s major slaughterhouses, the street is writhing with officers and Forensics techs, milling around with their flight cases. The vehicles have formed a queue, and sharp floodlights glare from every single window in the front-facing building. From the room on the first floor Hess can hear the old lady crying every now and then as she is interviewed, and the sound intermingles with rapid instructions, footsteps, crackly radio messages – but mostly with Thulin and Jansen’s conversation by the door.
‘But who tipped you off to come out here?’
‘Who says I got a tip? Maybe I was just out for a drive.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you call?’
‘You and Hess? What the fuck good’s that supposed to do?’
The photo has to be roughly two years old. The glass is dusty, but it’s nicely framed with black edges, lying on the pillow in the white crib beside a dummy and a lock of thin white hair. The young mother in the picture is standing beside an incubator and holding a child swaddled in a blanket, smiling for the camera. It’s a forced expression, bespeaking tiredness and great exertion, and because the young woman is still wearing a crumpled hospital gown Hess thinks the picture must have been taken at hospital shortly after the birth. The woman’s eyes are unsmiling. There is something fragile, something divorced from reality about her expression, as though she’s just been handed the child and is trying to play a role for which she hasn’t prepared.
There is no doubt that the Benedikte Skans in the photograph is the same pretty, grave-faced nurse he and Thulin met at the Rigshospital’s paediatric ward when they interviewed Hussein Majid about Magnus Kjær and Sofia Sejer-Lassen. Since the photo was taken her hair has grown longer, her features older, and her smile is gone. But it is her, and Hess struggles to understand the connection.
Ever since he and Thulin left the secure psychiatric ward, the conversation with Linus Bekker had been thickening inside him like a malignant tumour. All his energy and attention had been riveted on the possibility of tracing the killer through the images in the archive Bekker had hacked, but then the news began to trickle in. First from Genz, then from one of the detectives they’d left at the ministry, who had rushed out to Sydhavnen after Jansen’s call for back-up. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out that Jansen must have been tipped off by one of the detectives going through the files at the ministry, but right now that detail seems trivial in comparison to the breakthrough about Benedikte Skans and her boyfriend.
‘How far have you got?’
Nylander has just arrived, and Jansen appears relieved at the interruption.
‘The lease is in the name of Benedikte Skans. Twenty-eight, nurse at the Rigshospital. She and her boyfriend had their child removed
by Copenhagen Council eighteen months ago. The child was sent to a foster family, and Benedikte Skans took legal action. She also went to the press and attacked the Minister for Social Affairs for encouraging the councils to take more children into care.’
‘Rosa Hartung.’
‘Yup. The media lapped it up, until they suddenly realized that the council had removed the child for good reason, and the case was forgotten. But not by Benedikte Skans and her boyfriend, because shortly afterwards the child died. Skans was packed off to a locked ward and she wasn’t let back out until spring this year. She got her old job back and moved here with her boyfriend, but as you can see from the wall, they never forgot what happened.’
Hess is busy scanning the wall, and isn’t listening. He knows most of the information already from copies of the case file from Copenhagen Council, which a detective had brought from the ministry. Benedikte Skans’s youth in Tingbjerg was frittered on hash, nightlife and an unfinished traineeship at a clothing boutique, until at the age of twenty-one she was accepted into nursing school in Copenhagen. She completed the course with solid marks, and it was around the same time that she met her boyfriend, Asger Neergaard, who’d been a few years above her at high school in Tingbjerg. In the meantime Neergaard had been a soldier at the barracks in Slagelse, later deployed to Afghanistan, and together they’d set up home at the dilapidated slaughterhouse. Benedikte Skans got a job as a nurse on the Rigshospital’s paediatric ward, and meanwhile she and her boyfriend were trying to become parents themselves. According to the caseworker’s notes, when Benedikte did get pregnant she began to exhibit anxiety and issues with self-esteem. At the age of twenty-six she delivered a baby boy two months premature, which triggered puerperal psychosis. It didn’t seem like the child’s father had been much of a help. The caseworker found the then twenty-eight-year-old soldier immature and withdrawn, occasionally even aggressive, if Benedikte Skans provoked him. The council had done its best to provide support through various programmes, but after six months Benedikte Skans’s psychological problems had grown worse, and she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. When they’d been unable to get hold of the family for a few weeks, the council turned to the police, who conducted a raid – which turned out to be the right decision. The seven-month-old boy had been lying unconscious in his crib, sticky with faeces and vomit, and there were worrying signs of malnourishment. At the hospital it emerged that the boy had chronic asthma, as well as food allergies that made it dangerous to eat the squares of nutty chocolate they had given him.
Although the intervention had probably saved the child’s life, it left Benedikte Skans furious. She’d been interviewed several times, expressing her outrage at the way her family had been treated: ‘If I’m a bad mother, then there are plenty of them’ read one of the headlines reproduced in the case file. Because the council didn’t make the child’s neglect public, it must have seemed like Skans had a good case – but only until Rosa Hartung came forward and reminded both the press and the councils that it was in the children’s best interests to interpret Paragraph 42 of the relevant legislation as strictly as possible. The media went quiet. Then came the boy’s tragic death from acute pulmonary disease, only two months after being taken into care. Benedikte Skans responded violently to the caseworker who gave her the news, and her visits to the outpatient psychiatrist turned into a lengthy stay at Sankt Hans in Roskilde. She was discharged in the spring and took up her old job at the Rigshospital, on a probationary footing.
Hess shivers at the thought, because the wall behind the door makes it clear the young woman is anything but healthy.
‘My view is that she and the boyfriend are in it together,’ Jansen continues to Nylander. ‘They obviously felt they were unfairly treated, so they cooked up this plan in their sick little heads to mock the minister and make her look ridiculous, to expose the system and punish women who weren’t looking after their kids. As you can see, there’s no question who the crowning glory is supposed to be.’
Jansen isn’t wrong about that part. While one side of the room serves as a mausoleum for the dead child, the other side reveals a pathological obsession with Rosa Hartung. From left to right there are clippings of newspaper photographs and headlines about her daughter’s disappearance, including paparazzi snaps of the grieving minister. Words like ‘Dismembered and Buried’ or ‘Raped before She Was Cut Up’ are pasted mockingly next to a photo of Rosa Hartung dressed in black, breaking down at a memorial service. There are several featuring such headlines as ‘Rosa Hartung Crushed’ or ‘Sick with Grief’, but then the clippings jump forwards in time, and towards the right side of the wall are newer images, probably three or four months old, beneath the headline ‘Hartung Returns’. In one article pinned to the wall, there is a hand-drawn circle around the minister’s return to parliament on the first Tuesday in October, and beside it hangs an A4 page with various selfies of her daughter as well as the words ‘Welcome back. You’re going to die, slut.’
Far more concerning, however, is the fact that the clippings give way to another series of images. Not from newspapers, this time: photographs developed from film, evidently shot from some point after the end of September, before autumn had set in fully. Photographs of the minister’s house from various angles, of her husband, of her son, a sports hall, her ministerial car, her ministerial office and Christiansborg, as well as a profusion of Google Maps printouts showing routes into the centre of town.
The material is overwhelming. It torpedoes the frail house of cards Hess was on the verge of forming as he left the secure unit. Had the visit to Linus Bekker been pointless? Try as he might, he can’t rebuild it – but this isn’t the only thing nagging at him. There is clearly another threat. Something close at hand, something that demands their attention right now, just when they think they have the case under control, so Hess continues to scan the wall while Nylander questions Jansen.
‘And where is the couple now?’
‘They’ve not seen hide nor hair of the woman at the Rigshospital since she called in sick a few days ago, and we don’t know where the boyfriend’s staying either. He’s the one we know least about. They’re not married, so everything’s in Benedikte Skans’s name, but we’re getting his papers from the military. Have Intelligence been informed of what we’ve found?’
‘Oh yes. The minister is safe. Who’s the woman downstairs?’
‘Asger Neergaard’s mum. Apparently she lives here too. She says she doesn’t know where they are, but we’re not finished with her yet.’
‘But we believe this young couple are responsible for the killings?’
Hess hears Thulin interrupt before Jansen can answer, when suddenly he becomes aware of several pins in the wall. A few scraps of paper remain caught beneath one or two of them, as though a photo has been torn down in a hurry.
‘We don’t know that yet. Before we jump to any conclusions we need to –’
‘What else do we need to know? Christ, we’ve all got eyes in our head,’ exclaims Jansen.
‘Exactly! There’s all this material about Rosa Hartung, but nothing about the murdered women. If this couple are responsible for the murders then there ought to be some hint of them here, but there isn’t!’
‘But the woman worked as a nurse on a ward where she could have met at least two of the victims and their children. That’s irrelevant, is it?’
‘No, it’s not irrelevant. Obviously we need to arrest and interrogate them, but it won’t be very bloody easy now you’ve ridden in all guns blazing and told the whole world we’re waiting for them!’
Hess still can’t find the photo that must have been pinned to the wall, and in the background he hears Nylander’s voice chime in coolly.
‘As I see it, Jansen was well within his rights to act, Thulin. According to the consultant psychiatrist at Bekker’s unit – who was kind enough to ring me a few minutes ago – you and Hess have been busy harassing Linus Bekker … despite the fact that I specifically ordered you no
t to. Any explanation for me?’
Hess knows the moment has come to defend Thulin, but instead he turns towards Jansen.
‘Jansen, could the woman have removed something from up here before you came in?’
‘What the hell did you two want with Linus Bekker?!’
The argument continues behind him as he tries to figure out where he’d hide something if the police were knocking at the door. When he shifts a chest of drawers away from the wall, a crumpled photograph drops to the floor and he hurries to pick it up and unfold it.
The young man, whom Hess guesses must be Asger Neergaard, is tall and straight-backed, standing beside a car with a set of keys in his hand. He’s wearing a smart dark suit, and the black car shines in the weak sunlight as though it has just been washed and polished. The suit and the expensive German car are in stark contrast with the crumbling slaughterhouse behind them. At first Hess doesn’t understand why Asger Neergaard’s mother would have chosen this particular photo to get rid of, but then his eye is drawn back to the car, and when he dashes back to the wall and compares it with the photo of Rosa Hartung’s ministerial vehicle all doubt is dispelled: her car is identical to the one in the image of Asger Neergaard. Yet before Hess can say a word, Genz sticks his head around the door, clad in his usual white overalls.
‘Sorry to interrupt. We’ve just started searching the old abattoir building and there’s something you need to see. It looks like one of the rooms has been kitted out to keep someone prisoner for a good long while.’
89
It’s late afternoon, and the E20 motorway south-west of Copenhagen is dense with traffic. Asger honks the horn to clear the outside lane, but the row of idiots in front of him insist on driving cautiously because of the rain, and he edges impatiently along the inside. The minister’s car is an Audi A8 3.0, and it’s the first time he’s properly let the engine loose. He doesn’t care about attracting attention; what matters now is getting away. The whole thing has gone tits up, and Asger knows it’s only a question of time before the police realize it’s him and Benedikte they are after – if they don’t know already.
The Chestnut Man Page 27