‘Now use their ID numbers and search for a case from 1986.’
Liu does as Rosa says and searches again, but after a few minutes’ typing she shakes her head.
‘There’s nothing from 1986. As I said, they haven’t finished digitalizing everything, so maybe –’
‘Try ’87 or ’85. There was a boy joined our family, and his sister, too.’
‘Do you have the boy’s name, or –’
‘No, I don’t have anything. They weren’t there long. A few weeks or months …’
Liu had kept typing during the conversation, but now she halts. Her eyes are fixed on the screen.
‘Here’s something, I think. 1987. Toke Bering … and his twin sister, Astrid.’
Rosa can see Liu has reached a page with a file number and a block of text. The typeface is old-fashioned, revealing that the file was originally written on a typewriter. The names mean nothing to her. Nor does the fact that they were twins, but she knows it has to be them.
‘Looks like they stayed with you for three months before they were transferred.’
‘Transferred where? I need to know what happened to them.’
Liu lets Rosa closer to the screen, so that she can see the old file for herself. And Rosa reads. By the time she has finished reading the social worker’s three typed pages, her whole body is quivering. Tears run down her cheeks, and she feels like throwing up.
‘Rosa, what’s happened? I don’t like this. Should I call Steen, or …’
Rosa shakes her head. Her breath catching, she forces herself to read the text again. This time because she thinks there must be a message in it for her. Something the owner of the chestnut wreath wants her to pick up on. Or is it too late? Is the awful message simply that this is the reason for it all? Is the punishment that she’ll have to live with that knowledge for the rest of her life?
This time Rosa takes in all the details, frantically scanning for clues about what to do next. And suddenly she understands. When her eyes fall on the name of the place the twins were taken, it is obvious, and she knows it can only be there she is supposed to go. It has to be there.
Rosa stands up, memorizing the address in the file.
‘Rosa, could you please tell me what this is about?’
She doesn’t answer Liu. She’s just discovered a text from an unknown number on her phone, which she placed on the desk. It is an emoji with a finger placed in front of its mouth, and Rosa knows she has to be silent if she ever wants to know what has happened to Kristine.
105
The snow is coming down in dense flakes, and the part of the landscape Hess can view through the windscreen is white and ill-defined. On the motorway it was bearable because the snow ploughs had been shuttling up and down, but now he’s turned off the E47 and is driving down the country road towards Vordingborg, he keeps having to slow to a 20-kilometre-per-hour crawl to avoid bumping into the cars in front.
On his way out of Copenhagen and through Zealand he called the local police at Risskov and Nyborg, but as he feared they weren’t much help. Most limited had been the information about the 2001 killing in Risskov. Since the crime was seventeen years in the past, his enquiries were given short shrift by the Aarhus Police, and he was transferred three times before a female constable took pity on him and looked up the case: it was long ago marked unsolved and shelved. She wasn’t familiar with it personally, but she was willing to read out fragments of the case report over the phone. None of which proved useful. The victim, a lab assistant, had been a single mother, and the evening of the murder she’d found someone to look after her one-year-old girl because she was expecting a friend for dinner. When the friend arrived, he found her stabbed to death on the living-room floor and called the police. Two years later, the investigation was deprioritized and the case shelved – they’d run out of suspects and had no more leads to follow.
When it came to the Nyborg case from 2015, the situation was different. The victim was the mother of a three-year-old boy, and the investigation was still active. The boy’s father, an ex-boyfriend, was the main suspect, and there was a warrant out for his arrest, but he was believed to be hiding in Thailand. The motive, apparently, was a mixture of jealousy and money. The man had ‘biker-gang connections’, and the local inspector’s working theory was that he’d followed the victim in her car and observed her assignation with a married professional football player. On the way home he’d forced her on to the hard shoulder, then struck or stabbed her with an unidentified weapon, piercing her brain through her left eye. Since Hess didn’t think it likely that the victim’s ex-boyfriend, now presumed to be in Pattaya, could be responsible for the recent murders in the capital, he asked the inspector whether there had been any other suspects. Anybody who’d had a connection to the woman without being a close friend, ex-boyfriend or relative. But the inspector didn’t think so, and Hess sensed the man took the question as an indirect criticism of his work. He decided not to push. Instead, he approached the issue of the doll hanging from the rear-view mirror in the woman’s car.
‘When you were interviewing people and you showed them images from the crime scene, did anybody notice any objects that gave them pause, or that didn’t belong?’
‘How on earth did you know that? Why do you ask?’
‘Could you let me know who it was?’
‘The victim’s mother was surprised to see a chestnut man hanging from the rear-view mirror. She said the victim had had nut allergies since childhood, so it was a bit odd.’
The inspector, who didn’t like loose ends, had taken pains to solve the mystery. Questioning at the child’s kindergarten had revealed that one of the classes had made chestnut men a couple of weeks back, so it wasn’t inconceivable that the mother had put one of her child’s creations in the car herself, despite her allergies. The information gave Hess chills. Although the inspector’s theory sounded plausible, he didn’t for a moment believe it was true. But who’d spend any time wondering about the presence of a chestnut man in September or October? Probably no one. For a moment Hess had sensed his question had opened the door to fresh doubt and self-examination for the inspector, so he hurried to shut it again. There was no reason to raise the alarm when he had nothing more than theories to go on.
Unable to dig further into those two cases for the time being, Hess turned south in the hope of finding someone to discuss the case from Møn. Luckily Møn fell under the jurisdiction of Vordingborg in Denmark’s southernmost province, so at least he doesn’t have to make the endless drive down there. But he was beginning to regret his decision. For the same reason he still hadn’t contacted Thulin or Nylander, and as he walked up the slippery steps of Vordingborg Police Station he doubted whether he’d have to. Since his moment of clarity at the airport he’d realized how difficult a task he’d set himself. Even if it turned out that the same person had been killing and terrorizing women for decades, it might take just as long to prove as the murderer had spent committing the crimes. If it was true at all.
In the busy reception area at Vordingborg Police Station, Hess lies smoothly, explaining that he is with the Major Crimes Division in Copenhagen and would like to speak to the local chief of police. The station is busy. Apparently it’s a mess out there, and people are continually driving into one another, but a friendly soul takes the time to point Hess down a corridor and tell him to ask for Brink.
Hess enters a grubby open-plan office where a pockmarked, red-haired man around sixty years old and a hundred kilograms in weight is shrugging on his coat and chatting on his phone.
‘Then leave the piece of crap where it is, if it won’t start. I’m on my way!’
The man hangs up and strides towards the entrance, showing no sign of stepping aside for Hess.
‘I’m supposed to speak to Brink?’
‘I’m on my way out. You’ll have to wait until Monday.’
Hess hurries to fish out his police badge, but the man is already past him and heading down the corridor
, zipping up his parka.
‘It’s important. I have a few questions about a case, and –’
‘I’m sure you do, but I’m off for the weekend. Ask at reception. I’m sure they’ll be able to help you. Goodbye!’
‘I can’t ask at reception. It’s about a murder case on Møn back in 1989.’
Brink’s hefty figure comes to a standstill in the middle of the hallway. For a moment he remains with his back turned, but then he wheels around and looks at Hess as though he’s seen a ghost.
106
Police Inspector Brink would never forget 31 October 1989. Everything else in his experience as an officer paled in comparison to his memories of that day. Even now, many years later, sitting opposite Hess in the dimly lit office with the snow drifting down outside, the thickset man can’t help but be moved.
When Detective Brink arrived at Ørum’s farm the afternoon before his twenty-ninth birthday, he was responding to a call for assistance from Inspector Marius Larsen. Larsen, known in those days as ‘the sheriff’, had driven out to see Ørum because a neighbour or two had been complaining that his animals were wandering around on their fields. It had happened before. Ørum, a father in his forties, ran a small farm, but also worked part-time at the ferry terminal. He wasn’t trained in farming, let alone experienced or dedicated, and people said he was simply trying to earn a bit of extra cash by keeping animals. He’d bought the farm for a song at a forced auction, and since the animals, stalls and grazing areas had been part of the bargain he’d tried to capitalize on them. Which, unfortunately, hadn’t gone so well. Generally speaking, ‘money’, and maybe especially ‘short of money’, were the words that came to mind most often when the conversation turned to Ørum. Some people thought it was lack of money that had made Ørum and his wife register as a foster family. Each time a child or a young person was sent to stay at Ørum’s farm a cheque would follow, and over the years they’d added up. Others in the small community on Møn had probably sensed that the family wasn’t one of the soft, socially minded brigade, but on the other hand it was felt that the children taken under the Ørum family’s wing would benefit from the environment on offer. Plenty of fresh air, fields and animals; and the children could learn to help out and earn their keep. The Ørum youngsters, both foster and biological, were easy to recognize in the local community because they were more shabbily dressed than their classmates, often in clothes inappropriate for the season. True, there was perhaps a tendency for the family to keep to itself, as well; but in the case of the foster children, especially, this shyness was put down to their unfortunate backgrounds. So although the Ørum family wasn’t particularly well liked, it enjoyed a certain standing, because – money or no money – it was doing a good thing for children who didn’t have much else in their lives. That Ørum knocked back more than his fair share of beer when he was working at the ferry terminal or sitting in his old, clapped-out Opel by the harbour – well, that was his right.
It was with this limited knowledge that Brink and another colleague arrived at the farmyard about thirty years earlier, along with the ambulance the sheriff had requested. The dead pig behind the tractor had been an omen of the bloodbath that awaited them inside the house. Ørum’s two teenage children had been shot at the breakfast table, the mother had been chopped to bits in the bathroom, and in the basement they found the still-warm body of Marius Larsen, who had been killed with several blows to the face from the same axe used on the mother.
Ørum wasn’t there. His old Opel was in the barn, but the man himself had vanished. Since Larsen must have been murdered within the last hour, they knew he couldn’t have got far, but they had searched high and low without result. Not until three years later was Ørum’s corpse found quite by chance by a new owner, sunk in the marlpit just behind the farm, where it seemed Ørum had taken his own life with a hunting rifle. He must have done it just before Brink and his colleague arrived. According to Forensics, the hunting rifle in the marlpit was the same one used on the teenagers in the kitchen and the pig in the yard, and with that things fell into place. The case was solved.
‘What happened? Why did Ørum do it?’
Hess has been taking notes on a block of Post-its, and now he looks at the policeman on the other side of the desk.
‘We couldn’t be sure. Guilt, maybe. We assumed it was because of what they’d done to the foster children.’
‘What foster children?’
‘The twins. The ones we found in the basement.’
Initially Brink simply did a swift check that the twins, the girl and the boy, were alive. Then the ambulance people took care of them, while Brink and his colleague concentrated on getting the search for Ørum off the ground as more officers arrived on the scene. But when Brink went back into the basement, it dawned on him that the place was anything but ordinary.
‘It looked like a dungeon. Fitted out with padlocks, bars on the windows, some clothes, a few schoolbooks and a mattress – you didn’t want to know what that had been used for. In an old cupboard we found a stack of VHS tapes, so we soon learned what had been going on.’
‘What had been going on?’
‘Why is this important?’
‘It just is.’
Brink stares and him, and takes a deep breath.
‘The girl had been abused and raped. It started the day they arrived, and continued the whole time they were there. Different kinds of sex. With Ørum himself or with the teenagers – Ørum and his wife forced them to participate. On one of the tapes they even dragged the girl into the pigpen …’
Brink falls silent. The man rubs his ear and blinks, and Hess can see his eyes are shining.
‘There’s not much I can’t take. But sometimes I can still hear that boy screaming at the mother, trying to get her to intervene …’
‘What did the mother do?’
‘Nothing. She was the one filming it.’
Brink swallows.
‘On another tape you could see her locking the boy into the basement and telling him to make his chestnut men until it was over. And he did. Every time, by the looks of it. The whole basement was filled with those damned dolls …’
Hess pictures the scene. The boy was locked into a basement room by his foster mother while his sister was being tormented on the other side of the wall, and for a moment Hess tries to imagine what that might do to a small human mind.
‘I’d like to see the file.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t give you the details, but I need to find out where the boy and girl are today. And I need to find out soon.’
Hess gets to his feet to emphasize the rush, but Brink remains seated.
‘Because you’re doing a profile of an inmate in the secure unit in Slagelse?’
Brink raises an eyebrow as though to ask whether Hess takes him for an idiot. That was the explanation Hess gave him when he arrived. He’d judged it would be easier to expand on one lie than to start a new one, so he said he was helping the Danish police profile an inmate at a secure facility, Linus Bekker, whose brain, oddly enough, was obsessed with a particular photo from the 1989 Møn case. The less said about his true purpose the better.
‘I think it’s time to stop this. Give me the name of your superior officer on the murder squad.’
‘Brink, this is important.’
‘Why should I help you with a damn thing? I’ve already given you half an hour I should have used to help my sister out of the snow.’
‘Because I’m not sure it was Ørum who killed your colleague, Marius Larsen. Or any of the others, for that matter.’
The policeman stares at him. For a moment Hess thinks he is about to break into an incredulous laugh. But when Brink answers it is without surprise, and he sounds mostly as though he were trying to convince himself.
‘It can’t have been the boy. We discussed it at the time, but it was impossible. He was only ten or eleven.’
Hess doesn’t reply.
107
The case files about the bloodbath on Møn are comprehensive. The process of digitalization in the archive at Vordingborg Police Station is advanced enough that Hess can read them on a screen instead of flipping through dusty reports like the ones around him, although actually he prefers that. As he listens impatiently to the hold music on his phone, his eyes sweep across the shelves, and it strikes him what an incredible amount of human suffering must be documented by the state, lying forgotten in archives, registers and servers up and down the country.
‘You are number – seven – in the queue.’
Brink had followed him down to the basement and unlocked the archive, a primitive, dirty room with a long row of shelves carrying boxes and folders. There were no windows, only long old-fashioned fluorescent tubes, the kind Hess last saw at school, and the room reminded him how much he hates basements and underground rooms.
The extent of the case files was so massive, according to Brink, that the case was one of the first to be digitalized when they started the process a few years back: they’d wanted to save on space. And so Hess had to read the case on the buzzy old computer in the corner. Brink offered to help, almost insisting on staying, but Hess preferred to look through the material without interruption. His phone rang a few times, including several calls from François, and he guessed the Frenchman has realized he never arrived in Bucharest.
Hess knew what he was looking for in the material, but he still got bogged down in the details. The description of the officers’ first encounter with the twins made for lurid reading. They’d been found hugging each other tightly in a corner of the basement, the boy with his arms around his sister, who had seemed apathetic, as though in a state of shock. The boy had fought being separated from her when they were led out to the ambulance, and his behaviour was compared to ‘a wild animal’s’. A medical examination of the children had confirmed the abuse and violence already evidenced by the basement, but when they tried to interview the twins it proved impossible. The boy had been completely mute. He’d refused to say a word. His sister, on the other hand, answered unreservedly, apparently without understanding the questions. The psychologist present had declared the girl was living in a kind of parallel world – probably an attempt to repress her experiences. A judge excused the children from appearing in court, and by that point they’d already been sent to foster families in other parts of the country. The authorities had decided to split them up, hoping it would help the twins to put the past behind them and start afresh. To Hess it hadn’t sounded like a particularly wise decision.
The Chestnut Man Page 35