The Hanging

by Lotte Hammer

  “The current division of labor is that Pauline is trawling the neighbors and the outdoor areas of the school, the Countess is responsible for the interior of the school, Troulsen is debriefing the school staff, and I am free now that you’re here. Our most pressing problem is that the dead are as yet unidentified, and that the janitor is missing. Per Clausen is his name and he was likely the one who unlocked the school this morning, but no one has seen him. It is possible that he’s indisposed due to excessive alcohol consumption—apparently that happens from time to time. As for the task of identifying the victims, I have a dozen experienced people occupied with the task of finding out if the five men have been reported missing anywhere. There are not yet any results.”

  Simonsen reflected on this, then stood up, and Pedersen followed suit.

  “We’ll meet in half an hour, make sure the others get the message. You can come get me in the gymnasium, but I want to get Elvang alone first. Tell Troulsen that not so much as a flea leaves this place without my permission, and get Pauline inside before she starts to look like a drowned animal. I don’t even know what the hell she’s doing out there—helping the dogs?”

  “For Pete’s sake, she doesn’t have much experience yet.”

  “And she won’t get it simply by getting wet. Or get her some proper rain gear. The school patrol probably has one hanging on a hook somewhere. And one more thing. There have been ten schoolchildren in the gymnasium. Has a crisis counselor been called in? What about the parents—have they been informed?”

  “Oh, no.”

  Pedersen banged his fist against the doorframe. He had two children of his own.

  “Take care of it, but first lead me to Elvang and tell your story about him on the way. You’ve done a fine job, Arne. Very satisfactory.”

  The praise sounded hollow. As if learned in a management seminar.

  Chapter 4

  The graveyard was deserted and the lone man with the umbrella moved slowly, almost humbly, past the gravestones that seemed to sense that he did not fit in. Every step he took made a crunching sound in the pea gravel and sounded wrong in the wet silence of the place. At an unadorned grave at the edge of the cemetery he stopped and placed a folding chair on the ground. Before he sat down, he gently placed a bouquet on the grave. The rain freshened the flowers like a last caress from nature and caused the man, whose name was Erik Mørk, to smile.

  “I brought flowers with me today, Dad, because today was quite a special day. One that I have been waiting for a long time. Perhaps ever since I was a child, even if that doesn’t make any sense. According to the radio, those who were executed have been found and the rest of the day will doubtless be quite chaotic.”

  He stopped and looked down at the earth, and some minutes went by before he went on. Then he smiled, and the smile came from his heart, which did not happen very often. He loved sitting there in the quiet stillness far from the world, and he allowed the minutes to tick by as he chatted about this and that at his father’s graveside. His work was extroverted, though he was the opposite by nature. Perhaps it was the secret of his professional success. A success toward which he was indifferent, and one he would have traded for anything if only he could have had his childhood back.

  “I have been completely on edge since I got a letter from the Climber last Saturday with videos of the minivan and the gymnasium, so I knew it had been done, but …”

  The sentence was never completed, and he jumped straight into another topic altogether.

  “This morning I was at the office, where we had an evaluation with a client. The campaign is going very well and everyone is patting everyone’s back. They’re selling a lot of worthless girls’ clothes, we can add a new success story to the others, and both parties make a bucketful of money. Not a soul mentioned the eight little girls who at this moment are offering themselves like candy on billboards all over the city. For the love of Christ, they’ve hardly gone through puberty and… yes, I know it seems hysterical, because I if anyone am responsible for this, but I couldn’t deal with it very well and had to take the rest of the day off.”

  The rain was tapering off. He folded his umbrella, shook it, and laid it to the side of his chair before he resumed his monologue.

  “It is obviously one of the advantages of owning one’s business that one can come and go as one pleases, and today I left, without really knowing why. We have conducted so many similar campaigns, and this one is far from the worst, so perhaps it’s because I am particularly sensitive right now.”

  The clock in the church tower rang the hour. He stood up, stretched his legs, and crouched by the gravestone, where he had noticed a couple of wet leaves clinging to its face. Then he let his finger slide across the etching, back and forth a couple of times. Arne Christian Mørk. 1934–1979. As he meticulously plucked a few weeds that the gardener had overlooked, he continued to speak.

  “Yesterday I took a fond farewell of Per, you know Per Clausen, the janitor I was telling you about. He is a fantastic man, and I will miss him. First we ate breakfast, and after that we watched the video sequences I directed. He was full of praise, but I have to admit they did turn out very well. In particular there is one simple one from the minivan that is quite captivating, a satanic little pearl, that will shake public opinion and toughen our national soul. It may become absolutely decisive, you just wait and see. It was Per’s idea to mount hidden cameras above each seat, which was devilishly difficult, but turned out to be worth every bit of trouble. Other than that, we talked about everything between heaven and earth, not just about the coming weeks, almost as if he was on a normal Sunday visit. It is hard to imagine that I’ll never see him again.”

  A car drove past on the road behind the cemetery and a few isolated snatches of a car radio broke the peace for a moment or two. He waited until the quiet descended again.

  “When Per said goodbye he said something that I have thought a lot about: ‘goodbye, foam guy.’ That was his last word to me: ‘foam guy.’ Said with that crooked little smile that is so typical of him. He was obviously referring to the fact that I used to chew on foam as a child because I thought it could absorb the darkness inside me. I had almost forgotten about it, I mean, that I had told him about it. How I used to pick little bits of foam from all manner of places: cushions and seats, balls from gym class, the sweat band in my riding helmet, yes I even tore little pieces from my mother’s shoulder pads. When I speak of it, I can recall the taste, even though one wouldn’t think foam tastes like anything. But it does. It tastes of wrongdoing, of wrongness and guilt.”

  He shook his head to rid himself of his thoughts, and added thoughtfully, “It is unpleasant to remember and… well, perhaps Per captured it perfectly. When everything is said and done, that is probably what I am—the foam guy.”

  Chapter 5

  Professor, medicus, forensic pathologist, and medical examiner Arthur Elvang was a churlish man. Konrad Simonsen steeled himself, determined to keep his focus and not let himself be distracted by the professor’s sharp tongue. They met in front of the gymnasium, where Elvang sat absorbed in a newspaper in approximately the same place where the little Turkish girl had been sitting some seven hours earlier, and he, too, was reluctant to give up his reading material. After an eternity, he laid the pages aside and returned his awareness to his surroundings as his small, peering eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses flew critically up and down over Simonsen, as if he were taking measurements for a suit.

  “You have enough fat stores to last you through the winter, my little Simon. Too bad about your vacation. Where were you then? At a halfway house?”

  He stretched out a twisted hand, and Simonsen, who thought he wanted to underscore his observations by sticking a finger in his stomach, drew back.

  “Now don’t be sulky, give me a hand to get up.”

  Simonsen gingerly helped him to his feet.

  “I’m not upset. My daughter is always commenting on my girth so I am used to it, but it is many y
ears since anyone called me ‘little Simon.’ That stopped when Planck retired.”

  Planck had been the head of the Homicide Division before him.

  “Yes, time flies. Have you told your daughter about your diabetes?” Simonsen stiffened.

  “How in all the world do you know …”

  He stopped and regained control of himself. The professor’s medical expertise was legendary, although he might simply have been making a stab in the dark. A guess he had now unwittingly confirmed by his exclamation. He hurriedly left the subject.

  “Is the room free?”

  “Yes, the technicians left about a quarter of an hour ago, but keep away from the back entrance as well as the bathroom. I hear that you have free hands in this matter. Is that correct?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Then you should bring Planck in, unless he is senile. The two of you bring out the best in each other. And as it happens, he is more talented than you.”

  “He is far from senile. Shall we go in?”

  “Yes, of course. Good idea, little Simon.”

  The corpses of five men were strung up in the middle of the room, each with a noose of a sturdy blue nylon rope around the neck. The ends were fastened around sturdy hooks screwed into the beams about seven meters above. The men’s feet were about half a meter from the floor, and the bodies had been placed at least two meters apart in such a way that the four outermost bodies formed a square, the sides of which ran parallel to the walls. All the bodies were missing hands but the lower arms were intact from the elbow down to the wrist. The faces had been disfigured to the point that most of the human elements were gone; also the genitals, which had either been mutilated beyond recognition or removed. Death and the injuries gave the men a similar look, as if their physical differences no longer existed. Simonsen recognized the phenomenon and knew that when he had studied the dead a little longer, their individuality would return.

  “Chainsaw?”

  Elvang confirmed this. That was one of his positive attributes. He wasn’t afraid to express an immediate opinion, in direct contrast to most other pathologists that Simonsen knew, who seldom wanted even to confirm the sex of a corpse before it had undergone a CT scan. And physicians were even worse.

  “While they were still alive?”

  “No.”

  The answer was a relief; the whole thing was horrific enough as it was, even though he surprisingly did not react physically when he saw the bodies. Perhaps because the room had been aired out, or perhaps because he had had time to prepare himself for the sight, or perhaps because he was mentally desensitized and had already seen more than was good for him. Who could know what the reason was, and who cared? Not he, at any rate. He continued his slow circle around the men.

  In view of the fact that each of them must have bled a great deal, there were not a lot of bloodstains. Under each of the dead was only a small, viscous pool about the diameter of a tennis ball. The neck, the top of the chest, and the thighs were bloody, and there were also red clumps in their hair. Otherwise there was no trace of blood, but he could clearly discern the sickly sweet smell of blood that mingled with the stronger stink of excrement and bodily fluids. The temperature, and the three open windows, kept the stench at a minimum. The yellow-white swollen bodies led his thoughts to hanging sides of pork on a slaughterhouse assembly line, a disrespectful image that, to his vexation, he was unable to shake.

  He focused on the heads of the men as he slowly moved in among the bodies and examined each of them. The wounds varied from person to person. Three of them had had their entire faces sawed off. The blade had been drawn straight down from the crown of the head to the jaw so that brain, mouth cavity, and throat were exposed. The rest had been slashed in a crisscross manner with the blade held perpendicular to the face. Two had retained their tongues and some teeth. One had an almost-undamaged eye.

  The same destructiveness had dominated the removal of the genitals. Two had lost their penises and testicles, two others only the penis. On one the cut was so deep that the bladder had fallen out and was hanging out over the crotch. The remaining victim had lost only the foreskin. The man in the middle had emptied his bowels; sticky black excrement covered his buttocks and the backs of his thighs, and a handful of flies had found their way there. The wounds at the wrists, however, were clean and precise. Simonsen could see the marrow in the two bones of the lower arm and started randomly wondering which one was the ulna and the other radius. But which was the large and which was the small he could not remember.

  He started over and walked another round, this time looking for identifying markers. A rough estimate put the men’s ages between forty and seventy years. One had a gold ring in his left ear as well as a faded eagle tattooed on the right shoulder, and two had scars from appendix or hernia operations. One was bald and had an unnaturally dark complexion, probably from a tanning salon. The corpse in the back left corner had long, unclipped toenails that were infected with fungus and resembled pork rinds. In the right ear canal was a tooth with a gold filling.

  A last round was devoted to inspecting the ropes that had been hung with mathematical precision parallel to the walls. If he lined them up diagonally and looked down the series of ropes with one eye, he was unable to see the final one. That was true of both diagonals. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble inserting the screws into the ceiling.

  Simonsen concluded his inspection and walked back to Elvang, who had displayed only a fleeting interest in the bodies and now looked extremely bored.

  “Your initial assessment?”

  The professor did not hesitate.

  “Hanged here, weren’t moved. Wednesday or Thursday. Look like ethnic Danes. But don’t ask me how it was accomplished or why there isn’t blood everywhere.”

  “When will you have something firm on the time of death?”

  The old man sighed. He was no longer a spring chicken and the thought of the evening’s work that awaited him held no pleasure.

  “I’ve had to call for reinforcements. On overtime hours, which you are paying for.”

  “Absolutely. Bring in as many as you like.”

  “Call me after midnight.”

  “Roger that.”

  Simonsen had only one more question. It was, however, somewhat controversial. Strictly speaking, it also fell outside the professor’s line of work, but in view of the man’s enormous experience and preeminent expertise it was not an unreasonable question.

  “Terrorism?”

  It took a couple of seconds for Elvang to grasp his meaning, then he grew impish. He flapped his hands by the side of his head like a hysterical teenager and said sarcastically, “Ooooh, ooooh, the monsters are coming. And they’re not coming out of the forest, they’re coming from the water.”

  Simonsen ignored this odd outburst and said coldly, “Nine/eleven, Bali, Beslan, Madrid, London. Was that also paranoia, Professor?”

  Their gazes locked, then the old man finally shrugged.

  “If you are thinking of holy crusaders with curved sabres and dreams about the caliph, well, there isn’t anything here that I can see that points to such an interpretation. But I don’t know what that would be in any case. Your question is ill conceived.”

  “Perhaps, but it’s a question I will have to answer for the rest of the day.” Elvang did not reply. He glanced at the bodies and shook his head thoughtfully. With his bald, age-spotted crown, his thin ruffled hair and sunken chest, he most of all resembled a baby bird.

  Then he said, “I was in Rwanda in 1995.”

  “I didn’t think you liked to fly.”

  “I only do it in cases of genocide. For four months I traveled literally from one mass grave to another. There were so unbelievably many murdered people that it defies description, and I discovered a degree of depravity and excess that you could not imagine in your wildest nightmare. It was indescribably awful, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst thing was to come back home and realize that no one was inter
ested. The victims were simply the wrong color to sell news and to refer to the catastrophe was almost in bad taste, so I apologize if I have a somewhat cynical attitude to the concept of terrorism.”

  Simonsen felt empty.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “There’s no one asking you to say anything. Forget it, everyone else does. But tell me, how do you know I don’t like to fly?”

  “That’s just what I’ve heard.”

  “It wouldn’t by any chance be from that story about how the city’s hotel chains have pulled strings to keep me in my job as long as possible because my fear of flying has brought international conferences to Copenhagen?”

  Simonsen felt a faint warmth in his cheeks.

  “Something along those lines.”

  The door at one end of the gymnasium opened. Arne Pedersen, the Countess, and Pauline Berg walked in, immediately followed by Poul Troulsen.

  “You are a fool. To think that the country supports a homicide chief who believes that kind of nonsense. It is frightening. Shame on you. Get a bucket while you’re at it.”

  “What do you want with a bucket?”

  “Your latest recruit has not yet learned to suppress her instinctual human reactions.”

  The observation came too late. One second later, Berg collapsed and vomited onto the floor without making use of the plastic bag that she had been holding in her hand for that very purpose. Pedersen glanced down at his vomitspattered shoes and took out a handkerchief. It was made of raw silk and had been rather expensive. He managed to lift one foot before the Countess snatched the handkerchief and held it out to Berg, who looked gratefully up at him before she retched again.

  Chapter 6

  The corpses in the gymnasium were gone and all the windows were open, and yet it seemed to Pauline Berg, when she walked in the door, that the smell was unbearable. But it was most likely a deception of the senses and thus possible to verify. Konrad Simonsen was sitting in the middle of the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He reminded her of a monk in a pagoda and she had trouble guessing what he was up to.