The Hanging Girl

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Carl turned toward Inge Dalby. She seemed rooted to the spot, as if caught red-handed. “What do you have to say to that, Inge?”

  29

  End of March 2014

  After Shirley had spoken to Pirjo, she rolled up the two-tone belt and placed it on the windowsill. It lay there beside her toiletry bag and all the books she’d brought from home. Neither intrusive nor forgotten.

  She calmed herself with reassurances that Wanda must be in Jamaica. Right enough, she’d tried to contact people there, but were they the right people, the right telephone numbers, the right questions and answers? When she thought back to her memories with Wanda, there seemed to be fewer and fewer details about who she was—her background and future ambitions—that she could be totally certain of. Wanda had said that she wanted to go to Öland, but she’d always been a warm-blooded and spontaneous woman, so how could Shirley know with any certainty that something or other hadn’t happened in the meantime that changed her plans? She couldn’t.

  Nevertheless, from time to time she couldn’t resist letting something slip about the Wanda mystery if the opportunity presented itself.

  She told in colorful detail about how her best friend had become fascinated, yes, almost seduced, by Atu’s personality and presence, and about how she’d totally unrealistically thought she’d become his chosen one. In the beginning, the other disciples laughed a little at this ambitious story, but after a while, as it became more and more worn, interest decreased and irritation grew.

  “Some of us think that you should choose your words more carefully, Shirley,” said one of the men who worked with the carpentry team. “The story with the belt is creating unease and a lot of unsubstantiated speculation. We’re not happy about it. Maybe you should consider leaving the academy if being here gives you so many negative feelings.”

  They weren’t necessarily harsh words, but Shirley was paralyzed by them. Was she making herself a pariah? Did people really think that the place would be better without her?

  Shirley didn’t want to be a pariah, she wanted to be popular and liked, and so for that reason Shirley buried the story of Wanda Phinn.

  When her course period was successfully completed, it was her intention to apply for permanent admission, and her innermost desire was for this to be granted. As the months had gone by, she imagined with more and more certainty that it was here she should spend the rest of her life. Yes, and it was maybe even here that she’d find a life partner.

  Valentina was one of the ones she could talk about her future dreams with, because in that respect they weren’t much different. At a few communal assemblies she’d seen her with a guy who she’d seemingly set her eye on, but that had come to an end, and afterward the two women had begun to chat together. Throughout most of Shirley’s course period, Valentina had worked with the center website and advertising, but at her own request had been moved to internal maintenance, suddenly making her much more visible and present.

  They told each other about their unfortunate backgrounds. About how they’d escaped both bullying and harassment and been elevated to a new and better life.

  Shirley was astonished when Valentina began telling the story of her miserable time in Spain, because when Shirley looked around among all these well-functioning people, it had never crossed her mind that most of them had had experiences similar to her own before they came here. She’d seriously imagined that she was the only person here that fortune had never smiled down on. And now she’d found a like-minded friend, who was also able to tell her that her story was far from unusual.

  “Everyone here has skeletons in their closet they don’t want to be confronted with, Shirley. Remember that, and listen to Atu next time he says he ‘sees you.’ He knows who you are, and he accepts you for who you are.”

  It was with that realization that they came to be really close to one another in so many respects. Not since Malena had Valentina had such a good friend here as Shirley, she told her. And Shirley was flattered and moved.

  Naturally, it wasn’t forbidden to talk about life outside the center, but for many it just didn’t seem natural. This certainly wasn’t how Valentina and Shirley felt, with many common interests and favorite topics of conversation being the order of the day. “Even though you grow up in Seville, George Clooney can still give you as many steamy dreams as someone who grew up in Birmingham,” as Valentina put it. Just like Shirley, Valentina loved Enrique Iglesias more than his dad, Julia Roberts more than Sharon Stone, beer more than wine, and musicals more than opera.

  They rattled off hundreds of things they either hated or loved, and every time they ended up in stitches over how similar they could be in spite of significant cultural differences.

  Disciples didn’t normally sit in each other’s rooms. Even so, there were times when these two women sneaked into each other’s room so they could hang out together and have a laugh.

  It was on one of these evenings that Valentina noticed the belt on the windowsill and was given the true and unabridged version of what had gone through Shirley’s mind when it turned up.

  Valentina listened to the story with great interest. It was obviously the first time she’d heard it.

  And when Shirley was finished, shrugging her shoulders over how stupid it had been of her to have such thoughts, Valentina turned her head away and sat staring out of the window without saying a word for a long time.

  Shirley thought she’d behaved like an idiot by transgressing an inviolable boundary. That she’d violated the confidence and friendship that Valentina had shown her and that it was now irreparable.

  She was just about to say sorry and that it was all just nonsense, and that over time she’d become totally convinced that Wanda Phinn was now living her own peaceful life somewhere else in the world, when Valentina turned toward her with a look that you didn’t normally see in that place.

  “It reminds me of a strange and very unpleasant dream I had the other day,” she said with dark eyes. “But I don’t know if I should tell you about it.”

  30

  Thursday, May 8th, and Friday, May 9th, 2014

  “Put it on speakerphone, Carl,” said Rose.

  Carl hesitated. He knew who he was dealing with.

  “We’ll keep our mouths shut, right, Rose?” said the mind reader Assad.

  She nodded slowly with her chin right down on her chest.

  Carl dialed the number. It was a bit late in the day, but experience told him that all museum directors were geeks and found it hard to go home. Not least one like this one.

  “You say he’s a specialist of everything when it comes to the sun cult on Bornholm?”

  Assad nodded. “He’s an archaeologist, Carl. He’s the one who dug the rubbish up.”

  Carl gave him a thumbs-up. It had been an oddish sort of grey day, but good nevertheless. Inge Dalby had talked nineteen to the dozen, and they’d managed to get through to her. She’d been able to explain somewhat plausibly that she didn’t know Frank’s alias. They’d had sex together, nothing else. That Alberte had been closer to him and could say things about him that Inge didn’t know about had just been an extra thorn in her side.

  All things considered, Inge wasn’t a particularly attractive woman inside.

  “Bornholm Museum, Filip Nissen,” came the voice from the receiver. They were off. The man was still stuck behind his desk.

  Carl looked at the photo of him on the computer screen. A little too rotund, beard a little too scraggy, glasses a little too heavyset. A real geek, if you asked him.

  “No, I’m afraid I can’t talk just now; the museum is closed. You’ll have to wait until the morning. I’m going skateboarding with my sons, you see, and they’re waiting outside.”

  Proof you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. It must be an extremely sturdy skateboard. Custom-built, maybe.

  “We just need to know if you can rem
ember a hippie guy who was interested in your excavations back in 1997, and who was also very interested in sun cults and sunstones?” Rose blurted out. How long had she managed to contain herself? Approximately twenty seconds?

  “No, sorry,” he said, panting. Was he already on his way down the stairs with the skateboard and everything? If so, then he had call redirection to his cell phone, in which case the office hours were irrelevant.

  “His name was Frank,” shouted Assad.

  Then there was a pause in the panting. Had he stopped to think or had he already hopped on the board?

  “Okay, Frank, you say! Frank Scott, perhaps? Is it him you’re thinking about?”

  Rose gave Assad a high five, one-nil to him.

  Rose turned immediately to the PC in the corner. Now she had a real name.

  “A tall guy with long hair and a dimple in his chin?” Carl asked.

  “Yes, yes, that’s him. But why do you call him a hippie when he wasn’t?”

  “Because of his clothing.”

  He laughed at the other end. “He only had the same damn ugly gear as the rest of us. But maybe you wear Armani when you’re lying in the mud scraping away?”

  “I can’t say I do, no. Have you had any contact with him since then? We’d really like to get hold of him.”

  “Hi, boys,” they heard at the other end. “I just need to finish up here, is that okay?” But it didn’t sound like they thought it was.

  “Contact?” he returned to the call. “Well, not really. He disappeared from the island but we corresponded for a while. For a few months actually, I think. Frank had all sorts of theories and was very serious about the discovery of the sun cults that he could link with some theories about all religions originating from the same source: the sun, the seasons, and the zodiac.”

  “You corresponded. How? Letters? E-mails?”

  “Letters. He was very old-school. But I don’t have them anymore, I can assure you. I have enough old papers in my work.”

  “Never e-mails?”

  “No. Hang on, yes, maybe once, when he was visiting a colleague somewhere or other. Don’t ask me about what or where. They had a quick question they thought I was the man to answer. Something or other about timber circles, I think.”

  “Hopefully you’ve still got that e-mail?”

  “It would be quite strange considering we’ve changed computers at least three times since then. No, of course I don’t have it.”

  “Printouts?”

  “I belong to that rare group who’ve avoided maximizing their use of paper in the digital age, so no.”

  “Any address for Frank? Can you remember that?”

  “I don’t think I ever had it.”

  “Think?”

  “I never had it. I know he lived near Copenhagen. After all, that was where he could search for most of his information.”

  “What information?”

  “National Museum of Denmark, the Royal Library, Open University, that sort of thing. He soaked things up like a sponge. He was very inquisitive when it came to the sun cult’s roothold here on the island and parallel events like that, which is understandable enough.”

  “Absolutely,” answered Carl.

  Even Gordon began to smile now. An atmosphere like this would be welcome on a more or less permanent basis in the situation room.

  “Can’t we talk together tomorrow? The boys are tugging at me. They’re a little impatient,” insisted the man.

  Carl shook his head automatically. Hell no.

  “Do you have pictures of the guy? You must’ve taken loads of pictures in connection with your work on the site.”

  “I really don’t know. Maybe a few where he’s standing in the background. But it’s such a long time ago, and even if you’re an archaeologist, we don’t go around preserving everything that’s old.” At that, he laughed out loud and then just as suddenly stopped again when Carl fired off the next question.

  “This is a murder case,” he said dryly. “So will you tell your boys to go on ahead? We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

  * * *

  “Damn it!” shouted Rose a little later. “There’s no Frank Scott in Denmark to be found, according to the civil registration list. Damn it.”

  Carl fumbled for the cigarettes in his breast pocket, but stopped when Rose pointed to a sign on the wall written in capitals:

  SMOKING DOESN’T JUST KILL YOU BUT THOSE AROUND YOU TOO, YOU FUCKING MURDERER!

  It couldn’t really be put any more charmingly than that.

  Carl pushed the cigarettes back. “The museum director must’ve heard the name wrong, or else doesn’t remember it right,” he said.

  “Yes, or the man’s had a permanent name change or moved abroad,” suggested Gordon.

  Rose threw him a look of resignation. “If there’s been a man at some time or other in the more recent past living in Denmark under the name of Frank Scott, you can damn well bet that I’d have found him.”

  “I didn’t mean . . . I . . .” He looked around to find some sympathy. Christ, what a fool.

  “Maybe he’s not a Danish national and never has been,” he dared to continue. “He could’ve belonged to the Danish minority in Slesvig. Or maybe he was Swedish or something.”

  Carl nodded over to Rose. It was a possibility of course, so he gave Gordon a pat as high on his back as he could from where he was sitting, while Rose began typing like a lunatic.

  “There was something that was weird about that museum director, Carl,” grunted Assad. “He could remember Frank and a load of other details about how he helped at digs, and all sorts of things they talked about, but he didn’t remember Alberte.”

  “That’s how it is with professional geeks, Assad. They can’t see past the end of their own noses.”

  “No, I don’t think he seemed like an end-of-the-nose type. He remembered all sorts of things. How the weather had been, what Frank’s car looked like, how they discussed the size of the timber circles and the old sun worship sites they excavated. He could remember that Frank was a vegetarian, and that he used his left and right hands equally well. He could also remember that he once had one of the girls from their camp down to the excavations, and that she spoke Swedish with a Finnish accent. He had a very good memory in my opinion, and the Alberte case was big news. All the vehicles on the island were checked, and that most certainly includes the four-wheel drive from Bornholm Museum that they used at the dig.”

  “Where are you going with this, Assad?”

  “I know,” said Gordon with his hand in the air like a schoolboy. Wasn’t he aware that you asked to speak after you put your hand in the air?

  “He was most likely not on Bornholm at the time it happened, if you ask me.”

  He got another pat on the back. This time from Assad.

  “Exactly, boss,” said Assad. “We forgot to ask him. It’s possible this Frank borrowed the Rover from the museum and used it in the crime if the museum man had left it at his disposal while he was away.”

  Carl snapped his fingers at Assad, who immediately went over to the corner and tapped on his cell phone.

  “What about you, Rose, any luck?”

  She shook her head. “I think Frank was much better at using other people’s names than his own.”

  “So, suddenly we know almost nothing again,” said Carl. “When we pressed Inge Dalby last, she thought he’d changed his name to something very short that most likely started with ‘A,’ the rest of which was something oriental. But what the hell can we do with that? And now Filip Nissen says Frank was called Scott, but of course no such person exists. How far did you get, Rose?”

  She drew a circle in the air. Meaning all possible neighboring countries.

  Assad flicked his cell phone shut. “Filip Nissen was off travelling for part of that fall, he s
ays. But the museum car had definitely not been left at anyone’s disposal.” Assad sighed, and it was contagious.

  “I’ll call round the alternative therapists one more time,” said Rose. “Maybe there’s someone who can connect Frank with those two sunstones.”

  * * *

  She was already sitting in her seat when Carl turned up the next morning. Tousled hair, same clothes as the day before, and loud snoring was emanating from Assad’s office, which Carl could immediately eliminate as coming from Assad. You didn’t need to be much of a detective before you began smiling over the probable cause.

  “Well, well,” said Carl. “There seem to be a couple of you who slept in the situation room last night.”

  “Yes,” answered Rose with her back to him. “We have to get going with this lot, so I’ve caught those people on Bornholm in their beds before they went to work.”

  Carl had a cheeky smile on his face as he thought that this wasn’t the only thing that had gone on, and that they weren’t the only ones who’d been in bed before they went to work.

  “And Gordon?”

  “Yeah, he obviously needs more sleep than I do.”

  Poor guy. No doubt she’d sucked all the energy out of the beanpole.

  “Any results?”

  Now she turned around. Seldom would you see a more triumphant Rose. Even her running coal-black mascara glowed.

  “Several things. I called around some more of those alternative therapists and have finally managed to sort them. Half are too young to be able to give information about something that happened nearly twenty years ago, a quarter are too far gone, to put it mildly, to be able to get anything concrete or meaningful out of, and the last quarter are trying as hard as they can because they’ve got the right age, expertise, and wherewithal.”