by Lotte Hammer
The other woman did not conceal her irritation. The Countess met her eyes with scepticism in her own. They sat that way for a few seconds, staring each other down, until Madame said, “Today you have told a secret to the one you love. You regret having done that. He loves you too, but you can’t really work that out together. You’re like the old joke about how porcupines mate. The punch line is: very, very carefully. Well, shall we get started? What do you have for me?”
The Countess felt anger rise inside her and restrained herself only with great difficulty. She felt exposed. Her mouth tightened, and her eyes narrowed. Only then did she discover that her doubt about this woman’s supernatural talents had suddenly shrunk considerably. Silently she produced from her bag Jeanette Hvidt’s scarf and a belt that belonged to Pauline Berg, and handed them over. She asked, “What should I do?”
“Listen.”
“May I speak to you while you are in trance?”
“I am not in a trance, and of course you may. I can always ask you to be quiet if you are disturbing me.”
The Countess nodded. How hard could it be? It was nothing more than a very ordinary chat with the dead. With each hand Madame rubbed the belt and the scarf in turn between her fingers, while she looked around the room. Shortly after that she said, “There is a woman who was killed in a bookshop.”
She said the sentence declaratively and completely without reflection over its odd meaning.
“And another woman who has been a ballerina. Several women . . . all of them women. The two you are seeking are in a . . . ”
She hesitated and rubbed again; shortly after that she continued.
“I am sensing a white chapel, but something is wrong. Jeanette and Pauline are in a white chapel. They are together, and they are alive. There is something about bombs . . . the chapel has been bombed I think, during the war. It’s gone. A Cockney knee trembler for fourpence . . . back then the neighbourhood was poor, today it’s affluent. I see expensive glass facades, but that makes no sense to me. I also perceive that there is a name coincidence, something or other, that gets mixed up, some roots . . . around the chapel and in relation to some girls’ names . . . diabolical delusions. Yes, now a man is coming. Ugh, he is repulsive, definitely one of the worst I have encountered. He is both very well-known and completely unknown. The others disappear, they don’t want to be with him. So now we might just as well stop.”
Madame set down the objects. The Countess was deeply disappointed.
“Was that it?”
“Yes, you should look for a white chapel or a crypt. The two women are there.”
“Why did you stop?”
“He did not want to help, it was quite obvious.”
The Countess made a resigned gesture and then asked Madame a series of clarifying questions about the mysterious white chapel. With no further result. For want of anything better she returned to the man who had obviously scared the other spirits away.
“Why can’t you use him?”
The woman stared out into space and let her eyes run appraisingly up and down, as if she was looking at her own reflection. Then she concluded firmly, “No, he is evil.”
“Is he still there? Or whatever you say.”
“Yes, and I’m sure I’ll have a lot of trouble with him. He is not the type you can get rid of easily.”
“Couldn’t you try to speak . . . sense him anyway?”
“Yes, if you wish, but no good will come of it.”
This time she was content to touch the objects fleetingly. For a while she said nothing, then she said, “He has rattled off a poem. A vulgar poem . . . what is it they’re called? Oh, well, a hateful, mean satirical song, which he maintains is about him. It’s hard to understand, old-fashioned and not Danish. There was a politician, who saved a prostitute, and then otherwise it’s like the children’s song with the ten little Indians who get fewer and fewer. I think anyway. He has killed someone, there is no doubt about that. Let’s stop here.”
“No, keep going.”
The woman took a fountain pen and a pad from the coffee table and started writing. When she was finished, she said definitely, “Now we’re done.”
“What does it say?”
“A rhyme: it is the last four lines of his old poem, which is rewritten. Or perhaps translated, I couldn’t work that out. He wants to be in the newspapers again.”
“A rhyme to whom?”
“To you, but I don’t think you should read it. It won’t be of any help and will only do you harm.”
The Countess ignored the warning and reached for the pad. Madame handed it over without further objection and Pauline read:
Two little girls tremble with fear,
Child laughs in the dust with his catch so dear.
First girl in the bag, and the other is alone,
The one without curls will die as skin and bone.
Loathing struck the Countess then, and for a few seconds she gasped for air. She quickly got hold of herself again, sufficiently in balance to receive Madame’s toneless instructions.
“You are stubborn, the nobility often are. Now you will reap what you have sown. But sometimes stubbornness can be an advantage. You will experience that this evening.”
The drive from Høje Taastrup to Søllerød did the Countess good. The metaphysical encounter had not been pleasant, and she was happy to escape from the strange couple. She had little to show for her visit in investigative terms. She called Simonsen and, when she did not get through, left a message about Madame’s white chapel on his answering machine, happy that it was not up to her whether the information should be taken seriously or not. The rest of the way she tried to shake off the memory of the other things she had experienced by letting Bob Marley blow her head clear at full blast.
At home she emptied the mailbox and dumped the bundle of advertising directly into the rubbish bin before she went in. The rest, three letters and a package, she tossed on the kitchen table when she was inside, after which she put on coffee, watered her flowers and quickly packed clothing for herself and Simonsen. After lugging the suitcase to the back of her car she returned to the kitchen. The coffeemaker was still gurgling, and she thought she would either have to buckle down and decalcify it or else buy a new one. While she was waiting she browsed indifferently in her mail.
The letter on top was a statement from one of her banks; she threw that out. The next was a parking ticket, and she remembered that her windscreen wipers had dispatched the first copy on to the street; she was indifferent to that as well. The last letter was a bill from her private detective for ten pictures she had already received by email. She did not bother to open that either. The package remained. In the mailbox it had been under a home-delivered Sunday paper and therefore might have come by courier on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. No sender or recipient address was given, and with a feeling of paranoid suspicion she balanced it in her hands a short while, after which she tore it open.
The book was new, as if it came straight from the printer. The dust jacket showed a bluish-grey Boeing B-52 bomber hovering over a desert of ice, elegant and at the same time powerful with its slender fuselage and the gigantic V-shaped wings, each carrying four potent jet engines. Title and author were printed in capital letters and hatched in the colours of the American flag. On Guard in the North by Clark Atkinson. She opened it to page one and noted that her present was a copy of the very rare first edition from 1983. The non-existent edition. To top it off, it came with a personal greeting from Helmer Hammer. Freehand and not without talent, the under secretary had sketched a pair of magnolias, heavy with flowers, as they appeared in early June. Behind these a few strokes suggested the geometry of the Palm House. The message was brief and personal: Dear Countess, I certainly owe you a lot of G. Best, Helmer. For good measure the G was embellished with a pair of eyes on its lower curve, so that it resembled a smiley face.
Under normal circumstances she would be happy, both with the book and this acknowled
gment from the under secretary. But these circumstances were not normal, far from it. Her odyssey into recent Danish history seemed very far off and had no significance now. She squeezed Hammer’s present in among her cookbooks, poured coffee into a vacuum jug, looked at her clock and left. To begin with, however, she travelled only a short way up the street, where she stopped parallel to a parked blue Renault and rolled down her window. The driver of the other car did the same while he put a finger to his lips and then indicated behind him towards his female partner, who was sleeping in the back seat. The Countess knew him in passing, but could not remember his name. She handed over the vacuum jug and two mugs to him. He took them, whispering, “You are an angel.”
“How long are you on duty?”
“Don’t know, the plan has not quite fallen into place, but a long time. We’ve only been here a couple of hours.”
“Lousy job to be ordered out to.”
“It’s voluntary now, but it doesn’t matter. Just be sure to catch that mass murderer, and find his hostages alive.”
The Countess promised to do as he asked. Just!
CHAPTER 49
The drive from Søllerød to Police Headquarters was unpleasant. The Countess ran into rush-hour traffic and had far too much time to see how life in Copenhagen continued as it always had, despite the kidnappings of Pauline Berg and Jeanette Hvidt. Even though she knew she was being stupid, it made her angry and even more depressed than she was before. She tried to dismiss her anger before she went into Konrad Simonsen’s office. It was difficult.
Her boss was sitting on a chair above an over-sized map of Zealand, which he had set down on the floor in front of him, and barely said hello when she came in. The map was divided with red ink into a series of quickly and carelessly marked-off areas, which she did not immediately recognise. She started by opening a window; he had been smoking.
Simonsen said, “Do you know how many churches there are in Zealand?”
“No idea. Quite a few, I presume.”
“Exactly. There are an awful lot of churches with districts that don’t follow municipal boundaries, or other worldly boundaries for that matter.”
He rattled off facts about parishes, deaneries and dioceses. The Countess recognised his mood well. Pent-up irritation meant that he had a tendency to make lists, without realising it himself.
“The white chapel? Is that what you have in mind?”
He ignored her.
“And furthermore cemeteries, crematoria, parish halls and a wealth of private chapels in various castles and estates. Not to mention all the various Catholic monastic orders, which no Christian soul can tell apart—Capuchins, cappuccinos, whatever they call themselves. The whole mess combined in a perfect hodgepodge . . . but naturally each with their pestilential cloisters . . . at least one pestilential cloister that is, often several.”
He was talking fast, frantically, and his normal caution not to lose himself in detail had obviously been cast aside. She was worried to see that his face was flushed, beads of sweat visible on his forehead. She commented quietly, “You’re sweating.”
He wiped his face with a handkerchief. Then he said, sounding more under control, “You shouldn’t be nervous, I’m not about to submerge myself in details. I am just so confoundedly angry, which by the way I don’t have time to be. At least I was able to let off a little steam.”
“I’m not afraid of you losing yourself in the details, more about your health, Simon.”
Simonsen allowed himself a little smile.
“You shouldn’t worry about either. That sweating is only when I don’t breathe deeply and regularly, and it passes quickly. This afternoon I had a definite attack, and then I was a little unsure, but now I’ve discovered that I can provoke it myself by . . . what the hell is that called, when you make yourself short of breath on purpose?”
“Hyperventilation.”
“Exactly. As soon as I do that, I start sweating like a pig.”
“That’s not normal.”
“No, I agree. But it’s not something we have time to worry about now either. There are more important matters, don’t you think?”
“I think that you should breathe properly, and then tell me what made you so angry.”
“A meeting in forty-five minutes at the Ministry of Justice. And I’m sure you can guess who called it.”
“Helmer Hammer?”
“Nice! And I naively believed that the whole menagerie of them could be ignored after our press conference last Friday, but no. I have to go to a meeting with the police commissioner and the national chief of police and director this and chief administrative officer that and general commander bleepity-bleep, not to mention the head of the intelligence service, however he comes into the picture. But they’re not telling me what to do. I intend to shift responsibility for the meeting to you, and if you don’t care to go—for which I would not blame you for a second—I’ll send Poul. And if he doesn’t care to go either, I’ll send Pauline’s dead cat. Then Grand Duke Hammer will maybe realise that we have more important work to do than playing press secretary for him and all his dignitaries.”
The Countess asked carefully, “What is the meeting’s agenda?”
“Something meaningless about information sharing, I think. It was the police commissioner who called it, and that could easily be a pretext she thought of on the spot when I asked. That would be just like her. When the mighty whistle, she’s not exactly the type who asks impertinent questions, and certainly not about something as petty as an agenda.”
“Do you mean that you’re not coming?”
“I told her that I would do everything in my power to find a qualified co-worker with a gap in their calendar, but that it was especially hard, considering the circumstances.”
“What did she say to that?”
“Nothing. I don’t think she even got what I meant. But that’s her problem.”
The Countess looked at her watch and decided to let the matter rest a while. Instead she asked about the map on the floor.
“Are you thinking about putting the whole machinery in motion around that chapel? I mean, we don’t have much to hang that information on. And there is nothing to indicate that Andreas Falkenborg has any particular religious affiliation, or am I wrong there?”
“No, that’s correct. Actually I’m dropping our chapel line of inquiry to start with. Despite the fact I can’t bear to think that maybe later that will turn out to be a mistake. But I simply don’t have the resources at the moment.”
“Resources? We have plenty of resources. Our colleagues are reporting for work voluntarily on a large scale. Ordinary people too incidentally.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t help much here and now. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow our main priority is to get a super-effective covert surveillance of Andreas Falkenborg established, once he is recognised. There is hardly any doubt that he will be, if he so much as sets foot in a public area. We have a network of experienced people stationed in strategic places in the capital so that regardless of where he is discovered, we can shadow him on a large scale within fifteen minutes. That’s crucial. Under no circumstances must he slip away from us again, and if he discovers that he is being followed, that’s just as bad. For obvious reasons.”
“You don’t want to bring him in?”
“No, I don’t. My guess is that there is a greater probability of finding the women if we shadow him. That’s my assessment, and that’s how it will be to start with.”
The Countess supported the decision. Simonsen continued.
“If he isn’t found by Wednesday at the latest, we have to assume . . . assume that it is more reasonable to initiate a search for where he has concealed Pauline and Jeanette Hvidt. But it has to be organised. A lot of well-intentioned people, running around aimlessly, does more harm than good. And there we have the core of the problem, because those who can organise are mainly the same people now keeping themselves ready for surveillance. I’m giving up the w
hite chapel search because otherwise I risk being torn between two things, not because the tip is dubious. Crypts and chapels may well be an excellent place to start, because we don’t have anything better at the moment.”
The Countess let out a meditative sound and then said as casually as she could, “No, I can see that. We’re stymied, even though maybe Madame is right about her chapel. It’s so annoying that we can’t borrow people from the intelligence service. They would be tailor-made for that surveillance task.”
Simonsen muttered, “They’ll never agree to it. Think of the risk to the security of the realm in the meantime.”
“But maybe someone could convince them to help us out?”
About to get to his feet, he turned his head slowly and caught her eye. For a long time they looked at each other. Finally she said, “Madame called you a porcupine.”
“Hmm, I’ll have to bring that up with her. When I’m dead. Fetch Ernesto Madsen, I want him along, and let’s see about getting out of here.”
CHAPTER 50
The meeting was held in the Ministry of Justice on Slotsholmsgade in central Copenhagen, and its timing alone indicated the seriousness of the situation. All the participants could easily have found a more pleasant way to spend a mild September evening. But the kidnapping of two young women, presumed to be in mortal danger if not already dead, demanded the attention of even the highest-ranking members of the Danish bureaucracy. Or so Helmer Hammer said. The story was high-profile in both print and electronic media, and all the participants wished to be, or at least feel like they were being, updated about the police effort.
The police commissioner, national chief of police, head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service and the public prosecutor for Copenhagen and Bornholm were present, in addition to a chief administrative officer from the Ministry of Justice and the Minister of Justice’s personal secretary, as well as Bertil Hampel-Koch from the Foreign Ministry and Helmer Hammer from the Prime Minister’s office. The only participants in the meeting actively involved in the search were Konrad Simonsen, the Countess and Ernesto Madsen, whom Simonsen had insisted should take part, to which no one had objected.