by Lotte Hammer
‘Inglourious is a completely impossible word and it’s deliberately misspelled. A decent Danish translation would be Skændige møgsvin, not that it matters.’
‘Benedikte, I can’t read the subtitles, and you know it. If you’re just doing this to humiliate me, you might as well piss off home now.’
The nearest customers glanced in their direction. Benedikte Lerche-Larsen dismissed them with a glare. Then she smiled.
‘Easy now. I’ll read them aloud to you, of course. That’s the whole point.’
They made themselves comfortable at home in Henrik Krag’s flat. The snacks were lined up, and the armchair moved to make more space in front of the television. He fetched his mattress, she arranged the sofa cushions for back support.
‘What about the pizza? Aren’t you hungry?’
‘That’s for the breaks. We’ll have to pause every now and again. Now shut up and watch. It’s actually a really cool film. Not a masterpiece like some of his other stuff, but definitely worth seeing. You’ll love it.’
She was right. Moreover, as the film progressed, and she read the subtitles out loud for him, the miracle happened: he forgot about the food and about her, and enjoyed the experience, just like a little kid being read to. During breaks he was impatient, almost pestering her to start again. Benedikte Lerche-Larsen said:
‘Did you notice how that Nazi colonel is portrayed as an educated person, and that he drinks milk?’
‘Yes, yes, now please can we watch some more?’
‘I need some food and to rest my voice for a while.’
‘But you just have.’
They watched some more, and he loved every minute.
CHAPTER 42
Klavs Arnold was in high spirits when he turned up for work at Copenhagen Police Headquarters just after nine o’clock that morning. No one could tell from looking at him that he had already spent nearly three hours making packed lunches, getting his children dressed and taking them to their respective nurseries and schools.
His wife had gone to Paris with one of her Folketinget committees – he couldn’t remember which one – on a five-day study trip, so he was currently working overtime for the sake of democracy, as he loudly announced when chatting to his next-door neighbour over the hedge. The pressure on the home front meant he found it almost relaxing to be at his paid place of work where, for the next seven hours, all he was expected to do was to solve a crime or two. This explained his good mood, that and the fact he was a naturally happy person. Besides, he had actually solved something – if not a whole crime, then a not insignificant detail. He walked to his boss’s office with a small pile of papers in his hand.
Konrad Simonsen and the Countess were sitting in the room adjacent to Simonsen’s office watching breakfast television. They had achieved nothing since turning up for work that morning. A mutual acquaintance of theirs was about to be interviewed in the studio with his five dogs, a wire-haired fox terrier bitch and her four cute puppies. They didn’t want to miss that, so Denmark’s criminals would just have to roam free a little longer. Klavs Arnold sat down on the sofa between them, the feature with the puppies came on, was watched and duly commented on, after which the working day could start. The Jutlander suggested that they should sit down around the conference table in Konrad Simonsen’s office, which they did. He started:
‘It doesn’t take much to make people happy – a good hobby, for instance.’
No one could disagree with that observation. The Countess guessed where it was leading.
‘Is this about your ornithologists?’
It was. Over the last few days he had contacted several bird lovers, who had forwarded his request to dozens of their fellows. If anyone had taken pictures in and around Hanehoved Forest in the period 16–25 March 2008, the police would very much like copies, regardless of the birds depicted in the picture. The request had paid off; he had been sent almost two hundred images. As was to be expected, some still fell outside the time frame, but not all.
Konrad Simonsen, who had a meeting in twenty minutes, asked impatiently:
‘Which resulted in?’
The Jutlander took his time. He hated being rushed, and was generally of the opinion that things moved too fast in the capital compared to Esbjerg, his home town, where people took the time to talk about things properly.
‘Well, to begin with, I can say that I now know a great deal about the birdlife in Hanehoved Forest. There are black woodpeckers in November and common goldeneyes breed there, and if you’re lucky, you can see green sandpipers in the alder bog on the south side of Satan’s Bog, along with bearded tits in many places. Or it could have been some other kind of tit, I can’t quite remember. And then there’s this.’
He placed a photograph in front of his audience. It showed a falcon perching on a fence post with a mouse in its beak.
‘What is it?’ Konrad Simonsen grunted.
‘It’s a very rare Angry Bird, but the bird doesn’t matter. However, look at the date and the plume of smoke to the left across the forest.’
At this point Konrad Simonsen’s and the Countess’s interest perked up. They bent their heads and looked closely: the Jutlander was right. A distinct column of dark grey smoke was rising almost vertically above the treetops. Klavs Arnold explained that the ornithologist who had taken the picture had shown him that very fence post yesterday afternoon.
‘The angle and distance are right, but whether it’s the first or the second torching of the lodge we’re looking at, I don’t know.’
The Countess concluded: ‘Nineteenth of March fits perfectly with the pathologist’s time estimate.’
‘Yes, and there’s more. The ornithologist remembered the date clearly because she was fined during a vehicle inspection check that was taking place that day a few kilometres north of Lynge. It was an operation carried out by Hillerød police, and I got the duty officer to email his colleagues to see if anyone remembered attending the spot check and, of course, if they had seen anything that might be relevant to our inquiry. I didn’t get my hopes up either, but I was proved wrong. A traffic police officer will visit us on Friday when he’s back from his holiday. I’ve already spoken to him on the phone, and what he remembers isn’t earth-shattering, only that there was an African woman in someone’s car, but that’s reason enough for us to talk to him.’
Klavs Arnold wasn’t the only one with results on this Tuesday, when Lady Luck really seemed to smile on the Homicide Department. The forensic report on the spruce branches tied to the stone and the African woman in the lake had finally arrived. It was one of the few issues from their initial investigation that had yet to be resolved.
The report had taken weeks – an unacceptable amount of time, but nothing could be done. Arne Pedersen knew only too well that if you rushed the technicians, let alone chided them for their sluggishness, you would run into a wall of incomprehensible science, and could be absolutely sure that the next report would take twice as long to be completed. He sat in the canteen at Police Headquarters, eating his leek and potato soup, while working his way through the report one line at a time. It was almost three pages long and unnecessarily convoluted, in his opinion, but its conclusion was far from uninteresting.
Both spruce branches showed traces of four-stomach ruminants of the Cervida family. Arne Pedersen shook his head and went online on his laptop, which he had taken with him to lunch. As he had expected, the Latin nonsense turned out to mean a deer. A call to the treasurer of Fredriksberg Hunting Club shortly afterwards confirmed that there had been a pile of spruce branches used for transporting red deer stashed behind the old hunting lodge. A stag could easily weigh over two hundred kilos and you didn’t just pick up a chap like that. No, Arne could see that. The treasurer was insufferably pedantic and it took Arne ten minutes to get rid of him. He wondered if the African girl had been transported from the hunting lodge and down to the lake in the same way as a deer, with her hands and ankles tied together and a spruce branch threaded
in between, so two men could lift her. Then he went to his boss’s office to report.
Pauline Berg’s investigation also bore fruit that day. She had been tasked with tracing the jeans button and belt buckle found among the remains of the old hunting lodge. The button, like the hairband they had found when the forest was searched, she was forced to give up on. Thousands of both items had been sold in hundreds of shops in Denmark; the button, of course, as part of a pair of Levi’s. The belt buckle, however, was another matter. The belt was made from nickel-free steel and shaped like a snake coiled around itself in a stylised pattern, evocative of the engravings on the tenth-century Jelling Stone or an old-fashioned carpet beater. The technicians had also found three studs used for fixing the buckle to the belt.
She started with the big supermarkets and caught a lucky break with Co-op Denmark’s warehouse in Brøndby, where a purchasing manager remembered the buckle.
‘We discovered seven crates of belts in our warehouse. They had been missing . . . that’s to say, from our system. It happens sometimes. They must have been sitting around here for years. We offloaded them to Kvickly supermarket in Lyngby Shopping Centre for a song, just to get rid of them. That was two years ago. Try the Lyngby Shopping Centre, they might be able to help. I can give you a copy of the product number, date, that kind of thing.’
She thanked him.
In Kvickly in Lyngby Shopping Centre, the store manager referred to the belts as retro crap, which had been impossible to shift. Eventually they had flogged them for twenty kroner each and the owner of Mode & Trend in Lyngby Hovedgade had snapped up the lot.
This was where the trail went cold. Mode & Trend in Lyngby Hovedgade didn’t have the same superb logistics records as Co-op Denmark, and all credit-card information had long since been deleted. The owner threw up her hands apologetically. However, she did have a belt herself, at home in her wardrobe, and she never wore it so Pauline Berg was welcome to it, if she was interested. Pauline Berg was disappointed, but thought, despite the ultimate dead end, that she had a decent result to present the next day.
Konrad Simonsen listened to her, without interruption, and smiled broadly when she showed him the new belt. It was made from black leather, produced at the Guangzhou factories in the Guangdong province in China. The buckle was from nickel-free steel and . . .
He listened, thinking that he must remember to praise her when she had finished, a thought immediately forgotten when she took the original buckle out from her handbag and placed it next to the new one for comparison. He interrupted.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve been running around with that buckle in your handbag for two days?’
No, of course not, she had mostly kept it in her pocket.
He had to restrain himself in order not to shout. ‘You can’t do that, woman. What were you thinking? It’s evidence.’
Pauline took offence and stormed out. He shouted after her. To no avail.
The episode was witnessed by Arne Pedersen and a few hours later, it gave him an idea. The group of officers investigating Frode Otto’s telephone records reported to him, and they had almost finished. Only one telephone number in the estate bailiff’s contacts had taken a long time to identify. However, it turned out to be worth the wait. During the three years for which they had telephone records, Frode Otto had rung the number regularly, including every week before the first Saturday in odd months, though they had yet to establish why.
In addition, there had been activity between that number and the estate bailiff’s mobile seven times in the period 19–24 March 2008 – four times, when the estate bailiff had called, and three times the other way. Each conversation had lasted more than ten minutes, but less than thirty. The first conversation had taken place when the unknown caller contacted Frode Otto on 19 March, at 11.33.
The officers were obviously very keen to know the caller’s name, but unlike every other number they had checked, it proved difficult to obtain any information about this one. It was issued by the same provider as the one used by Frode Otto. However, NewTalkInTown refused to disclose the customer’s identity without a warrant. There was a restrictive covenant in place, the company’s head of security claimed, without being willing to explain what the easement covered. Indeed, he even refused to explain what an easement was.
Konrad Simonsen frowned; he hadn’t come across this before. An easement? A warrant? What on earth was going on? He had emailed the Deputy Commissioner, perhaps she could help, but had yet to hear back from her. A more direct approach would be to call the number, of course, and Arne Pedersen had indeed done so several times, but had yet to get through – until a short while ago. By now he had been calling the number so often that he was expecting the number never to be answered. The voice wasn’t Danish but Russian, as far as he could tell, certainly Slavic. It was a woman’s. He switched to English and asked to whom he was speaking. His unknown conversational partner asked him the same question, this time in intelligible but stumbling Danish. There was something commanding in her voice, as if she was a person people usually obeyed. Arne Pedersen from the Homicide Department and your name is . . .? She gave him her name without him being any the wiser. It was long and completely impossible to understand. Then she informed him with authority, but without irritation or indeed aggression, that he had to go through official channels if he wanted to speak further to her, and hung up.
He had recorded the conversation. He did so routinely when interviewing witnesses by telephone. It helped him if he made notes subsequently, and it was embarrassing to have to ring someone back because he couldn’t remember what they had said. He called a colleague at the National Investigation Centre who was married to a Russian. He asked for his help and ten minutes later his colleague’s wife called him on his landline. He played the recording on his mobile to her and she said:
‘Bepa Rozhdestvenskaya.’
Of course, how hard could it be? Then he asked her to spell the name, preferably slowly. She spelled it and added:
‘It’s not an uncommon Russian name, but try checking out the homepage of the Russian Embassy. I can’t be sure, but I think you’re in very fine company.’
He thanked her and followed her suggestion. On the homepage he found and played a three-minute video where a nice-looking woman in her early sixties spoke about the good relationship between Denmark and Russia. Her voice was easy to recognise, both in Danish and Russian. He exclaimed out loud.
‘I don’t bloody believe it!’
In the corridor between his and Konrad Simonsen’s office, Arne Pedersen was then prompted by Konrad Simonsen shouting at Pauline Berg to a flash of inspiration. He stopped, smiled and made a short detour after Pauline in order to borrow her mobile. She handed it to him without asking any questions, apparently absorbed in something else. Konrad Simonsen and the Countess were both reading through their notes when Arne Pedersen entered. He wondered if the newlyweds were making a habit of reading notes together; he would often find them like this. He interrupted them.
‘Listen, I’ve found this number, which we haven’t been able to identify. I mean, I’ve discovered the owner of the number.’
They both put down their papers, this was much more interesting.
‘You won’t believe it, but I’m quite sure it belongs to the Russian Ambassador.’
He gave her name and managed to pronounce it correctly. Arne Pedersen had an ear for languages and, having heard it three times, he knew it now.
‘The Russian Ambassador?’
‘Yes, the Russian Ambassador, Simon.’
Arne Pedersen explained how he had found her.
‘Wow! God only knows what Bepa was doing with someone like Frode Otto. However, this is highly sensitive and must be handled with great care.’
The Countess frowned at her husband.
‘Bepa? Tell me, do you know her?’
‘Not personally, but she used to be a chess player. It doesn’t matter. How many people know about this, Arne?’
> ‘Only the three of us, and Pauline, and she’s handling it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Ambassador is currently giving a speech in Industriens Hus, Pauline has gone there to arrest her.’
Konrad Simonsen shot up as if his office chair had exploded, propelling it backwards, and sending it crashing into the wall behind him.
‘She has what? Are you completely out of your mind?’
‘Didn’t you hear the sirens? Pauline thought it was about time we taught those Russians a lesson.’
Arne Pedersen thought he had overegged his story at this point. But it would appear not. Konrad Simonsen was scrambling round his desk for something that could stop his officers from arresting the Ambassador. The Countess came to his rescue, pointing to his phone. He grabbed the handset and dialled Pauline Berg’s number as quickly as he could. One second later a mobile in Arne Pedersen’s inside pocket started ringing. He answered the call. Hi, this is Arne Pedersen. I’m afraid Pauline Berg can’t . . . Konrad Simonsen stared at him for one short, mystified moment, then he threw down the handset and exclaimed in despair:
‘Tell me it was a hoax. For God’s sake, please let it be a joke.’
Arne Pedersen laughed so hard, he nearly fell off his chair. The Countess joined in when the penny dropped. A sheepish-looking Konrad Simonsen was left unable to decide whether he was relieved or furious.
Once Arne Pedersen had assured his boss that it was only the Pauline Berg story that was made up, Konrad Simonsen chased his staff out of his office, then phoned a friend who was a senior civil servant in the Foreign Ministry, and whom he had first met on a previous case. Unfortunately this man was abroad on business and unable to help. Konrad Simonsen was annoyed to hear it. Under normal circumstances this type of police business had to go through the Foreign Ministry protocol, which maintained relationships with foreign diplomatic representatives accredited to Denmark, but Simonsen knew from past experience that such requests could take a long time, sometimes months.