“I waited for Annie to come on her bike. It was dark. Then I caught her and put her in a bag.”
Anxiety, hatred, defiance, it was hard to tell which emotion was uppermost in Andreas Falkenborg then. His abrupt confession, made without a proper caution, could not be used for anything. Neither of the two officers was in any doubt about that. Nor that his comments were meant as provocation.
“It was nice, and now she’s gone for ever.”
Quietly and calmly, as if she had all the time she needed, Pauline Berg found a hand mirror in her bag, and critically inspected herself without paying the slightest attention to the two men. Then she fished out a tube of bright red lipstick and slowly unscrewed it. She inspected it, holding it up towards the light. She heard Falkenborg gasp, but withstood the temptation of looking at him. Instead she started putting lipstick on.
“You know perfectly well what you should tell me. No need for any irrelevant talk. Well, what will it be?”
While she waited for his reaction, she continued working on her lips, and when no answer came, she added, “Well, get going, I don’t have all day. Where did you kill Annie? And above all, where did you bury her? And be sure to include everything, little Andreas, or else I may come over there and give you a kiss.”
“She mustn’t do that, I can’t stand her. She mustn’t talk that way.”
Pauline Berg was quicker this time.
“I’m waiting, Andreas—but not for long.”
“Yes, I will, yes, I will. You stay where you are.”
“Where did you kill Annie?”
“On the terrace in my summer house. I swear it was there.”
“Her bicycle?”
“N?stved Station, I put it in the bike rack.”
“And where did you bury her?”
“But it wasn’t that way.”
Berg looked at him for the first time since she had started with the lipstick, and saw how he was suffering. Casually, as before, she put her things back in the bag and took a step forward, more threateningly.
“Yes, Andreas, that’s how it was. And I want to know where.”
One step more.
“Where, Andreas? Tell me where.”
It was Asger Graa who answered her.
“Uh, I don’t think he can, look at him, he’s almost . . . gone.”
Andreas Falkenborg was trembling uncontrollably. His eyes spasmodically rolled up in his head. He was obviously in no condition to continue. You did not need medical knowledge to see that he was balancing on the edge of a mental breakdown. Pauline Berg was close to crying from disappointment as she left the cell.
Outside she heard Asger Graa make his own attempt to question the suspect.
“Detective Pauline Berg is leaving the room. Listen here, my good man, the game is up. Please tell me where you buried the deceased.”
It took a few seconds before it occurred to her what had happened. A cold chill ran down her spine as, surprisingly calmly, she realised that her attempt had gone as badly as it possibly could.
CHAPTER 42
On Sunday morning at six o’clock Andreas Falkenborg was released from the jail at Police Headquarters. He was led out of a back entrance to avoid the waiting journalists and on Hambrosgade was released on his own recognisance, as the court and judge had decided. Konrad Simonsen showed up for the occasion, if you could call it that, feeling that it was wrong to stay home and sleep while a serial killer was set free. Afterwards he went to his office to mine away at the heaps of paperwork that always piled up in investigations like this.
At nine o’clock Arne Pedersen also arrived at work and shortly after him Poul Troulsen. The three men put their heads together in Simonsen’s office. Pedersen asked Troulsen, “Why didn’t you take the weekend off?”
The older man shrugged his shoulders.
“You were here, and I think I owe you a little extra effort. I wasn’t too active on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday.”
Pedersen teased him.
“Not too active? You’re joking. You were far too active last Wednesday.”
“You know what I mean . . . ”
He looked at his boss.
“ . . . and I still think it’s unfair they put all the blame on you.”
Simonsen stuck out his lower lip.
“Yes, it’s cruel, the world is so mean . . . mean.”
Troulsen shook his head.
“I’m starting to look forward to retirement.”
“Hmm, we have to talk about that at some point, Poul. There are a number of different arrangements, that if you stick around a couple more years—”
“Forget that.”
“Okay, well, no need to decide right now. How far are we with the Finnish girl, Arne?”
“We’ve got her data, but you know that, and otherwise not much has happened since Friday. The narrowest time frame we can establish in which she disappeared is between the seventeenth of April and the third of May, 1992, presumably from H?ssleholm Central Station. Falkenborg’s old farm was a few kilometres south-west by Finja Lake, but Elizabeth Juutilainen was never seen with him. The Swedes are working on the case.”