They laughed, and for the rest of the way they held hands, until they were out of the forest.
When Pedersen and Berg came back to the farmyard, the retired couple were sitting on the terrace waiting for them. The man was a round, short fellow with a bald head that seemed to sit right on his body, as if his neck had been cut away. The woman looked stern. They were sitting at a garden table, set with a pitcher of water and two cut-crystal wine glasses. The woman was working on a large dish of strawberries, which she expertly trimmed and let fall into a bowl below her chair. She barely greeted them when they arrived. The man on the other hand was more lively, and extended a short, fat arm towards two vacant chairs.
“Sit down. Mother has put out iced water, if you want a little against the heat.”
They poured and drank, while they let the man talk.
“My son tells me that you’ve come from Copenhagen to question Director Falkenborg, who once lived in the neighbouring house, and we know all about him. He was a very unsympathetic type, isn’t that right?”
The question was aimed at the woman beside him, whose mouth tightened though she did not respond.
“One of those types who will do anything to bother other people, not at all the sort we like down here,” the man continued.
Pedersen sensed that the conversation could easily veer off track, so he tried to guide it in the right direction.
“When did Andreas Falkenborg live in the neighbouring house?”
“Well, that I can’t remember, but in truth I recall that he poisoned our existence for an entire autumn break and most of the winter too.”
The woman surprised the officers then by pressing her husband to answer the question as fully as possible.
“Listen to what the officer is asking you. He wants to know when Falkenborg lived there.”
The man nodded his head tolerantly.
“When was it? Well, it must have been in the mid-1980s or thereabouts . . . 1987, I think. Yes, 1987 it was—now I remember.”
The woman cut him off.
“Nonsense, it was late summer of 1990, and in July less than a year later the teachers moved in.”
He tried sheepishly to save face.
“Yes, that’s even more correct.”
“Did he live there year-round?” Pedersen put in.
“Yes, he was always here.”
The woman intervened again.
“In the beginning he was in Copenhagen twice a week, from Monday to Tuesday and Thursday to Friday; later he almost never came here.”
“How did he acquire the house?”
“Well, he bought it.”
The woman confirmed the response with a little grunt, throwing a bad strawberry into the flowers for emphasis.
“ I mean, was it up for sale or did he approach the owners and make them an offer?”
Pedersen directed the question at the woman, but it didn’t work. She ignored his gaze and waited for her husband to answer, obviously satisfied to correct him when he made a mistake.
“It was up for sale, I remember that. I went to school with the man who lived there before, but he moved to Lolland to live closer to his son. Well, he’s dead now.”
Again the woman agreed. This time with an indifferent nasal sound that clearly indicated what was to be expected if you moved outside the parish.
“I see that you did not get along with Andreas Falkenborg. Why was that? Was there a specific episode that began the difficulties between you?”
“He was bad-tempered from the first day he moved in. By the day after he’d come over and complained to us.”
The man stopped talking and waited for a comment from his wife. Pauline Berg urged him on.
“About what?”
“At that time we drove slurry out over the fields, and he objected to that. But we had a right to do it, if it wasn’t at weekends or holidays. And if he had problems with the odour, he could always have stayed in the city. We weren’t the ones who forced him to buy his summer house.”
“And you told him that?”
“You better believe it! Even though he shouted and fussed like nobody’s business. Swore that we would pay, and poured a whole shit bucket of abuse over us.”
“So since that day you were enemies?”
“Yes, and after that there was the business with the pig. A few weeks later he got hold of a sow. It wasn’t even a dead one, because later on we found out that he’d bought it from a farmer in Allerslev and had it slaughtered for the occasion. And just imagine, he nailed it up on the old poplar that stands almost on the boundary with our land. That is, he didn’t do the work himself. He hired four men, and they went to work with pulleys and everything until they got the animal hung up. I don’t know if you’re aware how big a pig’s carcass is?”
“What kind of tree did you say?”
“That one, right over there.”
The man pointed to an old, slightly crooked poplar that badly needed pollarding and had seen its best years besides.
“If you go over there you’ll see the iron plates are still attached.”