His boss interrupted him rudely.
“Get on to Liz Suenson . . . now! I have a double murderer about to slip away from me, and I don’t have time for your navel-gazing. Let’s get a move on! I’m out of my office briefly. When I get back, I expect you to have some results for me.”
Simonsen stalked out. On his way he crumpled up the resignation and threw it next to the plastic bag.
CHAPTER 34
After his trip to the magistrate and back again to Police Headquarters, Konrad Simonsen went to Arne Pedersen’s office. His colleague was sitting behind his desk with an expression that proclaimed more bad news. Simonsen was not bringing good news either, so neither man seemed particularly eager to hear what the other had to say.
Nevertheless Pedersen asked, “You don’t look like things went very well in court. Don’t tell me he was released.”
“No, in spite of everything. He withdrew his testimony, but we more or less expected that.”
“Yes, that’s not surprising. And otherwise?”
Pedersen was struggling against blinding sunlight reflecting through the window. Instead of moving, he held one hand to his forehead, with the result that Simonsen could not see his face clearly.
“Can’t you sit somewhere else?” he growled. “Your hand is irritating me.”
Pedersen obeyed.
“This heat is unbearable,” he moaned. “My clothes stick to me and I’m sweating like a pig.”
Simonsen ignored the complaint. He had his own sweating to attend to.
“It ended with the judge adjourning the hearing in order to compare my questioning with the recording of Poul Troulsen and Andreas Falkenborg’s conversation in the car, at her leisure. There was a lot of legal nonsense about what was permissible and what wasn’t, as if it ever could be permissible for prisoners to monitor conversations held in a police car! There is of course no precedent, so both the prosecutor and the defence got very absorbed in that.”
“What about the judge?”
“She did not seem particularly interested in that aspect.”
“When will there be a decision?”
“When she’s finished reading, so no one has any idea. The court was full of media, and that doesn’t make things any easier, as you know. But she’ll probably end up at three weeks. She’ll surely take a week off the normal procedure to show her dissatisfaction with our approach. Or that’s my guess.”
“We’ll see. But how the hell did Falkenborg pull off that stunt with the recordings from the car? That’s beyond my understanding.”
“That’s actually very simple to explain. The execution, on the other hand, requires an expert. He used his cell phone, which he politely asked Poul if he could take with him since it was turned off, and was allowed to. But it wasn’t turned off at all, Falkenborg simply manipulated it so that it looked that way, and then he had phone connection to one of his own computers, where he also worked the same number—it looked inactive, while in fact it was running full blast. The last step was to digitise the conversation and make an automatic distribution to various forums on the Internet. Don’t ask me how you do that, but one of the computer nerds who was involved in the search said that it wasn’t difficult.”
“Hmm, very crafty. When I hear all this, I have a hard time accepting E. Madsen’s take that his naiveté isn’t put on.”
Pedersen’s face lit up in a boyish grin.
“Do you know what the E stands for? In E. Madsen, that is.”
“No, and I couldn’t care less.”
“Ernesto . . . the poor man’s name is Ernesto Madsen. I heard it from Pauline, but you mustn’t say I told you, because I promised not to.”
“Well, then, why are you telling me? No, never mind—the essence of it is that Falkenborg is far more wily and calculating than I thought from our original picture of him. Or profile, if you will. But tell me about the search, although I can guess that you didn’t find anything sensational.”
“No, we didn’t. They’re not quite finished, by the way, but I doubt that anything else usable will be found today.”
“Wasn’t there anything at all to collect?”
“You heard about the bust of Mozart? He pulled a plastic bag over it before the move, which is how he got Carl Henning Thomsen’s fingerprints. Later he used the same bag to suffocate the man’s daughter. That’s how we think it went anyway.”
“Besides the bust and the fingerprints, Arne. That’s pure speculation.”
“There was one bad thing, really bad actually. We’ve been in touch with his Internet provider, and he managed to download the article Dagbladet had on their website last Monday, where they interviewed Jeanette Hvidt—there are also traces on his computer that show he has seen her picture.”