“Hanged here, weren’t moved. Wednesday or Thursday. Look like ethnic Danes. But don’t ask me how it was accomplished or why there isn’t blood everywhere.”
“When will you have something firm on the time of death?”
The old man sighed. He was no longer a spring chicken and the thought of the evening’s work that awaited him held no pleasure.
“I’ve had to call for reinforcements. On overtime hours, which you are paying for.”
“Absolutely. Bring in as many as you like.”
“Call me after midnight.”
“Roger that.”
Simonsen had only one more question. It was, however, somewhat controversial. Strictly speaking, it also fell outside the professor’s line of work, but in view of the man’s enormous experience and preeminent expertise it was not an unreasonable question.
“Terrorism?”
It took a couple of seconds for Elvang to grasp his meaning, then he grew impish. He flapped his hands by the side of his head like a hysterical teenager and said sarcastically, “Ooooh, ooooh, the monsters are coming. And they’re not coming out of the forest, they’re coming from the water.”
Simonsen ignored this odd outburst and said coldly, “Nine/eleven, Bali, Beslan, Madrid, London. Was that also paranoia, Professor?”
Their gazes locked, then the old man finally shrugged.
“If you are thinking of holy crusaders with curved sabres and dreams about the caliph, well, there isn’t anything here that I can see that points to such an interpretation. But I don’t know what that would be in any case. Your question is ill conceived.”
“Perhaps, but it’s a question I will have to answer for the rest of the day.”
Elvang did not reply. He glanced at the bodies and shook his head thoughtfully. With his bald, age-spotted crown, his thin ruffled hair and sunken chest, he most of all resembled a baby bird.
Then he said, “I was in Rwanda in 1995.”
“I didn’t think you liked to fly.”
“I only do it in cases of genocide. For four months I traveled literally from one mass grave to another. There were so unbelievably many murdered people that it defies description, and I discovered a degree of depravity and excess that you could not imagine in your wildest nightmare. It was indescribably awful, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst thing was to come back home and realize that no one was interested. The victims were simply the wrong color to sell news and to refer to the catastrophe was almost in bad taste, so I apologize if I have a somewhat cynical attitude to the concept of terrorism.”
Simonsen felt empty.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s no one asking you to say anything. Forget it, everyone else does. But tell me, how do you know I don’t like to fly?”
“That’s just what I’ve heard.”
“It wouldn’t by any chance be from that story about how the city’s hotel chains have pulled strings to keep me in my job as long as possible because my fear of flying has brought international conferences to Copenhagen?”
Simonsen felt a faint warmth in his cheeks.
“Something along those lines.”
The door at one end of the gymnasium opened. Arne Pedersen, the Countess, and Pauline Berg walked in, immediately followed by Poul Troulsen.
“You are a fool. To think that the country supports a homicide chief who believes that kind of nonsense. It is frightening. Shame on you. Get a bucket while you’re at it.”
“What do you want with a bucket?”
“Your latest recruit has not yet learned to suppress her instinctual human reactions.”
The observation came too late. One second later, Berg collapsed and vomited onto the floor without making use of the plastic bag that she had been holding in her hand for that very purpose. Pedersen glanced down at his vomit-spattered shoes and took out a handkerchief. It was made of raw silk and had been rather expensive. He managed to lift one foot before the Countess snatched the handkerchief and held it out to Berg, who looked gratefully up at him before she retched again.
CHAPTER 6
The corpses in the gymnasium were gone and all the windows were open, and yet it seemed to Pauline Berg, when she walked in the door, that the smell was unbearable. But it was most likely a deception of the senses and thus possible to verify. Konrad Simonsen was sitting in the middle of the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He reminded her of a monk in a pagoda and she had trouble guessing what he was up to.
“Arne said you wanted to talk to me.”
She could hear that she sounded like a nervous exam taker. Normally she dealt well with men, who often found her attractive and intelligent, but her boss was the exception that proved the rule, and apart from the fact that her choice of clothing was sometimes criticized by his puritanical gaze, he seemed mostly to ignore her. That is, on a personal level. She obeyed his gesture and sat down next to him.
“Did you see the bodies?”