“Not necessary. A competent assessment of their weight from their height and build is more likely.”
Then it was Simonsen’s turn. He had jotted down a couple of questions on his pad and now discovered that he could neither read nor recall the first. The odd pause caused the others to give him quizzical looks, and Kurt Melsing briefly woke up in the ensuing silence. Simonsen went to his second question.
“In regards to the identification, is it correct to assume that we have a partly intact dental impression?”
“From Mr. Northwest, yes, with an emphasis on partly. But combined with his approximate age it should be enough to establish an identification, if you can locate his dentist.”
“You said that Mr. Northeast had a pacemaker inserted about forty years ago, when he must have been in his early twenties. Is that something that can be traced?”
Arthur Elvang paused before he replied, “He may have suffered from rheumatic fever. I’ll give one eye that this is one of our homegrown surgeries. A Danish hospital inserts a pacemaker on a man, nineteen to perhaps twenty-five, sometime between 1961 and 1968. He was given a blood thinner. Marevan or Marcoumar. We’ll analyze that later. Much speaks for the fact that he would have had his INR values measured quarterly in order to monitor his status and most likely at a hospital. That’s not a bad point of departure for an identification. There can’t have been many such operations at the time.”
Pedersen interjected, “Will you help us?”
It was a rational thought since the professor was the ideal man for such a task, but given the work that still lay before him, it was unrealistic. In view of the man’s age, which one often forgot, the question became unreasonable.
Simonsen modified it: “… To find someone that we can work with on this?”
Arthur Elvang looked in confusion from one to the other.
“Stop with the Donald Duck talk. Who is asking what?”
They both dropped the request.
The time was now ripe to put Kurt Melsing back into action, and they got some life back in the man, who was soon in the middle of an enthusiastic monologue on the subject of one hundred kinds of bloodstains, with a focus on arterial spurts and splatters. As opposed to the professor, his level of eloquence was relatively low and relatively disjointed, and apart from what Simonsen had noticed—that the floor in the gymnasium had been covered in plastic and signs—he offered nothing useful. That the man knew about blood was nothing new. Finally, it was too much even for Arthur Elvang.
“No one wants to hear about your bloodstains, Kurt,” he interrupted. “Let’s hear your conclusion. That is something they are more interested in.”
Kurt Melsing redirected himself cheerfully and took out a piece of paper from which he read, in an admission to his evident limitations in expressing himself off-the-cuff.
“Our measurements of interfaces and angles as well as bloodstains on the corpses show that the chainsaw was operated from right to left at an angle of about sixty degrees to the ground. The person who used the saw was located about one meter higher than the body he was cutting. It is also evident that the men were standing on a raised platform of some kind before they were hanged. It is also clear that the spray of blood has often been intercepted by a flat surface. Taken together, this information leads us to believe that a kind of podium of about one and a half meters above the floor was erected. A scene with five trapdoors. Nothing short of an execution ceremony.”
“Damn.”
That was Pedersen. His tone was muted but it spoke for them all. For a moment all was quiet, as if angles, rotational speed, intestinal residue, and dental records retreated to the background and the full impact of five people’s horrendous death hit them. Arthur Elvang broke the silence.