“No, thank you, spare me any more notes. Sit down and tell me about it. It’ll be a good time for me to take a break.”
Pedersen sat down while his boss stood up to stretch his legs. He paused by the window for a short time and looked down over the city. The sun was going down and there was a strong wind. He turned back to his place and trained his eyes on his subordinate with a grim expression.
“Now that you’re here, there is one thing that we may as well get over and done with. One thing that I expect you to adhere to in future.”
His tone was more telling than his words and indicated that Simonsen was wearing his boss’s cap. Pedersen sat up in his chair.
“From now on I expect you to keep your amorous escapades separate from your work, and especially from my crime scenes, which you can define as the entire school building for now.”
“But—”
“And you can put away your aggrieved attitude. I have much better things to do with my time than convince Kurt Melsing to … shall we say, refrain from certain forensic investigations surrounding Per Clausen’s death.”
He held a hand out as a stop sign while he continued.
“And I do not want to know whether it was necessary or not. What I do wish, however, is that I will not be placed in a similar situation. Do we understand each other?”
Pedersen’s thin defenses collapsed. “Yes, we do. It won’t happen again.”
They sat in silence for a while, then Simonsen said, “So, what about that e-mail? What have you found out?”
“The server is German. Its physical location is in Hamburg and you can probably guess who accessed it. Or, rather, signed up for Web hosting on it.”
“Per Clausen?”
“Naturally. He’s had the account for a year and paid for it online with a credit card. The American e-mail addresses were uploaded there over the summer in several rounds from the library computer at the Langeb?k School, so it is Per Clausen again, but the interesting thing is how the mail distribution was started. It was started from a cell phone that has been traced back to a transmitter erected where the Jyllingevej crosses Motorring 3, that is, in R?dovre. The IT nerds are writing a report right now that you’ll get Monday at the latest.”
“Cell phone, you say. What was the telephone number?
“The SIM card in question was sold at a Statoil station—we don’t know which one yet—but we’re working on it. In addition, the mail addresses were purchased from one or several sites. There were around five hundred twenty thousand, so it can’t have been cheap. There are a couple of folks working on that one as well.”
“Okay, Arne. I’m making a note that the e-mail mailings are linked to the crime through Per Clausen, which naturally is of interest but is also what we would have guessed. Clausen has also been taken to R?dovre to … oops, no, of course he hasn’t. For good reasons. I knew I was getting too old and tired for this job.”
Pedersen smiled crookedly and concluded on his behalf, “So R?dovre is a place that we should keep in mind in case it pops up in another context.”
“Yes, so far I’m with you. Anything else? Anything new with the identifications?”
“Not a thing. No one is missing these five, at least not yet, but Jens Allan Karlsen from ?rhus is of course about to get a visit. Also, the Countess and Pauline are in Middelford. Elvang’s pictures have been released, so the three remaining victims will be identified within a short period of time, even if we have to deal with the usual.”
“And what is the usual?”
“Yes, well, we have to assume we’re going to get a flood of wrong information. It would not surprise me if we spend most of tomorrow separating the wheat from the chaff. There are many who don’t want to see us clear this up.”
“That part is slowly becoming clear to me. Have some people ready to check the names. There’s not much else we can do. Did you find out why it was so urgent for Anni Staal to get the photographs a couple of hours before everybody else?”
“No, but maybe I can ask her this evening. I’ve promised to call her as soon as we can confirm a couple of the identifications.”
“Try that. And what about Clausen’s funeral?”
“Well, it was thoroughly photographed, as you know. But there were a lot of guests and we don’t know who most of them are so without a comparative basis we have nothing to go on. I have put a halt to the task of identifying the attendees.”
“With what motivation?”
“It requires too many resources in relation to the expected return. Not least because most of them can’t be expected to be cooperative. But I e-mailed you about it yesterday.”
“Hmm, I’m a little behind on my e-mail, but that sounds reasonable. Do you have anything else?”
“No, nothing of any significance.”