The assumptions about black-market activity were strongly supported during the course of the afternoon, when the search of the house revealed one hundred sixty thousand kroner in cash. The officer who had discovered the money proudly displayed it to Pauline Berg and said, “The bills were stored in four boxes of frozen ground fish, stuffed into the very back of the freezer. The ground fish didn’t fit in with the rest of the contents, which could all go straight into the oven. The money lay at the very bottom of the boxes in packets of forty-one-thousand-kroner bills. The top layer was frozen fish and the cartons were carefully glued back together. The fish cartons were without a doubt selected because their width so perfectly fits the length of the bills.”
Pauline Berg wasn’t sure if she was expected to praise him. The officer was twice as old as she was, so it felt strange. She looked in vain for the Countess.
“That’s clever, very clever.”
She felt ridiculous, but the man’s face lit up and he said, “This find, combined with the fact that most of the videos contain child pornography, makes the case obvious.”
“Yes, completely obvious.”
“If you ask me, they got what they deserved.”
But Berg was not asking. She set about counting out the money, until he left. The bills were freezing.
The next development in the investigation came that afternoon, and as fate would have it, the two women from Copenhagen were responsible for them both, which was extremely unfair to the horde of hardworking officers, but the great detective in the sky clearly did not feel in the mood to reward classic police work this time around.
Most of the credit had to be attributed to the Countess in that her discovery came from a series of excellent conclusions. There was hardly any doubt that the brothers sold child pornography. The amount of cash in the freezer, their videos, Frank Ditlevsen’s electronic equipment, and the charges filed against Allan Ditlevsen all pointed in this direction, and the most promising channel of distribution was the Internet. A brief but skilled examination of Frank Ditlevsen’s Internet transactions, however, eliminated the possibility of the electronic distribution of illegal material. The brothers must have used a more traditional method of sale that would have been slower but more secure, and in this light the hot-dog stand emerged as a three-star disguise.
The Countess assigned four officers to the matter and they drove to Allerslev, where the remains of the stand had been tossed into containers. With the ground-fish cartons in mind, she told the men to look for objects that had earlier been stored in the commercial freezer and two black plastic bags were recovered and opened. The Countess was pleased. She encouraged the men with a short pep talk and then removed herself from the smell. The upshot was uplifting—almost thirty foul-smelling CD-ROMs.
Pauline Berg’s contribution to the investigation was an itch and felt like a complete accident. When the Countess drove to Allerslev, Berg felt superfluous. That she was expected to discover this or that was a given, she just didn’t know how. In the absence of a more brilliant idea she walked around the garden without discovering anything except a persistent itch under her boot in a particular place. She tried to mitigate the situation by kicking herself in the heel a couple of times but to no avail except that the irritation claimed more of her attention and soon appeared unbearable. On her way up the stairs to the main entrance she stopped and pulled her zipper down with one hand while with the other she leaned against the mailbox, bolted into the wall to the left of the door. It was awkward but better than sitting down on the wet stone steps. After having scratched herself thoroughly she realized that the bottom of the mailbox felt wrong. The mailbox was constructed so that the sides extended a few centimeters past the bottom. She bent down and peered up at it. A special holder was glued to each end to enable the convenient concealment of two hard-disk drives.
CHAPTER 40
Saturday became a frustrating day for Konrad Simonsen and his investigation. Arne Pedersen’s pessimistic prophecy about a flood of false information, in reaction to the publication of Arthur Elvang’s posthumous photographs of the victims of the mass murder in Bagsv?rd came true to an unfortunate degree.