Simonsen reflected on this, then stood up, and Pedersen followed suit.
“We’ll meet in half an hour, make sure the others get the message. You can come get me in the gymnasium, but I want to get Elvang alone first. Tell Troulsen that not so much as a flea leaves this place without my permission, and get Pauline inside before she starts to look like a drowned animal. I don’t even know what the hell she’s doing out there—helping the dogs?”
“For Pete’s sake, she doesn’t have much experience yet.”
“And she won’t get it simply by getting wet. Or get her some proper rain gear. The school patrol probably has one hanging on a hook somewhere. And one more thing. There have been ten schoolchildren in the gymnasium. Has a crisis counselor been called in? What about the parents—have they been informed?”
“Oh, no.”
Pedersen banged his fist against the doorframe. He had two children of his own.
“Take care of it, but first lead me to Elvang and tell your story about him on the way. You’ve done a fine job, Arne. Very satisfactory.”
The praise sounded hollow. As if learned in a management seminar.
CHAPTER 4
The graveyard was deserted and the lone man with the umbrella moved slowly, almost humbly, past the gravestones that seemed to sense that he did not fit in. Every step he took made a crunching sound in the pea gravel and sounded wrong in the wet silence of the place. At an unadorned grave at the edge of the cemetery he stopped and placed a folding chair on the ground. Before he sat down, he gently placed a bouquet on the grave. The rain freshened the flowers like a last caress from nature and caused the man, whose name was Erik M?rk, to smile.
“I brought flowers with me today, Dad, because today was quite a special day. One that I have been waiting for a long time. Perhaps ever since I was a child, even if that doesn’t make any sense. According to the radio, those who were executed have been found and the rest of the day will doubtless be quite chaotic.”
He stopped and looked down at the earth, and some minutes went by before he went on. Then he smiled, and the smile came from his heart, which did not happen very often. He loved sitting there in the quiet stillness far from the world, and he allowed the minutes to tick by as he chatted about this and that at his father’s graveside. His work was extroverted, though he was the opposite by nature. Perhaps it was the secret of his professional success. A success toward which he was indifferent, and one he would have traded for anything if only he could have had his childhood back.
“I have been completely on edge since I got a letter from the Climber last Saturday with videos of the minivan and the gymnasium, so I knew it had been done, but…”
The sentence was never completed, and he jumped straight into another topic altogether.
“This morning I was at the office, where we had an evaluation with a client. The campaign is going very well and everyone is patting everyone’s back. They’re selling a lot of worthless girls’ clothes, we can add a new success story to the others, and both parties make a bucketful of money. Not a soul mentioned the eight little girls who at this moment are offering themselves like candy on billboards all over the city. For the love of Christ, they’ve hardly gone through puberty and … yes, I know it seems hysterical, because I if anyone am responsible for this, but I couldn’t deal with it very well and had to take the rest of the day off.”
The rain was tapering off. He folded his umbrella, shook it, and laid it to the side of his chair before he resumed his monologue.
“It is obviously one of the advantages of owning one’s business that one can come and go as one pleases, and today I left, without really knowing why. We have conducted so many similar campaigns, and this one is far from the worst, so perhaps it’s because I am particularly sensitive right now.”