Carl smiled cheekily. “Okay, Assad. So you think that our colleagues up on the second floor are looking at the paper and connecting these two incidents?”
“I know they are,” said Gordon. “I was upstairs asking Lis about something and she told me that they’ve already assigned a team to the case. A cyclist saw a red Peugeot tearing down the street where Michelle Hansen was hit, and a similar car was spotted parked with its motor running for over an hour on the street where the other girl was killed. Lars Bj?rn has sent several teams out to the area to question people all day. I think Pasg?rd’s team was among them.”
“Hallelujah,” said Assad.
Carl looked at the front page of the newspaper again. “I can’t bloody believe that they’re prioritizing this! But regardless of what they’re running around doing today, I seriously doubt that it’ll bring homicide to a standstill. Uniform will take care of this until there is evidence of murder.” He turned to Laursen. “But Tomas. If you don’t say anything to Pasg?rd and his team who are investigating the Zimmermann case, then I think I can damn well forget it too.”
Laursen patted Carl’s shoulder on his way out. “Then let’s hope you get there first, Carl.”
“Sure. What could stop me?”
He turned toward Assad and Gordon. There were several things in the case that needed clarification. Their assumption was that Rigmor Zimmermann had felt that someone was following her just before the murder and had therefore tried to hide. They also assumed that it might be because she had a bad habit of flashing her cash a bit too boldly and openly. The question remained how they could establish her movements from the daughter’s apartment to the scene of the crime. Had she gone in somewhere and opened her purse under the nose of someone she shouldn’t have? Or was it a coincidence that the killer had found both a victim and loot? But if the killer had just been a random person, why had she run? Had the person tried to attack her farther down the street? And was it even likely in a place where so many people walked and lived?
There were a lot of unanswered questions even in this small area of the investigation, so Assad and Gordon would be kept busy visiting dozens of buildings, shops, and cafés.
“Tell him what else you’ve been up to, Gordon,” Assad said with a grin.
Carl turned to face the lad. What had he done now that he didn’t dare mention himself?
Gordon took a deep breath. “I know we haven’t agreed on this, Carl, but I took a taxi to Stenl?se.”
Carl frowned. “To Stenl?se! With your own money, I assume.”
He didn’t answer. So he had had his fingers in the taxi vouchers.
“Rose’s youngest sister has let me borrow all of Rose’s notebooks,” he said. “She met me at the apartment.”
“I see. And of course Lise-Marie begged you on her knees to come and get them, is that it? Why didn’t she come down here with them herself if it was so important for her?”
“It wasn’t quite like that.” Was he pretending to be embarrassed? That man could be so annoying. “It was actually my idea.”
Carl felt his blood pressure rising, but just before he exploded, Assad jumped in.
“Look, Carl. Gordon has organized all the information.”
He placed Rose’s collection of notebooks and a sheet of letter-size paper on the desk.
Carl looked at the piece of paper—a chronological collection of what were undoubtedly frightening phrases filled most of the page.
It read:
1990 SHUT UP
1991 HATE YOU
1992 BLOODY HATE YOU
1993 BLOODY HATE YOU—I AM SCARED
1994 SCARED
1995 I CAN’T HEAR YOU
1996 HELP MOM—BITCH
1997 ALONE HELL
1998 DIE
1999 DIE—HELP ME
2000 BLACK HELL
2001 DARK
2002 ONLY GREY—DON’T WANT TO THINK
2003 DON’T WANT TO THINK—AM NOT
2004 WHITE LIGHT
2005 YELLOW LIGHT
2006 I AM GOOD
2007 DEAF
2008 LAUGHTER STOPPED?
2009 GET LOST, SHIT!
2010 LEAVE ME ALONE
2011 I AM OKAY, OKAY?
2012 LOOK AT ME NOW, BASTARD!
2013 I AM FREE
2014 I AM FREE—IT ISN’T HAPPENING—AWAY
2015 I’M DROWNING
2016 I’M DROWNING NOW
“These are the sentences that Rose has written in the notebooks.” Gordon pointed to the front covers: 1990 to 2016. They were all there.
“As we already know, each notebook is filled with a phrase that is repeated over and over, and it’s these phrases that I’ve systematized on this sheet. In total, there are ninety-six pages of these phrases per notebook, with the exception of a few that Rose didn’t fill completely.”
Gordon opened the notebook on the top of the pile, the one from 1990, where she had written over and over again: “SHUT UP SHUT UP.”
“She started every new day by drawing a thin line under the first word,” he said. “So four lines on one page cover approximately four days, as you can see.”
He pointed at a random page. It was just as he said; thin lines separated the days, and each day with the same number of phrases. Rose had obviously had a very systematic approach even as a ten-year-old.
“I’ve counted the lines. There are in fact three hundred and sixty-five lines because she has also drawn a line under the first word of the last paragraph on the last day of the year.”
“What about the leaping years?” asked Assad.
“They’re called leap years,” Carl corrected him.
He looked confused. “Leap years! That doesn’t make any sense,” he said dryly.
“Anyway, it’s a good question, Assad,” said Gordon. “She had those covered too. In the seven leap years that there have been since 1990, she inserted an extra day. She even drew a circle around the words written on the leap day.”
“Of course she did. That’s our Rose,” grunted Carl.
Gordon nodded. He seemed proud on Rose’s behalf, but then he was also her biggest fan and admirer. And all the feelings that came with that.
“Why seven? Haven’t there only been six of those . . . leap years?”
“Today is May 20th, Assad. We have had February. And 2016 is a leap year.”
Assad looked at Carl as if he had been accused of being dim-witted. “I was actually thinking about the year 2000, Carl. Years divided by a hundred aren’t leap years; I know that much.”
“True, Assad, but if the year can be divided by four hundred, then it is a leap year. Don’t you recall all the discussion there was about it back in 2000? It was repeated over and over.”
“Okay.” He nodded, looking thoughtful rather than hurt. “Maybe it’s because I wasn’t in Denmark around that time.”
“And people didn’t think about leap years where you were?”
“Not really,” he said.
“And where were you?” asked Carl.
Assad broke the eye contact between them. “Oh, you know, here and there.”
Carl waited. That was obviously all he was going to get out of him this time.
“Anyway, I chose to list what she has written down year for year,” interrupted Gordon. “And it says a lot about how she was feeling in those periods.”