The Killing - 01 - The Killing (54 page)

‘It’s a pre-paid phone card but the phone number’s no longer in use.’

‘And the name that was deleted?’

‘I never saw it.’

The old chief glanced at her. All the stubbornness, the temper, the arrogance had left him.

‘Believe that or not. It’s true.’

‘Why do you put up with this?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes.’

They walked past the Memorial Yard, beneath the tall yellow lights and the iron stars on the walls.

‘Either I get left holding the baby. Go count paper clips in some station in the sticks. Or I’m out. Forcibly retired. After thirty-six years they pin this shit on me.’

He turned to her.

‘Good luck, Lund.’

She watched him go. Called, ‘Who asked you to bury the information, Buchard?’

The old man didn’t look back.

In her office Lund checked what he’d left. Pages of calls. Nothing to indicate whose number had been erased.

‘What about the flat?’

‘Hartmann’s prints everywhere,’ Meyer said.

‘That fits with his story. Hartmann’s got an alibi. What else?’

‘We’ve got saliva, hair and fingerprints.’

‘DNA?’ she asked.

‘Nothing that matches any database records.’

Meyer shook his head.

‘There’s hardly any blood to speak of. It could have been an accident.’

Meyer shrugged. She watched. He was thinking in a way he didn’t when they first met. Not rushing to a conclusion. Now he was trying to see. To imagine.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘You know that smug bastard Olav Christensen? The smart-arse from City Hall?’

‘Yes?’

‘One piece of incriminating testimony.’

He threw Christensen’s file across the desk. She stared at the photo: young, thin face, staring eyes. Cocky.

‘Some time ago Hartmann refused to promote him. One of the campaign team told me he took the teacher’s file we asked for. He hates Hartmann. There’s going to be an inquiry. Christensen could lose his job.’

Meyer had brought in a loaf of bread, some butter and some ham. She got a plastic knife, slapped all three roughly together, made something that approximated to a sandwich, bit into it.

‘City Hall bitching,’ Lund said, mouth full. ‘It’s not him.’

Meyer grabbed the food, the knife, made a sandwich of his own. Lund looked at it. His seemed so much better.

‘Why not?’

‘Why would anyone delete calls from some pipsqueak civil servant? Christensen doesn’t have any class. Nanna met someone important through the Heartbreak Club. Not a pen-pusher.’

He sighed.

‘Maybe. I don’t know. When I talked to him he was squirming like a pig with piles. I was sure he was lying. If I’d had one thing to throw at him . . .’

‘But you didn’t.’

A rap on the door. One of the night team detectives.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘We looked at some cold cases like you asked.’

‘And?’

‘I’ve got some names . . .’

A woman was walking down the corridor. Full head of curly hair. Pretty face. Not smiling any more.

‘Let’s do this later,’ Lund said and walked out to meet her.

‘I love my husband.’

Lund and Meyer sat side by side. He didn’t smoke.

‘He was away on business for two hundred days last year. Just me and my son. Week after week.’

Lund pushed a printout of the Heartbreak site across the table.

‘You do have a profile, don’t you?’

Nethe Stjernfeldt looked at the logo. A heart torn in two by an arrow.

‘It was fun. That’s all. Nothing serious.’

A glance at Meyer’s notebook.

‘Do you have to write this down?’

He put aside the pen.

‘It was ridiculous. I put up this photograph.’ She primped her hair. ‘Half profile. You couldn’t tell it was me. Could have been anybody. It was like . . . a million lonely men appeared. All of them rich and handsome. All of them single. Supposedly.’

‘You checked?’ he asked.

‘No.’

There was a note of petulance in her voice. Lund kicked Meyer’s leg underneath the table.

‘Only one looked interesting. He was different.’

‘In what way?’ Lund asked.

‘He took notice. He was interested in me. When I wrote something he read it. We were on the same wavelength. I could tell. You couldn’t fake that.’

‘Then you met?’

‘I wasn’t looking for an affair. I was just lonely.’

‘You met him several times?’

She glared at them.

‘You want the details? Where and when?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘I thought I could control it. But . . .’

She smiled, remembering something.

‘For a while I felt I was . . . crazy. I thought I could give up everything. My husband. My son. My job. Just run to him. Be with him. He made it that way. Then . . .’

A flash of ugly bitterness.

‘I got too close. He didn’t want a relationship. Just names on a website. A night in a hotel. So he stopped answering my messages. I woke up I guess.’

Lund asked, ‘Have you seen him since?’

She was lost somewhere.

‘This sounds stupid but I think he saved my marriage. I realized what’s really important.’

‘OK, OK,’ Meyer snapped. ‘We don’t care if he ruins marriages or saves them. We just want to know who he is.’

‘I can see that.’ She watched them. ‘Why? Why do you need to know?’

Meyer growled.

‘This isn’t a flea market, sugar. Just tell us.’

‘I don’t want to bad-mouth him. He dumped me. But he was a good man. He cared.’

‘For God’s sake just tell us his bloody name. Before the Pope makes him a saint or something.’

Lund looked at her.

‘We need to know, Nethe. We will. One way or another.’

She looked at the door.

‘I don’t want to wait for your husband to turn up with a lawyer. But if I have to . . . Who’s Faust?’

An hour and ten minutes later Hartmann was in an interview room listening to the lawyer Rie Skovgaard had found. A severe, middle-aged woman from one of the big city practices. A party supporter. She’d donated. He ought to remember her name.

‘We’ve some time before they interview you,’ she said, taking off her coat, bidding him to sit down. ‘Let’s make the most of it.’

‘I’ve got to get out of here. This is ridiculous.’

‘You’re not going anywhere until they question you.’

‘But—’

‘They’ve got emails that can be traced back to you.’

‘What business do they have going through my emails?’

She looked at her notes.

‘A woman called Nethe Stjernfeldt has made a statement. She claims to have had sexual relations with you. She identified you as the man behind the profile Faust. The man who also met Nanna Birk Larsen.’

Hartmann got up, started walking up and down the room like a hungry cat.

‘Are you going to say something, Troels?’

‘I told them already. I’ve never met the Birk Larsen girl. I’ve got nothing to add. No statement to make.’

She waited. Disappointment on her lined and serious face.

‘Shall we talk about controlling the damage?’

‘What damage? I’m innocent.’

‘Let’s not get diverted by innocence, shall we? The police face a heavy burden of proof but . . .’

He shook his head, astonished.

‘Burden of proof?’

‘They’ve got the makings of a case. It’s important they know your side of the story.’

‘My side?’ Hartmann laughed. ‘Don’t you see what’s going on here? Every time one trumped-up effort fails they invent another. This is Bremer’s doing.’

‘Poul Bremer didn’t invent the Stjernfeldt woman.’

He was silent.

‘It sounds as if he didn’t invent your messages either.’

‘I never talked or met or communicated in any way with Nanna Birk Larsen. As they know.’

She scrawled something on her pad.

‘I’ll talk to Rie Skovgaard to see if we can take some civil action against them. I agree. The way they’ve acted is outrageous.’

‘Quite.’

‘Which is all the more reason to talk to them. You have to—’

‘No.’

She folded her arms.

‘You have to, Troels. If you don’t what will they think? What would anyone think?’

Meyer stood outside in the corridor, yawning. Lund leaned against the wall.

‘What’s the big idea, Lund? Are we supposed to wait around all night?’

She looked at her watch.

‘They’ve had enough time.’

A tall lean figure appeared. Lennart Brix striding down the corridor, on the phone, to the media by the sound of it.

Lund waited. Brix came and stood in front of her.

‘It was the right thing to do,’ she said. ‘We had good cause.’

‘Picking up a party leader? Without asking me?’

‘Do we normally make appointments with murder suspects?’ Meyer asked.

‘It could have waited.’

‘Hartmann’s Faust,’ Meyer said. ‘He drove the car. He was in the flat. It has to be him.’

‘Except,’ Brix said, ‘he has an alibi.’

‘We’re working on that,’ Lund told him.

The door opened. The lawyer came out.

‘He’ll talk to you now,’ she said.

Six of them in the room. Hartmann’s lawyer and a clerk to take notes. Lund, Meyer and Brix.

And Troels Hartmann, pale, weary, angry and determined.

‘My wife died two years ago. It was very sudden.’ He sipped at a coffee. ‘For a while I kept it to myself. I worked. I pretended there was nothing else.’

He stopped there.

‘Go on, Troels,’ the lawyer said.

‘One day I got some leaflets through the door. A nightclub. I don’t go to clubs but it advertised a dating chat room. You could talk to people. That’s all it was. Talking.’

Meyer coughed into his fist.

‘I created a profile. Under the name of Faust.’

‘How many women did you meet?’

‘That’s got nothing to do with this.’

Meyer cocked his head to one side.

‘More than ten, less than twenty,’ Hartmann snapped. ‘Something like that.’

No one spoke.

‘I’m not proud of it.’

‘You’re in the public eye,’ Lund said. ‘Where could you go?’

‘Just once in public. The first time. After that . . . if we got on . . . I had a cab pick them up.’

‘And go where?’

‘Mostly to the party flat on Store Kongensgade.’

‘Then what happened?’ Meyer asked.

Hartmann scowled at him.

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘But it is,’ Meyer insisted. ‘Nanna Birk Larsen was there. Two days later she was found raped and murdered. I don’t know whether you believe in coincidence in politics, Hartmann, but round here—’

‘I never met her! I never even knew she existed.’

Meyer’s head was still cocked.

‘Let me refresh your memory.’

He went through the stack of papers on the table.

‘We’ve got printouts of your emails. And Nanna’s. Take a look.’

He passed over a stack of sheets. Hartmann started to read them.

‘In April,’ Lund said, ‘you contacted her for the first time. She got back to you through the dating site. The messages continued until a few weeks before her murder.’

‘No,’ Hartmann said. ‘I didn’t write any of this. Look at the emails I do write. This isn’t my style.’

‘Your style?’ Meyer said, laughing.

Hartmann pointed to the dates on the messages.

‘These are months after I stopped using the site. I met someone. Rie. I didn’t want to go on like that any more.’

He stacked the pages, passed them back.

‘I put it behind me. I didn’t write those messages.’

The lawyer said, ‘Someone hacked into his email account.’

‘In City Hall?’ Lund asked.

‘I told you before,’ Hartmann said. ‘I had concerns.’

‘Anyone could have had access to the flat,’ the lawyer added. ‘The keys were kept in a desk. A visitor, someone else in City Hall could have copied them.’

‘Oh please—’ Meyer started.

‘Listen to me! I admit I created that profile. I don’t know who wrote those messages or how they got into the flat. They must have got my password. They pretended to be me.’