“The usual lines of communication are being silenced?”
“In a manner of speaking, but it gets better. You can proceed freely, and you have no resource constraints whether in regard to man-hours or financials. He will take care of any administrative hurdles so that your time can be completely devoted to investigating.”
“That is quite something.”
“Yes, he is not without power. However, he did make a point of saying that your official mandate has not yet been drawn up, but that is just a matter of paperwork. You should get in touch with him when you have a moment. I have his number. So the sum of all this, Simon, is that you are basically your own boss.”
“Did he say that too?”
“No, that is my own conclusion.”
“Hm, it doesn’t really matter to me that the usual protocol is put aside.”
“It’s better than having all kinds of highly elevated men and women throw us around according to their whims.”
“Maybe, but we’ll have to see about that. Right now we have other things to think about.”
Suddenly the bell went off, high-pitched and piercing. No one had thought about shutting it off since the children had been sent home. It caused Simonsen to jump, and his chair groaned. For a split second he lay outstretched on his desk. Pedersen, whose relationship to school bells was less troubled, waited quietly until the noise ceased, after which he completed his report.
“The current division of labor is that Pauline is trawling the neighbors and the outdoor areas of the school, the Countess is responsible for the interior of the school, Troulsen is debriefing the school staff, and I am free now that you’re here. Our most pressing problem is that the dead are as yet unidentified, and that the janitor is missing. Per Clausen is his name and he was likely the one who unlocked the school this morning, but no one has seen him. It is possible that he’s indisposed due to excessive alcohol consumption-apparently that happens from time to time. As for the task of identifying the victims, I have a dozen experienced people occupied with the task of finding out if the five men have been reported missing anywhere. There are not yet any results.”
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 Mørk, 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.”
The clock in the church tower rang the hour. He stood up, stretched his legs, and crouched by the gravestone, where he had noticed a couple of wet leaves clinging to its face. Then he let his finger slide across the etching, back and forth a couple of times. Arne Christian Mørk. 1934-1979. As he meticulously plucked a few weeds that the gardener had overlooked, he continued to speak.
“Yesterday I took a fond farewell of Per, you know Per Clausen, the janitor I was telling you about. He is a fantastic man, and I will miss him. First we ate breakfast, and after that we watched the video sequences I directed. He was full of praise, but I have to admit they did turn out very well. In particular there is one simple one from the minivan that is quite captivating, a satanic little pearl, that will shake public opinion and toughen our national soul. It may become absolutely decisive, you just wait and see. It was Per’s idea to mount hidden cameras above each seat, which was devilishly difficult, but turned out to be worth every bit of trouble. Other than that, we talked about everything between heaven and earth, not just about the coming weeks, almost as if he was on a normal Sunday visit. It is hard to imagine that I’ll never see him again.”
A car drove past on the road behind the cemetery and a few isolated snatches of a car radio broke the peace for a moment or two. He waited until the quiet descended again.
“When Per said goodbye he said something that I have thought a lot about: ‘goodbye, foam guy.’ That was his last word to me: ‘foam guy.’ Said with that crooked little smile that is so typical of him. He was obviously referring to the fact that I used to chew on foam as a child because I thought it could absorb the darkness inside me. I had almost forgotten about it, I mean, that I had told him about it. How I used to pick little bits of foam from all manner of places: cushions and seats, balls from gym class, the sweat band in my riding helmet, yes I even tore little pieces from my mother’s shoulder pads. When I speak of it, I can recall the taste, even though one wouldn’t think foam tastes like anything. But it does. It tastes of wrongdoing, of wrongness and guilt.”