It stung. Pedersen went pale, as if he had used up his last lottery ticket, and it got worse when the Countess, after a brief nod to Pauline, went to her office while Berg stood up in front of him. Much too close.
“There’s something you should know, Arne. Something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while.”
He simply nodded.
“You and me, it’s almost too much fun for you.”
“No, absolutely not. You shouldn’t think that.” His denial was genuine, and he stretched a hand out for her.
“Be still and listen. You have your children. Your wife, your house, your regular mealtimes.”
Again he simply nodded, without knowing what he should say. She grasped his head and looked him in the eyes.
“From now on it will be on my terms. When I want, if I want it, that is. Do you understand?”
He nodded a third time. She kissed him on the mouth, then pushed him away, then changed tack and suddenly sounded like a pouty schoolgirl.
“I don’t like the idea of playing governess to Malte and whatever that little chit is who has turned his head. A weekend away, God help me. Why can’t I be with the rest of you? Can’t you talk to Simon?”
Chapter 68
The drive to Ullerløse, four kilometers northeast of Vig in Odsherred, took a good hour and a quarter and Konrad Simonsen took pleasure in the trip. The sky cleared up the farther east he went and soon the Danish countryside was smiling at him in sunshine, which elevated his good mood even more.
The interview with Anni Staal had exceeded his expectations and he was sure that she was headed back to her office convinced that she had a new sensation on her hands that would shake the nation and generate record sales. He had confirmed the robbery-murder angle and then given her a series of additional details that were lies from beginning to end, but carefully formulated so as to be impossible to corroborate. He had also forced her to turn off the tape recorder and rely on her rusty stenography so that she would not be able to pin him to his words later. If her article was enough to shake the vigilante group, and perhaps draw Climber into the light through Erik Mørk, remained to be seen. There was reason to hope.
He had no problems finding the village, which turned out to be a collection of houses clustered around a supermarket and a church. He slowed down and drove slowly down the main street to gain an impression of the place. There was no sign of any industry or other places of employment and-apart from an elderly woman on a bicycle-no people. Soon he was out on the other side and surrounded by fields, so he turned the car around and headed back and stopped by the supermarket, which he assumed was the village gathering place. He was received in a friendly manner by an overweight storekeeper with an infectious, joyous laugh.
“If this is about the past here in Ullerløse, you’ll have to get a hold of old Severinsen, and it would be smart of you to take a couple of those cans with you. They help jog his memory.”
She smiled as she handed him a couple of beers. Then she followed him out of the store and pointed, smiling, at the house where the man lived.
Shortly thereafter he stepped into old Severinsen’s backyard, where he heard someone chopping firewood. Severinsen was a weather-beaten and sinewy old man. He was dressed in worn, dirty green work clothes and his thin white hair fluttered in the wind around a beautifully furrowed face. He laid his ax down when he saw that he had a visitor. A dog of uncertain extraction raised its head and stared at Simonsen before it lay back down to sleep. After having shaken hands, the old man led him to a moldy bench along the side of the house. Simonsen sat down and hoped for the best. The bench held up, and he opened the beers.
“They say you’ve lived here a long time.”
“My whole life.”
“I’ve come from Copenhagen to hear something about the brothers Allan and Frank Ditlevsen. Can you remember them?”
The old man drank some of his beer and Simonsen followed suit. Then the man spit contemptuously. Simonsen copied him. The beer tasted like a disaster.
“You didn’t like them?”
“No, they were pieces of shit. They spent more time at the pub than on honest work and if there was anything they could get away with, they did.” A peculiar expression came into his face. “They are both dead. Someone hung them in the capital city. It’s nothing less than they deserved.”
The information was not completely accurate but Simonsen did not correct him.
“I beat up their dad one time when we were young. He is of course also dead and has been for a long time, but no one around here misses them. They were rotten bastards, all three of them, if you ask me.”
“I have some names that I wonder if they mean anything to you.”
“Let’s hear them.”
He started with the first name on his short list: “Andreas Linke?”
The old man reflected on this. Then he said, “Andreas. Well, I don’t know exactly… I can remember dates and see faces, but I forget names.”
“So you don’t know him?”
“Maybe. Andreas-it could be the son, that is, the grandson, but Linke I know of course. That’s the German. Yes, we never called him anything but the German even though Linke was his name. He lived here for many years, right next to the brothers for that matter.”
Simonsen felt triumph rush through him, the beginning of an intense relief in his body, swelling to a boastful pride and culminating in an inner roar of victory that felt as if it separated everything around him into a before and after. He had found Climber!
What he wanted most of all was to take a little walk around the garden and savor the moment but, of course, that wouldn’t help anything. He continued the conversation.
“They were neighbors?”
“Yes, they were, but the addresses are different. The German lived on the side of the road down by the church, and the road there stretches into a curve so the last two houses toward the forest lie directly behind the brothers, who lived on the main road. A Copenhager lives there now but he’s never there.”
“Do you want to tell me about the German?”
The old man nodded. For a while he just sat and thought himself back in time, then he started to tell.
“The German, well that’s a long story. After the war, in the summer of 1945, he moved in together with his wife. They wanted to get off the main road a bit because the missus had been through a little of everything-had her hair cropped, that kind of thing-and back then there weren’t many who wanted anything to do with that kind of folk. Later they came and took him away. He wasn’t a real German, he was from Tønder, part of a minority population, but he had fought for Hitler so he had to sit on the inside for a couple of years while the wife had a baby and everything. Well, she was hardly a tender mother and there were all manner of things that people said that he had done even though most of it was just idle rumor. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been let out after three years.”
“And the wife had a child?”
“Yes, it was a girl, and then she had another while he was still in prison but that one disappeared. Well, she brought shame on herself, but on the other hand… things weren’t completely easy for her, to manage the everyday and such. And they reconciled when he got out in 1949 and then there were two of them to get things to work. He hired himself out locally as a farmhand. He was strong and as time passed people thought less often of the war so in the end he was an appreciated commodity. But then the girl grew up. She was quite pretty. She went to study in Nykøbing, that must have been in 1960 or 1961, but it wasn’t long before she moved back home again knocked up, as it were. Well, well-she was a chip off the old block, and then they had to start over, the old couple.”
“So she had a baby as well.”
“She certainly did, and she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The old couple never complained. They were used to it. Back then the German had gotten a secure position at the automobile factory in Vig and the mother and daughter kept a kitchen garden, some chickens and such and that yielded a trifle. And they looked after the little boy. But then came the fire. It was in 1964, October 1964, I remember it well. It was a tragic story.”