‘I’m with you, but where do we come in? It may be a mess, I’ll give you that, but people found dead with a broken neck at the bottom of a flight of stairs have only very rarely been murdered.’
‘True, nor is there any indication that Jørgen Kramer Nielsen was either, which Hans Ulrik Gormsen, to his great resentment, was told in no uncertain terms when he presented his photos to the police prosecutor. After that, nothing more happened for a month or so, until Gormsen moved on to a new job as security executive in a private company. At this point he decides to pick up the postman case, as he calls it, and lay it out for his mother-in-law. And she was a lot easier to convince that a crime had taken place. Unfortunately, his mother-in-law happens to be vice-chairman of the Parliamentary Legal Affairs Committee.’
‘Oh, Christ.’
‘My sentiments exactly, but the bottom line is we’re expected to spend a couple of days, maybe a week, on Kramer Nielsen’s death, after which we write out a report confirming the man died as a result of a simple domestic fall.’
Pauline Berg guessed:
‘A report the Deputy Commissioner can present to Gormsen’s mother-in-law with a clean conscience?’
‘Exactly, yes. Are you still interested? Or do you want me to tell Arne you’d rather be on the school shooting with everyone else?’
Pauline threw her hands up in annoyance.
‘The fat kid? No, thanks. That case is too depressing.’
She ignored Simonsen’s admonishment to be respectful and stared into space for a while. He waited patiently, and eventually she spoke.
‘What do we know about this postman? Any previous?’
Simonsen shook his head.
‘We know practically nothing apart from this. It’s all we’ve got.’
He handed her a sheet of paper from the folder.
On 5 March 1996, Jørgen Kramer Nielsen was attacked and beaten up on his postal route. His assailant was a forty-year-old fitter from Rødovre, no criminal record. Jørgen Kramer Nielsen had the stuffing knocked out of him, and the attack only stopped because a patrol car happened by. He was taken to Hvidovre Hospital, but afterwards neither man wished to make a statement, and Nielsen had refused to press charges. The assailant was detained, only to be released later.
Pauline Berg read the report through twice. It was quickly done. She handed it back and said in a wistful tone:
‘The others see me as some kind of untouchable. The Countess doesn’t know where to look, and no one really knows what to do with me. They treat me like an unwanted gift, something no one really likes, but which can’t be discarded either. What I’d really like is a case of my own, but Arne won’t give me one.’
‘I see.’
‘When I get up each morning I feel like it’s going to be the last day of my life. And as for the clothes… well, I don’t like my old stuff any more, the stuff I wore before… before it happened. It makes me afraid.’
‘Then wear your uniform. I can’t take you anywhere in that get-up.’
All of a sudden, she smiled at him warmly. Optimistically, almost.
‘OK, so tell me where to start.’
Arne Pedersen had allocated considerable resources to uncovering what might have been behind the shooting at the Marmorgade school, and their efforts quickly paid off.
The teacher who had been killed turned out to have been an arsehole, as Pedersen himself put it. Tobias Juul was thirty-two years old with a sideline in drug-dealing, supplying mainly to young teenage girls, among them a couple from the Year 11 class he taught. A search of his home revealed a wide selection of narcotics: ecstasy, amphetamine, methamphetamine and cocaine. But he was involved in other shady activities too. Once his girls, as he had referred to them, had become sufficiently addicted and had worked up a sizeable debt, he exploited them sexually. First, for his own pleasure, then later as a money-maker.
Arne Pedersen informed Konrad Simonsen of his findings. Not because Simonsen was a part of the investigation, he wasn’t, but more as a sparring partner, someone he could lean on. He elaborated on Tobias Juul.
‘That said, it was all small-scale. Juul was no big fish.’
‘So where does the shooting come in?’
‘We could basically be dealing with a common-or-garden crime of passion. We’re thinking that Robert Steen Hertz, the boy with the gun, might have been trying to help one of his classmates, a Maja Nørgaard. It seems she was one of Tobias Juul’s girls, to stay in the vernacular. Hertz may have had a crush on her, but of course he’d never have stood a chance with all that weight he was carrying. Maybe he wanted to save her, or whatever you want to call it.’
‘It sounds like you’re closing in on a motive. What about the gun? Where did he get it from?’
‘Good question. How does a sixteen-year-old Danish lad get hold of a nine-millimetre ArmyTocx SA-5 submachine gun? I’ve no idea, not yet. And your optimism as to the motive might still be a bit premature, I fear. These two girls, Maja Nørgaard being one, aren’t helping us one little bit. Both of them are denying any knowledge of events at all. It doesn’t matter what we’re asking them, they haven’t a clue, so they say. At the moment it’s all uphill. The parents are backing them, of course, especially Maja Nørgaard’s mother. She’s even hired a solicitor. I’m telling you, she’s a bloody nightmare, built like a barn and arrogant as hell. The truth of the matter is it’s the mother who’s obstructing the inquiry, but there’s not a lot I can do about it. The only alternative is to give her the swerve and piece things together as best we can based on second-hand accounts.’
‘Why is she being like that about it?’
‘I don’t know for sure, but most likely she’s afraid word’s going to get out. Her little diddums involved in drugs and prostitution. How the kid feels about it seems to be beside the point. Anyway, how’s the postman case coming along?’
Pedersen chuckled as he asked this.
‘It’s coming along.’
‘What about Pauline? Any problems there?’
‘None whatsoever.’
Konrad Simonsen had begun with the priest, the downstairs neighbour of the deceased postman Jørgen Kramer Nielsen, partly so as to have a look at the house in which the death occurred, partly to speak to the witness whose statement he assumed to be the most reliable. It would give him something to write in his report.
The priest turned out to be an amicable sort, a man in his late thirties who guessed Simonsen’s thoughts the moment he noticed the policeman’s somewhat surprised expression on seeing his white dog collar.
‘That’s right, I’m Catholic. It always seems to throw people a bit if they aren’t expecting it, so let me start by saying I don’t bite.’
He laughed warmly. Konrad Simonsen laughed, too, and they shook hands.
The man’s recollections of what had happened on 29 February were quickly dealt with. He had returned home from holiday to find his upstairs neighbour dead on the staircase. Simonsen moved on to the heart of the matter.
‘And you’re sure you didn’t move the body or alter its position in any way before the ambulance arrived?’
‘Why on earth would I do that? Jørgen was obviously dead, so there was nothing I could do.’
‘Quite. What about the police officers who came? Did any of them change the way the body was lying compared to how you found him?’
‘You mean, before the ambulance people took him away?’
‘Of course.’
The priest thought back, before answering with some measure of uncertainty:
‘The young detective placed a matchbox next to the head before taking photos with his mobile phone. To give an idea of relative dimensions, I suppose. I remember thinking it odd for him to have a matchbox at hand. I mean, who carries matches around with them these days? But he didn’t touch the body.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Yes… yes, quite sure.’