“Smashing-that’s it, almost word-for-word. You are amazing.”
“The father dies in 1985. That same year, Frank Ditlevsen becomes an independent instructor and earns a degree in languages in record time, namely the time it takes him to falsify his educational credentials. He builds a solid little enterprise with a firm client base within larger companies in the Copenhagen area. No one questions his background.”
“Right. As far as I can tell, it’s only come out now during the course of the investigation.”
“Yes, his clients did not doubt him, or else they were simply satisfied. He appears to have been good at his job. Now, on with the report. In 1994, Frank Ditlevsen buys the house in Middelford and two years later he gets divorced. Mother and daughter move away. After he gets out of prison, Allan Ditlevsen gains more stability in his professional life by getting a job selling hot dogs and delivering newspapers in Allerslev, and the past few years there is not much to report. People who knew the brothers all describe a quiet life, but we haven’t been able to track down any close friends as of yet. They may not have had any.”
The Countess stepped abruptly on the brake and a fox barely escaped with its life. It disappeared into a thicket.
Berg had finally put two and two together. She asked skeptically, “When did you get this report?”
“At five this morning. I’ve had it for three hours, so you don’t have to feel stupid.”
“It’s impressive regardless of whether you’ve had time to prepare. I mean, you remember all those dates.”
“Perhaps I don’t. You can’t check everything.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“And wake you up? Why should I? But listen to this. We’ll be there soon.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“If you disregard Allan’s two charges and Frank’s unfortunate predilection for acquiring borrowed feathers, the brothers appear to be a genuine socialsuccess story. Their start in life was far from promising, but little by little they got on solid financial ground and stable employment. The only red flag is that the two men’s finances don’t quite add up. Three experienced accountants have compared the contents of the house and the brothers’ bank statements with the household incomes. Going by Danish tax laws, the accounts make more sense if the two of them had additional income that the income tax authorities knew nothing about. But this is guesswork. We don’t have any concrete evidence.”
The assumptions about black-market activity were strongly supported during the course of the afternoon, when the search of the house revealed one hundred sixty thousand kroner in cash. The officer who had discovered the money proudly displayed it to Pauline Berg and said, “The bills were stored in four boxes of frozen ground fish, stuffed into the very back of the freezer. The ground fish didn’t fit in with the rest of the contents, which could all go straight into the oven. The money lay at the very bottom of the boxes in packets of forty-one-thousand-kroner bills. The top layer was frozen fish and the cartons were carefully glued back together. The fish cartons were without a doubt selected because their width so perfectly fits the length of the bills.”
Pauline Berg wasn’t sure if she was expected to praise him. The officer was twice as old as she was, so it felt strange. She looked in vain for the Countess.
“That’s clever, very clever.”
She felt ridiculous, but the man’s face lit up and he said, “This find, combined with the fact that most of the videos contain child pornography, makes the case obvious.”
“Yes, completely obvious.”
“If you ask me, they got what they deserved.”
But Berg was not asking. She set about counting out the money, until he left. The bills were freezing.
The next development in the investigation came that afternoon, and as fate would have it, the two women from Copenhagen were responsible for them both, which was extremely unfair to the horde of hardworking officers, but the great detective in the sky clearly did not feel in the mood to reward classic police work this time around.
Most of the credit had to be attributed to the Countess in that her discovery came from a series of excellent conclusions. There was hardly any doubt that the brothers sold child pornography. The amount of cash in the freezer, their videos, Frank Ditlevsen’s electronic equipment, and the charges filed against Allan Ditlevsen all pointed in this direction, and the most promising channel of distribution was the Internet. A brief but skilled examination of Frank Ditlevsen’s Internet transactions, however, eliminated the possibility of the electronic distribution of illegal material. The brothers must have used a more traditional method of sale that would have been slower but more secure, and in this light the hot-dog stand emerged as a three-star disguise.
The Countess assigned four officers to the matter and they drove to Allerslev, where the remains of the stand had been tossed into containers. With the ground-fish cartons in mind, she told the men to look for objects that had earlier been stored in the commercial freezer and two black plastic bags were recovered and opened. The Countess was pleased. She encouraged the men with a short pep talk and then removed herself from the smell. The upshot was uplifting-almost thirty foul-smelling CD-ROMs.
Pauline Berg’s contribution to the investigation was an itch and felt like a complete accident. When the Countess drove to Allerslev, Berg felt superfluous. That she was expected to discover this or that was a given, she just didn’t know how. In the absence of a more brilliant idea she walked around the garden without discovering anything except a persistent itch under her boot in a particular place. She tried to mitigate the situation by kicking herself in the heel a couple of times but to no avail except that the irritation claimed more of her attention and soon appeared unbearable. On her way up the stairs to the main entrance she stopped and pulled her zipper down with one hand while with the other she leaned against the mailbox, bolted into the wall to the left of the door. It was awkward but better than sitting down on the wet stone steps. After having scratched herself thoroughly she realized that the bottom of the mailbox felt wrong. The mailbox was constructed so that the sides extended a few centimeters past the bottom. She bent down and peered up at it. A special holder was glued to each end to enable the convenient concealment of two hard-disk drives.
Chapter 40
Saturday became a frustrating day for Konrad Simonsen and his investigation. Arne Pedersen’s pessimistic prophecy about a flood of false information, in reaction to the publication of Arthur Elvang’s posthumous photographs of the victims of the mass murder in Bagsværd came true to an unfortunate degree.
Already on Friday evening the calls had started to pour in to police stations around the country, especially to the police headquarters in Copenhagen. The majority were from people who tried to impress on their listeners all kinds of nonsense about the murder victims. Many were easy to weed out, but not all, so the work of identifying the deceased went on. The exception was Mr. Northwest, who was confirmed as Thor Gran, a fifty-four-year-old architect from Århus. Two architecture students had walked into the Lyngby police station with a newsletter, The Architect, from April 1999 with an article about landmark buildings and restoration techniques by Thor Gran. Even a layman could have established a connection between the picture in the newsletter and Arthur Elvang’s facial re-creation. With the identification of Mr. Northwest, all that was missing were the names for Mr. Northeast and Mr. Southeast. Simonsen had gone home convinced that both of these would be established by the time they met the following day. This optimism was perhaps justified since he did not know that the two architecture students had been rejected three times and that only their determination had secured the investigation’s results.