Only years of training made it possible for the Countess to conceal her amazement. An amorous connection between this woman and the janitor was the last thing she would have imagined and the age difference alone made it rude to ask. And then there was the difference in lifestyle. To her great astonishment, Emilie Mosberg Floyd did not dismiss the thought out of hand, nor was she self-conscious in the least.
“No, not sexual, not in the traditional sense of the word. We have never been to bed with each other. Per would never have agreed to anything like that.”
“But you had a relationship?”
“Yes, you could say that. We did.”
For the first time during her questioning, the woman was reticent, and the Countess sent silent thoughts of gratitude to her boss. When he was good, he was very good. The psychiatrist’s weak link had obviously been his wife. This was beginning to make sense. She slipped in the next question: “When you drove him home, did you stay with him?”
“In the beginning we talked in the car. Later on we went into his place and talked, sometimes all night. Or I slept while he lay next to me. My marriage was very rocky at that time. My husband was always at work and he expected me to do everything at home. To top it off, he had other women on the side and he often took his vacation by himself. Per helped me. He told me which battles I should take on and when and which I should put aside until later. He consulted Jeremy, I consulted him, and in the end we all won. That is, before these… crimes occurred. Per died and the newspaper wrote all kinds of things about him. That was hard. I was frustrated and angry and sad at the same time, and I miss him so terribly, much more than I miss Jeremy, but I couldn’t get away to go to his funeral so I had to settle for putting a bouquet on his grave the next day.”
The Countess observed quietly, “Perhaps it was also because you had guessed at the connection and didn’t wish to get involved.”
Emilie Mosberg Floyd glanced at the tape recorder and managed a nod. They let it stay at that.
Simonsen said, “It’s hard to imagine that the two of you never talked about how things were going with his therapy. The two of you, as well as your husband and you.”
“We did but only a little. Per preferred to keep those two things separate. Jeremy did too. He hated the fact that I was talking with Per but he had no choice but to accept it. When I told him about it he was furious and threatened to stop Per’s treatment but then for the first time I stood up for myself. I told him in that case I would take the children and leave. He backed down at that and it was my first victory. Later there were others.”
“But from time to time his name must have come up.”
“Yes, it did. When the one-on-one sessions between Jeremy and his patients were over he liked to place them in self-help groups. How long it took for a patient to be paired with that kind of group could vary a lot from case to case. It could be anything from six months to a year. Jeremy was very very careful about constructing groups that he thought would be successful, including taking geographic locations into account if he could. His patients often came from far away, some even from Jutland. A group usually consisted of four to six individuals and in the beginning they met with Jeremy under his direction. After a while they were supposed to continue on their own without him; they were-so to speak-kicked out of the nest, a process that took a couple of months but could also vary from group to group.”
“And Per Clausen joined this kind of group?”
“That was the problem. I talked with Jeremy a couple of times about it. He had some reservations about ending Per’s treatment in that way. For his part, Per very much wanted to join a group. He told me so at several different times and I put a lot of pressure on Jeremy to give him what he wanted.”
She stared sadly out into the room, then parted with her last bit of information.
“Yes, I forced him to do it, I’m afraid, and Jeremy probably also wanted to be done with Per. Push him out of our lives, so to speak. It was hard for him to separate the personal and professional in Per’s case.”
“Why did he have reservations? Was it because Per Clausen had not been abused himself?”
“No, it was something else. In part he was afraid that Per would dominate the group and there was some ground for his apprehension. As I mentioned, Per had an incredible manipulative strength, but that wasn’t the problem. It was more that Per… Per just hated pedophiles. With a red-hot, glowing hatred. We talked about Helene’s stepfather once, that he was seriously ill. Per told me that and was overjoyed. I don’t know where he had heard it. Another time there had been one of those terrible cases where a child had been killed. Per’s reaction was pathological. Not that he seemed beside himself, it was more the opposite. He was very… controlled, and at the same time he managed to frighten me without really saying very much. It’s difficult to explain. He was… I don’t know how to explain so that you will understand. He was… creepy. It was a side of him I didn’t like but perhaps it was his real self if we have something like that. Jeremy said once that there was not enough coal in the world to paint a true picture of Per’s soul, but it was during an argument so he was exaggerating.”
Neither of her listeners was convinced of this detail but both refrained from comment. On the other side of glass, Troulsen shook his head in vexation. Her story was substantially different from the one she had told only a short while ago.
Simonsen asked, “So the result was that Per Clausen joined a group?”
“Yes, he did, and Jeremy gathered together a group of people that he felt could offer Per a certain resistance, who had strong personalities themselves. The whole thing was quite an undertaking for him.”
“But you never got the names? Either from your husband or Per Clausen?”
“No, no, I never did.”
She hesitated.
There was something else and the Countess gave her the classic opening: “But…”
“But… there were some… some episodes. Per commented one time that one could say a lot about pedophiles but their victims spanned the social spectrum. Something like that, and then he added, a nurse, a farmer, an advertising executive, a janitor, and a climber. That was right after his group was formed.”
“A climber. What did he mean by that?”
“I don’t know. I wondered that myself when I had time to think it over. In that situation I figured he meant Jeremy, who was a mountain climber in his spare time, but he probably meant someone else. Per would hardly refer to Jeremy as a climber but paradoxically enough I think that that’s the reason I can recall the phrase at all, indeed, that I can remember the order. Of course, I have no idea if he mentioned all of them.”
“You never saw them?”
“Never, none of them, apart from Per, of course. He always came a little early and sat with me in the kitchen and had a cup of coffee. That is to say, those times when I didn’t pick him up. After that he would go down to Jeremy. The others used the basement entrance.”
The Countess let her arms fall helplessly to her side. The woman misunderstood this gesture and preassumed it indicated a lack of respect for the patient’s right to anonymity. She suddenly sounded sharp and professional.
“A violation of anonymity at the wrong time can often mean the difference between success and failure in this kind of therapy. I don’t think you really understand what sexual abuse in childhood does to people and how deeply it scars their souls. Did you know that some victims have to go to special dentists for the rest of their lives because they have such an intractable resistance to opening their mouths for others?”
This was a side of her they had not yet seen. It was the cardiologist commanding the nurse. The Countess didn’t bother to explain herself, she simply apologized. That was the easiest. Simonsen brought the conversation back to the matter at hand.