Pauline Berg removed her legs from the armrest of her chair and sighed heavily.
‘There’s no need for a raid for what we want. Can’t you get it into your heads, the only thing we need from you lot is some reliable information?’
The officers left. Simonsen found himself thinking he’d gone about this all the wrong way. Willing co-operation and support from local police was crucial. No one cared much for arrogant Copenhageners thinking they ran the country. He put it down to being tired and promised himself to phone the duty sergeant at Aalborg East where the two officers were from and apologise for his behaviour. He looked at Pauline and corrected himself: he would apologise for his colleague’s behaviour. He studied her for a second.
‘How are you feeling anyway?’
He’d meant to ask her on the plane over, had decided even before leaving that it would be a good opportunity. But as things turned out they’d ended up sitting several rows apart. Now would be as good a time as any, he thought. It would still be a while before Klavs Arnold got there. He was on his way from Esbjerg by car and surely wouldn’t arrive until after lunch.
Pauline lifted her head and looked at Simonsen, and for a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer. But then she spoke, and when she did her words were measured.
‘Not that good, I’m afraid. But thanks for asking.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. He stared out of the window. On the dock, a crane was unloading a container from a ship. A man in a hi-vis jacket waved his arms, though Simonsen couldn’t see what for. After a moment she spoke again.
‘At night I keep dreaming she’s calling out to me.’
He froze and shook his head imperceptibly.
‘I wish you’d let that… case… go.’
‘I’d like to. At least, sometimes I would. Other times I’m convinced there’s something not right. Something that’s never come to light, never been investigated.’
Neither of them uttered the name, as if both of them wished to avoid it. And yet they knew what they were talking about: the Juli Denissen case, that wasn’t a case at all. The dead woman Pauline Berg still couldn’t put out of her mind.
Simonsen wished he hadn’t asked. Pauline went on, despondently:
‘That case is going to haunt me for a long time to come, I can feel it. I can’t let go of it, even though I want to. But if it’s any consolation to you, I’m on my own with it now. Nobody else sees the point any more.’
‘I was thinking more about how you we were feeling generally.’
‘I know. And the answer is: not good a lot of the time. The last few weeks at work I’ve been scared stiff I’m going to burst out crying any minute. Just like that, for no reason. I feel like crying now.’
‘It wouldn’t matter if you did.’
She laughed, but her eyes were serious.
‘Hypocrite. You can’t stand women crying.’
It was true. He smiled at her and thought the exact opposite of what he’d thought two seconds before: that now and again they understood each other.
‘I’m reading a lot of stuff from the sixties,’ she said, ‘and watching films from the era. I was at the library on Saturday going through newspapers from nineteen sixty-nine on the microfiche down in the basement. There was this striplight that kept flickering all the time, it was annoying the shit out of me.’
‘Is that because I took you off Helena Brage Hansen’s problem pages?’
‘No, not really.’
She stared into space before going on.
‘When I do a thing, I tend to go all the way. Sometimes I take things to extremes. It’s the same with men, but you wouldn’t want to hear about that, would you?’
‘Yes, I would.’
What the hell else was he supposed to say? Of course he didn’t.
‘I know I’m being a pain. But I’m going to tell you now, my life’s like some terrible dream, a dark and heavy storm, and I can’t wake up from it. I can never sleep at night, a few minutes at a time is all I can manage unless I take pills, and the more I take, the more I need. I can’t concentrate either. I can’t remember things. And then there’s the feeling of being scared, it’s there all the time. Sometimes I can cope with it, other times it’s bad. I don’t think it’s ever going to leave me again.’
She paused, adding without self-pity:
‘I can’t help it.’
‘No, of course not. No one gets scared on purpose.’
She seemed not to hear him.
‘I think sometime… I mean, all that nostalgia you’re piling up inside yourself… but what about me, two thousand and eight, here and now?’
Simonsen folded his arms and considered her, cursing himself inside.
She began to cry. Nonetheless, her voice remained quite calm.
‘Leave me alone for a bit. I just need to sit here on my own. I’ll see you at lunch.’
As he closed the door behind him he wondered if he should take her some tissues. But on the other hand… she’d said she wanted to be on her own. He felt in need of a cigarette, and spineless because of it, but at the same time invigorated. It was an odd combination. No one gets scared on purpose. That’s what the cheesemonger had said at the Department of Forensic Medicine. Now, suddenly, he knew what it meant.
‘We can take Helena’s fear away, Lucy. It’s been there, eating away at her for almost forty years. She’ll welcome us with open arms when we come for her. You and I are going to Norway. That’s what we’ll do. It’s where you’ve been wanting to go all along. I should have listened to you before, my lovely diamond girl.’
It was the first time he had spoken to her. It felt good.
After lunch a new officer arrived from the Aalborg police, one considerably better informed about Jesper and Pia Mikkelsen than her two predecessors. She was attached to a special unit charged with various supervisory tasks relating to young people at risk, in the the city of Aalborg as well as the police district as a whole. As such, she had a good grasp of what was going on in the city’s nightlife, in particular the bars, nightclubs and discos of Jomfru Ane Gade, the city-centre street on which most of Aalborg’s carousing took place, among them Rainbow Six, the club owned in part by Jesper and Pia Mikkelsen. Moreover, she had done her homework and came well prepared.
The Mikkelsens had married in 1973, moving to Aalborg in 1978, the same year they opened their second-hand record shop. In 1986 they had purchased a villa in the affluent suburb of Hasseris, where they still lived, and in 1993 had furthermore bought themselves a small, but exclusive holiday home at Gammel Skagen, a summer playground for the jet set and other well-to-do people at the country’s northernmost tip. Neither of the Mikkelsens had any sort of criminal record, and apart from the occasional domestic disturbance that had never resulted in any charges being brought, the couple had had no dealings with police whatsoever. In 1994 they had acquired a fifty per cent share in the Rainbow Six nightclub, as well as a flat above the premises, in which Jesper Mikkelsen had made an office for himself, the rest being used as storage for the couple’s record business. In their private as well as commercial affairs, the couple appeared to keep their individual finances apart, likewise filing separately to the tax authorities.
Pia Mikkelsen returned often to the capital, visiting her brother or his grown-up children. Apparently, she was fond of the Austrian singer and entertainer Hansi Hinterseer, and liked to catch him in concert at least twice a year. Jesper Mikkelsen had no hobbies to speak of, or at least none known to police. However, he was seen often, usually on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, at his club or elsewhere in the city’s nightlife, not infrequently in the company of young girls of somewhat tender age. Whether anything illegal was going on in that respect was hard to tell, and would be even harder to prove, so Mikkelsen was by no means an object of special interest to the police, who had no shortage of other, more important things to be getting on with.