‘We meet again.’
The priest turned, his face lighting up instantly as if he’d run into an old friend.
‘What a nice surprise. Yes, indeed.’
‘A coming together of two people, isn’t that what you called it?’
‘Ah, yes. A coming together.’
‘Have you got time for a chat? I’ve got lots to tell and something I’d like to ask you.’
‘All the time in the world. Shall we find a pub?’
‘Why not just walk? The weather’s nice.’
‘Anywhere in particular?’
Simonsen didn’t know the city at all, so he had no preference. They agreed just to wander, and did so for a while in silence. Eventually, Simonsen spoke:
‘There’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell you. I almost did, when we met in Valby, but this is better.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with our… with the investigation. To tell you the truth, it’s a private matter, and I’m not sure exactly why I want to talk to you about it rather than anyone else. It’s just the way it’s turned out.’
‘I’m all ears, regardless.’
‘Back in nineteen seventy-three I had a girlfriend who’d got herself into a spot of trouble. We were an odd match. I was in the police and she was a left-wing activist.’
He told the story of how, following the Olympic Games massacre in Munich, Rita desperately wanted to break with the political association she’d got herself mixed up in. It wasn’t entirely accurate, insofar as she didn’t actually say as much until the following year, but explaining it this way added cohesion, and it made no difference in terms of what he needed to convey.
‘She wanted to go to the States and start again. Only she didn’t have any money and her ideas for getting hold of some were… well, naive, and would have involved putting herself at risk.’
‘Such is the way when we need money fast.’
‘Don’t I know! Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, my own ideas on the matter were neither naive nor particularly risky. You won’t have been old enough at the time, but there were a lot of struggles going on back then in the early seventies.’
He recounted the strikes, many politically motivated, others simply in favour of higher wages, others still to demonstrate solidarity with striking workers elsewhere, though in many instances it seemed like the actual purpose was known only to the organisers.
‘They called them lightning strikes, or wild strikes, and that’s exactly what they were, though not illegal, even if that’s sometimes claimed.’
‘There was no compulsory labour, not even then.’
‘No, thank goodness.’
Many of these strikes were partly or wholly beyond the control of the established trade unions. They were led by desultory groupings of radicals, thrown together ad hoc. Simonsen named a few examples of ones he could remember. And yet it had also been a time of solidarity, strikers often being helped along financially by what was referred to as the man with the cardboard box.
‘The cardboard box being full of money?’ the priest enquired.
‘Exactly. A lot of money.’
It all went on very discreetly, otherwise the donor, usually another trade union, ran the risk of heavy penalties. No one ever knew anything, Simonsen explained, apart from the fact that some person or persons unknown had been rather charitable all of a sudden. He went on:
‘Oddly enough, this money was actually always delivered in a cardboard box, never a carrier bag or a rucksack, but a cardboard box.’
‘See, hear and speak no evil?’
‘You could say.’
The priest nodded and listened with interest. Simonsen continued with his story. The recipient of the cardboard box would preferably be the senior shop steward for whatever area was on strike. There were no accounts, for obvious reasons, and no involvement by the banks, and thereby no risk of banknotes being traced. Those involved trusted each other, and had to.
‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, it didn’t take a genius to work out who’d have large sums of money stashed away in the bedroom dresser at the end of the month. Quite literally, as it happens.’
‘I understand.’
‘The shop steward I’d picked out lived on his own. In a fourth-floor flat in Nørrebro.’
Simonsen had stolen a bike from outside the Hovedbanegården, the city’s central station, and now he pedalled off, away from Rita and the telephone box. Two hundred metres along the street he turned in through a gateway and got off, wheeling the bike into the courtyard and parking it in the bicycle rack, confident that this was behaviour that would not awake suspicion. Systematically, he glanced around. The yard was deserted, and in the windows at the back of the premises he detected no signs of activity. With purpose in his stride, and without hurrying, he went up to the door leading to the rear stairway, opened it and stepped inside. He stood for a moment as planned, having imagined nerves would require him to pause here and collect himself. To his own surprise, however, he realised he wasn’t in the slightest bit anxious. Nonetheless, he stuck to his plan and slowly counted to thirty before making his way up the stairs to the fourth floor.
He put his ear to the kitchen doors on both sides of the stairway, first one, then the other, listening and hearing nothing. He took his tools from his little rucksack, though only the lock pick proved necessary, the lock a simple and commonplace older variety that took him less than a minute to open. He stepped into a narrow kitchen. Yesterday’s dirty dishes had been left in the sink. The flat was small, comprising besides the kitchen only a living room, a hall and a single bedroom. As soon as he’d satisfied himself he was on his own, he opened the front door, jammed a matchstick in the lock and closed it again gently. Now he’d have plenty of time to make his getaway if the owner suddenly came back in his Wartburg Convertible and Rita, for whatever reason, failed to phone. Thus, he began systematically to search the place, quickly and with efficiency, taking care not to disturb anything unduly.
The shop steward had hidden the money away in the second drawer of the bedroom dresser, wads of banknotes stashed away in nine long socks at the bottom of the drawer. Simonsen checked the contents of one: used notes in large denominations. It could hardly have been better. He stuffed the haul into his rucksack, closed the drawer and left.
The priest summed up without any air of condemnation:
‘So you stole the money from the drawer?’
‘The lot, almost three hundred thousand kroner, an absolute fortune in those days. It’d be ten times the amount today. And, just as I’d thought, it was never reported. It was all dealt with internally, and it can’t have been much fun for that poor shop steward. That was what worried me most, more than the fact that I’d taken something that didn’t belong to me. On the whole, though, if I’m to tell the truth, what I’d done didn’t really bother me that much. I was too busy trying to get the money transferred so my girlfriend could get it paid to her in the States. It was no easy matter, it took some time.’
‘Well, I can’t say I condone what you did. It was wrong, especially in view of the fact that you were in the police. But then you realised that yourself a long time ago?’