The Hanging Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

importantly to make Rose understand that the case she thought Carl should have done everything in his power to take on for Habersaat didn’t actually have anything to do with them.
    *   *   *
    For the approximately fifty students from eighteen upward enrolled at Bornholm Folk High School for the winter half year, taking courses in music, glasswork, painting, or pottery, November 20th, 1997, had been another typical day with good humor and certainly no sense of danger, explained Birkedal. A totally normal group of mostly happy young students who got along well.
    They didn’t know yet that Alberte, the gentlest, prettiest, and probably also the most popular girl at the school had been killed in a car accident that morning.
    A little more than a day went by before she was found hurled so far up in a tree by the roadside that it was almost impossible to see her. And the man who happened to look up at precisely the moment his car passed the tree, to his own misfortune, was a uniformed police officer from Nexø by the name of Christian Habersaat.
    The sight of the fragile, limp body hanging from a branch burned itself into him, exactly like the inscrutable look that had forever attached itself to the girl’s face.
    Despite only the slightest of leads, it was determined that she hung in the tree as a result of a serious car accident. A rather unpleasant episode that didn’t resemble any other hit-and-run cases in the more recent history of Bornholm.
    Skid marks were searched for but never uncovered. There had been hope that paint flakes would be found in her clothes, but the vehicle had slid past without leaving any trace. Those who lived by the road were questioned, but no one and nothing pointed toward anything or anyone specifically. Only that one person on the stretch of road had heard a car at a terrible speed disappear off in the direction of the main road.
    After that, perhaps due to the death being suspicious or because there were no other cases, a systematic hunt was instigated for vehicles with dents to the front carriage that weren’t immediately explainable. It was probably a day too late but, regardless, all cars on ferry departures to both Sweden and Copenhagen were closely monitored for the whole week, and all twenty thousand vehicles on the entire island were called in for inspection by motor vehicle diagnostics in Rønne and Nexø.
    Despite the obvious disruption, the locals were surprisingly understanding and actively helpful to the extent that no tourist could move on four wheels without the hood being scrutinized by hawkeyed locals.
    Birkedal shrugged his shoulders. “And in spite of all the efforts, the result was zero.”
    The Department Q staff looked tiredly at the police superintendent. Who wanted to tamper with an equation where the end result, regardless of what you did, was always zero?
    “And you know with certainty that it was a traffic-related death?” asked Carl. “Couldn’t it have been something else? What did you learn from the injuries at the postmortem? And what did you find at the collision scene?”
    “That she was probably alive for a time after she was hurled up there. Otherwise: fractures, internal and external bleeding, all the usual. And then we found the bike Alberte had cycled on quite a distance in the thicket and mangled almost beyond recognition.”
    “So she’d cycled there,” Rose said. “Do you still have the bike?”
    Police Superintendent Birkedal shrugged. “It was seventeen years ago and before my time, so I’m not sure. Probably not.”
    “It would be wonderful if you could do me the favor of finding out,” said Rose in a sweet voice and with bashful eyes.
    Birkedal pulled his head back. A handsome married man tends to know when he’s on thin ice. “Why are you so certain that she was thrown up into the tree?” Assad quietly asked. “Couldn’t she have been hauled up there? Was there a search for any sign of cordage on the branches above the body?