Fucking 87 million kroner,” Sejr said with a big smile when Louise came into the office the next morning. “I got the information about Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen’s foreign accounts from Interpol just before I went home yesterday.”
After her visit with Britt, Louise had forgotten how impatient she’d been to have a look at the hidden account on the Isle of Man. On the way in, she’d followed Jonas to school. They’d biked together along Gammel Kongevej, and afterward she’d had time to stop in at a bakery.
Now her adrenaline was rising.
“Son of a bitch!” she exclaimed and was about to turn on her desk lamp but stopped herself. Instead, she turned on her electric kettle and found a tea bag for her mug.
Sejr Gylling pointed to the lamp.
“You can turn it on. As long as you aim it toward yourself.”
Louise pushed a bakery bag across the desk.
“There are a whole lot of bank statements we need to look through. If you have time, I’d suggest we go through the printouts from the foreign account.”
Louise nodded.
“That’s a helluva lot of money!” she exclaimed in a broad mid-Zealand dialect and tipped her chair back while she waited for the water to boil. “How in the hell did he earn so much on the side? Weren’t his businesses at home doing terrific, too?”
Sejr nodded.
“Yes, they look pretty healthy. It’s like we guessed: profits from foreign customers and investments that were made abroad. Buy and sell, and then he found it attractive to go into the fast-cash business that Hartmann had going, where he could double his investment in no time. It gives you quite a high to haul in that kind of profit.”
Louise nodded and mumbled that you could certainly say that.
“And that kind of gambling fits very well with his interest in extreme sports. Isn’t it paragliding and that sort of thing you said he does?”
She nodded again.
“That type of person is attracted to the thrill of pushing himself all the way over the edge, and you can do that in several ways,” he added and straightened his cap a bit so the light from Louise’s desk lamp wouldn’t shine in his eyes.
“Have you found anything that ties Ulrik with Hartmann or the boys in the boathouse?”
“Not directly. There haven’t been any money transfers between Nick Hartmann and Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen except for the rent, which was paid every month,” he said. “And that went into the completely normal business account.”
He held back a little before his smile grew bigger and he added, “But in the beginning of July there was a transfer of 660,000 dollars to Yang, Inc. in Hong Kong from the account on the Isle of Man.”
“Holy shit!” exclaimed Louise and leaned forward excitedly.
The water boiled, but she ignored it.
She saw clearly the contours of the double life Ulrik had going, and that he seemed to be more of a smooth operator than she’d been capable of seeing at first.
“With that transfer, can we be sure that it was him who paid for the second container?” she asked dubiously, suddenly nervous that everything could fall apart again.
“I think so,” Sejr said, warding off her worries. “I have Hartmann’s business folders and papers here, but there’s nothing for the extra container. Only for the one he had delivered last time, and the earlier deliveries he received. But on the freight paper both containers are entered with numbers, so I’ve written to the office in Hong Kong to have them pull the invoices. We need to confirm that the money that was transferred from the British bank was payment for the specific container number. And when we have that, then the trap’s closed.”
The picture was now quite clear. Ulrik and Hartmann had known each other from Ulrik’s courses. Hartmann had presumably gotten greedy and wanted to run import alongside the business he had going with the bikers. But he didn’t have enough capital for investing, and that’s when he turned to Ulrik. He had plenty of capital and was more than happy to see his money multiply.
There was a knock on the door, and Willumsen came in.
“People are a hell of a lot dumber than you’d think!” he said with a certain enthusiasm and closed the door behind him. “That apprentice-mechanic idiot definitely was out in Værløse getting parts for his supervisor, but he also took a little side trip up to North Zealand with a child’s bed.”
He sat down on a bureau inside the door and clapped his hands together.
“The fool forgot about the packaging from a set of baby sheets and the receipt from BabySam on Roskildevej. All of it was lying in the back of the garage’s box van.”
Willumsen slapped himself on the forehead.
“Oh, my God! If the criminal mind is in such rapid decline, then there’s some damn hope for us in the future.”
Louise grinned and shook her head, then stood up to pour water over her tea bag.
“That’s a relief for Mie,” she said.
She offered the lead investigator a cup of tea and pointed to the bakery bag.
Willumsen declined the tea, but looked over at the cola Sejr had on the desk.
“You’re welcome to take one,” the fraud investigator said and pointed to the refrigerator.
“How about the arrestees?” asked Louise. “Are they still not saying who ordered or paid for the job?”
Willumsen shook his head and twisted the cap off his half-liter cola.
“They’re saying nothing. And we probably won’t get them to, either. That’s biker rule number one, and if they break it they’ll be targeted the whole time they sit in the slammer. A couple of goons like them know that much.”
“Yes,” said Louise, knowing he was right.
“The problem with these damned biker assholes is that they never get their hands dirty,” he said.
He took a gulp from the bottle and opened the bakery bag, fishing out a pastry.
“They’re uncanny about avoiding the fall when one of their businesses goes bad.”
The lead investigator took a big bite of his pastry.
Louise nodded thoughtfully.
“It probably wasn’t all that difficult for the bikers to see what Hartmann was up to when he suddenly went off on his solo ride,” she said. “They would have been bat-shit angry, and wouldn’t have wanted to be cheated like that. And so, they got their trainees to put a stop to him.”
“In a way, that’s what Thim and Thomas Jørgensen have already confessed to,” the lead investigator said. “They just won’t cough up the names of the ones who were behind it. And maybe they don’t even know them,” he said, brushing crumbs off his pullover. “After all, it was Nymann who was the primary contact and got paid for the killing.”
“I’d like to know if a new team’s being sent after Mie, now that Thim and Thomas Jørgensen are sitting behind bars,” Louise said.
She dove into the bag herself and broke a pastry in two.
Willumsen shook his head.
“Actually, I don’t think so. They might make big, bad threats, but usually nothing happens when there are witnesses against the bikers. It’s extremely seldom that there are revenge attacks afterward. And they know we’re onto them. The bikers got those two to take a test, and they got nothing out of it. Now it’s too dangerous to do more.”
Louise nodded and thought he was probably right.
“But what the hell are we doing with this stuff?” asked Willumsen. “We need to get the father in, so he and the wife can each have their own cell out at Vestre. They’re one hell of a nice married couple.”
Sejr pulled his chair over to the corner of the desk, so he sat facing Willumsen.
“What we’re doing with this stuff is, Rick and I are going through everything there is on Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen, so we’re well-armed when we pull him in,” he said.
He gave a rare smile.
“And you can go in to the lieutenant and tell him there’s a rather considerable offshoot that’s come up in connection with the investigation of the fire and the Hartmann shooting. If these things hadn’t fallen together, then Fasting-Thomsen could have kept on living his double life, free and clear, until the day he decided to leave his wife and head out of the country with his lover, or a new one like her.”
“Yup, the whole thing’s been damned unlucky for him,” Willumsen said happily.
He thanked them for the soft drink and pastry.
“If you can make it, then come to the morning meeting. But it’s more important that you take care of this stuff, so we can get our claws in him.”
He hummed contentedly as he left the office.