Death of a Nightingale (12 page)

“No. I came the other way, from Kokkedal.”

“Did you meet anyone on the way?”

“No. As I told you, it was midnight, more or less. And this isn’t exactly downtown during rush hour. But someone had been here. I could see car tracks in the new snow.”

Søren looked quickly at Veng, but the detective inspector shook his head. “It had been cleared again before we got here,” he said.

“Henrik does that,” said Anna Olesen. “Henrik Rasmussen. He also takes care of the golf course. Groundskeeper. Or whatever it is they call it in golf-speak.” A glint of humor lightened the guarded blue gaze.

“When was the last time you saw Michael Vestergaard?”

“Saw? I’ve seen his car a few times over the last couple days, but we didn’t say hello.”

“Was that unusual?”

“No. We used to be a bit more in touch, actually. He could be quite helpful on occasion.”

“Did you see Natasha Doroshenko often when she was living in the house?”

Anna picked at a thread on her mohair sweater. “We met now and again. Her little girl liked to help feed the cats. We talked about her getting a kitten, but … Well, that never happened.”

“What was your impression of her?”

“My impression? She was a nice young girl. Much too young for him, of course, but in her situation, security is probably not an insignificant attraction. I thought they were fine together until … well.” She interrupted herself in the same way as before. “I had no idea things were that bad.”

“I understand that you were out walking the dog when you found Vestergaard?”

The pink lips tightened. “It was more like the dog walking me. I had let her out when I got up, but she didn’t come back in. That happens sometimes. She doesn’t stray, not really, but she might take
a little excursion if I haven’t walked her enough. When my husband was alive, she would never have considered setting as much as a paw outside the garden without him. He used to take her hunting and had her trained to perfection, but now … Anyway, when she had been gone for an hour, I realized I would have to put on my rubber boots and go search. And then, of course, I heard her.”

“She was barking?”

“Yes. She was sitting next to the car—that is, Michael’s car—and barking as if he were a fox in a hole. And then I could see … Well. I called the police right away.”

“And stayed there, I understand?”

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“Did you notice any traffic during that time?”

“No. It was Saturday morning, so the few commuters we do have weren’t going anywhere.”

There was a very faint lilt to her voice that somehow wasn’t pure Hørsholm. It could be the remains of a regional dialect she had shed, from Fyn or Bornholm, maybe. He couldn’t decide.

“Were you born here on the farm?” he asked.

Again the guarded glance. “No,” she said. “It was Hans Henrik’s childhood home. We didn’t move here until nineteen eighty-two, when his mother and father really couldn’t manage it anymore. Before that we lived in Lund for years.”

“In Sweden.”

“Yes. I taught at the university. Classic philology.”

Not your typical housewife, in other words—and more than averagely intelligent, thought Søren. Something about her aroused his curiosity, and he felt a sudden urge to rummage through her belongings, though what, exactly, he would be looking for, he didn’t know. He had no legal grounds for such a search. If anyone was to do so, it would have to be Heide, he thought, with a grudging pang of envy.

UKRAINE, 1934

“No, no.”

The protest was so faint, it could barely be called a protest. More like a kind of moan. Nonetheless, the young, beautiful GPU police officer immediately hit Marchenko across the mouth so the blood began to seep from his lips and gums. Marchenko bent forward and let it drip on the newly fallen snow. For some reason that was where Olga’s eyes focused.

The red color against the blindingly white virgin snow was so vivid that it seemed almost supernatural in the midst of the grubby chaos. Behind Marchenko, most of his family’s former belongings were bundled together in a tall, ungainly load on what had previously been his cart. There were a butter churn and pickling troughs and blankets and clothing and sacks. At the back of the cart sat a few sheaves of straw and the bucket from the farm’s well. All of it had been tied to the cart by a couple of men from the kolkhoz. The three horses hitched to it stomped their hooves impatiently in the frozen wheel tracks and whinnied so the steam enveloped their muzzles.

Olga stood so close, she would have been able to stroke one of the horses’ flanks if she stuck out her hand. But she didn’t. The horse didn’t look nice, she thought. The lower lip hung down so you could see the long yellow teeth, and its coat was bristly, mud caking its
flank. She was closer than she wanted to be and also close to the scarlet blood spot in the snow in front of the cart.

Olga didn’t quite know why she kept standing there instead of going home. Marchenko was the idiot Fedir’s father and a kulak, and everyone knew that he had been behind with his grain deliveries for a long time. He had said that he didn’t have any, and the village soviet had until now chosen to ignore his negligence. But today Jana had reported at school that the GPU had ransacked the Marchenkos’ property and found grain as well as potatoes stowed away in a dugout under the house’s foundation. It was the fault of him and the likes of him that everyone was starving, Olga knew that well, but somehow none of them looked quite like the fat kulaks on the poster outside the village soviet’s office—especially not Fedir’s little sister, who hung on her mother’s arm. Her face was narrow and her eyes large. She wasn’t much older than Kolja, and every so often she opened her mouth and cried out, a long, thin scream like a hare in the claws of an eagle. The family had been sitting outside in the cold all day, waiting for their judgment, and the child was blue with cold and exhaustion.

The cries made Olga feel sick deep down in her stomach, but still she couldn’t tear herself away.

“There are at least one hundred twenty funt,” said Oxana, pointing at the six sacks of grain that were just then being carried out and placed on a separate cart. “Just think how many mouths that can feed.”

Olga nodded. She couldn’t remember ever seeing so much grain at once—and not just any grain, but wheat, supposedly. She had heard that from the talk among the gathered villagers. Most of them had come to say goodbye. Marchenko’s brother was there, and several of his neighbors, noted Olga. The men were smoking and talking quietly while the women had pulled their shawls close around their shoulders and were glancing nervously at the four armed GPU officers.

A GPU officer shouted something, and now the driver from the collective climbed, huffing, onto the load. He swung the whip over the sharp backs of the horses. The animals leaned forward heavily in their harnesses, but for a long moment seemed stuck in place until the wheels finally scrunched along in the slippery tracks and the cart began to move.

For a moment Marchenko looked as if he was planning to follow it, but he remained standing next to the four bundles that the family had been allowed to keep. What he had now was an idiotic son, a wife and a small daughter, thought Olga. Because Fedir was definitely an idiot. Even though he was fourteen, he stood sobbing as loudly as his little sister, and it was almost unbearable to keep watching. And yet she couldn’t stop.

One of the remaining GPUs apparently felt the same way, because now he poked Fedir in the side with his rifle and told him to start walking.

“Where to?” Fedir stared at him with his wild, cross-eyed gaze, and the GPUs laughed almost kindly.

“To the station in Sorokivka. You’re going on a trip, comrade.”

Fedir smiled back in confusion, hoisted two of the family’s bundles on his back and, neck bent, began to make his way through the crowd of gathered neighbors. One woman tried to sneak him a piece of bread, but he saw it too late and dropped it awkwardly on the road. When he straightened up, he saw Olga and Oxana and froze in his tracks.

“Oxana,” he said. A special light slid across his face. “I’ll come visit you when I get back.”

Oxana lowered her eyes and nodded briefly, and just then Olga noticed the silence around them. As if all sound had been sucked out of the world. For the longest time, people stood mutely, staring at Fedir and Oxana. Then Oxana pulled her scarf closer around her face, turned her back on Fedir and began to walk away. Olga hesitated.

The young, smiling GPU officer poked Fedir again and drove him in the opposite direction down the main street of the village along with the rest of the family. Marchenko was silent now and walked with heavy, stooped shoulders while behind him, his wife struggled to keep the child in her arms. Only Fedir turned back one more time and raised his arm in a farewell that was impatiently swatted down by the boyish GPU officer.

Oxana marched with quick steps toward the stream, and Olga began to run to catch up with her. At the same moment, she felt a sharp stab of pain in her shoulder blade. Something hard and pointy had hit her, but when she looked over her shoulder, she couldn’t see anything but the frozen ground and the fine dusting of new snow behind her. She increased her speed but stumbled and fell in the stupid bark shoes on the stupid cloddy ground. “Oxana, wait.”

Oxana turned. She backtracked two steps and offered her hand to Olga, who got to her feet, swaying, just as she was hit by an even harder smack. This time it was on her forehead, and she felt a warm trickle of blood run down over her cheekbone. She didn’t understand at all, but apparently Oxana did. Oxana raised a fist toward the Marchenkos’ house just as another stone whistled toward them.

Oxana’s eyes threw off sparks. “Act like it’s nothing,” she said breathlessly, pulling Olga along toward the stream. ‘It’s just Sergej, that idiot.”

Olga tried to walk as fast as Oxana but stumbled and fell again. She couldn’t help looking back.

No more stones came.

The incident van was still pretty empty, noted Søren. Some of Heide’s people were searching the house in Tundra Lane. Others were going door to door in the adjacent housing estates in the hopes that someone had noticed a car or anything else of relevance. Michael Vestergaard had not been considerate enough to get himself murdered in a public place with frequent traffic and CCT cameras. On a pitch-black, ice-cold winter night out here in the no-man’s-land between the golf course and the so-called urban development, they would be lucky to find even one pathetic jogger.

Veng poured coffee on automatic pilot, but before Søren had a chance to drink it, his cell phone rang. It was Susse.

“Are you busy?” she asked. Her voice was so stressed that it sounded like a stranger’s.

“What’s wrong?”

There was silence for a short moment. Then she began to cry. In the background he could hear unfamiliar sounds of steps in long corridors, mumbled voices, metallic clicks and a sort of hydraulic hissing.

“Susse … What’s wrong?”

“Ben,” she managed to say between muffled sobs. “Sorry. There’s no reason to cry now. It’s just … he felt ill. We’re at Herlev Hospital. They say it’s a little blood clot in the heart.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“No, no. It’s okay now. But … if you have time. The dogs.”

“Of course I have time.”

“Thea is on a ski trip with some kids from her class. And the neighbors are on Fuerteventura. They’ll be home tomorrow, and Barbara is on her way home too, but she’s stuck in the snow somewhere outside Fredericia. So … so you’re the only one here who has a key.”

Barbara, Susse’s oldest, was at the School of Design in Kolding. A long trip when the snow made train travel irregular.

“Susse. Stop. Of course I have time. Are you okay?”

“I was okay until I heard your voice. Then it all came crashing back again. Sorry. I was so afraid. He was in such pain, and I could see in his eyes that he thought that … Damn it, Søren. He’s fifty-three. He can’t be turning into a heart patient.”

Ben had lived the hard life of a touring musician and had smoked twenty cigarettes a day for most of his life, although now he had quit. In Søren’s opinion, this placed him dead in the center of the target group for a heart attack, but there was no reason to say that out loud.

“I’ll take care of the dogs,” he said. “Call if there’s anything else I can do. Any time.”

“Thank you.”

He stood for a moment, thinking. Babko’s restless energy had worn off, and he was sitting in a slump.

I could get a patrol car to drive him back to headquarters, thought Søren. But on the other hand …

On the other hand, he was convinced that Babko could tell him more if he could just poke a hole in the Ukrainian’s jovial but uninformative façade. Perhaps it would help to get away from the uniforms and the coffee-and-adrenaline atmosphere. “Do you feel like helping me feed my ex-wife’s dogs?” he asked.

T
HERE WAS A
string of belated Christmas lights along the white fence. There were birdseed balls on branches of the pear tree and dog tracks in the snow. Susse’s two cocker spaniels were barking eagerly, and even through the door you could hear the soft slaps of wagging tails hitting walls and furniture.

Søren unlocked the front door, and the dogs came leaping. They needed to pee so badly that they barely took the time to say hello.

“You meant it,” said Babko.

“Yes, of course. What did you think?”

Babko just shook his head. “Your ex-wife?”

“Yes. Her husband ended up in the hospital with a heart attack.” Common-law husband, actually, but Babko probably didn’t need those kinds of nuances. “Come on in. We might as well have a decent meal. You must be getting tired of cafeteria food.”

He could see that Babko was … shocked was probably too strong a word, but thrown off-balance, at least. This was unexpected for him. He looked around at the white hallway, the rows of shoes and coats, a couple of Barbara’s watercolors, the old school photos of Thea and her that hung on the wall facing the living room. Ben’s African-American genes revealed themselves in the form of dark, bright eyes and a warm skin tone. They were attractive children.