Death Sentence (12 page)

The first thirty minutes I wrote dedications non-stop. My smile was set on autopilot while I listened to people’s comments and thanked them, nodded and smiled again. Individuals turned into a blur of smiling, sweating, panting faces. The queue seemed never-ending and the only thing that kept me going was the prospect of an ice-cold beer in the backroom.

My gaze was fixed on the spot on the title page where I signed my name, but I was roused from my daze when someone put a book in front of me with a different title. The book was
Media Whore
, which I wrote seven years ago. I straightened my back and looked up at the reader. It was a man, which was in itself unusual, but even more unusual, he wore sunglasses and smiled in a bizarrely expectant manner as though he was waiting for me to recognize him, despite the glasses.

He wouldn’t be the first weirdo to come to a book signing, but I must have been thinner-skinned than normal that day because I got a really bad feeling about him that I couldn’t shake off. After I had signed his book, his smile changed to triumphant as he turned around and walked away from the stand.

I followed him with my eyes until the next fan placed their book on the table and demanded my attention.

The queue diminished only slowly. Some fans might even have given up waiting and gone away, but there was no escape for me. I rarely write by hand and my fingers were aching by the time the queue had almost gone. I
paused
briefly and flexed my fingers while the next female fan expressed her excitement at starting a new Føns thriller. By now, I was exhausted and barely raised my eyes. The books flowed through my hands as if I was a checkout assistant in a supermarket, and the customers were served with haste and indifference.

Suddenly my movements froze.

The last person in the queue placed her book in front of me, opened on the title page, but it already had a dedication, and in my own handwriting, too:

Dear Line

Another scalp. Hope you’re well
.

Take care of yourself and the girls
.

Your F.Føns

I looked up.

After a few seconds of disbelief, I recognized my older daughter, Veronika.

THE THOUGHT OF
having children had never really crossed my mind.

I had always imagined my books would be my legacy. With
In the Dead Angle
and
The Walls Have Ears
I had given birth to a couple of freaks that I could barely bring myself to acknowledge. They were rejects no parent could love, and it was in the light of this realization that I welcomed Line’s desire to have children. Suddenly it was obvious we should start a family. Of course we should.

The joint project brought us even closer. We became obsessed with every aspect of how to bring up children, decorating the flat and dreaming about the future. We bought baby magazines and read articles on parenting methods and child psychology and our library of literary classics was supplemented with colourful self-help books about nappy changing and sleep training.

Sex acquired a whole new dimension. We enjoyed it more than ever before with the added awareness that tonight might be the night it happened. It made both of us conscious that everything should be just right. We wanted
to
be in the right mood and the bedroom must have the perfect romantic atmosphere with candles and soft music.

I will never know if this caused Line to fall pregnant as quickly as she did, but after throwing away the pill, we hit the jackpot very soon. Our families were thrilled. There were already plenty of children on Line’s side, but she was nevertheless the object of extravagant attention and support from everyone. The child would be the first grandchild on my side and my parents were beside themselves. We hadn’t seen them for nearly two years due to my disillusionment with their lack of support for my writing. Now they spotted an opportunity to become a family again.

Our greatest worry was financial. It was my idea to drop the writing completely for a while and focus on earning money until Line could return to work. It was the responsible thing to do and it lifted a huge weight from my shoulders. My frustration at not being able to write anything worthwhile vanished in an instant now that I had the world’s best alibi. I no longer felt guilty about not contributing to our living costs; indeed, I relished becoming the breadwinner. I had hoped to achieve that status through my imagination, but now that my creativity had failed, my hands paid our rent. It didn’t even feel like a defeat; on the contrary, I experienced a deep sense of satisfaction when I came home late in the evening after job number two or three and collapsed on the sofa or snuggled up to my sleeping wife.

Line had to stop dancing early in her pregnancy in order not to strain her body. She managed to get an office job in a theatre for a couple of months, but otherwise we
depended
on my income from whatever work I could find. In the period up to the birth, I had many different jobs including postman, delivering newspapers, assistant in a video rental shop and removal man for a kitchen fitter. None of these represented a huge intellectual challenge, but I think it ultimately helped make me a better writer. I mixed with people I wouldn’t normally have met and heard stories from all levels of society and ethnic groups. It was all valuable experience that settled in my memory and gave me material from which I would later construct my characters.

I didn’t touch my computer in that period. The only writing I did was filling in timesheets or making shopping lists. I enjoyed not having to think about anything other than where and when my next job began and how to get there.

Line’s pregnancy went according to plan. She grew more beautiful with each day that passed and her stomach sat like a fully inflated beach ball on her slim body. Her friends envied her, and only a few months later Bjarne and Anne told us that she had thrown away her pills, too. When Line was eight months pregnant, they announced that Anne was finally eight weeks pregnant.

Anne miscarried a couple of days before Line gave birth. It was a monstrous coincidence, but not enough to mar our joy at our new baby girl, Veronika. Bjarne and Anne, however, took it hard and were unable to visit us in the first few weeks after the birth. When they finally did, the atmosphere was strained with awkward pauses where no one said anything.

No one except Veronika, that is. She was incapable of
shutting
up. From the moment she opened her eyes to the moment she fell asleep, she would either be crying or babbling happily, and I listened in raptures to everything she had to say. I simply couldn’t get enough and there was nothing I wouldn’t do for her.

But it wasn’t me she needed; it was her mother, which was fortunate as I had several jobs to hold down. It was tough to be away from home that much, but there was a point to it and I would always tiptoe into my daughter’s room when I came back and just sit there gazing at her in her cot until I could no longer keep my eyes open. There is no better stress therapy than watching a sleeping baby.

The first four months flew by. I worked, Line breastfed. She started exercising as soon as she was allowed. Even with three jobs I couldn’t make enough money for us to live reasonably so it was essential that Line returned to work as soon as possible. With her income I would only need to do one job and I could look after Veronika the rest of the time.

In many ways this proved to be the turning point in my life.

My feelings for Veronika deepened with each day. She was now old enough to be aware of what was going on around her and she was easy to entertain and love. She was happy most of the time and she developed a special smile that knocked everyone who saw it for six. It was a slightly private grin as if we shared a secret or she had just made a sarcastic remark. Later it turned out to be one of her personality traits. Even as a baby we had nicknamed her Ironika.

Babies are creatures of habit and my new job as a father
meant
I had to arrange my day to suit my daughter’s needs. This was the second turning point. Her sleep pattern gave me time when she wasn’t directly dependent on me. During those periods I started writing. First I just scribbled down everyday stuff I experienced with my daughter, the kind of naive observations that all parents probably make, but it soon turned into more coherent texts and stories. Ironika had forced me to organize my writing. I rose early to feed her and when she slept, I sat down in front of my computer and got to work. It became a routine that you could set your watch by and I discovered that it was an incredibly effective way to write. Before I had only written when I felt inspired, often at odd hours and mostly under the influence of alcohol or cannabis. Now I wrote with a clear head, keen to make the most of the time Ironika had deigned to grant me. These highly concentrated periods of writing produced surprisingly good results.

Whether it was my new responsibility that made the difference, I don’t know, but what I wrote was more accessible than anything I had ever attempted before. Through my two previous books, both in some way a distortion of the crime novel, I had acquired a basic understanding of the genre, its clichés and literary devices, and it was that knowledge I now exploited. Rather than manipulate the genre this time, I embraced it and wrote a standard crime novel with all the components the reader would expect. I knew it would need a unique selling point to stand out from the rest, and I created the explicit torture and murder scenes that were to become my trademark.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Ironika was
the
reason I could write what I did. She rewarded my efforts with smile and gurgles when I was doing well and cried when she could feel I was frustrated at my lack of progress. Previously I hadn’t shown anyone my work until it was finished, but my daughter was with me all the way. She sat on my lap when I proofread, I told her about the characters and their stories, about alternative complications or endings that she could reject or approve with a smile or tears.

Ironika and I wrote my breakthrough novel,
Outer Demons
, together. We were a team with set rituals and secrets known only to us. Not even Line read anything we wrote.

Finally the script was ready. A fat stack of 450 pages had slowly grown from our partnership. I remember feeling immensely proud because I knew I was on to something this time, something that would work. I also had a sense of loss. Even though Ironika couldn’t talk yet,
Outer Demons
had been a joint project and the finished script was the end of an era.

At that point my editor, Finn Gelf, had almost given up on me. We hadn’t spoken for a very long time and he was surprised, to put it mildly, when I turned up at his office with a buggy containing Ironika and the script.

‘Bloody hell,’ he kept saying as he flicked through the pages at random.

I handed over Ironika to cooing secretaries and female editors so we could have a conversation. I don’t remember which I was prouder to show off that day, Ironika or the script.

‘So that’s what you’ve been up to?’

‘That and changing nappies,’ I replied.

He nodded. ‘I can’t promise you anything, of course,’ he began, ever the salesman. ‘But I’ll have a look at it as soon as I can.’

It’s possible he had a good feeling about the script from the start because he rang me the following day to tell me he had begun it the night before and had been unable to put it down. He was clearly excited and raved down the telephone about foreign and film rights. I stayed calm. Ironika sat in her highchair by the table, frowning. It was as if she didn’t approve that I had handed over our project to a third party and she foresaw where it would lead. If I had shared her insight then, I would have snatched the script from Finn’s hands and burned it.

Editing the script took hardly any time. The text was so carefully composed that there were very few corrections to make, either in language or structure. Finn bought advertising space, posters and special display stands for bookshops. Later I learned he had remortgaged his own house to finance the marketing campaign, but I also know that he got his money back and then some.

A week before publication, Line was finally allowed to read
Outer Demons
. Not that she had pestered me to read it, but she had dropped a few snide remarks along the way and acted a little offended when I denied her. There were several reasons why I kept it from her. First, I doubted she would think it was any good, and secondly, there was my exclusive partnership with Ironika, who didn’t seem to want to share our work with others, not even her mother.

When she finally read the book, she was stunned. Mainly at the violence and the factual manner in which it was depicted. She said she couldn’t recognize me at all. The words were mine, but the images they conjured up she could in no way connect to me as a person. I said it was the best compliment she could give me and I meant it, or I did at the time.

The publication was celebrated at Krasnapolsky, which ZeitSign had booked for the night. The bar was located in central Copenhagen and was at the time one of the trendiest places without being exclusive. It was a huge change from the Scriptorium parties. This time we had bartenders, bouncers and waiters. Black banners promoting the book hung from the walls all the way around the rectangular room and stickers were scattered across the tables. At the bar guests could buy the book at a reduced price, which a lot of people did. In fact, more copies of
Outer Demons
were sold at Krasnapolsky that night than of my two first books put together.

All my friends came, as did all of Line’s family and even my own parents turned up. ZeitSign’s staff were present as well as a fair number of journalists, whom Finn plied with drinks. I got drunk very quickly, both on my editor’s visions for my future and a couple of strong cocktails called Demons, which had been invented for the occasion, so my speech was a tad more improvised than I had planned. But the mood was jubilant, except that Mortis was in his usual changeable frame of mind and kept fiddling with the free copy I had signed and given to him. I knew he disapproved of my writing a typical genre novel and he was only waiting for an opportunity to voice his disgust.
I
managed to avoid him all evening and at some point he left. Bjarne and Anne were there too, obviously. They had given me a gold fountain pen, ‘to sign autographs’ as Bjarne had joked, and done their best to recoup the cost of it in Demon cocktails.