Death Sentence (29 page)

I parked on the pavement, close to the entrance and got out after checking there was no one around. The steps down to the shop were wide and deep and around ten bin bags were lying there. I squatted down on the edge of the top step, grabbed hold of the first bin bag and tore it open. The tear revealed pink colours, white tights, princess dresses and teddy bears. I threw the bin bag aside and took a new one. It was full of suits, but I soon discovered that they were far too small for me.

When I ripped open bin bag number three, I was joined by a tall, thin man in a long coat. His dark hair was wispy and his stubble revealed it was a while since he’d had a shave. I threw him a frightened look, but he merely nodded to me and sat down on the steps where he started on the bin bag I had just discarded. He didn’t waste time rummaging through the bag, but tipped out the contents in front of him and studied the clothes through narrow eyes. He held up a jacket, but realized – as I had done – that it was too small and tossed it down the steps.

I copied his example and emptied the contents of my bin bag on the pavement. It was full of curtains and bed linen. I kicked them aside and started on the next one. The man held up a small pink princess dress. Something made his eyes light up and he stuffed it inside his long coat and smiled with satisfaction. Then he took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. In the glow from the lighter, I saw that his face was pockmarked and it was dark around one of his eyes. He hummed to himself as he stretched his lean body and grabbed another bin bag.

My next bag contained children’s clothing. Small socks, shorts and T-shirts spilled out and buried my feet. I kicked them out of the way. People really did throw away an unbelievable amount of children’s clothes. Surely there must be something somewhere I could use. Irritably, I glanced at the man next to me. He had found a pair of corduroy trousers. He turned them over and over while nodding to himself, then he stood up and held the trousers up to his waist. His cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth and he looked down himself with approval. A little ash fell on the corduroy trousers and he brushed it off carefully.

The anger rose inside me. Those trousers would have suited me. In fact, they were too big in the waist for him and a little too short for his long skinny legs. I was supposed to have found them. I was there first. They belonged to me.

I got up and stepped over to him. At first he didn’t notice. He was focused on his trophy and grinned idiotically at his luck. Finally, he looked up. His half-open eyes stared into mine with wonder and he frowned.
Without
a word, I grabbed hold of the corduroy trousers and yanked them from him. However, he had a strong grip and I only succeeded in pulling him closer.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he grunted.

‘Let go,’ I said. ‘They’re mine.’

‘No, they’re bloody not,’ he replied tugging at the trousers. ‘I found them, find your own.’

I let go of the trousers, but only to shove the man hard in the chest. He fell backwards and the cigarette slipped out of his mouth. His eyes were no longer half closed, but wide open, and he stared at me in disbelief.

‘Give them to me,’ I ordered him.

He tried to get back on his feet, but I pushed him and he fell again. His head snapped backwards and he hit it against the pavement with a sickening thud.

‘Shit!’ I swore and knelt down by his side.

Wailing noises were coming from his mouth and his eyes closed for a moment. When he opened them again and looked at me, there was fear in them. He let go of the trousers and scrambled away from me.

‘You’re a psycho, man.’

I took a step towards him and held out my hand. ‘I’m really—’

‘Stay away from me!’

I picked up the trousers and got back to work. The bin bag he’d ripped open lay exposed like a cadaver and I searched through it quickly. There were several pairs of trousers, jumpers and even a pair of shoes. I cradled everything in my arms and walked back to the car. With some effort I managed to open the door to the passenger side and dumped the clothes on the seat.

The man in the long coat had reached the next set of steps where he sat down, hugging himself and glaring at me.

I ignored him, got in the car and drove off.

I CHANGED CLOTHES
in the car. It wasn’t easy. A Mercedes Smart has roughly the same floor space as a shop cubicle, but is only half as tall. Apart from the corduroy trousers, the bin bag had yielded a jumper that fitted me, while the shoes, a pair of blue deck shoes with tassels, were one size too big, but at least they weren’t covered in blood.

I dumped my blood-soaked trousers and shoes in a skip in the car park where I had changed. I felt relieved and, as I also abandoned the car, I felt I had put as much distance between me and Linda Hvilbjerg as I could. I couldn’t banish the images of her naked body hanging in the living room, but I did my best to keep them at bay. I had to.

Now my daughter was all that mattered.

I had tried to protect Linda, but being with her had made no difference. She had been murdered right before my eyes – all right, so they had been closed and I had been in a deep sleep, but it had happened while I was near. So how would I be able to protect my daughter?

I walked back to the hotel without finding the answer. It was a long walk and I had money for a taxi, but I preferred
walking
. I think better when I walk and I needed some time out. I reviewed the murders. I tried to imagine the person who was capable of carrying out these killings exactly as I had described them in my books. It was risky. Murder was my home turf, not his, which ought to give me an advantage, or at least a chance to understand him. But what was he hoping to achieve? Did he mean to punish me, challenge me or was it a tribute? I was fairly sure he expected me to make the next move. He had done that with Linda. Like a chess player, he had set a trap and waited for me to make my move, a move by which I would expose myself and thus lose my knight. Now he was going for my queen and it wasn’t enough for me to lose her, I also had to
feel
that I had lost her.

Chess had never been my strong point, but murder was. For more than half my life I had planned murders. I had described the psyche of countless murderers to explain why they did what they did, and even though it had become just a business over the years, it was always important to me that it made sense. To me, job satisfaction was the moment everything added up. I was proud when a scene or a detail slotted into the story like a missing cog that makes everything else turn. The sensation never lasted long, but it made it all worthwhile.

I was vain about my plots. I hated it when readers sent me letters pointing out inaccuracies in the killings, things that were physically impossible or errors in the narrative. There was always some tiny piece of information it hadn’t been possible for me to check. They were usually trifles with no impact on the story, certainly not given the genre, but it still irritated me.

Take the fish in the Gilleleje murder, for instance. In the book I had described how the fish had nibbled away at the victim’s body and swum off with large chunks of her flesh. When Verner told me this hadn’t been the case, I had experienced a certain amount of pique. The same pique had hit me when I saw the colour of Verner’s hands. In
As You Sow
I had described them as purple and swollen, like a pair of dark leather gloves, but in the hotel room they had the same colour as the rest of his body.

Perhaps I wasn’t the expert after all.

I stopped in my tracks.

My heart must have skipped a couple of beats and was now trying to make up the shortfall. I staggered to the nearest bench where I sat down and concentrated on my breathing. I closed my eyes and pressed my palms against my ears to block out sound and make room for thought. I was on to something. I was convinced of it. It felt just like when I was close to solving a problem in a novel. An intoxicating feeling. Better than sex.

I knew what the killer wanted.

He didn’t want to punish me or celebrate me.

He wanted to educate me.

It may sound strange, and thinking back it certainly is weird, but at that moment I felt relief. I believed I now understood what the killer wanted from me, and the first step towards stopping him was precisely that. It was the cornerstone in practically all my books.

The killer had shown me there were inaccuracies in the murders I had described. In the Gilleleje murder it was the fish, at the hotel it was the hands, but Linda Hvilbjerg? I
recreated
the image of her hanging like a lump of meat in the elegant living room. I had received several letters regarding that murder. I hadn’t read all of them, but a couple had pointed out that the victim’s blood pressure wouldn’t be high enough after the blood loss to produce the garden sprinkler effect.

Truth be told, I had suspected that when I wrote the book, but for once I had ignored the facts. I was more concerned with writing a spectacular crime scene and had knowingly allowed this factual error.

Linda’s killer had to be an expert. It shook me – physically as well – as I sat there on the bench. All the time I had regarded myself as an authority in the field, but it was clear that I didn’t have the necessary practical experience to describe all the details accurately and this was what had enraged the killer. He knew more about the body’s reaction than I did. He wanted to educate me, highlight my inadequacy and my errors.

I had met my master.

Impressions from the world around me slowly returned. I noticed the traffic and the sounds from the street. The wind got hold of me and reminded me of the season and my flimsy clothing. I opened my eyes and looked around. I had walked almost in a trance before I sat down and now I saw that I was outside the Zoological Garden in Frederiksberg.

There was still another two kilometres to my hotel, but I covered the distance with brisk, purposeful steps.

I pushed open the door to the lobby with both hands and crossed the room. Fortunately the reception was unstaffed so I picked up my key and went straight to the lift.
It
took for ever before the doors started to close and just before they met, they were blocked by a hand. The doors opened again and revealed Sergeant Kim Vendelev, the boy detective from Vesterbro police station.

‘Frank Føns,’ he said and entered the lift.

I held my breath and waited for the inevitable continuation. He would arrest me and take me down to the station. He briefly looked me up and down, but his facial expression didn’t change even though I was wearing my spoils from the charity shop: blue shoes, brown corduroy trousers, a red pullover and my own black jacket, which by now was rather crumpled. I was still holding the book and I sneaked my hands behind my back to hide both the book and their shaking.

‘Glad I caught you,’ he continued. ‘There’s something I want to ask you.’

The doors closed and the lift started pulling us up inside the building.

‘I was just about to go home,’ he said. ‘We’ve taken forensic samples all day, but we’ve almost finished now.’ He exhaled heavily.

As did I, mentally. If he wanted to arrest me, he would have done it by now.

‘Have you found anything?’ I asked, although I didn’t want to know.

‘There’s plenty of evidence,’ he said. ‘Too much, almost, but this is a hotel. A lot of people pass through so there’s a mountain of paperwork to process – you know, the kind that solves crimes.’

‘You’ll get there in the end,’ I said. It was hard to keep calm. Two people in a lift take up a lot of space and it
wasn
’t easy to hide my nerves. I was sweating and I couldn’t help tapping my foot.

‘But while we were working, I heard some of my colleagues say something about the deceased.’

‘Yes?’

‘They said that Verner Nielsen had shown an interest in a murder on the north coast, more specifically in Gilleleje. That’s near where you live, isn’t it?’

I started to feel faint. My body was swaying slightly and I had to fix my eyes on the doors in order not to fall.

‘Are you OK?’ Sergeant Vendelev said, placing his hand on my shoulder.

At that moment the doors opened and I fell on my knees out into the corridor. I dropped the book when I instinctively tried to cushion the fall with my hands and it landed a short distance from me. I started wheezing.

‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’ Sergeant Vendelev asked anxiously.

I shook my head.

‘It’s OK,’ I panted. ‘I just don’t like lifts.’

‘Perhaps you should have taken the stairs?’ Vendelev suggested and picked up the book with one hand while helping me to my feet with the other.

I staggered towards my room.

‘I think I had better make sure you get to bed in one piece,’ the sergeant said.

Vendelev supported me to my door where I struggled to insert the key with my still trembling hands. He led me to the nearest chair into which I collapsed and placed the book on the coffee table. The top of the photo stuck out so you could see my daughter’s eyes. The sergeant went
to
the bathroom to fetch a glass of water. I accepted it gratefully and gulped half of it down.

‘I didn’t know you were claustrophobic,’ Vendelev said, sitting down opposite me. ‘But then again, I don’t suppose there are many lifts in Rågeleje?’

I shook my head and drank the rest of the water.

‘Because that’s where you live, isn’t it?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘It’s a remarkable coincidence that Verner shows an interest in a murder near where you live, after which he’s murdered at a hotel where you’re staying, don’t you think?’

I agreed that it looked like more than a coincidence, but suggested that this was what separated reality from fiction; in fiction nothing was coincidental. He appeared to reflect on this and nodded to himself with his eyes fixed on
Outer Demons
, which lay between us. He reached for the book.

‘Yes, it’s very strange that—’

‘Thanks for helping,’ I interrupted him and took the book before he could pick it up. ‘But I think I had better get to bed.’ I nodded in the direction of the bedroom.