Life and Limb (17 page)

‘D
on't go.'

Bo pulled her closer by her jacket lapels. She literally had one foot out the door of the office.

‘I have to.'

‘Then take me with you.'

He gave her a mischievous smile.

‘I promise to be good and sit in a corner.'

‘Since when have you ever been able to do that?'

He shrugged.

‘I could drive you. I could wait in the car.'

‘I'm not that useless.'

‘Damn it, Dicte. The man's a convicted killer. He's playing with you. How can you even be sure that he is who he says he is?'

She took a deep breath and pressed her face into his neck. They both knew. She had to go, but, even so, he was making it difficult for her.

‘It's him, I'm telling you. And why on earth would he ask me for a kidney if I wasn't a match? It makes no sense.'

‘It makes a lot of sense,' Bo muttered into her hair. ‘It makes sense if someone is trying to sabotage your work on this story. He might be mixed up in it. Criminals can commit crimes on the outside even when they're banged up. Perhaps he's behind everything.'

She looked up.

‘Behind everything?'

‘The whole operation, whatever it is. There has to be more than one cold-blooded killer involved – especially when the case seems to extend beyond Denmark's borders.'

She put her arms around his neck. He'd had a haircut and looked like a blond train crash, and she hated it. His blue-grey eyes studied her with equal amounts of concern and knowledge. He thought she was insane. He thought she was letting herself be used. She had come home to him in the middle of the night and he had seen the impact the man in the hospital had had on her. It hadn't made him see the man whom she considered to be her son in a favourable light.

‘Don't you dare give him your kidney! Give him anything and you're an idiot.'

She kissed Bo on the cheek.

‘He's my son, Bo. What would you do if it were you? Have you thought about that?'

The word ‘son' wasn't easy to say, nor was it easy to think of or associate with the man she had met in the hospital cafeteria.

Bo made no reply. She caught his eye.

‘Will you promise to stay in the car?'

‘Will you promise to be professional? Don't let him in, Dicte. That's the worst thing you can do with his kind.'

She nodded – it was a promise – but deep inside she was wondering if she would be able to keep it.

In theory, Bo was right. She thought about it as she left him by the car, well aware that he would sniff around the hospital like a bloodhound while she made another visit to the cafeteria.

As all kinds of emotions whirled around inside her, she kept telling herself to concentrate on Mette Mortensen – her grisly death and whatever had prompted it. She couldn't deal with the other matter, and even though images from her pregnancy and the birth jostled inside her – at times causing her physical pain – she forced them into the background. Despite that, scraps of her repressed past kept poking out.

Peter. His name was Peter, and he had blond hair and blue-green eyes that looked far too much like hers. What kind of life had shaped him and made him so cynical?

Enough.
She injected fresh vigour into her stride, knowing that she had to save herself from herself. Peter Boutrup was a grown man and
he
had laid down the rules for their meeting. He wanted to swap information. So she would look at things from his point of view and try and keep emotions out of it, if at all possible. She would meet him with the same cynicism that he exhibited. This was her only chance of survival.

Nevertheless, he seemed to have a well-developed sense of her weaknesses. This wasn't going to be easy. She wondered, not for the first time, what kind of person he really was. The story about how he had shot and killed a burglar – she had dug it out of the press archives – did, of course, reveal something about him, but how much? Two people – both ex-offenders who, like Boutrup, had been imprisoned for a range of violence and property theft offences – had gained access to his cottage outside Randers, where he lived alone with his dog. Apparently it wasn't the first time he'd had uninvited guests.

Boutrup had set the dog on them, but the intruders had killed it with one rifle shot. In response he had fired a salvo through his front door with a sawn-off shotgun and the men had fled. He had hit one of them in the back. A bullet had pierced the man's main artery and he had died instantly.

‘His kind,' Bo had said. ‘What kind of man has a sawn-off shotgun in his house and isn't afraid to use it?'

A chilled knot started to form in her stomach as she walked up to Building 6 from the car park, and she was grateful for the numbness spreading through her. Her son might be a callous thug and a killer. Was that her fault? In the past she would have thought so and felt responsible. But the ice in her stomach made it impossible for her to feel anything, and that was probably just as well.

She tensed every muscle and braced herself as she stepped through the door to Building 6. He wasn't in the cafeteria and neither were his two uniformed prison friends. She sat down and waited. Soon afterwards a nurse came over to her.

‘Are you here to visit Peter Boutrup?'

She nodded. Alarming thoughts flashed through her mind. Had he died waiting for a new kidney? Could she have saved him? Did she want to? Or could she? She remembered the smile that had made her feel warm all over. Perhaps ties of blood were stronger and more robust than she had expected.

‘He's in dialysis. Would you come with me, please?'

She followed the nurse without saying a word as they walked down the long corridors. Boutrup was sitting, rather than lying, on a black couch, hooked up to a machine with a needle going into his arm. The two uniformed guards were sitting outside the open door.

‘Can't wait to get rid of all the hardware,' he said on seeing her. ‘Please. Take a seat in my palace.'

She perched on the edge of a chair. She wanted to appear cynical, but different words came out.

‘How long have you been ill? Does anyone visit you?'

‘You visit me,' he said curtly. ‘Who else would visit a prisoner but his mother?'

She looked him in the eye.

‘Friends? A girlfriend?'

She was afraid of thought, but she voiced it anyway.

‘Children?'

He laughed bitterly.

‘That would be nice, wouldn't it? Do you really think you and I should pass on our genes? What if my kidney disease is genetic?'

A calculating look appeared in his eyes.

‘Talking about kidneys: have you made up your mind?'

He would have been handsome if he had been in good health. She imagined him changing in front of her eyes. His skin began to glow, his body fleshed out with muscle. He was tall and upright and would make a mother proud. That is, if he had had a mother.

‘Have you?'

She swallowed, although it made no difference. There was a lump in her throat that refused to go away.

‘A girlfriend?' she asked again. ‘You must have someone. Someone you love and who loves you?'

She wished it to be true for his sake. But she doubted whether it existed in his life.

‘Love is overrated,' he said. ‘What's wrong with a good fuck?'

She saw lust in his eyes and flinched on her chair. At least she had tried. Slowly, she composed herself. She would give him a deal, all right. She'd barter with him.

‘Okay – you said it was business, nothing to do with a serial killer. What kind of business are we talking about?'

‘So have you made up your mind?' he repeated. ‘I can make an appointment for you to talk to the transplant nurse and learn more about the procedure.'

She thought on her feet. An appointment couldn't hurt; an appointment didn't mean consent.

‘If you make me an appointment, I'll be there. But you have to give me something in return – now.'

His eyes bored into her. She felt he could read her easily and was not going to be conned.

‘Are you scared of dying?' he asked out of nowhere. ‘Or perhaps I should rephrase that. What do you fear most of all?'

Images of Armageddon emerged in her head for the second time in a matter of days. She dismissed them, conscious now that she was the one who was keeping feelings at bay. It occurred to her that they might be alike in this respect, too.

‘What's that got to do with anything? Let's get to the nitty-gritty and not wallow in emotion. That was what you said, wasn't it? That you're not interested in feelings?'

He leaned as far forward as the machine he was connected to would allow.

‘Of course I'm interested in feelings,' he said. ‘I don't care if you have feelings for me and I don't have even a scrap of what could be called feelings for you. But I'm a curious person and perhaps I'm a chip off the old block. Think of me as a burglar. I enjoy picking locks and gaining access to people's innermost cores – and you're no exception.'

They were interrupted by his nurse, checking that everything was all right.

‘How's your dog?' he asked her.

The nurse – who, according to the ID card on her chest, was Ingrid Andersen – looked to be in her fifties with a round, slightly frumpy figure and upper arms that made her sleeves bulge. She smiled.

‘Fine, thank you. He'll have a bit of a limp, but apart from that he'll be fine.'

‘I'm so glad you found him,' Boutrup said. ‘He's your companion for life now.'

Dicte saw tears welling up in Andersen's eyes.

‘That's right,' she said. ‘He's my best friend.'

Boutrup reached out his hand, took hers and squeezed it.

‘A dog is a man's best friend,' he said. ‘A woman's, too. I'm glad you're taking such good care of him; he has many happy years left. I don't suppose you'll be looking for a new husband straightaway? Not now you've just got rid of the old one?'

Andersen laughed.

‘Oh, no, I can do without one of those for the time being.'

Boutrup winked at her.

‘Well, let me know if you change your mind and I'll turn up in my best suit with a bunch of flowers and a top hat.'

This time she threw back her head and roared.

‘Thanks, but no thanks. I think I'll stick to my dog.'

Boutrup laughed, too. Dicte recognised her own bubbly laughter after Bo had delivered a one-liner.

‘Can't say I blame you. I'm not good enough for you.'

The nurse gave him a maternal pat on the shoulder.

‘You'll be all right,' she said, casting a glance at Dicte on her way out. ‘You're one of life's survivors.'

Silence descended on them after she left.

‘Her husband beat her half to death, yet it took her twenty years to leave him,' Boutrup explained. ‘All she has now is the dog and it nearly bled to death the other day. It cut itself on a beer can in the grass. Now, what were we talking about?'

Dicte couldn't think of a thing to say. Most of all she wanted to get up and leave. No one was stopping her. Still, she stayed while the conversation with the nurse sank in and a rising confusion started to spread. She couldn't pin down this strange person. Was he vicious and calculating or was he warm and caring?

‘Are you scared of dying?' he asked her again.

‘Are you?'

She expected a counter-question, but he chose to give her an answer.

‘No,' he said, ‘but I would like to defer the event. There's a lot I want to do.'

She didn't ask what, because she knew he was expecting it. For some reason he brought out her obstinacy. It was clear that he got on well with the nurse and possibly with people in general, but she was reluctant to join the list of people he had won over. He didn't want feelings, he had said, especially not from her. So she chose to focus on the case.

‘Okay, I've agreed to the appointment. What have you got to offer me in return?'

He leaned back and studied her. Behind the signs of his illness she could see his charm. His eyes were bright and they looked at her playfully, as if he had suddenly remembered a funny story.

‘You're a real bloodhound, aren't you?'

She made no reply.

‘Aren't you curious? Don't you want to know how I found you?'

The playfulness was still there, but earnestness trailed in its wake.

‘I would rather discover something about you,' she said, with no idea where her courage had come from. ‘Do you hate me? Do you recognise yourself in me?'

For a moment he appeared to hesitate and she thought she could see behind the mask. She swallowed again. Her head was spinning. Was he about to give her an opening? She held her breath, but the moment passed and he met her with the same pitilessness as before.

‘Time is precious to me. I don't waste it on hate or love.'

They locked eyes and she shut everything down again.

‘I think we should get to the point, in that case,' she said. ‘The stadium murder.'

For a moment he seemed to have forgotten all about it. Then he closed his eyes and leaned back on the couch as if asleep.

Eventually he half opened his eyes.

‘You wouldn't believe how many bills Folketinget has passed this spring,' he said softly, looking out of the window to where spring had turned into summer at a stroke and the sun was glinting on the grass outside. ‘And some of them have had unintended consequences.'

Dicte sat as quietly as a mouse. Part of her wanted to ask him what he meant; other, quite different words stuck in her throat – words such as ‘blood', ‘thicker', ‘water' – and she felt the bond tighten.

He reached for a cord and pulled it. The same nurse, Ingrid Andersen, reappeared in less than thirty seconds.

‘Please escort my guest back to the cafeteria, Ingrid, and you're the loveliest woman in the world.'