Life and Limb (19 page)

N
ight was overtaken by dawn at 4 a.m., precisely when the sun rose and the birds outside the Velux window gave a concert fit for a large choir and symphony orchestra.

‘Stop that noise,' Bo murmured, barely asleep. ‘I'll strangle the little bastards!'

‘Shhh.'

She stroked his chest until his breathing settled down again and she heard the usual snorts of sleep issuing from his mouth. He was lying naked on top of the doona with one arm across his eyes to shield him from the daylight and the other flung across her pillow. She savoured the sight of his body, which was long and sinewy, as if he'd had a past as a marathon runner. He hadn't: Bo's only interest in sport was the one he could exercise at a football match with a camera lens in front of him. She had never seen him go for a run or lift weights. Yet to her his body was like coffee and red wine: highly addictive, and in the emerging daylight the urge sounded as clear as a bell. It merged with the bird chorus outside and displaced, for a time, both the dead woman at the stadium and the meetings at the hospital with the man who spoke in riddles, the man who wanted her kidney and who had taken possession of a fragment of her life she had no wish to relinquish.

She snuggled up to Bo and worked her hand further down. His stomach was flat, as if he hadn't eaten for days. His skin was warm and moist from sweat and, where the sweat had evaporated, cool and dry.

She kissed him and nudged her head into where the shoulder became arm, but received no other reaction than his continuous breathing, which ended up lulling her back to sleep.

She woke with a jerk when her brain suddenly remembered what Bo had told her: that he had caught a glimpse of Anne and Torsten in the hospital car park.

She pressed herself closer up against Bo. Anne and Torsten. Her best friend and her ex-husband. What was going on?

She tried to analyse it and explore her feelings, and she could not detect even a hint of jealousy. She didn't want Torsten for herself – that wasn't the issue. It was the silence. It was a breach of trust. She didn't expect anything of Torsten but she did of Anne, and the deep disappointment was now working its way around her system. Anne, her most trusted friend, to whom she could tell anything. Anne who had distanced herself and was sending out mixed signals.

The tears welled up in her eyes and Bo's arm grew moist under her cheek. Eventually he woke up and shifted with unease.

‘What's wrong?'

She replied with a lengthy sniffle. He responded by putting his arm around her waist and flipping her over deftly so she lay with her back to him. Half asleep, she felt him grow hard against her. Then he carefully pushed his way in between her legs and she felt secure.

‘We need stories we can print. We're wasting time running after stories we can't write.'

Holger Søborg's gaze lingered on her before shifting to the day's edition of
Avisen
, which was lying on the table at the editorial meeting.

Dicte cursed him inwardly. But he was right: the deadline for the crime section was twenty-four hours away and they would have to come up with something soon to prevent Kaiser from blowing his stack.

‘We've never written anything about the new maximum-security prison in Horsens,' she said. ‘Perhaps one of us could go on a visit to see if it's doing any good?'

She looked at Søborg, who seemed to swallow the bait although with a hesitant nod, which did not signal top marks for the originality of her idea.

‘But that's not news. What's our angle? Sell it to me.'

‘It's great material. People like reading about prisons,' she said. ‘I mean, it's newsworthy in itself. Besides, I believe there were some problems with the prison officers. Something about a struggle for power in the workplace, that kind of thing?'

Even if she pointed him in the right direction, Søborg's journalistic talent was minuscule, so she predicted that Bo's pictures would be blown up to maximum size and Søborg's text would act as a kind of expanded caption. It was a battle she would have to fight later.

She thought about Peter Boutrup and his life in Horsens. Did he have friends who would do anything for him? Or was he friendless and family-less? Did he lack the ability to connect with people? Or was he a Pied Piper?

Personally, she had no desire to see where he lived, but her curiosity still nagged at her. There was nothing wrong in sending Holger and Bo on a mission and getting an article out of it at the same time.

‘You would be the perfect prison officer, Holger,' Bo piped up from the depths of the sofa, where he was slumped with his nose in a comic. ‘If I ever end up behind bars I'll write to the prison service and request that you be my warden.'

He flashed Holger his most charming smile.

‘We'd make a great team, don't you think?'

‘Okay, you two, get permission from the prison,' Dicte said, while Søborg was still working on a suitable comeback. ‘Helle, do we have a story from you for the “Life and Limb” series?'

Helle nodded.

‘I'm meeting a woman who has complained that her husband's coffin was kept in the chapel for so long that it started to smell. All because there was no room to store the coffin elsewhere.'

‘Are you saying that even the mortuary has a waiting list now?' Bo asked as he flicked through his comic. ‘What next? Burying people standing up to make room for everyone?'

‘We certainly don't want to be cremated,' interjected Helle, who loved playing verbal ping-pong with Bo – a little too much, in Dicte's opinion. ‘Not if we want to be environmentally friendly. Or we could do a different take on it: how to reduce carbon emissions by choosing a green funeral.'

‘A green funeral?' Søborg echoed.

‘The kind where you become at one with nature over the course of time,' Helle expanded, glancing first at Søborg and then at Bo, clearly expecting another ball to come from that quarter. And it did, true to form.‘Or why – if you end up as a
green
vegetable in a hospital bed – you should donate your body to those in need. Now that's recycling,' a voice said from behind the Donald Duck comic strip.

Dicte looked at her watch and stood up.

‘Right. Let's get going. I'm going to the Glass Museum in Ebeltoft to do a story on last night's break-in. I'll try to link it to a broader story about how the police don't have enough resources for investigating crime.'

They all knew, following the Police Reform, that the force was drowning in red tape and struggling to implement new systems. They had also heard about the break-in at the Glass Museum, where works worth several thousand kroner by three international glass artists had been stolen. Bo tossed the Donald Duck comic onto the pile of newspapers on the table and swung his legs over the edge of the sofa.

‘It's obviously a coincidence that you're sending me to Horsens with Holger the Caveman,' he said when the others couldn't hear. ‘But while I'm there, is there anything you'd like me to do for you?'

‘Mmm hmm.'

‘It'll cost you a lot of kisses, just be aware of that.'

‘How many?'

‘That depends on what I find out. I presume we're talking about the same thing?'

‘Peter Boutrup,' she managed to say, though she struggled with the name. ‘Yes, please try to dig up some info – but be discreet.'

She said it knowing that Bo was about as discreet as a fluorescent cat in the dark.

He bowed to her.

‘I'll be the soul of discretion.'

Driving to Ebeltoft, where she had arranged to meet a local photographer, she cogitated on Boutrup's enigmatic allusion to recent bills that had been passed. What was he referring to? Was it relevant, or had he simply pulled this topic out of a hat because he could no longer be bothered with her once she had agreed to the kidney consultation? She had spent the greater part of one evening searching the net to find out which bills Folketinget had passed in the course of the year, and there had turned out to be quite a few. And that was the problem: there were bills covering everything from amendments to the
Insurance Contract Act
to the new
Human Tissue Act
; new provisions for driving and rest periods, and for the
Product Liability Act
. It was a bottomless pit of information and she had been on the verge of a temper tantrum when Bo had dragged her away from the keyboard. At which point it had been well past midnight.

Damn.

She smacked the steering wheel. It was all a game to Boutrup. A devious exploitation of other people's weaknesses. He traded information with Dicte in return for answers to his intrusive questions. He even appeared to be playing Russian roulette with his own illness. And how did she feel about all of this?

The frozen knot in her stomach was starting to thaw – she felt it very clearly. It was turning into anger and irritation, to curiosity and horror, all thrown into a mixture it would be difficult to keep a lid on. Surely somewhere within her she must feel love for her prodigal son, but she hadn't even started to reach those layers yet, thank God.

She overtook a lorry on Grenåvej and promised herself, yet again, to concentrate on the Mette Mortensen murder. The fact that someone was pestering her for a kidney wasn't something she wanted to deal with right now. She would have to make that decision later and hope she wouldn't be tempted into parting with it for the sake of a dead girl. Because she couldn't do it for his sake – could she?

While she was in the overtaking lane on the motorway, she reminded herself of her new motto: she owed him nothing. She had paid her dues and it had taken her years to understand that. As regards the child to which she had given birth: she had spent as many years coming to terms with her regrets. But it wasn't as if she could adopt a twenty-nine-year-old total stranger, a prisoner, and call him her child. It was too late – surely even he would accept that. She didn't owe anyone anything. Including him.

She tried to hold on to this thought for the whole journey. She drove up to the Glass Museum and was passing the wooden frigate
Jylland
when it occurred to her that he might die while she was shadowboxing with her own obstinacy. He was young – and too young to die. He was her flesh and blood. And while she didn't owe him anything there was nothing to stop her saving the life of another human being. Blood is thicker than water, as his doctor said. Would she be able to stick to her decision?

Dicte was shown around the museum by the curator, a young woman with a bob of blonde hair and nervous movements. She felt responsible to the artists for the exhibition, and the works were irreplaceable, even if they were insured.

They walked through room after room of empty display cabinets. The museum's security system was excellent, the woman assured her, but the thieves had managed to circumvent it. They had entered through a window, loosened the whole frame and lifted it out. They had known exactly what they were doing.

‘Though they didn't go consistently for the most valuable works,' the curator said. ‘So perhaps they're amateurs, after all.'

Footsteps could be heard on the wooden floor in the corridor and another woman appeared.

‘Oh, that'll be Lis. You should talk to her too,' the curator said and introduced them.

The Danish artist Lis Grumstrup was the only one of the three glassmakers who lived in Denmark. She was a middle-aged woman who lived up to every stereotype of what an artist should look like: her hair was short and grey, her face bore no trace of make-up and there was a certain sculptural quality about her, in a green and grey linen dress which looked handwoven, with a broad belt around her waist and a heavy designer brooch on her chest. There was sadness at the theft but a light in her eyes accompanied a healthy streak of gallows humour in response to the situation.

‘What do they want with an old woman's creations? Perhaps they think they can melt them down like The Golden Viking Horns?'

She shook her head.

‘Doubt they're overburdened with intelligence.'

‘Is there a market for what they stole?' Dicte asked. ‘Or are the works too easy to identify?'

They entered another room. Dicte counted five empty cabinets out of eight.

‘Fat chance! I make ladybirds. That's what I'm known for. Ladybirds in all shapes and sizes. I don't see how you could pass them off as Rembrandts.'

The police had obviously been and the crime-scene team had checked for fingerprints and other evidence. Red-and-white police tape still stretched across the doorways to some of the rooms, so Dicte could only glimpse inside.

‘The police seemed to be in a mad rush,' the curator said, ‘and they didn't sound very optimistic about catching the thieves.'

The photographer arrived and took his shots, and then the curator left for a meeting. Dicte stuck her notepad in her bag and shook Grumstrup's hand in goodbye.

‘What will you do now? Go home to Copenhagen?'

The artist shrugged.

‘There's not much point in my staying here. If the police want to talk to me, they can give me a call.'

Dicte rummaged through her handbag and pulled out the bag that had been lurking in there for several days.

‘Do you think you can tell me what these are? Are they glass? We haven't been able to identify them.'

She tipped the two little lumps into the palm of her hand. Grumstrup took one of them and held it up against the light.

‘Where are they from?'

‘From an urn containing human ashes.'

She studied the lumps closely again.

‘It's definitely glass,' Lis Grumstrup said eventually, still focusing on the two lumps. ‘But they've practically melted.'

She looked at Dicte.

‘I think they're glass eyes. That would tally with the temperatures. The glass hasn't melted completely because a crematorium oven cannot reach 1400 degrees Celsius, which is the melting point of glass. Sloppy undertakers.'