Life and Limb (2 page)

W
agner stared at the body leaning against the car and felt strangely relieved.

The woman was looking up at him from vacant eye sockets. Everything about her was wrong, from her strange pose – like that of a discarded toy – to being propped up here amid beech trees and birdsong with the noise of football fans on their way home – and the fact that she was dead. This was, however, a death he could do something about. Not that he could rouse her to life again, but this death he could work with. He could tease out information from it and its surroundings. He could find, if not a meaning, then an explanation.

‘I was thinking I'd better get hold of you. Hope that was okay.'

Wagner had a job recognising Jan Hansen.

‘I didn't know you were a fan,' Wagner said, motioning towards the officer's muscular upper body squeezed into a blue-and-white Hummel T-shirt. ‘All you're missing is the scarf.'

Hansen looked uneasy.

‘It's in the car.'

‘All right. So you were already here?'

Hansen nodded.

‘How did the funeral go?' Hansen said.

Wagner's gaze landed back on the body. The crime scene officers were busy looking for clues. The forensic examiner – his good friend, Gormsen – still hadn't appeared but was expected at any moment.

‘The way these things do go,' said Wagner. ‘Slowly.' ‘Slowly?'

Wagner didn't answer; instead he borrowed a sterile coverall, gauze mouthpiece and pair of latex gloves from an officer then crouched down by the body. How could he explain his feelings of impotence? How could he describe the tumultuous last hours, from the day his mother-in-law returned home from the United States after a successful hip operation to the fever that had racked her and the infection that – despite the doctors' best efforts – later killed her? How could he talk about Ida Marie's grief, which he would have done anything to ease but which instead had eaten away at him, so that in frustration he had to give up trying to be any support at all. He, who was used to tackling death and its causes, had stood there looking on, paralysed, as in the course of very few days his darling wife had crumbled like the pastry men his son, Alexander, had baked the previous Christmas when he still did children's things.

‘Went well enough,' Wagner said now, and he felt tempted to remove a wisp of hair that had strayed into the dead girl's half-open mouth. But that was impossible: the crime scene had to remain intact; everything had to be recorded exactly as it had been found. This was as instinctive to him as fastening his seatbelt in the car or brushing his teeth before going to bed.

Instead, he scrutinised the woman carefully. She was young – not much more than twenty. Her skin was nice and smooth where she wasn't bruised or bleeding, but she was marked in several places: on her bare arms, over her face and what could be seen of her chest. Flies buzzed around her, even though it wasn't a warm summer's day. It was typical Danish weather, fluctuating between sunshine and ominous rain clouds scudding across the sky. Her hair was dark enough that the blood plastered to her temple was hardly noticeable. It must have been the result of a blow – that much he could see, although he was no pathologist. The temple was a mass of blood, but better that, he mused, than marks left by strangulation and a swollen tongue sticking out of the throat. This death seemed more presentable in all its grim detail. More merciful.

‘Right, so what have we got here?'

Gormsen, in a white crime-scene suit, kept a distance while balancing on one leg to put on a shoe protector.

Wagner stood up. The relief he had felt before was beginning to give way to anxiety.

‘Looks odd. Something ritualistic about it, if you want my opinion.'

‘When have I ever not wanted your opinion?'

Gormsen slipped on the second shoe protector with a little smack of the elastic.

‘No eyes.'

The forensic examiner crouched down by the corpse and got to work. Straightaway Wagner could sense Gormsen's gaze taking in the worn jeans, the skimpy pink T-shirt, the head leaning back against the passenger door, the slim neck, the regular features, her complexion, which was young and well cared for. Perhaps she had been wearing eye make-up. They would never find out: there were no eyelids. Gormsen took the temperature of the body.

‘ID?' he asked.

‘No bag,' Hansen explained. ‘Nothing in her pockets that could give us a lead.'

Gormsen's eyes wandered downwards.

‘No shoes, either.'

The girl's feet were nicely formed and small with a high arch. Her toenails were varnished with a pearlescent pink. There were sandal marks on her skin.

‘She can't have been sitting here long, that's obvious. Someone has placed her here. When? During the match? When was she found, precisely?' Gormsen asked.

‘Four forty-five p.m.,' Hansen said. ‘A quarter of an hour before the end of the game. A mother and her eleven-year-old daughter found her. They left before the final whistle.'

Hansen looked annoyed.
Real fans stayed to the end and supported their heroes through thick and thin
– Wagner could read that from his body language, which today showed no time for women with eleven-year-old daughters.

‘No one can blame them for that,' said Gormsen, who supported Brabrand FC, where he had once played way back at the dawn of time.

Hansen didn't reply.

‘Now Brabrand'll be relegated from Division One,' Gormsen continued as his gloved hands examined the lesions on the temple. ‘Nasty blow here,' he mumbled. ‘Probable cause of death.'

‘What weapon do you think was used?'

Wagner took as much interest in football as in a world potato-peeling championship.

‘A rock, maybe,' said Gormsen. ‘A baseball bat. We'll have to see if we find any splinters when we run tests.'

‘And the eyes?'

Gormsen sat, staring, for a long time. Wagner could sympathise. The empty sockets seemed to suck everyone's attention their way. It wasn't a complete myth that the eyes were the window of the soul. He had seen a lot of bodies in his time, but never one that appeared so soulless. A scarecrow, he thought.

‘The perpetrator has removed the eyes,' Gormsen said. ‘But not only that. He sliced into the eyelids and removed them as well.'

‘Why?' Wagner said. ‘What's the purpose of that?'

Gormsen shrugged.

‘Pre-emptive strike, perhaps?'

‘To frighten other potential victims, you mean? Mafia style?'

Gormsen's latex-clad hands turned the woman's head to one side and then the other.

‘I'm afraid that's your department,' he said gently. ‘I'm just the corpse doctor here.'

They both knew he was so much more than that.

‘Time of death?'

Gormsen shrugged again.

‘Incipient rigor mortis and livor mortis along with temperature of the body … hmm … it's not very precise, but I would say around three or four hours ago. We'll have to get her back and open her up.'

He straightened up from his crouch position.

‘And the press? I suppose they were here right from the start. I wonder if they managed to get any close-ups. I hope no photos were leaked, and certainly not before we've established her identity.'

Hansen answered that it was unlikely. The area had been quickly cordoned off with the same tape the community-support officers had already used to indicate that the car parks were full before the match.

Wagner's mind flashed to Dicte Svendsen. When your wife was friends with a crime reporter, sometimes it was a bit like being married to the gossip columns; however, it was rare that their paths crossed at social events. Dorothea Svensson's funeral was an exception, although not an agreeable one. Meeting Svendsen privately was like believing you could go for a round of golf with an Israeli general without talking about the Middle East. He was sure that she and Bo Skytte were somewhere on the other side of the cordon.

‘Svendsen?' asked Hansen who, like everyone else, knew the lie of the land in regards to her, and that Wagner was fighting to keep their relationship on a professional level.

‘I reckon she's out there somewhere,' Wagner conceded.

‘Isn't she always?' Gormsen muttered. ‘Somewhere …'

Wagner pushed his thoughts about Svendsen to one side. Things were as they were and he couldn't change them just like that; he could only try to stay firm and stick to the rules. That was hard enough.

Gormsen had bobbed back down again and was now busy with the victim's mouth.

‘Have you found something?' Wagner enquired.

The pathologist answered with a sound from deep in his larynx, then opened his bag and took out some forceps. Wagner crouched down beside him.

‘I think there's something inside,' Gormsen said, as though to himself. ‘If only I could open her up.'

They waited for what seemed like hours until he finally got the victim's jaw open. Gormsen stuck two latex-covered fingers into her mouth and pulled out a round object. He turned it over and over again, and Wagner gasped as a blue eyeball stared up at him.

‘Hers? Is that her eye?'

Gormsen shook his head and struck the forceps against it:
tap, tap, tap
.

‘Not unless she had a glass eye.'

V
arna Palace lay like Sleeping Beauty's castle in the middle of Marselisborg Forest.

It was the place to go eat or visit, with manicured lawns; a view of the forest and beaches; beautiful rooms with lofty ceilings; enormous flower arrangements, and furniture worthy of a prince.

‘The bastion of the bourgeoisie,' Bo muttered, opening the door for her in an exaggeratedly courteous fashion. ‘La Svensson has planned this in the spirit of La Svensson.'

It was true, Dicte thought. Ida Marie had said that her mother had found the strength to express her last wishes about the funeral: it was to be interment, not a funeral service. Varna had always been fru Svensson's favourite restaurant in Aarhus. It had precisely that air of former glory which Dorothea Svensson herself once had, with her fluttering diva robes, back-combed hair and all that gold and diamond jewellery.

Dicte walked through the foyer and on to the function rooms. She had been looking for John Wagner's Passat in the car park, but it wasn't there. Knowing him, she thought, he would turn up eventually. He would not leave Ida Marie in the lurch if he could spare half an hour, now that work had sucked him back into its vortex.

‘I know where you two have been.'

There was a coolness in Ida Marie's voice and a sudden hush over the whole company as they arrived at the same time as the salted neck of pork.

‘My apologies.'

Dicte embraced Ida Marie, who stiffened at first but then softened and returned the other woman's warmth.

‘Is he coming?' Dicte asked, not naming names.

‘So he says.'

They stood for an instant without saying anything. Their friendship was prone to awkwardness at times.

‘I have to speak to him.'

Ida Marie's eyes grew wary. Dicte placed a hand on her arm.

‘It's important. Mostly for his sake.'

‘But most of all for yours? Important – for your story?'

Ida Marie shook her head.

‘I can't ring him now. They're in the middle of … something.'

Dicte wanted to say that she knew exactly what the ‘something' was that Wagner was in the middle of, but as so often there was a barrier that separated what she knew from what she was officially supposed to know. The latter was ‘not much'. The former was generally a great deal more than she felt like sharing with anyone.

‘You'll have to wait until he comes. If he comes, that is.'

The meal was perfect, and Bo launched himself into it with his usual gusto. Dicte watched him as pork and vegetables were wheeled in and briefly wondered what he did with it all. It vanished into thin air – along with his quicksilver restlessness, she guessed. At any rate, it didn't hang around on his body, which was whippet thin and, even for today's solemn occasion, clad in his customary jeans and T-shirt.

She could hardly swallow a bite. Vacant, hollow sockets continued to hover in front of her eyes with the ironic legend on her T-shirt: I Love U. Of course, she had heard and read about the most bizarre rituals connected with the ultimate act, which a murder was. There could be all sorts of explanations, logical and illogical. But still she could not comprehend why a killer would cut out the eyes of a victim. If he didn't want her to see anything, surely killing her was enough.

Dicte forced herself to eat some broccoli and checked her watch. They had reached the stage when a few words had to be said to commemorate the occasion, and one after the other the family stood up and extolled the woman who, in many ways, had destroyed her only child's life. That was how it was with death, Dicte mused: it could elevate even the worst and most egotistical to sainthood.

As they were finishing dessert, he arrived. She recognised his steps in the corridor. She would recognise those steps anywhere in the world. Demanding respect, but nevertheless at ease; not too fast, but with all the considerable authority his person possessed. It always surprised her that she, someone who hated authority, could make an exception for him. Perhaps because it was not just the authority that came with his job and title; it was the natural kind, deepened by his experience over the years.

‘Please accept my apologies,'

John Wagner mumbled as he took his seat next to Ida Marie. There was, however, nothing apologetic about his manner or bearing. There was only the familiar gravity which had settled in his eyes and could be observed from the end of the table where she and Bo were sitting. In honour of the occasion he had donned not his usual tweed jacket but a dark suit that emphasised his slightly exotic appearance of grey-tinged hair with a complexion that spoke of genes from more southern climes. Attired thus, he reminded Dicte of a conductor of a symphony orchestra, with a rather curved nose, and heavy eyelids which could be mistaken for tiredness, but which concealed a gaze that took in everything around him.

She understood his gravity. It was a kind of instinct and, as fate would have it, they both had this instinct – although, of course, they had never spoken about it. Over the years they had only had a handful of one-to-one conversations, and it had resided there forever, this quality that they shared, whether they liked it or not. It was as if they were driven by a fascination with evil and whatever inspired evil. As though each of them were destined to try to create order from the chaos that followed when death did not arise from natural causes. He, with law on his side and from his top management position in the Aarhus Crime Squad (or what now, following recent reforms, was called the East Jutland Police Crime Division); she with few weapons other than an eternal urge to question and sift the truth from lies.

After half an hour people began to change places, circulate round the room or make for the toilets. Fragments of conversation floated on waves between the corners. Some of them were about Dorothea Svensson, but there were also some about the body in the car park. Rumours were already rife, perhaps spread by the restaurant staff. After all, Varna was close to NRGI Park, the stadium's official name. Snippets like ‘young woman' and ‘Wagner's on the case' and ‘poor Ida Marie' found their way into Dicte's hearing. Into Wagner's, too, because he withdrew, struggled with a terrace door and stepped into the fresh air. She saw him standing there, quite still, perhaps listening while staring at the grounds – but more likely into his own soul.

‘Are you leaving?'

He turned and didn't seem in the least surprised. Then he nodded.

Dicte approached with caution so that he would not just turn on his heel.

‘It's a ritual thing, isn't it? The business with the eyes?'

His gaze contracted; his lips became tight. But it seemed to be more an instinctive reaction than a considered one, because then he smiled a little.

‘You're well informed, as always. What have you got up your sleeve this time?'

Dicte rummaged in her bag and found the girl's mobile phone. She passed it to him, and he took it.

‘Something the police missed.'

She motioned towards the telephone. ‘It's called pocketfilm.dk. The daughter thought she might win a school competition with it.'

‘By filming a dead body?'

She nodded. Wagner stared at the phone in his hand. It wasn't his fault that only the mother was questioned. He had appeared late on the scene and someone else had made the initial decisions, but she knew he was annoyed.

Now he would feel indebted to her. He would fight it, although his basic sense of fairness would win the battle, and she would get what she wanted. She hoped.

Dicte turned to go. The article about the eyeless body would not write itself.

‘By the way …'

She stopped in mid-stride and turned.

‘I've only borrowed it, and I said you would call tomorrow. You know how much mobiles mean to children, so it's important she hears from the police that she is helping to solve a murder case.'

He weighed the phone in his hand and nodded.

‘I had to cough up two hundred kroner. Which I assume you will refund.'

He stared back at her, and she went on.

‘Don't spend too long on the phone calling family in Australia.'