Life and Limb (21 page)

‘And the money is out there?'

He nodded.

‘I don't think people have ever had as much money in their pockets as they do now. They want it all: new cars, foreign holidays, a new kitchen and bathroom. All the things we used to just read about. We have the cash. Including cash for things we didn't think could possibly ever be for sale.'

T
he pain started while he was in the bathroom shaving. Or perhaps it was more a cramp than a pain. Its origin was somewhere in his neck and at first Wagner thought that he might have pulled a muscle. But then it began to move downwards and before he knew it his breathing had seized up and he could only inhale with difficulty. The paralysis spread to his chest and he stared at his own agonised reflection in the mirror as the pain kept him frozen in time.

A thousand thoughts flashed through his mind. Was it a heart attack? Was he about to die? Without having said goodbye to Ida Marie, who was in the kitchen making coffee? Without saying goodbye to Martin, who had gone to kindergarten, and Alexander who was on his way to school – Alexander, who had hit puberty and put a painful distance between himself and his father? And to his adult daughter, who was now herself a mother?

He was unable to call out for Ida Marie. He could do nothing but wait. During which time he managed to think about his children and his marriage to Nina, who had died so young. He had time to think that love transcends all and it was actually quite all right to spare his loved ones the sight of his death throes. It was okay for him to die now. If it had to happen, he preferred to be the first to go this time.

Unlike Mette Mortensen, he had accomplished as much as he could: he had gone from being a cocky young police officer to someone who was, hopefully, a mature man with a healthy amount of scepticism. He had been very happy in so many ways. However, even if it was all right to say a reluctant goodbye now, it was not all right for his loved ones. They would never let him go and he loved them for it and for their sakes he finally, and in great pain, managed to drag himself to the toilet, where he sat down. He waited patiently, staring straight ahead at the sink and at the soap on the shelf with Ida Marie's bottles of perfume. Her smell, her skin, her kisses. Everything welled up inside him and demanded his attention. No, he wasn't ready to die after all.

Then the iron grip on his chest appeared to slacken. He could take deeper breaths, but still only with great care. He knew his brain was being deprived of oxygen. He would pass out very soon unless the cramp went.

While waiting, he made himself a promise: Ida Marie would not find herself bereaved without knowing anything about his wishes. He wouldn't do that to her; she shouldn't have to second-guess what would happen to his body after death. If he survived this attack he would make plans. He would make a will and commit to paper his last wishes.

He was busy choosing the music for his own funeral when he discovered that he was able to breathe relatively freely once more. The pain receded as quickly as it had arrived. He got up with care and met his reflection again. His face was pale and tiny trails of sweat had dried on his forehead and cheeks. His nose looked even sharper than normal, and his eyes looked like sunken raisins. He could almost reach out and touch the fear hovering in the room.

He turned on the cold tap and bent over the basin, still wary in case the attack returned. But he was blessedly free from pain as he put his hand under the water and splashed handful after handful of it onto his face. When he looked up again his skin had regained its former glow and his eyes had come alive.

He adjusted his clothes, cast a final glance at himself in the mirror and went to join Ida Marie.

‘You've got a visitor,' said the officer behind the reception counter when Wagner arrived at work one hour later.

A young man was waiting for him in the corner. Wagner thanked the officer and walked over to him.

‘Jeppe Ødum?'

Wagner recognised him from the visit he and Ivar K had made to the accountancy firm on Åboulevarden. The young man nodded. He couldn't have been any more than twenty-five years old.

They shook hands. Ødum's handshake was surprisingly firm, as if he was trying to give the impression of being in control of the situation, but his eyes betrayed him: he looked nervous.

‘Come with me. We can go up to my office.'

They went into the lift. Neither of them said anything during the seconds it took them to reach the third floor, but Wagner discreetly checked out the man's appearance, so used was he to internalising descriptions of people. An occupational hazard, he thought as he registered that Ødum was tall – around 1.85 metres – of slim build, with short blond hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a pair of khaki chinos, a pale blue polo shirt and dark blue deck shoes. He looked like the son of a rich man from north of Copenhagen – that is, the way Wagner imagined they looked, well aware that he was probably wrong.

‘You say you have information about Mette Mortensen,' Wagner said, closing the door to his office behind them. ‘Please sit down.'

It wasn't a very big office and when he had visitors he frequently found it annoying that he sat so close to people. Now, however, it gave him a pretext to study the young man in detail, and this was not without interest. Shadows of doubt and uncertainty flitted across his face, alternating with confidence and occasionally an attempt at a disarming smile.

‘I couldn't say anything when you came to the office,' Jeppe Ødum began. ‘In fact, the whole thing is very difficult and I've given it a lot of thought.'

Wagner got up.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee? Or a glass of water, perhaps?'

The young man shook his head, then changed his mind.

‘Yes, please. Coffee would be great.'

Wagner filled a plastic cup from a thermos and offered it to the younger man. He poured himself a glass of water. He then offered cream and sugar, and watched as Ødum dropped two lumps of sugar in the cup and stirred.

‘Why don't we take it nice and easy, from the beginning?' Wagner suggested when he had sat down again.

Ødum carefully tapped the teaspoon against the cup and put it on the desk.

‘Okay.'

His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he drank the coffee.

‘I know I should have come here sooner, but Kamm … he can be really difficult if you go behind his back. I have to think of my future …'

‘I understand,' Wagner said in a kind voice. ‘But even so, your conscience got the better of you, am I right?'

The young man nodded and stared at his coffee.

‘As for Mette,' he said finally, ‘she was up to something she didn't want to tell me about. But I knew what it was. We've all been there.'

Wagner raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

‘My boss … Kamm … he drives us hard. Especially the new ones. They do so much overtime and they don't get paid for it. Mette was working on some company accounts outside normal working hours.'

‘So Kamm told Mette to work for free in her spare time, if I understand you correctly?'

Ødum nodded in such a way that it was unclear whether he meant yes or no.

‘Kamm did some of the work himself, but he usually gave most of it to a new member of staff, who was then dispatched to the relevant client to check the books and prepare the annual accounts.'

‘And who was Mette working for at those times?'

‘I don't know. She didn't say. But something was going on, because she hinted that not everything was above board. She was worried about the work she had been told to do and dropped a hint that she couldn't balance the books.'

‘But she did it anyway?'

Ødum stared into space.

‘I don't know. She's dead now, isn't she?'

Wagner thought about the desk that had been cleared so quickly.

‘When you were working the same kind of overtime, who did you work for?'

Ødum looked at his hands, neatly folded in his lap.

‘Nothing important, please don't think that,' he said. ‘There's probably nothing to it. The clients included a florist and a baker. Oh, and the businessman who's got such a bad name in the press – what's his name? He's got his fingers in a lot of pies.'

‘Any of them illegal?'

Ødum shrugged. ‘Borderline, I would say. It's within the law or we wouldn't be able to sign off the accounts.'

Wagner looked at his watch. It was 9:30 a.m., and the morning briefing started in two minutes.

‘Okay. Thanks for telling me all this. I'll need a list of names of any people you know are involved. As you say, they may not be important but we have to check them.'

Wagner said this knowing that those names might prove to be very important indeed, but there was no reason to frighten Ødum even further. He opened a drawer in his desk and gave the young man his card.

‘You can e-mail me or call me if you like. And if you remember anything else …'

He scrutinised Ødum. Nice lad. Slightly older than the victim. A more obvious boyfriend than her boss had been.

‘What was your relationship with Mette?' Wagner said. ‘Were you two friends? I guess you must have been, since she confided in you?'

Ødum's eyes narrowed.

‘We were good friends,' he muttered. ‘That's all.'

‘And you knew she was having an affair with the boss?'

Ødum's cheeks flushed scarlet and his eyes shone with anger.

‘In that respect she was an idiot.'

Wagner was inclined to agree with him. The affair with Kamm must have made it even harder for Mette to say no to overtime. He said goodbye to the young man and made his way to the briefing room with a cup of decaffeinated coffee in his hand, grateful to have a job that demanded his full attention and helped him forget the minutes in the bathroom earlier that day.

‘He's a slippery sod, that Kamm,' Ivar K said, putting a piece of nicotine chewing gum in his mouth. ‘I knew we hadn't finished with him.'

Wagner wondered how Kamm might look once Ivar K had finished with him – given Ivar K's understanding of the word ‘finished'.

‘Perhaps she threatened to go public and he dragged her to some secret spot and cut her up,' Ivar K muttered. ‘Maybe he's the tall fella everyone's talking about?'

‘He has an alibi,' Hansen said dryly. ‘And exploiting your workforce isn't the same as premeditated murder.'

‘People can fake an alibi. Especially if it's provided by the missus. I bet you he threatened to knock her about a bit if she didn't back him up.' Ivar K, whose father who had been a notorious burglar, spat out the words with contempt.

‘Oh, so that's how you do it,' Hansen said, looking enlightened.

Wagner let them bicker on a little longer before they agreed that Hansen and Arne Petersen would continue with door-to-door enquiries in Jægergårdsgade in the hope of finding witnesses for the Saturday night Mette Mortensen was driven there in a taxi with Arne Bay and an unknown man. They'd had to release Bay; they had learned nothing new from their interview with him while his flat was being searched. His memory of that night hadn't improved and until they found incriminating evidence in his flat and could charge him, they couldn't put him before a judge and ask that he be held on remand or even request a short extension of his arrest. They had detained him for the legal entitlement of twenty-four hours, and that was it for now.

Kristian Hvidt had identified the names of the people Mortensen had rung on her mobile phone in the days leading up to the killing and on the day of the killing itself. Several of the numbers attracted interest. She had, for example, called her father's mobile phone at 1:23 a.m. on Sunday morning and spoken for five-and-a-half minutes, which Ulrik Storck had failed to mention.

‘They're messing us around,' Ivar K opined. ‘All of them. Isn't it gloves-off time yet?'

Wagner wasn't convinced that they had been wearing velvet gloves to start with. But he agreed with Ivar K that both Mortensen's father and her boss were running rings around them. That would have to stop, obviously, but it didn't necessarily follow that either of them was responsible for her death.

In his experience people always had so much to hide. Relationships they didn't think were relevant to the investigation and which they would prefer to keep secret for fear of exposure. Married men having affairs or people with unusual sexual proclivities they preferred to keep private. The world was full of deceivers. He wondered what he would have said if he had been told to account for his movements that same morning. If he could have avoided it, he probably wouldn't have mentioned his attack in the bathroom.

He was halfway back to his office and had decided to make a doctor's appointment when Haunstrup came walking towards him. He was waving a small sealed plastic bag.

‘Looks like we're finally in luck. We found this under the sofa in Bay's flat.'

Wagner looked at the bag. Inside it was a small white pill.

‘What is it?'

Haunstrup smiled and the freckles on his face merged.

‘It looks like a two-milligram Flunipam pill from the pharmaceutical company Actavis. The Institute of Forensic Chemistry will give us the final answer, but if it's what I think it is, you may have a crime scene. The odds are that Mette Mortensen was rendered unconscious with Flunitrazepam in Bay's flat.'

Wagner stared at the pill, which looked so small and innocent but which could be the tipping point for the whole case and then they would be able to charge Bay at last.

‘When will we know?'

‘I'll try to speed it up, but they're under a lot of pressure in Risskov at the moment. It'll probably take a couple of days.'

Two days sounded like an eternity, except he knew the procedure and also that there was no such thing as a miracle. Except the one that meant that he was still alive after this morning, and that was no minor matter.