Life and Limb (5 page)

H
e was waiting for her to come home. He always waited for her. The children were in their rooms; they had given up on her long ago. Besides, twelve and fourteen year olds had so much to preoccupy them. But
he
was there, sitting as he had when she had left the house that morning. He was waiting for the story she had to tell.

Kiki Laursen click-clacked over the kitchen floor on high heels and stooped down over her husband.

‘Hello, love. Good day?'

The kiss landed on his forehead. She knew he hated kisses on the forehead. They made him feel like a child.

‘Fair to middling. What about you? You're late.'

‘Dorrit was off ill. You know how it is.'

She looked at her watch. It was a quarter past six. She quickly went into action, pulling pots and a pan from a cupboard. The clatter was louder than it needed to be. Perhaps because she was still trembling inside.

‘When are you going to tell me about him?'

She spun around.

‘About whom?'

‘Him. The new one. You've just come from him, haven't you? I can see it in you. The way you walk. You're so distant.'

It wasn't the first time. She knew there was no point but she still had to run through her usual protests. Sometimes she almost believed them herself.

She shook her head.

‘I don't know what you're talking about. How do you want your duck breast?'

‘Rare. You know very well how I like it.'

Of course she did.

‘Was it the hen's night? Was that where you met him?'

She had squatted down to look for an apron in a drawer. Now she stood up and tied it around her waist.

‘I'm going to brown them and put them in foil into the oven – is that okay?'

‘What does he look like?'

She turned her back on him and dropped a blob of butter on the pan. Then she scored the two pieces of duck. The children would have a pizza, courtesy of the microwave. They weren't keen on duck.

‘He's not that tall,' she said with her back to him. ‘Muscular.'

She described him down to the last detail. His hands, eyes, mouth, and the nose which must have been broken at some time. His clothes. His smell. In the ensuing silence her body came alive. She couldn't help herself. It was like a downpour inside her with the water level rising and rising. She was sore in the places where he had been. Her buttocks smarted with every step she took and reminded her of the whip that had rained down blows on her. Carefully at first, and later, when she had asked him for more, harder and harder. He had snatched at her hair and her scalp had hurt. He had penetrated her, hard, first there, then elsewhere. He had groped his way to her most secret places and found them; found what made her react with the greatest passion. She had been close to losing consciousness before he was finished with her. And yet she had gone back to him the next day and begged for more. Two hours ago she had been lying there, legs spread and strapped into position. Helpless by her own choice – if she could be said to have any choice.

‘What else?'

She fried the duck in the pan; it sizzled and spat.

‘Nothing else.'

He sighed. She could hear he wanted to pump her for details and he would succeed in the end. But now the children had been lured from their caves by the smell of food. She gave them a hug of gratitude, which took them by surprise.

‘Set the table, will you? We're eating soon.'

Strangely, they obeyed. She knew it was a brief respite, but for the time being she could breathe freely and imagine that they were a normal family: father, mother and two children, a boy and a girl. The perfect life.

While they ate, she was back in his flat. It wasn't intentional; she tried really hard to be present at the table and ask the children about their homework, school and day. As it was, she was operating on two levels while
he
sat silent and ate dinner and sent her searching glances.

‘Have you heard about the dead woman? With no eyes?'

It was Emma who asked. She was the youngest, and she had just started to show an interest in thrillers and absorbed everything in the papers about murder and horror.

Kiki shook her head.

‘That doesn't sound very nice. Is it true?'

She looked at
him
, and he nodded. She hadn't been keeping up with the news at all over the last few days.

‘They found her by the stadium. Twenty-two years old.'

‘And with her eyes poked out?'

She wanted this story off the dinner table, but now Oliver stuck his oar in.

‘It was after the last match of the season. AGF was hammered.'

It was typical of Oliver that he was more interested in the football result. She had to smile to herself as she passed around the salad.

‘Do they know who did it?' she said.

In fact, she wasn't particularly interested; she asked just to keep the conversation going and the children at the table. They had eaten their pizzas, though, and were about to take themselves off to their rooms. She was losing them – she knew that. Amid this chaotic family life, that was what worried her most – and then the thought that she was not sure how much she loved them. She was not sure how much room there really was for love in her life. Or, for that matter, what love was.

She got up and started clearing the table. She rinsed the plates and put them in the dishwasher. Tiredness, pain and wellbeing vied for supremacy inside her.

‘Did it hurt?'
he
asked, after the children had gone.

She shrugged, keeping her back to him.

‘Did you scream?'

Had she screamed? She had groaned inside the sea of pain, but she didn't remember anything else. She had been numb. Her arms and legs had stopped obeying her. It was just pleasure and pain gathered in one burning spot where she tasted the whip.

‘Maybe,' was all she said.

She didn't turn until she had finished the kitchen. She observed him. He still looked good, but however much he trained his leg muscles would never be the same as before. How long had they actually known each other? How long had they had been yoked together? Nineteen, twenty years? Something like that. He was the millstone around her neck, and she his.

He turned his wheelchair away from her and trundled into the living room. After wiping the table and worktop she followed.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘Tell me.'

She began at the beginning. Omitting no details. As she spoke he looked at her and undressed her with his eyes. She could almost see the images forming in his mind.

After she had finished, he placed his head against the neck rest and closed his eyes. She went to stand behind him, massaging his scalp until his breathing calmed down again.

‘You did ask.'

He nodded slowly.

‘But it's different this time, isn't it.'

She hesitated.

‘Maybe. I don't know.'

‘Could you bring him here?'

‘No.'

‘Then it's different this time,' he confirmed.

He motioned towards the card table, where the newspapers were.

‘Read the article about the woman's body they found by the stadium. They're looking for a guy who could be your friend.'

This was said without any nastiness, but it stung more than the whip had. Stiff-legged, she made her way to the paper and turned to the article. She read, then looked at him.

‘Lots of people wear those boots.'

She sounded neutral, and all the while a prickling sensation of excitement spread through her.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘It could be anyone.'

T
he victim's parents lived in Sjællandsgade, the old red-light district of the town centre which had long been gentrified and where working girls had been replaced by members of the Danish Association of Masters and PhDs and the Danish Association of Lawyers and Economists. Hence, Ulrik Storck and Marianne Mortensen. She taught Danish and English at the Cathedral School. He was a solicitor and partner in Lind, Balle & Storck, known locally as ‘the red solicitors'.

Wagner parked his car outside a bakery. Jan Hansen sent lingering glances at the cakes in the window and the attractive buildings further up the road. In Wagner's mind the detective looked out of place here in academia country, where small, well-renovated closely packed houses bore the stamp of the quarter's many craftsmen and architects and their ideas on light, glass and mute colours. Hansen fitted in better with the detached houses in Tranbjerg – with a lawn that was as well trimmed as his moustache and a hammock with room for him (and the magnificent muscles he had cultivated in the fitness centre), and his wife, who was a nurse at the Kommunehospital.

‘Number thirty-five, did you say?'

Hansen had the situation under control and pointed at a well-kept courtyard. The house was painted black and white, and the door shone like black lacquer.

They rang the bell and Ulrik Storck opened the door, his face contorted with grief, but Wagner also noticed the measured scepticism he had detected in the man's eyes the previous day.

‘Come in.'

There wasn't room for much in the little house – Wagner guessed it measured around eighty square metres – but the furnishings were light, friendly and of modern design. There was also something else, and the aroma hit his stomach like an electric shock: someone had been baking.

‘I had to do something with my hands,' Marianne Mortensen explained, serving rolls with the coffee on the corner sofa.

That's what death does to you
, Wagner reflected.
There are so many different reactions.
Some people break down weeping. Others bake rolls. No one reaction was more correct than any other, in his experience.

While Hansen reached out for a second roll and its thick layer of organic butter, Wagner found himself overwhelmed by sympathy for the parents.

‘We would like to form a picture of Mette and establish who her circle of friends was,' he said carefully, turning to Mette's mother. ‘I know this is hard. But I'm afraid it's necessary.'

Marianne fingered the untouched roll on her plate. She and her husband exchanged glances.

‘Mette was a perfectly normal girl,' she said. ‘She had boyfriends and girlfriends like most other kids.'

‘Perhaps you could give us a list of names with addresses and telephone numbers,' Wagner said. ‘That would be a great help.' He glanced at Mette's father. ‘We'd also like permission to read her diary.'

Ulrik Storck nodded in reply. Wagner could not rid himself of the illogical impression that the solicitor was working.

‘I have to ask this question: did Mette have any enemies?'

‘A girl of twenty-two?' Storck frowned. ‘What enemies would she have?'

Wagner could have reeled off a whole list but instead let Jan Hansen into the conversation.

‘Perhaps a jealous ex-lover,' Hansen said, then sank his teeth into a roll. ‘Or someone at work? There could be several work-related things. Anything is possible.'

Storck gripped the arm of his chair.

‘An ex-lover,' he said, snorting. You don't seriously believe an ex-lover could have done what was done to Mette, do you?'

He looked at Wagner.

‘Have you really nothing better to suggest? It's obvious this was some crazed lunatic. Mette didn't know that kind of person. Have you rung the psychiatric hospital? Do they have a dangerous psychopath on the loose?'

Wagner wanted to say something to soften the man's dislike of them; instead his own resentment bubbled up, and he had to fight to restrain it.

Marianne Mortensen was weeping silent tears. Ulrik Storck stood up and stormed off, returning with a green leather diary in a spiral binding. He tossed it onto the table.

‘There you are.'

‘Thank you,' Wagner said. ‘We'd also like to see Mette's bedroom.'

‘She rented a flat,' Marianne said with a sniffle. ‘She was going to move in on the first.'

The room measured about nine square metres. Mette had been an only child, and the family had moved to Aarhus from Roskilde when she was fourteen.

Wagner scanned the room, closely supervised by Storck, who stood in the doorway. From the living room he could hear the clink of cups and he knew that Hansen had offered to help clear the table and that at the same time he would try to get a conversation going. The room was painted pink and white. There were posters of pop stars on the walls. The bed was neatly made and had a white quilt. On the pillow there was a pink teddy bear.

‘If it's okay, we'd like to take the computer with us,' Wagner said, angling his head towards the Acer on the desk.

‘Of course,' Storck said. ‘But I don't think you'll find anything. Or in her diary, for that matter. She didn't know her murderer, that much is quite obvious. How could you even imagine she would be so lacking in common sense?'

Wagner sat down on the red swivel chair.

‘We don't, but then we don't know Mette, do we? I take it she was a sensible girl. A trainee accountant? She must have had a head for numbers.'

At last there was a glimpse of something softer in Storck's eyes.

‘She loved numbers,' he said. ‘She was good at everything connected with numbers.'

‘But didn't she want to go to university? To study maths?'

It was a logical question. With two well-educated parents, a university course would have been on the cards.

Storck shook his head.

‘Mette was practical, not one for theory. She was good at bottom lines and surpluses, credit and debit. You can ask at her workplace.'

‘Hammershøj Accountants,' Wagner checked. ‘On Åboulevarden?'

‘She had only been there six months, but they liked her.'

Wagner got up. He carefully examined the room, opened a couple of drawers in the dresser and flicked through some exercise books. Mostly numbers. Not many letters. There were also some print-outs of columns of figures.

‘We'd better take these with us too,' he said, putting the pile of books and paper on the desk. ‘Do you know what this means?'

Ulrik Storck took the book Wagner was pointing to and leafed through it. He shook his head.

‘No idea. But she was always like this. Everything had to be documented in numbers, from shoe sizes to how many kilometres she cycled. It was a bit of an obsession.'

Wagner thumbed through the books again. He looked at Storck, who met his gaze with a tired frown.

‘Are you busy at the moment? Couldn't you get some time off?'

Storck shook his head.

‘We're snowed under with industrial injury cases. And I've just been given the assault on the young man from the Socialist Workers Party. High-profile cases are pouring in right now.'

Wagner nodded.

‘Hooligans?'

Storck shrugged.

‘Fascist thugs, I would call them. Football is all a front. They text each other and organise where they're going to meet and cause trouble. Hellishly difficult to prove, but that's the way it is.'

‘And in this particular case they smashed up a café where there were socialists meeting?'

‘And beat up my client, yes. Apparently they had an old score to settle.'

Wagner got up. He and Hansen took the computer, the diary, books and paper and walked out to the car.

‘Mette had a boyfriend at work,' Hansen said. ‘Her father didn't know, but she'd told her mother.'

‘And?'

Hansen cleared his throat.

‘Her boss. A certain Carsten Kamm.'

‘Age?'

‘Thirty-seven,' Hansen said, blushing for no reason. The same age as himself.

‘A young woman of twenty-two and a man of thirty-seven,' Wagner said under his breath. ‘It's happened before.'

‘The mother thought Ulrik would hit the roof. They've always tried to instil a sense of equality between the sexes and raised their daughter to stand up for herself.'

Wagner unlocked the car thinking about the twelve years between him and Ida Marie.

‘An age difference doesn't necessarily prevent that. But we'll have to talk to Carsten Kamm.'

‘And he's married,' Hansen said, landing heavily on the passenger seat.

‘Well, that's quite another matter, then.'

Wagner pulled away from the kerb and passed the bakery. Hansen didn't give the shop window a second look. Was it just chance, he wondered, that once again football violence had crept in as a factor in this bizarre case?