Next of Kin (3 page)

Fifty-six.

The red number flashed down to him from the display on the wall of the post office in Storcenter Nord shopping mall.

Ole Nyborg Madsen looked at his ticket. Seventy-seven. Only two windows were open. Perhaps there was just enough time for him to nip out to the kiosk for a packet of cigarettes. He was certainly in need of something or other now at 10.30 in the morning on a run-of-the-mill Friday. A drink would work wonders, but it was too early in the day.

He walked over to the kiosk and, outside, by the stands displaying cheap DVDs, he spotted her. He froze in mid-step. His heart also froze, at least for a quarter of a second until it resumed pumping at a speed that suggested it had just changed into a higher gear. Nanna: it went right through him, and the recoil from her name hammered against his brain.

She picked up a DVD and read the blurb on the back. Ole pretended to be hugely interested in a pharmacy's window display of remedies against colds and constipation, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the way her soft, dark brown hair fell to her shoulders and he could detect the still faintly childlike rounding of her cheek, and her skin, so radiant and pure. He was unable to see her eyes, but when she was born everyone had noticed how big and beautiful they were. ‘She'll be a handful,' Maibritt's mother had predicted. ‘Better have your shotgun ready when she turns sixteen so you can keep the male of the species at bay.'

She had also predicted that one day a young man would sweep Nanna off her feet and it would lead to a grand wedding at which he, a fervent atheist and socialist, would have to walk his daughter up the aisle. She had obviously said all this to wind him up, and she was good at that, the family's staunch left-winger. Ironically she proved to be right. A young man had indeed swept Nanna off her feet. However, it didn't end with a church wedding. It ended with a funeral.

Nanna.

He mouthed her name and imagined it flying through the air and into her ear, but she didn't react. He wanted to ask her to turn around and smile at him so that he could be certain, but the girl did precisely the opposite; she put the DVD back, turned and walked away from him in the direction of the Føtex supermarket, past the ridiculously named clothes shop Jørgen & Jørgine and the bistro where people were eating slices of pizza and hot dogs.

Ole forgot all about his ticket. From a careful distance he began to follow her while a little voice in his head started to sound the alarm. It was Maibritt, the voice of reason, he decided, and switched it off. He was sick of being mature and sensible and sick of people's assumptions that he could heal himself because he was a psychologist. He had slowly come to the conclusion that there was no treatment. There was no mercy for those who have lost their own flesh and blood, knocked down on a wet road in the middle of a pedestrian crossing.

For a moment he pondered if the presence of the pedestrian crossing made any difference to the intensity of his grief. As he passed the shoe shop on the corner he concluded that it did. He couldn't say by what percentage it increased his sense of the futility of it all, but it was not inconsiderable. It signified chaos where there ought to have been order. If you can't feel safe on a pedestrian crossing, where the hell can you feel safe? It was almost in the same category as being strangled by your own safety belt or beaten to a pulp by a faulty air bag. But in this case someone had caused her death. There was someone who could be held to account.

Nanna went into Føtex, picked up a blue shopping basket and looped her arm through the handle. He noticed the way she walked: light and airy as if she were walking on cotton wool. She had always moved like that, mostly on tiptoes, when she was a little girl at any rate, and everyone had predicted that she would become a ballerina. Always on tiptoes like a sylph, except when she lost her balance and keeled over like she used to do when she was two.

Images kept emerging and they obscured his vision. Nanna as a baby. Nanna dancing. Nanna's first day of school with a blue Alice band and matching shoes and a pillar-box red satchel on her back which, of course, was as straight as a soldier's. Where on earth she got that posture from, God only knows. It certainly wasn't from his side of the family.

From Maibritt, perhaps.

Suddenly memories from his youth flooded in, the first time he kissed Maibritt's red lips and their falling in love, which had been so all-consuming.

And where was it now? Where were they gone?

He looked down and discovered that he had a red bra in his hands. Lace scratched against his fingertips. Straps dangled aimlessly in the air like two empty nooses. The girl who looked like Nanna, but would never even come close, not in looks nor in personality, spun around. He had been careless and had got too close to her as she stood eyeing the lingerie.

‘Are you following me?'

He couldn't reply.

‘Well, are you?'

He managed to swallow, yet swallowed nothing. His throat was parched and his voice broke halfway through.

‘You look like my daughter.'

‘Your daughter? Well, I'm not your bloody daughter. So keep your distance or I'll call someone I know who'll kick seven shades of shit out of you. You're a bloody pervert.'

Her manner took him so much by surprise that all he could do was stare.

‘Now piss off, sicko.'

She walked away and he was left standing there. The humiliation smarted, but it was gradually replaced by relief. It would have been worse if she really had resembled her. If her lips had been soft and not hard and vulgar. If her eyes had been inquisitive and warm rather than sharp, menacing icicles.

It would have been much worse if she had been the Nanna for whom, deep down, he longed for. As it was, he could tell himself that he was a fool. Not a sicko. Not so far gone that he had no control.

Just a fool consumed with longing.

‘What's wrong?'

The question followed the obligatory hug and, for a brief moment, Dicte had clung to Anne, inhaling her aroma of shampoo and home cooking mixed with hospital.

‘Everything is just shit,' she said.

Anne stepped aside to let her in from the street in residential Viby, outside Aarhus, which had already gone dead after the morning rush hour.

‘And I was thinking you might need a hand with the preparations for the party,' Dicte added lightly. ‘After all, you're not working today, are you?'

She was met with a look of disbelief as she followed Anne through the house. Extra chairs and tables hired for that evening's farewell dinner party were stacked everywhere.

‘Don't tell me you've come here to peel potatoes and help me set the table. Or do the seating plan, for that matter.'

Dicte shrugged and sat down on a kitchen chair.

‘Among other things. Any chance of a cup of coffee?'

Anne bustled around, switching on the kettle, grinding beans. Dicte absorbed the normality of the scene and allowed it to sink in. This was her safe haven, a sanctuary away from her house in Kasted. She felt the layers of accumulated tension and rage slowly begin to fall away.

‘Do you remember the day we first met?' she said, out of the blue.

Anne's back exuded concern as she tapped ground coffee beans into the Bodum
cafetière
.

‘It was hard to get a word out of you in those days,' she replied. ‘You were always so bloody secretive. So very Dicte-like, I must say.'

Anne turned around. Dicte felt observed under the gaze of her friend's narrowed Asian eyes.

‘Like now,' said Anne.

‘Now?'

There was a hint of impatience in Anne's voice. ‘Out with it. What's happened?'

There was no escape. There never was with Anne, who had been born with both a sixth and a seventh sense. Or perhaps it came from all that time spent caring for babies, Dicte thought briefly. Tiny creatures whose feelings and needs you had to be able to divine.

So she told her about the film even though she didn't want to cause any alarm before Anne left. She needed some advice and, besides, it would all come out anyway when the story hit the streets.

‘What am I going to do?'

Anne put the
cafetière
and two cups on the table and brought out a small bowl of cantuccini biscuits. She poured coffee for them both.

‘You know very well what to do.'

Dicte helped herself to a biscuit and dunked it in her coffee. ‘The police?'

Anne sat down and just looked at her.

‘I've written the article.'

‘And?'

‘The police it is,' Dicte repeated, gradually starting to feel more convinced.‘Wagner?' She took a bite from her biscuit, which was soft now.

‘Was there ever any doubt?' Anne asked. ‘I don't think so.'

She couldn't remember having doubts, but that was the effect Anne had on people. She knew from experience. Anne never judged because she was the soul of discretion and in that way they were very different. Anne never needed to say very much. In fact, all she needed to do was to be there.

Dicte shook her head. ‘What am I going to do without you? Tell me that.'

‘It's only a year,' Anne said in consolation, but Dicte clearly saw the uncertainty in her eyes as they scanned the room. ‘One obligatory year.'

Dicte knew all about it. Anne and Anders needed a joint project. It was a question of life or death for their marriage and now she had come over and caused alarm. She was well aware of that. Anne worried about her, and vice versa. She imagined that this was what it must be like to have a twin.

‘You've always been there for me,' she burst out. ‘Thank you.'

Their hands met across the oil cloth on the kitchen table with its radiant, oversized flower pattern.

‘And you for me.'

It was true. Dicte thought about it as they peeled the potatoes and put up the tables. The years flowed by like molten silver, all the way from school to the half-finished psychology degree, to her marriage to Torsten, the eternal womaniser. Who had been there when Rose was born? Who had comforted her when her marriage collapsed, and she and Rose, now a teenager, moved from Copenhagen back to Aarhus to a job in a local newspaper office? Who had warned her against Bo and his restlessness, and told her he was incapable of ever giving her security? And who, ultimately, had accepted her for what she was, someone who was always searching for love and safety, but incapable of controlling her feelings in the face of common sense?

‘What?'

‘The slices,' Anne repeated, echoing something Dicte had only half heard. ‘You're slicing them too thinly. What are you thinking about? Is it the film?'

Dicte shook her head. For the first time in a long while it wasn't the sequence of horrifying images that was preying on her mind.

‘I'm thinking about family. About what that means.'

There was no need for her to say any more. They both knew. Dicte had a sister she never saw, because Sofie had chosen to stay with Jehovah. So had her mum, and her dad wouldn't have been any different if he was still alive.

Anne rinsed a potato under the tap.

‘Blood is thicker than water,' Dicte went on, voicing it with caution precisely because Anne had no family ties, but then again, that was one of the reasons she could travel the world. ‘I was wondering how important they really are when push comes to shove and, if we had any choice in the matter, who we would want our family to be.'

Anne's face showed signs of distress. Dicte watched from side-on as Anne cut the rinsed potato into neat, thin slices.

‘For some people it means a very great deal indeed,' Anne said. ‘For others it may just mean that you've got someone you can hurt easily.'

Dicte waited for her to elaborate, but she didn't, and she was reluctant to dig any further.

John Wagner turned his back on the group and stared out of the window of the briefing room in the police station. The rain was bucketing down. It was like sitting in a car wash as the machine sprayed the car with soap and water. The window had steamed up; people down on the street appeared in soft focus and the multitude of umbrellas took on a dream-like form.

‘Rape?'

It was Jan Hansen who said the word first and served reality up to him, not on a silver platter, but with a cup of coffee rattling against a saucer. Wagner accepted it gratefully and tasted the pungent liquid which, if nothing else, warmed him up a little.

‘Rape,' Wagner echoed, and now his coffee tasted even worse. He shook his head and sat down by the table where the rest of the investigation team was seated. Hansen had his nose buried in the forensic report. Ivar K was reading over his shoulder, yet managed at the same time to tilt his chair backwards at a perilous angle and shove a sugar cube in his mouth.

Hansen looked pained. He might be big and strong and capable of making even the most hardened criminals tremble in their pants, but essentially he was every grandmother's dream and he had a deep-rooted urge to protect women of all ages. Including those aged seventy-five.

‘But ... she was an old lady?' he objected.

‘Love knows no season,' Ivar K declared philosophically in a tone of voice that implied that Hansen might be too delicate a bloom to be working for the Crime Squad.

‘Love,' Hansen said, immediately rising to the bait. ‘If you think that's what it is then I really don't blame Anette.'

Ivar K turned scarlet at this reference to the wife who had left him. Wagner looked at them and wondered how to keep them from each other's throats. But what were his options? Put Ivar K in detention and make him write ‘I will not tease Jan Hansen' five hundred times? Or put Hansen on the naughty carpet? Hansen, the paragon of virtue, who always had an apple for the teacher—in the guise of over-sugared cups of coffee. That wouldn't work. Besides, he needed the dynamics that existed between the two detectives, despite everything.

‘Love knows no season, love knows no clime, nature's way any old time,' said Eriksen, who wrote songs in his spare time.

Wagner rolled his eyes and Eriksen had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. Squabbling was still preferable to Arne Petersen's somewhat plodding pace or Eriksen's incessant need to make everything rhyme. Not that they weren't good at their jobs, the pair of them, but perhaps it had something to do with age, Wagner thought, contemplating Petersen's burly figure and Eriksen's West Jutland chubby cheeks. Perhaps when you hit your fifties it was time to review whether your appetite for catching criminals matched your appetite for potatoes with gravy.

He interrupted this train of thought as his own age—fifty-four—surfaced in his consciousness. He took another mouthful of coffee slightly faster than he had intended. Surely age had nothing to do with it?

Petersen scratched himself under the chin with a ballpoint pen. ‘There's no accounting for taste, isn't that what they say? So now what?' He looked at Wagner like a scout at his troop leader. ‘Back to Grønnegade and ringing doorbells, I suppose?'

Wagner nodded. They had to go over the case again even though they had already spoken, several times, to the neighbours and other residents in the apartment block where the old lady had been found dead. Her death had not initially been treated as suspicious. The only disturbing aspect was the fact that her body hadn't been discovered until the stench of decay had spread all the way down to the ground floor. She had no relatives apart from a nephew who, at the time, had been in hospital for quite some time. No friends, apparently. What a way to go: rotting away in the heart of a city in a welfare state.

‘It now appears that we may be investigating a murder, or possibly involuntary manslaughter. She might have been strangled, but it's impossible to assess the degree of strangulation because of the decay. Our theory is that she died from a heart attack, probably as a result of being attacked.'

He looked at them one after the other. ‘Of course, it's possible, but not very likely, that she consented.'

Ivar K opened his mouth to make some frivolous remark, but Wagner held up his hand.

‘We always treat victims with respect. I don't have to remind anyone of that, do I?'

Ivar K shut his mouth. Jan Hansen looked smug and Wagner's irritation, along with a good measure of frustration, increased. He recalled how three days earlier they had entered the second-floor flat in Grønnegade and how the smell had hit them in the stairwell. No one had seen anything. No one knew anything. No one ever spoke to anyone else. Everyone kept to themselves. However, a neighbour, a young girl aged twenty-two, had finally alerted the police. Her boyfriend's parents were coming over for dinner and she didn't feel she could ask them to take their places at the table and enjoy her culinary delights with the stink of putrefaction in their throats. She was aware an elderly lady lived next door, but she had never seen her. She had only lived there for six months.

‘Our job would have been a lot easier if Johanne Jespersen had been given homecare,' Petersen said. ‘She would have been discovered then.'

‘Or she might have died of thirst,' Ivar K said, referring to a recent tragic case of social services' negligence.

Wagner cleared his throat. He pushed the coffee cup out of reach. His stomach lining had taken enough of a beating.

‘That's what you get for being independent,' Eriksen philosophised. ‘Poor woman.'

They divided up the tasks and concluded the meeting. Chairs were shoved backwards, screeching across the floor. Ivar K stuffed another sugar cube into his mouth before hooking his finger through the loop of his jacket and slinging it over his shoulder.

‘I'll deal with the press,' Wagner said. ‘We need reminders in the papers to encourage other witnesses to come forward.'

The others nodded. Each was more sceptical than the next, and for good reason. People's memories were short. If anyone had seen anything at all, a green jumper would probably turn blue three days later, and a bicycle would turn into a moped.

‘We'll meet here again at three.'

Hansen turned around and gave him the thumbs up. Wagner was reminded of another gesture a suspect had shown him during an interrogation the day before and caught himself yearning for a plain old-fashioned ‘Okay.' He sighed out loud. Sign language seemed to be all the rage these days.

‘Wagner.'

He stopped halfway down the corridor. The voice behind him was familiar and all sorts of unpleasant premonitions crept up on him before he could turn around to see her walking towards him. She was wearing a raincoat and white wellies. Her hair around her cheeks was tousled, as if she had just pushed her hood back, and her eyes shone with a feverish gleam. Dicte Svendsen had a juicy story.

‘To what do we owe this honour?'

He turned back and headed for his office. She followed him tenaciously and out of the corner of his eye he saw her pulling something out of the shoulder bag slung diagonally across her hip.

‘I've got something for you.'

‘And what if I don't want it?'

‘Trust me,' she said in English. ‘You'll want it.'

First sign language; now foreign languages. He must be getting old.

Wagner reached his office and pushed open the door. Dicte followed him in.

‘Well, what is it?'

He snorted the words without meaning to. But an old lady had been raped and killed in her own home in the centre of town while he had been at home watching TV, or eating Ida Marie's low-fat pasta salad. Every now and then his two worlds collided in all their absurd lack of logic and he felt inadequate.

‘A CD.'

‘Give it to the guys in IT. Fourth floor,' he informed her politely, hoping she would hop it.

‘Not this one. At least not until you've seen it,' she said. Then she lost patience with him. ‘Come on, for Christ's sake. I'm handing you this on a plate. When you see tomorrow's paper, you'll be ordering me to give it to you anyway. Or, if not you, then Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, the Intelligence boys,' she added with a look that told him she had played her last ace.

He had to concede it had worked. In fact, she generally did succeed. She had a gift for attracting incidents that belonged to an underworld you did not want to believe existed.

Wagner finally looked her in the eye and was reminded of the dead weight in his arms as he carried her out from an inferno of bullets an eternity ago.‘What's it got to do with PET?'

She handed him the CD. ‘See for yourself. Watch out for fingerprints.'

He took it carefully and slipped it into his computer. She stood in front of the screen, observing him as he watched the film, and he could hear her rapid breathing and feel her tension rubbing off on him.

Five minutes and it was all over. There wasn't a hint of triumph in her eyes, only deep disquiet.

‘Glass of water?'

He shook his head and tried to take in what he had just witnessed. Water wasn't going to help. He couldn't think of anything that would.

‘Did anything come with it? A demand? A statement of some sort?' he asked when he had managed to compose himself as far as he was capable. In the meantime Dicte had gone to get him some water after all. She shook her head.

‘But bound to follow, don't you think?' He stared at the screen. It made no sense. ‘And you've written the article?'

She nodded.

Of course she had, he thought. He couldn't demand the impossible. She had a boss, too.

‘Kaiser was aglow with excitement, so we've got terrorism plastered all over the front page, I'm afraid.'

‘So tomorrow it is?'

‘Tomorrow.'

‘Does he know you're here?'

She shook her head.

Wagner clutched his glass. He had only taken sips, but it seemed to have succeeded in allaying his nausea. Yet his skin still felt clammy beneath his shirt and a sour taste was forcing its way up his gullet. He reached down into his pocket and found his packet of antacids, popped out a tablet and chewed it. He turned towards her and stared right into her eyes, which had always seemed bottomless to him, like boggy water. Beautiful, that much was true, but also demanding, as if they were trying to suck something out of him that he didn't want to part with.

‘Why? There was no need for you to come here today. We would have seen the article tomorrow and confiscated the film, taken out a court order if necessary.'

‘But now you've got twenty-four hours' head start,' she said, rising to her feet.

And what exactly were they meant to do with that, he wondered. Without any demands or a despatch address this was going to be a tough nut to crack, and Intelligence, PET, would probably be on the case quicker than you could say ‘terrorist'. He looked at his watch. There might just be enough time for him to track down his boss before his meeting with the police commissioner.

‘Think of this as a thank-you,' Dicte said with her back half-turned to him, her hand on the door handle.

‘For what?'

She didn't reply. She opened the door, turned and flashed him a rare smile.

‘I kept a copy for myself, obviously.'