Next of Kin (8 page)

Rose removed the security chains one by one. Through the spy-hole she could see Aziz waiting in the stairwell. He kept shifting from one foot to the other and she noticed his eyes darting all over the place.

When she opened the door, he entered in a nanosecond. He shut the door with his whole body and leaned back against it as if he had just run though deadly crossfire. For a moment she couldn't work out if it was anger or longing she could see in his face. He grabbed her firmly and his face closed on hers. She was trying to read him and felt her heart pounding in insistent bass notes as his lips brushed hers.

‘Are you sure this is okay?'

He spoke the words so close to her mouth that they almost scorched her. She could already taste him and smell his aroma. The picture from the newspaper and the conversation with her mother merged into a mush in her head while a premonition of disaster propelled itself into her consciousness.

‘Katrine has gone to her sister's birthday party. She won't be back until tomorrow.'

‘Where does her sister live?' He was whispering now. His lips moved to her ear. The tip of his tongue caressed her ear lobe.

‘Aabyhøj.' She spoke with difficulty. Her desire for him surged through her and made her whole body tremble. She had never dared try E, but this must be what it felt like. Ecstasy. ‘Aziz …'

His lips closed her mouth. His tongue forced its way in and the roughness startled her. His arms locked her in so that she couldn'tt move. She wanted to protest, but then he slackened his grip, as though he had realised that she was a living creature, and that she had gone rigid in his embrace.

He inhaled so deeply that she could feel the movement in his body against hers. He buried his face in her neck. A prolonged sigh sent a shiver though him.

‘I'm sorry. I'm scaring you.'

And now she recognised him. She was beginning to learn, she thought, as he kissed her, soft, searching. There was the dangerous Aziz, who was capable of drawing a knife and using it. And then there was the gentle Aziz. Like now, his roughness dissipating with every kiss she reciprocated.

‘It's okay,' she whispered.

But he shook his head. ‘I'm going crazy. I shouldn't be doing this, but I love you so much.'

‘It's okay,' she repeated and pulled him along with her. He followed her willingly.

‘It's too dangerous. It's not going to work.'

But his actions spoke louder than his words as he practically pushed her the rest of the way to her bedroom.

He took it easy this time. She sensed his restraint as if he were genuinely scared of what he might do. He kissed her neck and slowly and carefully unbuttoned her blouse. His hand meshed with hers and he forced it down onto the pillow. Lips and tongue sought her breasts and the pleasure took her down into a deep, soft cave, built from sensations. Sweat glued his dark skin to her pale body. Earthy aromas reached her nostrils and blended to create an exotic perfume. The room swirled with images of bodies; of contradictions. There was a moan as he entered her. They clung to each other, drowning, as the roar engulfed them.

***

Later he got up and wandered naked around the room. The blinds were rolled down and they were alone. He felt safe now.

‘I'm putting you in danger. I must learn to control it.'

‘Control what?'

He turned to face her. ‘When I miss you, it feels like something inside is eating me up.'

She suppressed a joyous smile. Perhaps she ought to be scared and angry with him, too. But he might also be painting everything black, imagining a terrible future that might never happen. She couldn't deal with this while her heart was jumping for joy.

‘A whole year,' he said, and she saw his jealousy flare up. ‘Have you been with anyone this past year?'

He came over to her on the bed and sat down on the edge. She shook her head, yet wondered all the same how he would have reacted if she had replied yes.

‘Have you?' The words escaped before she could stop them. But she didn't want a reply. She didn't want to know.

He didn't reply either, but lay down beside her, without touching this time.

‘Your sister,' she said. ‘Nazleen.'

‘What about her?'

There was a defensive edge to his voice. The muscles in his throat had tensed.

‘She didn't seem terribly pleased to see me.'

‘Well, she doesn't know you.'

‘And what about your mother?' she insisted. ‘Your parents? Do they even know I exist?'

He turned abruptly to his side and looked her straight in the eyes. ‘I think my parents are the least of our problems right now.'

‘But afterwards,' she said. ‘Once everything returns to normality and we can be together, be a couple like everyone else. Are you going to tell them about us then?'

She had no idea where she found the courage to ask. Naturally she knew that young people from his background were forced into arranged marriages.

‘Of course,' he replied. ‘Of course I will. I'm in charge of my own life.'

‘But what do you think they'll say? How will they react?'

It was as if shutters closed in front of his eyes. She was clearly not supposed to go into such detail. It was too soon. It would probably sort itself out along the way and, besides, she wasn't sure that she wanted to know the answer.

He reached out and caressed her hair.

‘It'll be fine,' he said.

Sleeping in the same bed was like ascending in a hot air balloon and floating. Rose lay for hours drifting between sleep and consciousness, listening to his breathing close to her mouth, feeling his body pressing against hers.

She thought about her mother and what Aziz had said, and she thought about their problems and their two different cultures.

She was just about to nod off again when she heard voices outside the front door. Katrine's loud giggles could penetrate any door. A deeper voice was trying to get her to be quiet. Rose looked at her alarm clock. It was three in the morning.

The sound of the key in the door woke Aziz up. ‘What the hell?'

He was out of bed in one second flat. He groped for his clothes in the dark and got dressed while Katrine and her companion were already in the living room. Katrine was in high spirits and wanted the world to know it.

‘Rose!' she hammered on the door. ‘Come out and say hi. I've brought home some visitors. One for each of us,' she giggled.

‘We went to the Showboat and inside I met—'

The door opened. Light poured in from the living room. Rose pulled up her duvet. Aziz sat on the bed, wearing jeans and no shirt. Katrine stood in the doorway, swaying drunkenly. Behind her stood a couple of young immigrant men, staring nosily into the room.

Rose heard a sharp intake of breath from Aziz. Then he got up and marched across the room to the two guys.

He shouted something at them in a foreign language and for a moment they stood frozen to the floor, mouths agape. Then, in a show of bravado, one of them made an offensive gesture with his finger, and they both fled through the front door.

‘Where are you going?'

Ida Marie was holding Martin in her arms. The three-year-old squirmed in her embrace and she set him down and watched as he toddled towards Wagner with a broad grin.

‘Pin,' the child said.

Wagner put car keys into his pocket. ‘To the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Gormsen is performing the autopsy on our friend from Samsø.'

Ida Marie frowned, clearly displeased. In that split second Wagner remembered that he had promised to go to her mother's for lunch.

‘But it's Sunday?'

If only she had sounded reproachful he would have been able to handle it better. But she was not reproachful, only disappointed and that was always worse. It made him feel like a cheat.

‘Pin.' Martin tugged at his trouser leg.

‘Not now, Martin. I'm not going to spin you around just now.' He was about to add that he didn't have the time, but even he thought that sounded too harsh. So instead he bent down and lifted up the boy in his arms.

‘You're getting heavy. You're nearly a grown-up, my lad.' He rubbed his nose against Martin's soft cheek. His guilty conscience ambushed him as he looked into the boy's innocent eyes. He didn't spend enough time with his family.

Ida Marie turned and went to straighten some cushions on the sofa which didn't need straightening. Then she headed for the kitchen where she took a glass from a cupboard and a bottle of sparkling mineral water from the fridge.

‘I wanted to talk to you about something that's going on at the nursery,' she said in such a neutral voice that he detected caution. It was probably not the time to insist that he needed to leave. Gormsen would just have to wait a while.

‘What?' He sat down on the sofa with Martin on his lap.

‘Pin,' demanded the boy with an earnest expression on his face, close to tears.

Ida Marie looked at him. She still looked like an angel with her long blonde hair hanging down her back, framing her elegant oval face. He owed her, he was well aware of that. He owed her time and presence.

‘All right, but just once.'

Martin squealed with delight as he swung him around until the room started to spin for him, too.

‘Pin. Pin!'

‘No, no more spinning. It's making me dizzy.' I'm getting old, too, Wagner thought. Or older, at any rate, he corrected himself.

He sat down on the sofa again with Martin on his lap. The boy kept pestering him, but with less enthusiasm, as if he had actually had enough for now, but would hate to admit it. Ida Marie came over with her glass. Forty-two, he thought. Oh, to be forty-two and look thirty-five. Tenderness and pride suddenly made him feel like a young man. She was his. She loved him. Only a few hours ago they had been lying close together in their bed and he had inhaled her scent and kissed her salty skin.

‘There are rumours going around about one of the nursery teachers.'

The words brought him back from the bedroom with a bump. He sat up straight. ‘What kind of rumours?'

Wagner was frightened of rumours. Rumours spread like wildfire and ruined reputations. They had called his mother ‘a Teutonic tart' because she had fallen in love with his father, who had been a German solider. They had humiliated her and punished her for it.

‘That he likes touching small boys,' Ida Marie said, looking at Martin.

The information came like a punch beneath the belt and he gasped for air. The bedroom vanished completely from view. ‘What you're saying is too serious to be a mere rumour.' He struggled to find more words. He didn't want to judge. Couldn't.

‘Why do you say that?'

She sent him a firm stare. She was no gossip. He saw fear and concern in her eyes.

‘We parents chat when we collect our children.'

That smarted. He rarely picked Martin up. Ida Marie ran her own business, a travel agency, and it was easier for Ida Marie to get Martin, but far from ideal.

‘Several people have noticed something.'

‘Noticed what?'

She hesitated before launching herself into it, running her finger around the rim of the glass. ‘A cuddle that lasts a little too long. A sudden enthusiasm to help boys when they need the toilet. Children who come home and know just a little too much about what willies and fannies are and what you can do with them.'

Wagner tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. ‘It might be nothing at all. We need to be so careful …'

‘Anton's mum says that Anton told her that Hans always wants him to sit on his lap. And that Anton doesn't want to.'

It still sounded quite innocent to Wagner. But perhaps he was too naïve, it occurred to him. Nowadays everyone was looking out for such signs. ‘Has anyone spoken to any of the other nursery teachers? Is there any physical evidence? Bruises? Cuts where there shouldn't be?' He knew he sounded like a policeman and that he was being patronising.

She shook her head and looked disappointed. This time because he hadn't supported her as she had hoped. He patted the seat next to him and she came over, sat down and nestled up to him. Sometimes her vulnerability and delicate nature irritated him. It didn't take much to upset her.

He put his free arm around her. ‘We need to monitor the situation,' he said impotently, because he knew such cases were practically impossible to prove unless there was physical evidence of a sexual assault, God forbid. ‘Keep an eye on Martin and see if his behaviour starts to change.'

She pulled away from him. ‘We can't just wait until something has happened to him.'

He sighed. ‘It might be nothing. Imagine if we labelled the poor man and it turned out he'd done nothing at all. That's not right. He's entitled to a fair hearing.'

She got up abruptly. ‘Easy for you to say; he's not yours,' she said with her back to him. She picked up her glass and went over to the kitchen table.

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

She turned around. Her eyes flashed. He had just enough time to think that she was overreacting. She was angry with him because of the autopsy and because he was so distant and had spent all of Saturday on Samsø. Still, it was a slap in the face.

‘You're not Martin's biological father. If you had been, you might have reacted differently.'

She was so worked up she might as well have been armed with a machine gun and a couple of hand grenades. It struck him that he'd had no idea how much had been building up between them.

Martin started to cry quietly. There was nothing Wagner could say. If he opened his mouth there would be no way back. He got up. He met her eyes and saw that she had already regretted what she'd said, but it was too late and he left quickly.

‘Who's put your nose out of joint then?'

Gormsen was in buoyant mood, even though the dead body on the steel slab stank like hell. The head and the body had been placed together. The body was still unwashed and covered with soil and earth from the midden. The head was crawling with maggots and in an advanced state of decomposition because it hadn't been protected in the soil from the heat of the summer and flies. Eyes stared at them like brown stains; they might once have been blue or green, but now they were as good as dissolved. Wagner breathed through the gauze of his mask. He shook his head and Gormsen acknowledged he would cease fire. After all, they were old friends.

‘Anyway, this is a very interesting gentleman we have here,' Gormsen prattled on, nodding to Ivar K who had been volunteered to attend the festivities. Jan Hansen was busy working on the Grønnegade case and besides, Wagner had to concede, Ivar K's nerves were in better shape.

The Institute of Forensic Medicine was in limbo, waiting to be moved from the city to new, improved premises at Skejby Hospital, and Wagner knew that Gormsen was like a child with Christmas lights in his eyes. But until the new facilities were ready, they had to share the premises with the pathologists from Aarhus Hospital, who seemed to spread into every corner.

Many people thought that forensic examiners only autopsied crime victims, but of course that was only a small part of the job, something Wagner often had to explain to the public. According to the Autopsy Act, general practitioners were required to register all suicides, accidental deaths or corpses, regardless of whether death was suspicious or not. This also applied to cases relating to the medical profession, such as alleged professional negligence. A judicial autopsy would then be performed at the Institute, where the body would be examined externally and the police would decide whether to order a full autopsy. It had been decided long ago that all drug addicts would be autopsied as a matter of course.

Wagner thought briefly of old Johanne Jespersen from Grønnegade. She, too, had been autopsied. True, she had been found neatly dressed in her own bed; yet there had been something that suggested the involvement of a second party. On closer inspection it turned out that she was wearing her underwear back to front. It could have been nothing, sheer absent-mindedness. But then again it might have been something else and once traces of semen had been discovered, mere theory became a suspected rape with death as a result. However, the body was too decomposed for the forensic examiners to find unequivocal signs of violence.

There were six of them present in the small room with the solitary steel table; it was next to the pathologists' central room containing four tables in total. The smell of decomposition was unbearable despite the ventilation system which roared away like an aircraft engine. The other three were another forensic examiner, an Institute official and Haunstrup, the head of Crime Scene Investigation who was there to log any evidence. He and Gormsen had already stripped the body and placed the clothes in numbered bags by the sink, and now Haunstrup was ready with his camera, an old-fashioned model because the police did not use digital cameras. Images could be manipulated all too easily.

Gormsen was holding a dictaphone in one hand while examining the body with the other. As always, he intoned his words into the air like a vicar on the pulpit.

‘We have a hitherto unidentified male, aged approximately fifty to fifty-five. The head is in the advanced stages of decomposition. It is infested by fly maggots and in all probability has been kept in a warm place for about a week, depending on daytime temperatures. The victim has dark hair, recently cut. Due to decay, eye colour is difficult to determine. Also difficult to determine are any potential red dots as an indication of strangulation. One ear lobe is pierced, but skin has grown back. There is evidence of contusion on the lips, probably as a result of blows.'

Hands in latex gloves turned the head carefully. Gormsen leaned forward closer to study the severed neck. A profusion of maggots crawled around the victim's flesh, like living grains of rice.

‘We assume the body and the head belong to one person, but the head has been separated from the body by slashes with a sabre-like instrument. The surface of the cut is irregular, which indicates that the perpetrator needed to make several attempts. The bone lesions show no signs of a saw. They resemble a blow to a tree and form a right angle, which suggests that the perpetrator was standing with the weapon raised to bring down across the victim's neck, and that the victim was bound. DNA tests will ultimately confirm whether the head and the body belong to the same man.'

Gormsen's hand moved professionally down the body. Wagner tried to isolate his feelings but he couldn't free himself from the impression that an enormous rage would be required to mutilate another person in the way this man had been. A rage of such magnitude that it was beyond comprehension. He knew that Muslim terrorists, as a rule, did not know their victims personally and that they killed them out of some twisted notion of a world they wanted to defend against western values and everything they considered to be amoral. Was that really why this man had been killed? Or was there another, more personal motive?

Ida Marie's words re-surfaced. It was as if they were fermenting somewhere inside him and increasing in significance. The injustice of them smarted all the way down to his stomach. She knew how much he loved Martin.

What if your child had been the victim of a crime? Would you be able to summon up this degree of hatred and lust for revenge?

He thought of the innocence in Martin's eyes as he had held him in his arms a short time before. In a flash he saw an abused, battered child's body, a shaken and weeping child, too shocked and too young to articulate what had happened. How would you react? How would he have reacted?

He looked at the victim on the steel table.

It was possible. Anyone could kill, wasn't that what they said? He certainly had the capacity. He was sure of that.

‘… tattoo on the right upper arm. It's difficult to decipher because the body has been buried in damp soil and has disintegrated to some extent,' Gormsen intoned.

Wagner spotted the tattoo. ‘It looks like a tower,' he muttered.

Gormsen spoke into the microphone. ‘The tattoo appears to depict a tower. It's difficult to tell how old it is, but from the state of the skin and the intensity of the colour, I would estimate that it's probably of older vintage.'

Gormsen's hand moved down one arm and reached the swollen fingers.

‘The fingernails on the victim's right hand are ragged. This is consistent with him boring his fingers into the grass at the moment of death. We will investigate. I expect all we'll find will be grass and soil.'

He took samples from under the man's fingernails. The samples were placed in sealed clear plastic envelopes and labelled. Then Gormsen continued his examination, his gloved hands working with almost familiar touches of the victim's body. One arm was held up and studied. Then the other, before the microphone was fed with new information.

‘There are lesions on both wrists, indicating that the victim was restrained. The skin is strongly discoloured and the hands are swollen, again evidence that decomposition has set in.'