The Killing - 01 - The Killing

Non nobis solum nati sumus.

We are not born for ourselves alone.

Cicero,
De Officiis
(Book I, sec. 22)

Contents

Principal Characters

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Principal Characters

Friday, 31st October

Through the dark wood where the dead trees give no shelter Nanna Birk Larsen runs.

Nineteen, breathless, shivering in her skimpy torn slip, bare feet stumbling in the clinging mud.

Cruel roots snag her ankles, snarling branches tear her pale and flailing arms. She falls, she clambers, she struggles out of vile dank gullies, trying to still her chattering teeth, to think, to hope, to hide.

There is a bright monocular eye that follows, like a hunter after a wounded deer. It moves in a slow approaching zigzag, marching through the Pinseskoven wasteland, through the Pentecost Forest.

Bare silver trunks rise from barren soil like limbs of ancient corpses frozen in their final throes.

Another fall, the worst. The ground beneath her vanishes and with it her legs. Hands windmilling, crying out in pain and despair, the girl crashes into the filthy, ice-cold ditch, collides with rocks and logs, paddles through sharp and cutting gravel, feels her head and hands, her elbows, her knees, graze the hard invisible terrain that lurks below.

The chill water, the fear, his presence not so far away . . .

She staggers, gasping, out of the mire, clambers up the bank, splays her naked, torn and bleeding feet against the swampy ground to gain some purchase from the sludge between her toes.

At the ridge ahead she finds a tree. Some last few leaves of autumn brush against her face. The trunk is larger than its peers and as her arms fall round it she thinks of Theis her father, a giant of a man, silent, morose, a staunch and stoic bulwark against the world outside.

She grips the tree, clutches at it as once she clutched him. His strength with hers, hers with his. Nothing more was ever needed, ever would be.

From the limitless sky falls a low-pitched whine. The bright, all-seeing lights of a jet escaping the bounds of gravity, fleeing Kastrup, fleeing Denmark. Its fugitive presence dazzles and blinds. In the unforgiving brilliance Nanna Birk Larsen’s fingers stray to her face. Feel the wound running from her left eye to her cheek, vicious, open, bleeding.

She can smell him, feel him. On her. In her.

Through all the pain, amidst the fear, rises a hot and sudden flame of fury.

You’re Theis Birk Larsen’s daughter.

They all said that when she gave them reason.

You’re Nanna Birk Larsen, Theis’s child, Pernille’s too, and you shall escape the monster in the night, chasing through the Pentecost Forest on the fringes of the city where, a few long miles away, lies that warm safe place called home.

She stands and grips the trunk as once she gripped her father, arms round the splintering silver bark, shiny slip stained with dirt and blood, shivering, quiet, convincing herself salvation lies ahead, beyond the dark wood and the dead trees that give no shelter.

A white beam ranges over her again. It is not the flood of illumination falling from the belly of a plane that flies above this wasteland like a vast mechanical angel idly looking for a stray lost soul to save.

Run, Nanna, run
, a voice cries.

Run, Nanna, run
, she thinks.

There is one torchlight on her now, the single blazing eye. And it is here.

Monday, 3rd November

‘Around the back,’ the cop said. ‘Some homeless guy found her.’

Seven thirty in the morning. Still dark with the rain coming down in straight and icy lines. Vicekriminalkommissær Sarah Lund stood in the lee of the dirty brick building near the docks, watching the uniform men lay out the Don’t Cross lines.

The last crime scene she’d ever see in Copenhagen. It had to be a murder. A woman too.

‘The building’s empty. We’re checking the block of flats opposite.’

‘How old is she?’ Lund asked.

The cop, a man she barely knew, shrugged his shoulders then wiped the rain from his face with his arm.

‘Why’d you ask?’

A nightmare she wanted to say. One that woke her at six thirty that morning, screaming bolt upright in an empty bed. When she got up Bengt, kind, thoughtful, calm Bengt, was padding round the place finishing the packing. Mark, her son, lay fast asleep in front of the TV in his room, didn’t even stir when, very quietly, she peeked in. That night the three of them would catch the flight to Stockholm. A new life in another country. Corners turned. Bridges burned.

Sarah Lund was thirty-eight, a serious woman, staring endlessly at the world around her, never once herself. She was starting her final day in the Copenhagen police. Women like her didn’t have nightmares, terrors in the dark, fleeting glimpses of a frightened young face that might, once upon a time, have been hers.

They were fantasies for others.

‘No need for an answer,’ the cop said, scowling at her silence as he lifted up the tape and walked her to the sliding metal door. ‘I’ll tell you something. I’ve never seen one like this.’

He passed her a pair of blue forensic gloves, watched as she put them on, then put his shoulder to the rusting metal. It opened squealing like a tortured cat.

‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he said.

She didn’t wait, just walked ahead the way she always did, alone, staring, this way then that, bright eyes wide open, always looking.

For some reason he rolled the sliding door shut the moment she was inside, so rapidly the cat squealed an octave higher than before. Then fell silent with the metallic clatter of the heavy iron slamming out the grey day behind.

Ahead lay a central corridor and a chamber like a meat store hung with hooks at intervals along the rafters. A single set of bulbs in the ceiling.

The concrete floor was damp and shining. Something moved in the shadows at the end, swinging slowly like a gigantic pendulum.

There was the clatter of an unseen switch and then the place was as dark as the bedroom that morning when a savage unwanted dream shook her awake.

‘Lights!’ Lund called.