Three Dog Night (15 page)

As she walked, her initial misgivings returned: something didn't add up. About the body she had found. About how she had found it. It wasn't as she had imagined, but then again, when had it ever been?

She watched the inflatable on its way out to the buoy with the two divers. She would have to wait a little longer. That was how the job was, and it was the least attractive part. The best was being chosen for an operation. She saw the two divers fall back into the water. They had found the body, but they needed to search for more. Much more. She would get her turn today.

The harbour had changed a great deal over the years. She remembered the summers when she had come here with Uncle Hannibal, him chatting with fishermen or making arrangements for a dive. In those days Grenå was a major fishing port and smacks lay shoulder to shoulder when they weren't at sea. There had also been more ferries, but the crossing to Hundested had been closed down long ago and now only the route to Varberg in Sweden still functioned, mostly for freight, she thought. Whenever the ferry docked, there was a queue of heavy goods lorries waiting to embark, but she never saw very many ordinary passengers with suitcases and rucksacks, prams and buggies. In general, the harbour no longer bustled with life as it once had. Many people had lost their jobs and several businesses in the area had had to close. Some were still there, though.

Three women appeared with bags and white plastic trays from the staff entrance to the fish factory, the biggest employer in the harbour. Many of the vehicles parked in front of the building carried the Thorfisk name. Some were white saloon cars with the characteristic blue fish logo; others were large cooling trucks with the same logo. These vehicles transported vacuum-packed fish to the supermarkets, where they would end up in consumers' shopping trolleys.

‘Ah, Thorfisk. The essence of our childhood town, eh.'

She turned around and discovered the black-haired policeman. The sun had appeared in the frosty weather, and snowflakes glistened in his hair and on the shoulders of his jacket. He came up to her and extended his hand in a slightly formal manner, which contradicted his long-haired look.

‘Mark Bille Hansen. Weren't we at school together?'

She nodded and felt awkward under his scrutinising gaze.

‘Yes, we were.'

She withdrew her hand, not knowing what to say next.

‘You found the body, didn't you?'

She nodded once more. Here she was on more familiar territory. He started to walk and automatically she followed. He flapped his arms to keep warm as he walked.

‘You need to keep moving in this cold. What do you reckon about it all? What do you think happened?'

He had homed right in on her inability to make sense of the killing, she felt. She would have liked to say something clever, but as so often happened she couldn't find the right words and wasn't even out of the starting blocks before he continued.

‘She was tied up. Very thoroughly, I understand. And weighed down by an anchor?'

He looked at her while they walked, as if waiting for confirmation. The thought occurred to her that he wasn't a detective on this case. He was the local policeman, but he didn't seem like one. He seemed to have the detective's customary right to turn every stone.

She limited her response to a nod.

‘But why?' he said into the frozen air. ‘Why mutilate her face?'

His voice became more insistent: ‘And why not just dump her in the sea? She must have been held somewhere before she was dropped into the water. How could there have been enough time? And what about the anchor, and the rope?'

That was one of the words she had been casting around for: time. He was right. It didn't seem logical, but killers often weren't.

‘He must have had a car,' she thought out loud. ‘Perhaps he transported her in the boot. To a place where he could do whatever he wanted without disturbance. Afterwards he must have had a boat to dump her.'

‘So, a car. A boat. Quite a few things.'

He mulled this over.

‘And then there's the anchor she was tied to,' Kir continued. ‘If it's not from his own boat, he might have stolen it. Perhaps someone's missing one?'

He nodded, with a look suggesting she had said something clever. If only he knew how images of the faceless body had floated around her head all night.

‘Did you know her?' he asked suddenly. ‘Nina Bjerre?'

She shook her head.

‘How old are you?'

‘Thirty-two. Nina was nineteen.'

He smiled.

‘Of course. You wouldn't have known each other. My cousin was at school with her.'

She didn't know what to say, so she stood there feeling inadequate, as she often did. She was good at many things, but casual conversation with strangers wasn't one of them.

He seemed to snap out of a reverie, as if realising he was talking to the wrong person. She was just a diver, after all. What did she know about murder?

‘Right, I should be going,' he said. ‘See you later probably.'

‘Something doesn't add up,' she burst out, surprising herself. ‘It seems too planned.'

He nodded.

‘I think you're right.'

He turned his palms up.

‘Oh, well. We found her. We have a body. It's a start.'

He left her, and she watched him go, feeling just as she had at school when she had watched him unobserved. Yes, he had spoken to her. But he hadn't noticed her. ‘We', he had said, not ‘you'. But so what? Since when had she been a little girl craving praise from her teacher?

To avoid attracting attention, she carried on walking along the harbour towards an area she had dubbed the ‘cemetery': where the bodies of old fishing vessels and other clapped-out ships were dismembered and converted into valuable scrap. The breakers' company had started up after her childhood and stood as a testimony to the way the town had developed: it had gone from being alive to something that resembled death; it was definitely heaving to, at any rate.

She looked at the rusty ships crammed together side by side and stacked on top of one another. Workers in winter overalls operated cranes and loader tractors, swallowing up pieces of iron, metal and wood like giant scavengers, but taking care to remove any useful components: engines, trawl nets, freezers, pumps, pulleys, propellers and compressors. Everything that made the ship's heart beat.

A feeling of death and destruction spread through her. Perhaps the whole place was cursed.

She turned around and went back to the diving truck and the quay. Allan Vraa had returned in the inflatable. One of the detectives walked gingerly down the icy gangway to take a bag that had been held up to him. It was a transparent plastic bag, and as she came closer, she saw it contained a mobile telephone.

T
HERE WAS NOTHING
more they could do for the time being. Stinger was stable. The nurse said they should go home and get some rest. They would need all their strength soon enough, she said.

Elisabeth sat for a while, slumped and passive, just staring into space. Anja was still sitting in the chair by the window, her eyes intermittently darting around in a panic-stricken way. She seemed subdued and bruised, as if the encounter with her ex-boyfriend's fists had also affected her ability to speak.

‘Perhaps she's right,' Peter suggested at last. He was also thinking about Felix and Manfred, whom he owed an explanation. ‘They'll call if there's any news.'

Elisabeth wiped her nose on her sleeve.

‘Can we be sure of that?'

‘I don't know. But you can't possibly stay here day in, day out, can you?' he said. ‘You've done everything you can.'

He wanted to add that she should be proud of herself, but it wasn't his business to grade other people's qualities.

A sharp intake of breath came from over by the window. Anja had got up from her chair and was moving back into the room.

‘It's him!'

Elisabeth went to the window and looked out.

‘It's his car. I recognise it!' Anja gasped.

Elisabeth leisurely scanned the car park.

‘You mean the Volvo?'

Anja nodded. Peter, too, could see the white Volvo, an older model, parked at an angle by the postbox.

Elisabeth shook her head.

‘Can you read the number plate, Anja? Please tell me what it says.'

Anja's voice was trembling.

‘ZJ something.'

‘And what did we agree Klaus's car was?'

‘Something beginning with A.'

‘There you go. It's just one that looks like it.'

Anja stood very still, staring down at the Volvo. Peter followed her eyes. The car appeared to be empty.

‘A lot of people drive those old Volvos,' Elisabeth said. ‘I can see why you got scared, but it can't be him.'

Anja shook her head as if trying to convince herself, but she continued to look doubtful. Elisabeth put a hand on her arm.

‘You'll have to get used to this. You'll have to get into the habit of combating your fear with common sense, see? It'll happen so many times. Believe me. I know what I'm talking about.'

Anja nodded again and swallowed. Elisabeth continued: ‘There are three of us. Peter is with us. We'll all leave together and nothing will happen to us, you'll see.'

She looked at Peter, a new, determined expression in her eyes.

They said goodbye to Stinger, who didn't react, and started walking down a long corridor towards reception and the car park. Anja walked between them. Her anxiety was palpable. She looked behind and to both sides, and blinked with fear every time they met someone, whether it was a nurse, doctor, patient or visitor.

‘I can drive you home,' Peter said. ‘If you wait at the entrance I'll just go and get the car.'

He had taken the car key from his pocket, and they had just emerged from the door when a gruff male voice shouted in a loud, ringing voice: ‘You fuckin' bitch. You're coming with me right now.'

Peter turned, as did Elisabeth. The man, who looked like an angry bull, his head lowered between burly shoulders, came charging from behind them, and he had someone with him. They were heading for Anja. His henchman looked the same type. He moved like an armoured tank on slow caterpillar tracks. His broad boxer's nose had undoubtedly been broken more times than he could count. Both men were wearing leather and heavy boots and had gang insignia fore and aft, as if they welcomed being identified as thugs. The leader grabbed Anja in a stranglehold and started dragging her along the pavement despite her screams and resistance. Boxer Nose crashed into Elisabeth, sending her flying into a snowdrift, where he pummelled her with his fists.

Peter's instincts were aroused and old routines took over. The most expedient moves and blows flashed up in his brain, like springs from a well-worn mattress, as he grabbed Elisabeth's attacker from behind, spun him around, rammed a knee into his groin, rabbit-chopped him as he doubled up and dumped him into the snow. The man seized his legs and Peter felt iron fists tear the ground away from beneath him and a pain in his back as he landed with a thud. Then the enemy was on top of him, his hands around his neck, using gravity to hold Peter down. But Peter was both faster and lighter, and he wriggled free from under the dead weight and got in a crunching upper cut to the boxer's nose. The man tumbled to the deck, leaving his flank exposed. Peter slipped on the ice, but managed to stand up again and launch one kick into the man's liver and then a second, until the guy was curled up in pain.

Peter straightened up. In another world, in another place, he would have finished him off with a couple of kicks to the face, but he restrained himself. Instead he went after Anja's ex-boyfriend, who was now close to the white Volvo with Anja in tow. Her ponytail bobbed up and down wildly. She had lost her handbag.

He had almost caught up with them when an old silver 4x4 pulled up on the pavement and two figures jumped out. He registered their faces and the fact that they were wearing black. They were both women. One was wielding a baseball bat. The other had a gun. The first was big and sturdy in a muscular way, like a female wrestler; the other slender and quick. The woman with the gun had a boy's haircut, short, black hair that stood up, and piercings in her nose, eyebrow and lips. He knew he had seen her before.

The operation went like clockwork: the larger woman rained down blows on Anja's ex while the smaller one led Anja from the battlefield and into the car.

Speechless, Peter stared after them as they left Anja's ex bleeding in the snow, piled into the 4x4 and roared out of the hospital car park. A hand touched his arm and he swivelled round.

‘Let's get out of here,' Elisabeth said. ‘Where's your car?'

Peter pointed to the two men.

‘What about them?'

She pulled at him.

‘Forget them. They could hardly be in a better place, could they?'

‘Shit, shit, shit.'

‘What are you going on about?' Elisabeth asked when, fifteen minutes later, Peter was in her flat, where Anja's few belongings were neatly organised next to the sofa: a book, a wash bag, a jumper, a pair of flat shoes, a bottle of perfume and a box of tampons.

He looked at her and abandoned any attempt to explain.

‘Nothing.'

She was proud of him and the fight he had put up. She had talked of nothing else all the way back from the hospital, sitting next to him, shaking with excitement, her eyes gleaming. ‘It was amazing! You floored him, just like that!'

The more she spoke, the worse he felt. He had promised himself never to get involved with anything like that ever again. He had promised himself never to use the combat techniques he had learned in the past and refined in prison. Yet that was what he had done. Elisabeth had no truck with this kind of moral hangover, though, he was certain of that. However, she was strong on TLC and fetched an ice pack for his lower back, found some crisps and made them a cup of tea.