Three Dog Night (22 page)

Niklas grinned from ear to ear after she'd told him this.

‘Super Kir!'

‘Don't you dare tell anyone!'

They played pool and she gave him such a drubbing that she started to feel sorry for him and let him win. They drank more Coke, more customers began to turn up, and little by little the pub started to feel as it should: a place where you could hide in the crowd, drink what you wanted and then make a discreet exit.

Niklas had gone back to his hotel and she was in the bar chatting to Red when she saw Mark Bille Hansen walk through the door. Her initial thought was that he had come to question Red about something, but then she realised that even a police officer might need a beer, because he sat down on a stool by the bar. Red pulled a large beer for him and exchanged a few words before addressing another customer. She stared, knowing it was wrong, but she couldn't help herself. Mark Bille was like an exotic stranger here, surrounded by provincial dreariness. She was fascinated by what he did, the way he drank his beer and sat at the bar without displaying any insecurity. He stood out. She recognised that quality from herself.

He looked up and caught sight of her. There was no time to withdraw her gaze, so she merely blinked and kept staring. He nodded and raised his beer. She took a sip of Coke. They looked at each other. Then he got up, came over and stood beside her.

‘Are you on your own?'

‘It's my brother's pub.'

She nodded towards Red, who was pouring foaming beer from the barrel.

‘I was here with a colleague, but he went home,' she explained and added, ‘I'm working tomorrow.'

He nodded.

‘So you didn't find anything today?'

‘Nope.'

‘You were right,' he said then. ‘Something didn't add up.'

She blushed. She did this easily and it had been a torment all her life.

‘It doesn't make things easier,' she said. ‘Now there might be two dead women.'

He nodded. There was something unabashedly hungry about the look he sent her, and she sensed his presence all the way from her hands and feet to the skin under her hair.

‘They must have been similar,' she said, mostly to keep the conversation going so that he wouldn't walk away. ‘Could it be a coincidence?'

He shrugged. He seemed tangible and distant at the same time. It was as if something needed to be released, but couldn't find a way out.

‘Young blondes. Almost identical height and build. That could be a coincidence, of course.'

‘How long was she in the water?' Kir asked.

‘Pathologist reckons a couple of days.'

‘So New Year's Eve fits?'

He nodded. They looked at each other and suddenly she knew they'd had exactly the same thought and were thinking it for the first time.

‘Nina could have walked by and seen a girl being thrown in,' Kir said. ‘She was a witness, so the killer grabbed her and threw her in as well.'

She sensed her own excitement and started talking faster.

‘He didn't have time to do to her what he did to the other girl: tie her up and weigh her down. That's why she's not there. The current would have taken her.'

His eyes had narrowed to slits. He leaned over to her. Her heart was pounding madly.

‘That's what I'm thinking. You're good, Kir.'

His lips tickled her ear. When he straightened up again, his eyes were telling her quite a lot more than she wanted to know. But then there was a rumpus outside on the pavement and he turned to look out of the window, to where a young girl in a buttock-skimming dress and a bum-freezer jacket was having an argument with an older man. No prizes for guessing what the drama was about.

Mark Bille forgot all about his beer and went outside. Kir watched him break up the quarrel between the punter and the prostitute, who either hadn't been paid or was annoyed about something. Shortly afterwards, the customer drove off in his car, but Mark Bille stayed behind to talk to the girl, who lit up a cigarette and waved it around in an agitated manner, making patterns in the darkness. Their frozen breath mingled to form bigger clouds that rose and dispersed in the pub's neon light above the entrance. Mark Bille nodded and even smiled. Then he took the girl by the elbow and led her across the road into the hotel. Kir waited, not sure what she had just witnessed, expecting him to return at any moment. She stood by the window for a quarter of an hour, then another. But he didn't come back.

W
HEN
P
ETER CAME
home after work, his arms weighed down with shopping bags, Felix was sitting on the floor rummaging through boxes. Her cheeks were glowing and her eyes sparkling in a way he hadn't seen before. There was an almost manic intensity to her movements as she picked items out of the boxes, only to throw them back in again.

‘Nothing!'

She reached for a mug beside her on the floor. Tea, he guessed. She was an inveterate tea drinker and as such belonged to a tribe of people he didn't understand.

She stood up. She was wearing jeans and a dark blue T-shirt. Her breasts were pushed up by her bra, which he hadn't seen her wear before. Her clothes hung loosely and her trousers were gathered in at the waist by a tight belt, but her voice was energetic.

‘Are you busy at the moment?' she asked.

‘No. I thought we were going to cook dinner together?'

‘Would you mind coming with me to the house in Århus?'

‘Now?'

‘Yes, now! I have to know what happened. Why Erik and Maria had to die.'

She moved closer to him. Her perfume wafted into his nostrils and he recognised something he'd felt about her from the day they first met – her willpower and ability to latch on to him.

She tugged at his jumper.

‘I'm ready now.'

He knew that feeling only too well. You reached a point where you had to know. Even if the truth was grim and painful.

‘OK.'

He put the shopping bags down on the kitchen table.

‘When we've cooked dinner and I've seen you eat half of it.'

It was a part of town he knew only from the surface. No one he knew had ever lived in Skåde, and the further they entered the complex of steep, winding residential roads, the more he understood why: people like him didn't own this type of house. Some of the residences resembled Gothic castles with towers and spires. He and his friends lived in badly maintained flats in the city centre, in social housing ghettos, or paid 500,000 kroner for a derelict cottage on Djursland, which they then did up.

It was nine o'clock when Felix and Peter parked outside the house set back behind a tall hedge at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was a dark night, but street lamps and the snow lit up the area, showing where responsible house owners had cleared the pavements and shovelled the white mounds to the sides. The snow also weighed down the branches of the tall spruces surrounding the three-storey house. The sounds of suburban living reached their ears as they got out. Excited, happy voices. Somewhere behind the undulating terrain there had to be a hill where you could go tobogganing. In next door's garden they could see the outline of a snowman. Somewhere a dog was barking and a female voice called out into the night.

Felix rummaged around in her bag for the key and he could tell from her deep breaths that she was trying to summon the courage she had felt before they left Djursland.

‘It's been a long time. It feels very alien and yet at the same time …'

They walked up the garden path to the front door. A security light caught them in its beam halfway there. Felix entered a code, pushed open the door and they stepped inside a hallway with a high ceiling. The house reminded Peter of the English country manor in Cluedo.

‘Erik loved this house,' Felix practically whispered as they moved from room to room.

Peter was no expert, but he thought everything looked seriously expensive. In prison he had worked in the carpentry workshop. The furniture here was of quite a different calibre and most certainly came from the house of one of the renowned Danish furniture designers: Børge Mogensen, Arne Jacobsen or Hans Wegener. He knew the names. He had studied them in books at the prison library. Fiction or non-fiction, he had devoured both with equal hunger. At school, a teacher had encouraged him to read. Sebastian Warming was his name and he had a big black beard. One day he had put
Robinson Crusoe
into Peter's hand and told him it was a story about survival against all the odds. After that he had read
Treasure Island
, then
Oliver Twist
and
David Copperfield
and other stories about boys or men who overcame life's trials and tribulations. This was how books had become an indispensable part of his life.

Felix held an office chair and rotated it. It made a soft creaking noise.

‘I think I was always a little frightened by all the money it cost us to run this place. I was scared we wouldn't be able to pay the bills, but Erik always dealt with that side of things.'

She sat down on the office chair and swivelled around. Her face hardened.

‘I was an idiot. Look at this. No one can afford a house like this, even if they're a managing director on a good salary, unless they've got other sources of income.'

‘What sources would that be?'

‘That's precisely what I'm asking myself.'

She got up. ‘The police took away a lot of stuff, but they've returned most of it. They were obviously looking for a cause for the crash, because they failed to identify a technical fault. We had plenty of fuel and visibility was good. Come on, let me show you Maria's room.'

They went up the staircase and down the landing. Maria's room was a typical girl's bedroom with several Disney posters of characters he didn't recognise on the walls. There were teddy bears on the pink bedspread and the curtains were also pink. Felix stood for a brief moment without saying anything. Peter searched for some suitable words to say, but all he could manage was a brusque, masculine presence.

‘Maybe we should have a look at Erik's study, if he had one. I don't think we'll find where the money came from here.'

Looking hurt and vulnerable, she sat on the bed, took one of the teddy bears and hugged it.

‘This was her favourite teddy. She called it Toben.' She held the teddy at arm's length. ‘Perhaps it should have been in the coffin with her.'

Her voice was thick. Peter looked away, at the flower tendrils on the wallpaper coiling up towards the ceiling and around the white bookcase.

‘I wasn't there to make the decision. I was in hospital.'

At length she got up. He would have liked to say or do something kind. Something more than kind. But the moment passed and she walked on to the landing still holding the teddy.

Downstairs, she showed him Erik's study. If Maria's bedroom had been typical of a six-year-old girl's, Erik's room was typical of a man with a top job and a high level of self-esteem.

Here, they found themselves in veritable Cluedo territory: the room was like an imitation of a gentleman's study, with a massive mahogany desk, a high-backed swivel chair in black leather, floor-to-ceiling bookcases in dark wood and what looked like a Persian rug on the floor. The walls were painted ox-blood red and there was a lamp with a green glass shade on the desk. In the middle was a laptop.

‘Perhaps you should take it with you?'

She shrugged.

‘I could, but the police confiscated it, so if there was anything on it, they'd probably have found it.'

Peter looked around. The books were packed spine to spine. Many were bound in leather, the majority biographies of industrialists and thick tomes about economics and politics.

‘What are we looking for?' he asked. ‘If we are looking for something, that is.'

He perched on the edge of the desk. Felix flopped on to the chair and swivelled from side to side with the teddy bear on her lap.

‘I don't know how thorough the police search was,' she said. ‘Don't forget Erik wasn't a suspect. He was killed in the crash. They never found a cause, and I suppose there wasn't really anything suspicious about him.'

‘So you don't think they did a detailed search of his study? Took all the books out? Discovered secret compartments in the desk?'

She shook her head.

‘Why would they? They might have done a superficial search, checked his diary and computer to see if he had any enemies.'

She started opening desk drawers and pulling out piles of paper from them.

‘Anyway, what would they be looking for?'

They rifled through some of the paperwork without finding anything to attract their attention. There were tax forms, receipts, old diaries, notepads and folders containing contracts and covering letters. They flicked through them, but found nothing of interest.

Felix pulled out a notebook, black moleskin held together with a black elastic binder. She removed the elastic and opened the book. Inside it Erik had kept scraps of paper – a receipt from the dentist, various private telephone numbers and a couple of business cards from restaurants and a hairdresser.

A folded piece of paper fell out and Peter picked it up.

‘What's that?'

He unfolded it and showed it to her. She frowned.

‘East Jutland Prison,' she read, sounding baffled. ‘Application to visit.'

She looked at him: ‘Who would he want to visit there?'

M
ARK DRAGGED
G
RY
over to the hotel room window.

Her face was devoid of expression. Her jaws were working without cease on a piece of chewing gum and the fingers of her right hand kept twisting locks of hair.

‘Can you see it? Can you see the water in the harbour? Salt water freezes at minus one-point-eight degrees. The entire marina is covered in ice. If you fall into that, you'll be dead within a few minutes, if not seconds.'