Three Dog Night (23 page)

He shook her, but not nearly as violently as he wanted to. Her fragility, defiance and the slight fear in her eyes caused his lust to swell. It didn't make him feel proud and he tried to ignore it.

‘You walk around down there every night. It's pure chance that separates you from Nina Bjerre. You could've ended up in the freezing water. You still can.'

‘Let me go. You're hurting me.'

‘And for what? For some loose change, for the next packet of fags or the next joint? You're bloody pathetic. Get a life.'

She tore herself loose. His blood was pumping hard.

‘You get a life.'

‘I'm trying to find the killer.'

‘You're sick in the head, do you know that?'

‘He's out there.'

Mark grabbed hold of her again and pushed her up against the window pane. He pointed out of the window.

‘He might kill again. In a provincial dump like this, who are the easiest victims? Girls working the streets – and you know it. No one wants to know about them. No one will miss them because their parents don't really know what their daughters are up to.'

She recoiled. He carried on: ‘Does your mother know where you are? Does she know what you do? When did you last speak to her?'

She sniffed. Possibly because she had a cold or else because she was on the verge of tears.

‘Now tell me about the three girls who turned up. What were their names? What did they look like?'

She sat down on the bed and crossed her legs. She would have looked young and innocent had it not been for the far too worldly gaze skulking behind the heavy eye make-up. She was neither innocent nor naive. She took a cigarette from her small bag.

‘This is a non-smoking room.'

‘Stop me if you can.'

She lit the cigarette with a plastic lighter, her hands shaking. Her voice was, too.

‘Her name was Tora, the girl who looked like Nina.'

‘What else?'

‘I don't know her surname.'

‘And the others?'

She shook her head.

‘Lily, I think. Or Lilian. Something like that.'

‘Describe her.'

‘Short and dark with a lot of piercings. I've never seen so many before. Short, spiky hair.'

‘And the third one?'

Gry sat for a while rocking her leg. Suddenly her face cracked into a childish grin.

‘She had a mullet,' she said. ‘Layered at the top and long at the back, you know. It looked like a train wreck, but she thought it looked great. And she was a big girl.'

‘Fat?'

‘No. Just … big.'

‘Why did you let them join you? Were they allowed to make money here?'

She shook her head.

‘They weren't on the game. They had their own cash. They just hung out with us.'

‘Hung out?'

‘It was like they were waiting for something. They were dead cool. We only saw them a couple of times.'

She took a long drag of her cigarette and exhaled.

‘I don't know where they stayed, but we may well have had some shots together or done a few lines.'

‘Coke?'

She smiled and pulled him closer.

‘You won't tell anyone, will you?'

He wondered if she was high on something. She probably was.

‘What about men? Did you see them with any?'

She seemed uninterested in the question.

‘Men. They're always there.'

‘Can you describe them?'

She made no reply.

‘What happened to the girls?'

She stubbed out the cigarette in a small bowl on the bedside table and rubbed up against him. He wanted to push her away, but his body refused to obey.

‘One day they were just gone. It happens,' she said, putting her hand on his crotch.

Her mouth was half open. He pushed her back on to the bed and put his hand up the short skirt. Her snatch was wet. Images rolled around inside his head, of Anna Bagger's stern face and Kir with her gappy teeth and red hair. He pushed them all away and buried himself in meaninglessness. Afterwards, though, his moral hangover returned and he cursed it and himself roundly. Why did he constantly have to prove that he could do something most men in the world took for granted? Why was the casual encounter – the faceless fuck – so important to him?

Afterwards he took a shower, got dressed and zipped up his trousers. So much had been destroyed, that might be why, he thought. Everything was hopeless. It was tempting to finish the job and just screw everything up.

He paid her. She looked at him with dull eyes now.

‘Will you order me a Coke?'

He left her on the bed with the TV blaring. In reception he asked them to send a Coke up to her. It wasn't until he was on the way back out in the cold that it struck him: perhaps this was how you had to think to kill. Perhaps you just had to be as indifferent as he was.

The thought still lingered as he sat in the hospital waiting room fifteen hours later. As always the scan had been pain-free. The worst was still to come.

As usual, he involuntarily started to take stock. When in his life had he ever been happy? The answer wasn't when he married Helle, he was absolutely sure about that. The marriage had been a mistake from day one, and she would undoubtedly agree with him. He had needed someone to show TLC and she had needed to give it. It hadn't been a question of infatuation or even love, but selfish needs on both sides. Helle was the nurse in his GP's practice. She was young and pretty and the first person to reach out to him when he'd been diagnosed two years ago. She was by his side after the op. From then on it could only go one way: into mutual dependency.

They had agreed she should stay in Copenhagen to keep the job she loved when he moved to Grenå, a tacit agreement that they were going their separate ways. The care and understanding had been exhausted. His illness had eaten it all up. Including what they'd never had.

Before Helle, there had been Anna. He took a random magazine from the stand in the waiting room. An old one, creased, with models in bikinis and swimsuits. One of the models seemed to him to have Anna Bagger's oval, angular face, her expression that was both provocative and prim. Anna could embody everything from frostiness to passion. Had he been happy in the time they had spent together, in the stolen moments when her husband was unaware, on a course, or when they were working together?

He had started getting symptoms, even then – at first without realising. His desire disappeared and more importantly his potency. He was ashamed and he retreated from her. He got the diagnosis the day before she broke off their relationship with an iciness that didn't touch him, because nothing did any longer.

‘Mark Bille Hansen.'

The door had opened and the nurse had called him in.

Fifteen minutes later he drove back to Grenå and went straight to Anna Bagger's temporary office where she sat with her eyes glued to the screen and her mobile pressed against her ear.

Mark ignored her conversation.

‘Her name is Tora. The woman in the harbour. She and two other girls were pulling punters in Grenå a month ago.'

Anna Bagger ended the call and put down her mobile.

‘How do you know that?'

‘Does it fit in anywhere?'

She nodded, her fingers tapping away on the keyboard like castanets.

‘We've been contacted by a couple from Mors. They haven't had e-mail contact with their eighteen-year-old daughter for a week. Her name is Tora.'

She turned her laptop so that Mark could see.

‘They thought she was staying with a girlfriend in Århus, but it turned out to be a pack of lies. For six months she was sending false e-mails and photos of herself and her friend.'

A picture emerged from the screen of a young blonde. She was quite pretty, Mark thought, but she still looked like so many other teenage girls: blue eyes, straight nose, full lips and regular features. A small birthmark on her right cheek appeared to be her only distinguishing feature.

‘So where was she really? For those six months?'

Anna Bagger shrugged.

‘Who knows? The girlfriend says she has no idea. They only met a couple of times at a café and she couldn't understand why the girl had to take photos of every meeting they had. She didn't think they were that close.'

‘And the brand? Anything about that?'

‘Nothing.'

He pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘You look pale. Are you ill?' she asked.

He nodded at first, but then shook his head. It didn't matter now.

‘So we're talking about a girl who has actually been missing for six months. There have been signs of life in the form of false e-mails and photos, but no one really knows where she has been or what she's been doing, is that right?'

Anna Bagger laid both hands flat on the desk.

‘Looks like it.'

I
CE CRUNCHED UNDER
the soles of Peter's boots. It was minus seven.

The fishing boats lined the jetty on both sides, ropes connecting them to their mooring posts like umbilical cords. The day was cloudless and the sunshine made the sea sparkle like blue silver and the piles of snow glisten. Hopeful gulls screamed out their hunger and circled close to the smell of fish on decks and in trawl nets. Otherwise all was quiet.

He walked along the jetty, his woollen hat pulled over his ears, and stopped at the end. He could see down to the empty ferry berth and the low grey buildings of the fish factory, and further to the left the ship cemetery where old vessels were scrapped.

A fisherman in an Icelandic sweater and rubber overalls was standing on the deck of his boat stacking crates. Peter greeted him, raising two fingers to his hat.

The fisherman nodded to the harbour entrance where the divers were working. Everyone in town now knew that the body they had found wasn't Nina Bjerre.

‘Wonder if they'll find her today.'

‘We can only hope,' Peter said.

‘So you knew her, did you?'

‘My boss did.'

The fisherman shook his head.

‘I dread pulling in the net at the moment.'

Peter could well understand why. Nets didn't always catch just fish.

As if he had read Peter's thoughts, the fisherman said: ‘Old mines and flotsam and jetsam, if you're lucky.'

He wiped the back of his glove under his nose.

‘And wrecks?'

Peter was thinking of Brian's boat.

‘Nah, we sail around them. Most of them are listed on the charts. Or at least the commercial vessels are.'

‘But an ordinary motorboat might not be?'

The fisherman shook his head as he patted the railing of his boat.

‘No, only boats like this one. And bigger ones. Small wrecks usually go undocumented.'

Peter was frozen. He turned his face to the light, but the sun still didn't have the strength to warm him. He really should be back at work, but restlessness and the many questions on his mind had driven him down to the harbour in his lunch break.

‘What about if the water's shallow? Couldn't you get your boat torn to shreds, or the propeller caught on something?'

‘No problem for dinghies or such like,' the fisherman said.

He stacked a crate on top of the others and looked as if he, too, had work to do.

‘The Kattegat's deep.'

‘Not everywhere, surely?'

‘There are shallows, of course.'

The fisherman took another crate and started hosing it down. His voice rose over the noise: ‘Out near Hesselø. Hastens Grund and Lille Lysegrund. You want to watch yourself there.'

Peter walked back to the car. He needed to get hold of a chart. If Brian had scuttled his boat in the hope of returning to it to retrieve a cargo, he wouldn't have done it in very deep waters. He knew the sea like the back of his hand. He would have picked the right spot for it.

He walked past the harbour office and found a shop selling ship's supplies. An old-fashioned bell rang when he pushed open the door and stepped into the warmth. From the back appeared a man of around fifty with glasses and unkempt grey hair, as though he had been pulling at it. He was chewing a matchstick.

‘We're closed during the winter,' he said. ‘I'm just doing a stock-take.'

‘I'm looking for a chart.'

‘Go on to the K&M homepage.'

The man took out the matchstick.

‘Do you know how to read a chart?'

‘No, I don't suppose I do,' Peter said. ‘Do you need to?'

The man chuckled.

‘Well, it helps. What are you looking for?'

‘The shallows around Hesselø. Hastens Grund and Lille Lysegrund.'

‘Then you'll want chart one-two-nine. Number five-zero-three, B and D.'

‘I'm impressed.'

‘Let's say I've got a head for numbers.'

The man returned the matchstick and held up a finger to indicate that Peter should wait. Then he opened a large drawer and rummaged around under the counter until he reappeared with a rolled-up piece of paper.

‘No charge. We're such nice people here in Grenå.'

Peter unrolled the chart when he was back in his car. Stinger's six-figure tattoo matched one of the coordinates for Lille Lysegrund.

K
IR DIDN'T WANT
to get mixed up in anything to do with the investigation. She didn't want to get caught between the local police and the detectives from Århus, and she most definitely didn't want to do anything that might bring her into contact with Mark Bille Hansen.

She left the group of divers and the depressed atmosphere at coming up empty-handed. Allan Vraa had ordered the big fibreglass boat in the water and they had dived in the deeper waters at the harbour entrance, but in vain. They had found nothing apart from tyres, a couple of bicycles, a pram and two shopping trolleys. The time was approaching when Århus Police would call off the search and pack them off home. It was expensive for a financially pressed police force to engage mine clearance divers plus equipment day after day.