Three Dog Night (3 page)

She moved away from the window but didn't know where else to go. The cold and her tiredness were a bad combination. She was always cold in this house. She was sneezing, shivering and coughing so much she permanently had chest pains. There appeared to be draughts everywhere, and she felt like she was walking on cotton wool, she was so exhausted. She knew she ought to eat something, but whenever she tried, the food would stick in her throat and she wouldn't feel hungry any more. If only she could sleep a little. But everything inside her resisted the thought of bed. Only when she was finally worn down by insomnia was she able to ignore her resistance and let go. She wasn't exhausted enough yet, though, so she turned on the television. They were showing the New Year's Concert from Vienna.

She liked the music. The waltzes swayed to and fro inside her. At one time, before the accident, she used dance to find a space for herself. She wasn't trained; she made up her own steps. But her body was made for dancing, she knew that. It wasn't her job and never had been. It was just part of her, like breathing or putting one foot in front of the other.

She rose to her feet, drawn by the waltz. Tentatively, she began to dance to the rhythm of the music. Humming and swaying, she spun around, up on her toes, down again until she was almost in a trance. But she was too weak, and when the music suddenly stopped and the applause erupted, she stood breathless on the floor in her stockinged feet, everything spinning around in front of her. Suddenly it wasn't the dancing on the television she saw. It was glimpses of the accident, everything spinning her around and around and around, until she no longer knew who she was or why.

She switched off the television. Her heart was pounding and she was dripping with sweat. Fresh air was what she needed, even though her exhaustion was now almost insurmountable.

She went into the hallway and put on several layers of clothing. To be on the safe side, she stuffed her mobile in her pocket, thinking about her neighbour, Peter A. Boutrup. He had said hello to her one day, but she had not returned his greeting. She didn't know why, but perhaps she hadn't had the strength.

She was about to venture out into the cold when she noticed he had just closed his front door and was on his way out with the dog. She hated situations like this and felt angry inside. Now what? Her indecision halted her; she was incapable of moving. From the window she saw him embarking on his usual walk up to the cliff in snow up to his ankles, with the dog running alongside him, a bundle of energy after being confined to the house. He tossed treats into the air, which it caught, or threw them into the snow so it would have to dig down to find them.

She didn't open her front door until he had been gone for quite some time.

The air was freezing cold and stung her lungs. She had no option but to follow him and the dog. The snow was too deep in every other direction. She walked at a brisk pace while keeping her distance at the same time. Soon she spotted them. They were oblivious to anything but themselves, it seemed, but one day she supposed she would have to say hello to him, exchange a few words and perhaps make it clear she wasn't interested in being close neighbours.

Suddenly the dog started to bark. She saw Peter stop and she did the same. He stood still for a while, looking down from what appeared to her to be the highest point of the cliff. She tried to follow his gaze. She couldn't see what he had spotted, but the mood had changed and the man and the dog were no longer playful.

Peter leaned over the cliff edge. He needed to get closer to see what the dog had seen, but walking beyond where the snow had been cleared was dangerous. The drop to the beach was dizzying. He decided to send Kaj down first. The dog would love it.

‘Off you go.'

He pointed downwards.

‘Find.'

The dog took up the challenge. It ran to and fro along the cliff before deciding where to begin its descent. Then things moved fast. It careered down, skidding on stiff legs all the way to where the waves rolled into the crust of ice along the beach. It soon reached the dark spot on the stones. It sniffed all the way around, nudged it with its nose and barked loudly.

‘Bloody hell.'

The dog's instinct had been spot on. He had to get down there. But he already knew what awaited him. Like Kaj, he stumbled, slipped, and almost rolled, to the foot of the cliff.

‘What is it, boy? What have you found?'

He approached with caution. He had never seen the dog so agitated. The figure was half concealed by snow, lying on its stomach with one cheek distorted and the mouth open. Dark stubble covered part of the face; one black bushy eyebrow – the eyebrows which had been his pride and joy – was caked with ice. As was his hair. It looked as if someone had scattered artificial Yuletide snow across him, and it had settled like white crystals against the black background. He was dressed inappropriately for the weather: a short, black leather jacket, jeans and a pair of trainers.

Peter knelt down and felt for a pulse, but he knew it was too late. Ramses – who in life had been a handsome idiot, always a sucker for a girl in a short skirt or easy money – was as dead as a doornail. There was what looked like an exit wound in his back, where the blood had stained the snow a rusty red. He surmised that the Egyptian had been shot from the front at close range, straight through the heart.

He heard a noise and turned around just in time to see the woman from the neighbouring house – he recognised her black Puffa jacket – standing and waving her arms at the top of the cliff. She cupped her gloved hands to her mouth: ‘Hi. Is that what I think it is?'

He waved and nodded. She started her descent.

‘Stay where you are,' he shouted. ‘There's no need for you to see this.'

But she was already halfway down. She lost her footing and tumbled, but she didn't seem to care, even though she could easily have broken her neck. She landed at his feet and he automatically stuck out a hand to support her. It was the first time he had seen her close up and he found it hard to take his eyes off her. She was both beautiful and ugly. The beauty lay in her eyes, which shone like a pool of turquoise contained inside a clear, black circle; it was also in the oval form of her face and the colour of her hair, various shades of dark against skin as white as chalk, although only a few strands protruded from under her cap. The ugliness lay in the fact that she looked as if she might faint on the spot and occupy a position next to the corpse. She was painfully thin, her skin waxen, and the beauty of her eyes was framed by sunken, charcoal-grey sockets which made them seem dark despite their colour.

‘I suppose you think I've never seen a dead body before.'

‘Have you?'

He guessed she was around thirty, the same age as him. How many bodies could she have seen?

She made no reply, just stared at Ramses and ran her hand nervously up to her throat and around her neck, under her scarf and hair, as if something was too tight. There was a wide variety of birds on the cliff all year round, and Peter thought he had seen most of them, but she was the most exotic of the lot.

‘Poor guy. Who is he?' she asked.

He hesitated.

‘No idea. You wouldn't have a mobile on you, would you?'

She put her hand into her pocket, found her mobile and passed it to him.

He took it, brushing her hand, and felt a sudden urge to touch her, to stroke her cheek. Instead, however, he did the last thing in the world he wanted to do: he called the police.

‘A
ND SHE HASN'T
been seen since?'

Mark Bille Hansen, the new head of the East Jutland police force in the town of Grenå, had a headache. Not because he had overdone it on New Year's Eve, but for a completely different reason he didn't want to think about right now. He shook some pills into the palm of his hand as noiselessly as he could, letting the person on the line carry on talking.

‘We had a party, which finished around two o'clock. She wanted to go home but there was no one to give her a lift, so she said she would walk.'

Mark swallowed the pills dry. Wedging the telephone between his chin and his shoulder, he lined up a few items on his desk: blotting pad, pen, notepad, mobile. He placed his coffee cup in the corner, with a packet of V6 chewing gum next to it. An old newspaper flew into the waste-paper basket.

‘How far did she have to walk? Where does she live and where was the party?'

He made a note of the addresses while looking across his office. The furnishings were sparse, not to say austere. Nothing surplus to requirements. No ornaments. It suited him just fine.

‘The others said she wasn't wearing much. We're afraid she might have frozen to death in this weather.'

He could see why. A nineteen-year-old with champagne in her blood, dressed in scanty clothing, outside in minus thirteen, was close to a deliberate suicide mission in his mind.

‘And you've spoken to her family?'

‘I've just this minute spoken to Nina's parents, yes. They're too upset to call,' said the man who had hosted the party. ‘Her father's been driving around town for hours. Now they're at home crossing their fingers that she'll turn up.'

Mark coughed discreetly as the pills slowly made their way down. Thank God he didn't have children to worry about on top of everything else.

‘Can someone bring us a photo? Or better still, e-mail us a photo that's a good likeness and we'll treat her as a missing person.'

‘Is that all you do?'

The man sounded disappointed, but also as if he hadn't been expecting anything else from the police, who had been getting a bad press recently.

‘We'll get reinforcements and start a search.'

Mark ended the conversation. What the hell did the idiot imagine? That the police would just let a young girl disappear in the snow without even trying to find her? He started organising the operation, called Århus and explained the situation. After that, he took his jacket and braced himself to visit the girl's parents in Nørrevang.

A cushy number, that was how it had been sold to him when the posting became a reality. In Grenå he could recover in peace instead of rushing off in pursuit of dead bodies with the Copenhagen Homicide Squad. And he did have family in Grenå, as they had pointed out. They would undoubtedly be a great source of support to him, they said. Screw his bosses. They had failed to mention that it took half a day to travel to the hospital – to the kind of hospital he needed, anyway.

He was leaning on the door handle when the telephone rang again.

‘Grenå Police. Bille Hansen speaking.'

It was going to be a New Year's Day he would never forget, he thought, as a man who introduced himself as Peter Boutrup informed him, calmly and concisely, that his dog had found the body of a man at the foot of Gjerrild Cliff. The man appeared to have a bullet hole in his back.

Mark quickly ended the call, made a second call to Århus, then got hold of Jepsen and briefed him.

‘Go to Nørrevang and talk to Nina's parents. Hopefully the officers from Århus will soon be there with the dogs. They know where, and what it's about, so they can just get started. Otherwise I'm on my mobile, OK?'

Jepsen blinked like a frightened animal. After six weeks he still seemed surprised every time Mark asked him to do something. What were they used to out here in Djursland? A glass of port and a friendly word? A matey pat on the shoulder? He could do neither.

Jepsen nodded, red-eyed but composed. Mark hoped this was because he had let the New Year in with a bigger bang than his boss's own damp squib.

‘I'm going to the cliff to have a look. But it won't be long before the others get there: the ambulance crew, the forensics team, the SOC people. Anyone who can do the things we can't,' he said.

Jepsen nodded once more, with panic in his eyes now, possibly in response to the guest list Mark had just reeled off. He wasn't wild about it, either. He put on his coat and gave a last glance round his office. He should have opted for a career in the army.

‘See you later.'

Mark closed the door behind him slightly too hard. Århus. He bounded down the stairs, suppressing his irritation that officers from Denmark's second largest city would now be hurrying here to solve a case he could have solved himself if he'd had the staff. He doubted there was a single detective in Århus with more experience than he had after eight years in Copenhagen. But it made no difference. He would just have to get used to the role of rural police officer and having no say in murder cases.

P
ETER WATCHED THE
black Puffa jacket as it moved up and down along the shore. She refused to go home. He had offered to stay behind and deal with the police. It was obvious she was unwell. But no. She refused to let anything go, and that included Ramses who was lying there looking as if he was frozen senseless, which of course he was.

Peter looked at the remains of Ramses and cursed him to hell and back. He had been a nice enough bloke, but he had never been blessed with much intelligence. Now the lack of brain cells had probably brought his life to an end and, well, so be it. It was worse that it had happened right here, by the cliff – right in the middle of the life Peter had hoped to rebuild without being dragged back by his past. That had been the plan: a nice, easy life, just him and the dog; seeing good friends when the opportunity arose; the job which he enjoyed; the outdoors; and possibly at some time in the future a dream of the normal family life he'd never had himself. Now that Ramses was lying there, he'd been forced to contact the authorities, people he would have preferred to give a wide berth, and who had never done him any good in the past.

‘The police are here.'

It was as if noises were amplified in the clear frost. A car fought its way through the snow, the engine sounding as if it was about to explode with anger. They'd only had time to exchange a few words and she had politely patted Kaj on the head. She stopped doing that now.