Three Dog Night (31 page)

‘And the hotel?' asked her father, who never missed a thing.

‘I was just passing,' she said, hoping that would suffice, but knowing full well that it wouldn't. She had called in advance and told her mother the story, to prepare them for the newspaper headlines, but fortunately she hadn't been named in the article.

The newspaper rustled as her father put it down on the table. He took a deep breath.

‘Just passing, were you? I can see how you would pass a hotel. But as I understand it, you just had to rush in when you heard something from an open window. Why do you always have to go and stick your nose in other people's business?'

She stood very still. It wasn't going to go away. She looked at her mother, who turned her back on them and started carving, at Tomas, who was leaning against the window sill scratching his chin and avoiding her gaze, and at Red, who was taking the cap off a beer, apparently revelling in the entertainment. She considered her strategy, as she had done so many times before. And she asked herself why she didn't just give up. Why was it so important to her to pretend they were really a happy family? Why did she keep hoping that they would be blinded by some light and suddenly see what was wrong? She was thirty-two years old. Things were never going to change.

She chose a third option. She walked across to her mother.

‘Can I help you with anything?'

‘You can set the table.'

It was the closest she would ever get to helping her, being asked to do something. She made a big fuss out of looking for plates in the cupboard – she knew exactly where everything was kept. Ditto cutlery in the drawer and glasses from the vitrine cabinet. Tomas and Red didn't move, but talked in muted tones about the new roof on the barn and the new herd of pigs. Her father watched as she cleared the table, including the newspaper, which she put in the kitchen window. Tomas sent her a small, secretive smile, or at least that was her impression.

‘Right, I think we can eat now.'

It was her cue to put the food on the mats. After all, she was the girl in the family.

Her mother handed her a bowl of boiled potatoes. She looked at Kir, but didn't see her; that was how it felt, and it was her mother's speciality. Kir had to remind herself that her mother was caught in the middle. This was the only life she knew. Her daughter's lifestyle with no boyfriend or children but with a job she loved was a constant threat to a more traditional way of life. Kir knew that only too well, yet still it hurt.

‘Why couldn't you have walked on past the hotel?'

Everyone had sat down, the dishes were being passed around, and her father's question came like a slap across the face.

‘I couldn't ignore a cry for help,' she said.

Her father shovelled caramelised potatoes on to his plate.

‘You can't save the whole world. It's rotten anyway.'

No one spoke. She helped herself to a slice of pork, the smallest she could find.

‘Perhaps you don't think I'm entitled to ask?' her father continued after the first mouthful, and she knew what was coming next. ‘I go about my business every day without bothering anyone, but my daughter keeps finding one corpse after another and interfering in other people's lives. People are talking.'

Kir put down her fork.

‘Then let them talk. I'm only doing my job.'

Her father, too, put down his cutlery on his plate.

‘To my knowledge it's not a mine clearance diver's job to find bodies in hotels. Unless we're talking about flooding. A tsunami, perhaps?'

‘It is my job,' Kir repeated. ‘I was in the area because I was looking for rooms for my colleagues.'

Her father snorted.

‘They've probably got somewhere to stay already. And what's that got to do with you? The police are footing the bill.'

‘It's my town,' Kir said. ‘I wanted to find them a good deal. But now it's too late. Today was the last day.'

This time Red, who was sitting opposite her, chewing a piece of crackling and then holding it between his fingers, reacted.

‘Have you only found the one body in the harbour?'

‘And a few bits and pieces,' Kir said vaguely. She wasn't allowed to discuss the case with anyone, not even family.

‘Bits and pieces?'

Red's eyebrows shot up. Kir shrugged her shoulders.

‘I found the body. That's all. She's been identified now. As you know, it wasn't Nina Bjerre, so she must still be out there somewhere. Chances are she's on her way to Norway.'

‘Says who?' Tomas said.

She told him her theory that Nina had stumbled across Tora's killer and had been thrown into the sea.

‘She'll turn up,' Kir said. ‘They always do.'

At least the interrogation by her father had been halted, but this wasn't much of an improvement. During the rest of the dinner she fought off questions to the best of her ability. She knew better than to get up and leave. She knew better than to call them what she felt they were right now: not her family, just four people tied to her by blood and very little else. From experience she knew she would regret it later. It would take months, years possibly, to mend fences because deep down they didn't understand her. She loved them; that was the root of the problem. She longed for closeness and intimacy. In her childhood she had harboured the illusion that it had once been like that, with her siblings and especially with her mother, but she must have been deluding herself. Everything was broken and she knew exactly when it had happened.

She endured it. She answered their questions, stayed for pudding, lemon mousse, and then used tiredness as an excuse to leave.

Back home in her summer house, she was frozen to the bone and lit a fire in the wood burner before sitting down with a whisky. But no matter how close she moved to the fire she couldn't get warm. Her teeth began to chatter and one shiver after another rippled across her skin as though there were ghosts nearby. Perhaps there are, she thought. There was the ghost of Uncle Hannibal and then there were those of Nina Bjerre, Gry and Tora. No matter where she turned something was breathing down her neck and it went back a long way, to the time her path had been strewn with the dead creatures, and not all of them wished her well.

The family. None of them had ever forgiven her. It all started the day she had dived down and pulled Tomas out of the water to a life with brain damage. Two years ago the episode had been raised at a family dinner, just like tonight's. The evening had ended in conflict with mutual recriminations and she had no desire to repeat the experience, but the essence of it was still a bitter pill for her to swallow.

She ran her finger around the rim of her whisky glass. There was a knock at the door. Through the spyhole she could see Mark Bille Hansen outside. She let him in, still holding her glass, and seated him next to the wood burner, with an identical glass.

‘What's happened?' he asked. ‘You look worse than me.'

She scrutinised him and concluded that, if so, things had to be pretty bad. He was definitely a mess, with bags under his eyes, his jacket and trousers crumpled and his hair all over the place. He apologised for turning up at her home, but he couldn't stop thinking about the case.

‘And you seem to have a flair for crime,' he said.

She followed her smile with a sip from her glass, and the whisky burned all the way down her throat.

‘That's what my dad says. He thinks I've got a flair for finding bodies and upsetting a small community where everyone knows everybody else.'

He gave her a look which she interpreted as compassion.

‘I know what you mean.'

She nodded. She could tell from his face that he understood and before she knew it, she had started telling him about her evening. Normally she was a very private person. She was astonished and possibly also a little annoyed with herself, but the intimacy – or the illusion of it – was so very welcome. She needed it. She told him about that night two years ago.

‘We ended up talking about the time I jumped in the water and fished out my brother, Tomas. We don't usually talk about it. That day is taboo.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it's all about emotions and we've never been good with emotions. Love, gratitude, anger.' She corrected herself, ‘Oh no, that's wrong, we can do anger.'

‘What were they angry about?'

‘My dad was angry that I'd brought up the subject. I did it because I thought we should talk about it; it was a day that changed everyone's lives. We began treating each other differently from that day onwards and I didn't understand why.'

‘Your brother was brain-damaged?'

She nodded.

‘It isn't immediately obvious, but his short-term memory isn't very good. Nor is his concentration. But Tomas wasn't the problem.'

‘Then what was?'

‘My dad said it was rather reckless of the guilty party to raise the subject.'

‘Guilty party?'

‘That's what I queried. And you know what he said? He said everyone knew that it was me who had pushed Tomas overboard.'

‘And had you?'

She shook her head. The tears welled up, but she managed to suppress them.

‘Of course not. But I realised that everyone thinks I did.'

This was the essence of her life, and there she was, talking about it to someone who was actually a stranger. It was an open wound she was constantly trying to heal. That was why she kept going back for those dinners. That was why she was still living in Grenå. She lived in hope of healing a family that refused to be healed.

Mark Bille asked her: ‘How did Tomas end up in the water?'

She hunched her shoulders.

‘Perhaps he just fell in. Perhaps the boat listed suddenly, I can't remember. I think I must've been looking away or had my back turned when it happened.'

They sat in silence for a little while. Then he said: ‘There's a reason for my visit.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Gry. The flat she lived in. Her landlord, a man called Asger Toft, told me he inherited the property from his mother, and that was technically correct. But, just to be on the safe side, I looked into it and it turns out he sold the house a year ago.'

Intuitively she knew something was about to happen and she needed to brace herself. She pressed her knees against the edge of the table.

‘Who to?'

He looked at her as though anticipating a reaction.

‘Your mother.'

‘C
OME ON.
D
ANCE
with me.'

Felix put on some music and reached out for Peter, but he shook his head. She just smiled at him, a sad inward-turning smile, and slowly her body started moving to the rhythm of the music. To and fro, back and forth, spinning around, bending her knees and stretching up on her toes in dance moves that looked as if she was improvising, but whose magic had him completely hypnotised. Her body was like a single organic movement: it twisted around itself, it swayed like a flower in the wind, it unfurled and it contracted. He was reminded of his encounter with a stag, with something wild and untamed and beautiful. Something you couldn't change or disturb, but could only watch, although you didn't quite understand what you were witnessing.

All he could do was devour her with his eyes until the music subsided and she collapsed like a rose under the weight of rainwater. Tired. But without the anger and fear that had recently consumed her.

They had swapped stories. Shaking and agitated, she had told him about her escape from the black saloon. Once she had started to calm down, she sat wrapped in a blanket and drank three cups of tea. Afterwards he told her what Miriam had said about Erik's secret life. He felt no pleasure, as he might have imagined he would. Felix's sadness, her anger and fear, had knocked him for six, and he was left wishing he could have spared her the truth.

‘He loved me once.'

She had said the words with the usual stubbornness in her voice, followed by the more sceptical: ‘He must have done.'

He discovered that he would have liked to eradicate her doubt and replace it with certainty, to see her happy.

‘I'm sure he did,' he had said.

That was when she had turned on the music and started dancing with her eyes closed, as though she could dispel disappointment and pain in that way. Perhaps she could.

‘One day I'd like to paint you dancing,' he said after she had flopped down on an easy chair and curled up in it.

‘I thought you don't paint people.'

‘I could make an exception.'

She smiled, a little distracted, and he knew that her thoughts had once again returned to Erik. She took the burgundy briefcase from the table, placed it on her lap and drummed her fingers.

‘He must have had enemies. It's par for the course in the drugs business.'

He didn't know what was worse for her: the women or the drugs. But ultimately lying had to be the greatest villain. With lies came doubts about everything she had believed in and trusted. Trusted blindly, or so it seemed.

‘I don't think it was an accident,' she blurted. ‘Not any more.'

‘But the Air Accident Investigation Board didn't find anything, did they?'

She shook her head.

‘That was before all of this.'

She was alluding to the briefcase and the boxes from Erik's office. ‘They found nothing because they weren't looking.'

‘Is the investigation over?'

‘No. I'm meeting them tomorrow. I'll have to tell them what I know now, won't I?'

He nodded. He supposed she would.

She got up and started pacing the room, again as if driven by an internal engine.

‘The question is who was behind it. Whoever killed Erik also killed Maria.'

In her eyes he could see her thoughts making connections.

‘They must be the same people who are after me now. They think I know something. Or they're scared I might start remembering things.'