Three Dog Night (40 page)

Back in his car, a thousand thoughts surged through his head and he barely heard the text message announce its arrival with a beep. He had put his mobile in his jacket pocket and felt the faint vibrations, enough for him to retrieve it as he drove.

The text was from Cato. He had been granted day release from prison and would meet him the following morning in a scout hut in Lisbjerg Forest. He had more info, he wrote.

Peter contemplated the message and compared the wording with what he'd just seen by the lake. At home he made a plan.

T
HE MORNING WAS
still dark when Mark turned off the main road and headed for Allingåbro. It was snowing. The headlights caught the large flakes in their glare and the wipers juddered across the windscreen in a mechanical rhythm. One was broken and the rubber screeched in protest as it was dragged across the glass. While he drove around looking for a barn under construction, the light started breaking down the curtain of black, the snowfall dwindled to scattered flurries and the pale fingers of the sun clung to the horizon like a desperate prisoner scaling a fence.

He stopped at a garage in what a country singer would call a one-horse town and bought a couple of cinnamon pastries when he paid for the petrol.

‘You wouldn't happen to know if anyone is building a barn around here, would you?' he asked the girl behind the counter.

She brushed an invisible speck of dust off her white blouse, whose two top buttons were open to reveal a small gold heart on a chain.

‘That'll be Thorvald's farm.'

She gave him directions. He couldn't miss it, straight through the village and he would see it on his right a few kilometres after the exit sign. Mark was tempted to blow her a kiss, but controlled himself and saluted her with two fingers to the temple.

‘Only the skeleton of the barn's up so far.'

‘Thank you. I might be back for more pastries later.'

‘You'll be more than welcome,' she said in mock dialect with a tilt of her head.

She was right. He didn't miss the red structure once out of the village. The snowy landscape spread in all directions and there it was, on a hilltop, catching the morning sun, a sparkling mixture of red and white. It was beautiful here in a rugged kind of way. In the summer the fields would be a billowing mass of green or yellow and nature would truly come into her own. He had a sudden hankering for milder weather, a longing to see the snow turn to water and be absorbed by the soil, for the first spring rain, even though the farmers would inevitably poison the air by spreading manure. Christ, how he longed for something that would germinate and grow. Something that would give him a sense of meaning.

He drove a little further, round a bend in the road, and pulled over. That morning he had put on heavy boots and a winter coat. Now he studied the field leading up to the farm thinking about Christian Røjel's grim face. The pig farmer hadn't given much away and for most of the conversation had been tight-lipped and stony-faced. But towards the end he had given him a few titbits of information.

The Poles had been crammed together in the attic because the other flats in the property were already let and bringing in rent. Officially they didn't exist; they were paid in cash and the taxman was none the wiser. It was hard to keep body and soul together as a farmer if you had to pay the union rate for every single job that needed doing. Men from the same Polish family had been coming to Røjel's farm for years to do the kind of work that would have been unprofitable with Danish labour. In the end, Røjel had reluctantly informed him that their next assignment was building a barn in Allingåbro.

Mark drove on until he could see the back of the farm in his rear-view mirror. Then he pulled off the road, got out, slammed the door and walked through ankle-deep snow across the field. He avoided the small frozen pond, which now formed an ice rink in a dip, but kept to the edge, hoping the bare poplars around the farm would conceal his arrival.

The main building was white and blended in with the snow. Smoke was coming out of the chimney. He might have been mistaken, but he had the feeling he had been spotted. As he approached, he could see something else that was white in the whiteness behind the poplars. At first glance, it looked like a private rubbish dump, where someone had left their old, clapped-out caravan, a rusty van, a pram and a trailer. But on getting closer he could see movement behind the caravan window, the twitch of a curtain. The door opened and two men charged out, one more panic-stricken than the other, without coats but in overalls and socks. They set off, running across the field to where he had come from. He tore after them, feeling a pain in his side, but he ignored it and picked out the slower of the two, a fat little man, whose legs were going nineteen to the dozen in the snow. But not for long. The lack of footwear made it hard for him to make headway through the drifts, and his pace slowed and slowed until Mark caught his sleeve, and they rolled around in the snow.

‘Police,' Mark shouted in English with all the authority he could muster, turning the man on to his stomach and forcing his hands behind his back. To emphasise the gravity of the situation, he took one of the silly cable ties he kept in his jacket pocket and tightened it around the man's wrists. Then he dragged him to his feet.

‘I'm a police officer. I'm not here about work. I have some questions for you about some girls in Grenå.'

The man looked unconvinced. Further ahead, his pal had reached the frozen pond and stopped, as though he couldn't decide which way to go.

‘Tell him it's not about work,' Mark said to his captive, hoping he understood English.

The man shouted something to his friend, who was still caught in two minds. Then he stuffed his hands into his overall pockets and started walking back, lifting his feet high with each step.

They spoke English. One a kind of pidgin, the other slightly better. Yes, they were from Poland, they were just visiting. Mark didn't care. He undid the cable tie and marched them to the caravan, which was clearly inhabited. There was a smell of sweat, dirty socks, garlic, cabbage and oil. Some clothes had been hung up to dry on a line and there was a pair of socks on a small electric heater. An electric cable from the farm had been fed through a window. There were rubber boots and trainers lying around, and the bed linen on the two mattresses was crumpled. It looked as if the alarm clock had just gone off.

They sat down at a folding table. There was a half a bottle of vodka in the corner with a couple of glasses. Mark nodded to the bottle and the squat Pole found an extra glass and poured vodka for all three of them, looking as if he couldn't quite believe his own eyes.

‘Na zdrowie.'

Mark had learned the word on a school trip to Poland in the distant past.

‘Na zdrowie.'

The little fat guy, who, Mark guessed, was around his own age, threw back his head and drained the glass in one go and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The other man followed his example, but his eyes watered and his face went red. They put their glasses down on the laminate table with a bang. Mark earned himself cautious smiles as he tipped the vodka down his throat and felt its beneficial, burning effect all the way down, followed by the relief of dulled pain.
Highly unprofessional conduct
. He could almost hear Anna Bagger's outraged voice, but it served merely to enhance his enjoyment of the vodka. He stuck his hand in his pocket and took out the CCTV picture. The Poles looked at it and nodded. Yes, they recognised the girls. They had been with the two prostitutes in the house. Yes, they admitted they had invited them up to the attic, but they hadn't paid for sex.

‘We had fun.'

‘What were their names?'

They pointed: ‘Lena, Lily and Tora.'

‘When did you last see Tora?'

They looked at each other and exchanged a few words. Mark guessed from their expression that they were trying to agree whether to tell the truth or not. He tried to read their body language and intonation. The fat one appeared to have more experience. The other, who was younger, early twenties perhaps, looked like a gangly teenager and was still nervous.

‘Christmas,' the fat one said.

‘December the twenty-fourth?'

He shook his head.

‘The twenty-fifth. We drank some vodka and ate fish. Polish tradition,' he said with an airy gesture, almost reaching for the vodka bottle, but folding his hands on the table instead. ‘We were with the girls from downstairs. Tora went down to the kiosk to get another bottle of vodka, but she never came back.'

Even a kiosk had to be closed on Christmas Day, surely, Mark thought.

‘And the others? Didn't they start to worry?'

‘They were a little drunk. But later they panicked and said she must have been
taken
.'

‘Did you find out anything about the girls? Their history? Why they were in Grenå?'

The young Pole studied his lap. The fat one gazed longingly at the vodka bottle, and when Mark nodded, his hand shot out and grabbed it. He spoke while pouring out three glasses.

‘When they were drunk, they talked about a treasure at the bottom of the sea – some money or something they wanted to find.'

‘Were they on the run from someone?'

The fat one drained his glass as he had the first and looked at Mark as if to say everyone was running away from something.

‘There were some people they didn't want to meet, but I don't know who they were. They didn't mention any names.'

Mark showed them another photo. A picture of Ramses.

‘Have you seen this man before?'

They both nodded.

‘Once with Lily.'

Mark looked at the first photo again: Lily, the smallest of the three, with the Mohican, pierced eyebrows, lips and nose, and a hard expression on her small, pale face. He produced the earring from his pocket and showed it to them. Yes, that was hers, they confirmed. Lily had had a couple of ear studs with a fleur-de-lis. They matched her name, she had said. A fleur-de-lis was a lily in English.

‘The fleur-de-lis,' Mark said. ‘Did you see if any of the girls had tattoos or brands on their thighs?'

He held his breath, but he drew a blank. Whatever the two Poles had been doing with the three girls, it hadn't been in daylight.

Before leaving, he asked to see their passports. He wrote down their names: Krystof and Marek Skopowski.

He turned in the doorway. Something didn't quite add up. The men weren't attractive, they weren't rich. They were working illegally in Denmark. They lived in a place reeking of cabbage, garlic and dirty socks. What could they possibly have to offer three young Danish women?

‘What did the girls want from you? What did you have that they needed?'

Mark looked around the caravan. As a child he had gone camping with his parents. He took two swift steps, flipped aside the mattress and bedding and looked in the box beneath.

‘What the hell is this?'

He counted five handguns and one automatic weapon. A veritable arsenal. He straightened up. The two Poles scrambled to their feet, ready to flee a second time. Mark launched himself at them. He was pushed to the floor, but got hold of the older man's legs and felled him. The younger man tried to get him in a headlock, but Mark found his police gun and pressed it against the man's neck.

‘Let go.'

The young guy released him. The older man had struggled to his knees, but he was moving sluggishly and Mark managed to stand up before he could muster any resistance. Mark pointed his gun at the two men, who were quite clearly inexperienced fighters.

‘Hands up!'

They did as they were told.

‘On your knees.'

The men knelt on the floor of the camper while Mark cuffed them with cable ties again. He read defeat in their eyes and their posture.

‘They bought weapons from you, didn't they?'

He pointed his gun at each in turn. ‘How many?'

Finally the older man answered.

‘Two automatics and two handguns. Two night-vision goggles.'

‘Where did they get the money from?'

They didn't know, but he could guess: robbing shops in Grenå.

‘That's why the girls went up to the attic, wasn't it? To check out the merchandise?'

It had never been about sex or friendship. It had been about business.

He frogmarched them to his car, put them in the back and locked the doors. He leaned against the car and called Anna Bagger. He quickly explained the situation and requested assistance: two patrol cars and a search team to turn the caravan inside out.

‘I can only give you one car and two officers,' she said. ‘We've got too much going on here. Didn't you get my message?'

‘I've been busy.'

Her voice was chilly: ‘Felix Gomez's parents have reported her missing. She was on her way to see them, but she never turned up.'

‘Shit!'

‘We're meeting here at eleven. I'd like you to be here. I want to know what your friend Boutrup is up to and where he is.'

P
ETER COULD HEAR
the chainsaw chewing its way through the wood and he knew that Manfred had been in his workshop since daybreak. Jutta had driven the children to the nursery and then gone on to her job as a carer at a centre for senior citizens. The house was empty. Only King, the dachshund, was at home. The door was open and he went straight in, bent down and chatted to the dog, who greeted him like a long-lost friend.

He went over to the window, opened the curtain a fraction and looked across the yard to the workshop. From where he was standing, the noise was muted, but it was there. Manfred was busy.

In the few seconds he stood there, scenes from their friendship flashed through his mind: their first discussions about books they had both read. Hunting trips. A shared love of carpentry. A game of chess in the evening with a whisky and Jutta and the children around. Time spent in each other's company without many words or any grand gestures.