Three Dog Night (7 page)

‘Of course. What are we looking for?'

‘A young woman, Nina Bjerre. Does the name mean anything to you? She failed to return from a New Year's Eve party on the seafront.'

Kir was a Grenå girl born and bred, but she didn't recognise the name. Nevertheless, her spirits fell at the thought that someone had ended their life at the bottom of an icy harbour, on New Year's Eve of all nights.

‘Where are you?'

‘Out walking in Polderrev Plantation,' she lied.

‘In this cold?'

She hoped he couldn't hear the waves. What would he think if she told him she was two nautical miles out from the harbour?

‘I needed some fresh air,' she said.

‘You'll get plenty of that when you're down here helping us, I can guarantee you that,' said her old commander. ‘It's minus bloody ten degrees. Snowstorms are forecast. Go home and have a hot drink before you leave.'

She told him not to worry and ended the call. She felt like a complete idiot. No one must know about her hopeless little venture, least of all Allan Vraa, who had professional respect for her as a mine clearance diver – respect which could soon be lost if he knew that she'd gone out on her own to search for a body which had in all likelihood been fish food long ago.

She just had time to stop by her summer house on the outskirts of Grenå. It had been a struggle to scrape up the money to buy it – not surprising, really, considering how much she'd spent on diving equipment over the years, she thought, as she drove up Hasselvej. The summer house was in an enclosed field south of the town, near the old summer house area, and technically she wasn't allowed to live here all year round. It was old, wooden, painted black, with an asphalt roof, and should have been demolished and rebuilt ages ago. But she didn't have enough money for that, and besides, she liked it the way it was. She felt at home here and that was what counted.

She had planned to throw some logs on the fire and sit in front of the wood burner with a mug of hot tea, a woollen blanket and one of the muffins she had baked the day before in a fit of domesticity, but she would have to put that off until later. She parked her car outside the garage, hauled her gear inside and started her post-dive routine. She had changed her clothes when she docked in the harbour, and had – with a selective sense of order which only manifested itself when it came to her diving equipment – carefully returned every item to its respective box. First she switched off her diving cylinder, emptied the tubes of any remaining air and disconnected the regulator from the cylinder valve. She checked the cylinder was properly closed before emptying the tubes again. When she had completed the first stage, she blew on the dust cap and filter to dry them, replaced the cap carefully and rinsed the regulator again before hanging it up to dry in its usual place.

The equipment box also contained her custom-made neoprene drysuit. In addition to that, there was an inner suit for extra insulation; then came the neoprene gloves and the hood, the compensator vest with the integrated weighting system, which could increase or reduce buoyancy – she released the lead weight pockets and laid them out in front of her – the fixed diving cylinder with a compressed air, depth and air pressure console – the compass and everything else needed for safe leisure diving.

She checked her watch. It was ten o'clock. She didn't want to delay the search for the woman in the harbour, so she quickly rinsed every item, cleaned the vest and emptied it again by turning it upside down. Then she re-inflated it so it would dry quickly. She gave the rest – knife, scissors, torch, marker buoys and signalling equipment – a quick once-over before closing the garage door.

In the kitchen she grabbed a rye bread sandwich and glugged down a glass of milk before locking the house and, filled with a mixture of nervous excitement and sadness, drove to the harbour to meet her colleagues, whom she hadn't seen since the search in Vejle Fjord.

They had assembled in the cold outside the big green diving truck, which stood near the harbour's middle basin, holding cups of hot coffee and discussing the day's strategy. Allan Vraa briefed her and handed her a steaming plastic cup.

‘She went to a party over there.'

He pointed in the direction of the flats by the marina. The people who lived there probably wouldn't see the attraction of an old wooden summer house, she thought.

‘But a witness saw her at around two a.m. by this basin, so that's where we're going to start. Niklas and Karsten have set up the poles.'

Kir had dived in Grenå before. There were three basins in all. The largest industrial basin was furthest away, with a depth of ten to eleven metres. The middle one was where the big trawlers were moored, and it also contained sorting and pumping facilities for industrial fishing. And then the last basin was for the net fishermen and small trawlers. In the middle basin, the depth was around seven metres and visibility was always poor. The basin lay next to the scrapyards where redundant ships were decommissioned and cut up.

‘That was quick,' she said, still cold from her earlier dive.

She drank her coffee. She had swum around where old Hannibal used to take her fishing, but she hadn't found much, except for sand, seaweed and a couple of gawping fish in the sub-zero water. Soon she would have to get this silly idea out of her head. Hannibal was dead. More than likely he had fallen overboard by accident, because his boat had been found later, washed up on Fjellerup Strand. She didn't understand why it continued to haunt her; everybody else appeared to have accepted this explanation. So why couldn't she just let it go?

‘… mind diving with Niklas?'

Allan Vraa looked at her quizzically.

‘Kir?'

She pulled herself together. She'd been looking forward to working with her colleagues again. She was going to make the most of it.

‘No, not at all.'

‘Good,' Allan Vraa said, crushing his empty plastic cup and throwing it into a bin. ‘Get your gear. Let's get cracking.'

F
ELIX KNEW ALL
about befriending insomnia.

She had learned something from all those women's magazines she'd ploughed her way through over the years after all: the trick was to embrace your insomnia, welcome it like an old friend.

The only problem was that it didn't work. She'd tried. It always ended up with the old friend outstaying her welcome.

So she walked around in a daze, as if the world was stage scenery and she an extra in a play with a large cast. But she could do nothing else.

She sipped her tea and tried to force down a cracker, pretending to herself that she had slept. She collected the newspaper from her mailbox and in the process let the cold in. The front page told the story of the young girl who had disappeared on New Year's Eve and the discovery of a man's body. His name was Ramses Bilal. Egyptian. An ex-convict.

She looked out of the window, towards her neighbour's house. Who was Peter Boutrup? And how did he come to know a violent criminal?

Boutrup hadn't returned yet. He hadn't been home since he'd left the house the day before. She presumed he'd taken the dog with him. You didn't leave a dog alone for so many hours, and he was clearly a man who loved his dog. Felix wondered if there were people he loved, too.

She looked down the lane that led from the cottages on the cliff towards Gjerrild. The postman had been and gone long ago. Right now there wasn't a soul to be seen. She got up but was overcome by a coughing fit and had to sit down again to recover. This wasn't good. She was ill. She didn't care about the illness, but she did care about the flashbacks, which had troubled her all through the night. Ramses Bilal had triggered it: snippets of stories, intruding, urging her to address them; faces; fragments of conversations. Pieces of jigsaw from the day her world had exploded. She fought them. But they surged like a tsunami against oblivion and demanded she let them in.

Peter Boutrup. She must try to concentrate on him. Perhaps he could force the jigsaw pieces out of her mind.

She put on her coat and boots and went to the car port, where she found a shovel. It took her a few minutes to dig down to the stone Peter Boutrup's guest had unearthed on New Year's Eve. Once the stone was exposed, she quickly found the key. She stood holding it in her hand for a long time, trying to talk herself out of it, but a stronger voice drowned out the warning.

She unlocked the door and went inside.

It was clean and there was a smell that reminded her of something. At first she thought it was the boat: they had painted it a couple of years ago, just before it put to sea after the winter. She didn't remember the details, only the sense of companionship. Erik and her together, sharing a project for once and enjoying it – or she was, at least.

She moved noiselessly through the house. Wooden floors. White walls and white furniture. Austere. There were landscape paintings on the walls. Several were pale winter scenes in blue and white shades and she recognised her surroundings: the cliff, the sea, the lane. She walked up to one of them. Sniffed it. The smell came from them. It was fresh paint. She looked at the initials: PAB. Then she found an easel and paints in another room which apparently served as a studio. Several more paintings were leaning against the wall. She flicked through them. Many of them were part of a series. Just as the ones in the living room had a winter theme, these had a recurring subject: a big, burning tree. Here she noticed the initials were of an older vintage.

She tried to draw some conclusions about the occupant of the house as she moved from room to room, but she kept finding new things that contradicted what she had just deduced. The paintings suggested he might be a cultivated man behind the brusque exterior. But then she looked at his music collection: dreadful canned music, rap, hip-hop; black men wearing layers of gold jewellery, probably with previous for drug dealing and violence, graced several of the CD covers. The same went for his DVD collection: brain-dead action movies and – God help us – a pile of porn. No sophistication there.

She scanned the bookcase, expecting more of the same. But apart from books about dog training and wildlife, she would not have predicted what she found. The majority of the space was given to classics and they looked as if they had been read: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Steinbeck, Flaubert, Dumas, Hugo, Cervantes and several others. Robinson Crusoe was so worn and dog-eared it was falling apart. Danish writers were present, too: Johannes V. Jensen, Karen Blixen, Martin A. Hansen, I.P. Jacobsen. She recognised the names, of course, and might well have read some of them at school, but she wasn't much of a reader herself.

She went into the kitchen, expecting his culinary interests to match his literary predilections, but didn't find very much – just expensive dog food from the vet, some bags of porridge oats, a large supply of baked beans, tinned tomatoes and pasta, as well as eggs, milk, bacon and white bread in the fridge. And the remains of a beef joint.

She found the bedroom. It was cold and reminded her of a monastic cell; there was no linen on the bed. She went upstairs, which was one big room. On the floor lay a mattress, a sleeping bag and two thick fleeces. Apart from that there was an old sofa and a small coffee table with a lamp on it. The French doors led out to a balcony overlooking a partial view of the cliff and the town. It was from here she first heard the sound and saw the car coming down the lane, struggling to get through the snow.

She wanted to make a quick exit, but froze. She heard the car engine being turned off. Then a window was smashed. She stood very still while someone started trashing the ground floor. She heard things being pushed over, items splintering, books falling off shelves and landing on the wooden floor with a thud. There was nowhere to hide and she had no weapons within reach. Yes, she did. The lamp on the table. She yanked it out of the socket and pulled off the shade. The base was ceramic. As heavy as lead.

Then she heard the sound of boots on the stairs.

K
IR FOLLOWED THE
line from the red buoy and dived seven metres down to the bottom of Grenå Harbour, right next to the wharf. Visibility was zero. Even when she held a gloved hand to her face, she couldn't see it. She found pole one, grabbed hold of the search line and swam twenty metres across the basin holding the wire in one hand. Along the way she felt the sludge with her other hand for anything that might be a dead body, but found nothing. At pole two she turned around and repeated the process until she was back at pole one with the carabiner an arm's length from the pole, and then swam the twenty metres back to pole two. All the time she kept one hand deep in the fish sludge. After a few minutes, she could feel something bothering her, so she was forced to remove her mask, drain the water out and put it back on. During this manoeuvre she got polluted water in her face, and the stench of fish waste reached her nostrils and made her gag. It was like swimming in fish soup. She appreciated all the more her suit, her gloves and the full mask that kept her dry, and the body heat that was generated by moving around in water that was three degrees Celsius.

She concentrated on her work, her hand groping and touching bottles and scrap iron on its way. And so the first twenty minutes passed. She had almost got used to the smell and the thought of the sludge when something quickly wrapped itself around her fingers. She stopped and examined it more closely. Grass? Hair?

The cold began to penetrate her drysuit now that she was no longer moving. Images rushed in from the job in Vejle Fjord: the long hair floating in the water. It was the hair she had felt first. She had pulled at it to free her hand and been scared the head might follow.

She tugged gently at whatever it was she had got hold of. It gave and her arm recoiled in an arc, still holding the tuft. It wasn't hair, much too coarse for that, she concluded. More likely old, frayed rope. She forced herself to breathe calmly until she was back to normal. No one must know that she had reacted like this. It would pass, she was sure of it. It always did.