Three Dog Night (9 page)

He could see they were getting ready to go back out after their break in the diving truck. They climbed into the rubber dinghy and were taken out to the basin, where even the fishing boats appeared to be frozen solid. He stood with his hands buried in the pockets of his jacket, freezing and desperate for some coffee, as the two divers in the boat fell backwards into the icy water. Mark shuddered. It wasn't often he counted himself lucky because of his job, but this was one of those occasions.

‘Coffee?'

Anna Bagger proffered a double-wall cup, with hot steam rising from it like a pillar.

‘Thank you.'

He took the cup and raised it to his mouth. The contrast between the freezing temperature and the hot coffee was like an electric shock to his lips.

‘So you were transferred here from the Copenhagen Homicide Division. Why?'

He looked at her through the steam.

‘It's a long story.'

He'd previously thought one single misplaced stroke in the portrait of Anna Bagger would have tipped the balance. Seen in isolation, her jaw was a little too square and her face a little too long, her eyes a little too big and her lower lip a little too full. And yet she was an attractive woman, possibly because she wanted to be and did something about it, with make-up, clothes and the way she moved. This was how some women could create an illusion.

‘It's a somewhat unusual career choice,' she said. ‘So you know a lot of people around here, do you?'

He nodded. He probably did.

She tilted her head.

‘You've lost weight since I last saw you. Are you all right?'

In a recess of his mind he wondered whether she bore him a grudge, whether in her heart of hearts she was his friend or his enemy.

‘I'm fine. And you?'

She straightened, as if bracing herself. He didn't know what for.

‘I don't suppose divorces are ever much fun. Mine certainly wasn't.'

She'd never referred to her marriage with much enthusiasm, but that probably wasn't the done thing with potential lovers. Mark didn't want to pry, so he returned to the case.

‘Did you find that Boutrup?'

She stood for a while scrutinising him, as if she had X-ray eyes, he thought. Then she shook her head.

‘As you know, we had to start looking for a body here in the harbour, so he was given a bit more slack than planned. But I've checked him out.'

‘And?'

‘He's an ex-con. Like Ramses. They were in prison together.'

She looked across the harbour, to where the dinghy was skirting the edge. Two handlers and their dogs were busy searching the buildings leading down to the dock itself. The dogs looked keen, but neither of them seemed to have a scent.

‘But you don't think he's the killer?'

‘Take it easy, Mark. We're not eliminating anyone or anything at this stage.'

He drank some more coffee, this time with more care.

‘What was he in for?'

Her blue eyes blinked in the cold.

‘I thought you were the local cop with your ear to the ground.'

‘Give over, Anna.'

‘Involuntary manslaughter. A trespasser shot his dog. Boutrup shot him with a hunting rifle.'

Mark sighed. He was a detective, too. He'd learned everything he knew during the Copenhagen gang wars, even though he was only thirty-seven. How had he ended up in a situation where his ex-student and lover was his boss?

‘Let me have a word with him,' he heard himself say. ‘I imagine the investigation is understaffed as usual.'

Any hint of anything personal was purged from her eyes.

‘No offence, but questioning murder suspects is not part of your job description.'

That smarted, like a resounding slap in the face, but he controlled himself and assumed an impassive expression. Above all, he was annoyed with himself. The plan had been for him to take it easy. That was the whole reason for the transfer, but sod that. He'd been here for six weeks and he was bored rigid, in a way he'd rarely been during his entire life, and already he was acting up.

He looked across the icy harbour, where the seagulls were screeching with hunger and rage. He might be dying, but he wasn't going to die from boredom. Anna Bagger wasn't going to dictate what kind of policing he did on his own beat.

‘So what do you want from me?' he asked, his thoughts already at the cliff in a confrontation with the two neighbours.

Her gaze was still probing, but perhaps it had softened a touch.

‘I imagine your own patch is keeping you busy.'

‘Come on, Anna, give it a rest. There are questions I can help you answer. I could speak to Boutrup.'

He held up one hand and used his fingers to count the questions:

‘What's his relationship with Ramses, apart from the fact that they were in prison at the same time? Why didn't he say he knew him? Why did he run? There must have been something important he had to do. What was it? What do you even know about him?'

She looked him straight in the eye as she replied.

‘He isn't local. He bought the house seven years ago and did it up himself, I've been told. Apparently he worked in the region as a carpenter before he went to prison. That's what he does now. He seems to be respected both professionally and generally.'

‘What about before? Any other previous convictions?'

‘Not documented. But they could be so old that they've been wiped.' She looked at her watch. ‘Got to go.'

She left and he stood for a moment watching her. Then he took a sip of his coffee, which had grown cold, tipped out the rest on the tarmac and crushed the cup. He went to chuck it in the bin and passed the diving team on his way. Some of them were standing by the tow truck chatting to the dog handlers, who had evidently finished searching the seafront.

He asked the men standing in a group: ‘The local diver, the woman. What's her name?'

‘Kir,' said one of her colleagues, a fit young man in army green from top to toe.

‘What's Kir short for?'

They looked at each other. Kirstine, they thought, but they weren't sure. It could have been Kirsten. At FKP headquarters in Nykøbing, Sjælland, she had only ever been known as Kir.

‘Kir Royal,' said one of her colleagues, with a warm smile.

‘Royal?' Mark asked.

‘Her surname is Røjel. So we call her Kir Royal. She doesn't mind.'

Mark nodded. Kirstine Røjel. The short form, Kir, must have been something she'd started using as a teenager or an adult. Back at school she was only ever known as Kirstine.

K
IR QUICKLY REDISCOVERED
her rhythm, ploughing back and forth between the poles. In the harbour, Niklas was about to fix another pole in place. They were on track to finish searching the whole basin before dark.

As she felt her way through the fish sludge on the seabed, she thought about the police officer, Mark Bille Hansen. She remembered him from school. He had been in one of the higher classes; three to four years above her. She used to think he was cool. He did a lot of sport and was a real tearaway, but she'd never exchanged as much as two words with him.

At school she had always been a very physical girl. She was good at sport and her body was built for it, agile and strong. She loved athletics. She relished it when her body exploded into life off the starting blocks and she could control it, down to the nearest millimetre, until she crossed the finishing line. But interest in athletics was limited in the small provincial community. Usually people played only handball or volleyball. She didn't love ball games in the same way, but they came easily to her. Anything physical came easily to her.

Books were another matter. She hated books. She hated all of it, all the sitting still, concentrating on words and letters which danced in front of her eyes. It wasn't until she was in year five, and lagging hopelessly behind, that it was discovered she was dyslexic.

It had seemed like a catastrophe. Overnight, she had gone from being the strong, sporty girl to someone in need of help. She was put in a remedial class, and she had wished the ground would swallow her up in shame. She desperately wanted another life. She wanted to be like her father's brother, Uncle Hannibal, who was a mine clearance diver and a bit of an alcoholic, and could tell blood-curdling stories about bombs he'd detonated underwater or bodies he'd salvaged from dangerous shipwrecks. Her parents had resented her admiration for Uncle Hannibal. Her dad was quite the opposite to him: regular in his habits, traditional, married to his childhood sweetheart, father of three and the heir to a pig farm. According to him, Uncle Hannibal had deep dive syndrome resulting in white spots on the brain. In other words, he was an incorrigible liar.

Kir smiled behind her mask. Her father hadn't been entirely wrong. Hannibal was an old salt and yes, a liar, too, when the mood took him. On more than one occasion she'd hidden in the basement when her father had been looking for her, and she'd heard Uncle Hannibal insisting vehemently that he hadn't seen her for days. After they had quickly hidden her bicycle in the outhouse and lowered his vodka bottles in a bucket down the dry well, of course. No one, least of all his big brother, was going to catch Hannibal red-handed with a stash of bottles and reeking of booze.

She turned around at the pole and attached the carabiner an arm's length across, remembering the summer she turned twelve. For her that summer represented a turning point in her life. It was the summer she decided to become a mine clearance diver. It was the summer her brother Tomas fell overboard and would have drowned if she hadn't dived four metres down under the dinghy to rescue him.

She had come to the end of the wire and was about to give up hope of finding anything when she felt something nudge against her. At the last moment, she managed to move out of the way, otherwise she would have literally found herself face to face with the dead body. As it was, her hands found the body first. She knew immediately what it was. She recognised the soft feel of bloated flesh. Her heart was galloping, but she managed to stay calm. She mustn't panic now. If she kept a lid on everything for long enough, it would go away.

She prodded with gloved fingers. The body was naked and it was female. Legs, torso, neck, head. Hair floating in the water, like a mermaid's, a different, finer texture than the frayed rope from earlier. Matching the description of Nina Bjerre. Some of the hair came out as Kir disentangled herself, and she had a sense of the whole body flopping about, like a flower in a vase. She dug down in the sludge. The dead body was in fish waste up to the ankles. She could feel that the legs had been tied together with a rope. At the end of it was a ship's anchor, resting at the bottom of the sludge. She dived down further and located the anchor, which must have weighed around fifteen kilos. The rope was looped through the eye of the anchor and ran from the ankles, up the calves to the hands, which were tied behind the back. From there, it went up to the neck and was tied tightly around it.

She could see very little, but a strange instinct made her move close to the face. The head had felt peculiar, even through the gloves. Now she strained her eyes to catch a glimpse, but it was too difficult in the light conditions, and for much of the time all she could see was darkness.

In the end, she gave up, marked the spot with a buoy and signalled to the dinghy that she'd found something and was coming up.

‘Is the press still there?' she asked, as she was pulled into the boat.

‘The place is crawling with them,' Allan said, looking towards the seafront. ‘Can you bag her? If Niklas helps you?'

‘Yes. But she's tied to an anchor. I'll have to cut the rope, won't I?'

He nodded.

‘Just tie another rope around the anchor and we'll salvage it later.'

He looked around and directed his gaze at somewhere on the horizon. She knew what he was thinking before he said it.

‘It'll be dark soon. We'll have to hurry. We'll mark the spot, recover the body and the anchor and carry on looking tomorrow for the rest of the evidence.'

With calm professionalism, Allan Vraa radioed the police on shore that the body had been found. The crew noted the time and position, took photographs and measured some distances from the quay and outwards, so that it could all be reconstructed in their report. Then they set off to collect Niklas.

P
ETER WAS TROUBLED.
Upstairs, Felix had gone back to sleep. He had no idea where he stood with her. She had seen through him when he lied about Ramses. She had broken into his house, where she had been attacked and was now in a bad way. He should be angry. Who was she? What did she want from him?

But there was something about her pulling him in the opposite direction. She seemed so abandoned and he wondered what her story could be. She had a way of looking at him, hostile at first sight, but underneath there was an element of pleading, as if with one hand she was telling him to go to hell while with the other she was begging for help. He thought about Stinger's sister and her guest: ‘I have to help her.' Perhaps he was just like Elisabeth.

He stared out of the kitchen window while he did the washing-up. Outside, it had started to grow dark, but the snow and the moon would shortly take up the baton, and daylight would be transformed into pale reflections of night. On the Kattegat, there were only a few lights to be seen from vessels plying to and fro. Peter had personal experience of people imposing their help and he had protested just as Felix had. Helping was no simple matter. Ultimately, who was helping who?

After washing up, he wandered around the house followed by Kaj. He finished tidying up after the break-in and concluded that nothing had been stolen. Whoever had burgled his house hadn't found what they were looking for. Nor had the intruder known that Peter kept a key under the white stone. It narrowed down the field of suspects considerably.