Trophy (28 page)

She had driven for a long time in silence. Michael knew that the superintendent was still angry with him.

‘You fell asleep,’ she reproached him when she woke him up later that afternoon. ‘You promised you’d keep a lookout.’

He had mumbled an apology, but she was frosty and monosyllabic as she boiled water for their Nescafé and Michael carried their equipment out to the car. They had drunk the coffee in silence and she walked in front of him down the path and drove off before he had time to shut the door.

On one occasion Michael had tried to strike up a conversation, but he hadn’t been very successful. While they drove west through the afternoon rush-hour traffic, he had made a half-turn in the seat and sent her stony profile his most infallible wry smile.

‘What do you do when you want to go to sleep?’ he had asked.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘When you want to go to sleep. I think of images, scenes from my childhood. An attic filled with old junk, my grandmother’s
sitting room. She had a grandfather clock that always ticked even though time stood still in her house and I never saw anyone wind it up. What do you do?’

She glanced at him sideways while she made sure to concentrate on her driving.

‘I imagine I’m lying on my back on a guillotine looking up at the blade. It falls … and just when it hits me, I fall asleep.’

‘Okay … That’s … very interesting, Lene.’

‘I’m taking the piss, Michael. It’s none of your business what I think about when I go to sleep. I’ve enough strangers in my head right now. Got it?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good.’

*

One hour later she stopped in a lay-by with a view of Holbæk Fjord. She turned off the ignition and put her hands on the steering wheel. The lay-by was a few hundred metres from the dead-end road that led to Kim and Louise Andersen’s small cottage.

‘Do we walk the rest of the way?’ Michael asked.

‘Yes.’

Michael looked at her.

‘I could go there first to see if it’s safe,’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘It’s okay. I just need a …’

A drop of sweat trickled from her hairline and down her temple.

They put their bags in the back. Michael took the torch and slammed the boot shut.

‘There’s a police car outside,’ he said as they came nearer to the cottage.

‘I asked them to keep an eye on it.’

She pressed down the front door handle and frowned.

‘They must be in the garden,’ he said.

They walked in the direction of the voices. The young, bearded officer who had first drawn Lene’s attention to the missing jib sheet on the dinghy was sitting at a garden table. The dog handler she had met in the kitchen of Holbæk Police Station sat opposite him. The Alsatian was standing in the middle of the lawn, watching them with pricked ears. A yellow tennis ball was lying on the grass in front of the dog. The two police officers looked up, but failed to recognize her.

‘It’s me,’ she said, showing them her warrant card.

The bearded officer smiled cautiously. ‘I see that. Now.’

Michael cleared his throat impatiently.

‘Has anything happened?’ she asked, ignoring him.

‘Nothing,’ the officer said. ‘Louise Andersen dropped by a couple of times to pick up some stuff. Clothes for the children, that kind of thing.’

‘How did she look?’

‘Sad.’

‘You can go now. We’ll guard the house. In fact, there’s no need for you to return. Please would you tell them back at the station?’

‘Of course. But are you sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ she said.

The policeman nodded, and collected the Thermos flask and the coffee cups from the garden table; the dog handler picked up the puppy’s water and food bowls from the grass. It had pricked up its ears again and turned its attention to the forest that started behind the meadow. The dog handler watched it. The dog took a couple of paces forwards and emitted a low growl.

‘What is it, Tommy?’

Michael looked in the same direction and spotted a roebuck slowly and cautiously making its way to the meadow. Its ears were turned backwards towards the forest.

‘I know that roebuck,’ Lene said.

‘You do?’

‘It so tame you can touch it. I almost shot it the other night. It was standing right behind me, sniffing me. Nearly gave me a heart attack.’

*

They waited until they heard the patrol car reverse out of the drive. The branches of the trees were darkening against the deep blue evening sky and the sun hung low. It was a lovely scene, Michael thought. Peaceful. It reminded him very much of his own home. Further down the meadow the roebuck was foraging.

‘Nice place,’ he said, while Lene shivered in the cold. ‘But perhaps you’re more of a city girl?’

‘You could say that,’ she said, and walked up to the cottage.

They stopped in front of the impeccable log pile, which reached right up to the roof of a well-constructed lean-to, covered with roofing felt, at the back of the cottage.

Michael opened a shed next to the lean-to and saw a couple of large yellow gas canisters. One of them supplied the cottage through a rubber tube connected to a safety valve, while the other was still sealed. He looked through the window to the small, but neat kitchen: gas cooker, round table, two chairs and two Tripp Trapp children’s chairs. Everything ready for the family.

Lene tugged at a beam and ran her fingers along the inside of the lean-to. The sun was sinking fast, and Michael lit the torch and inspected the underside of the roof. As far as he could see, there was nothing wrong with it.

‘Try removing the log pile,’ he suggested.

‘All of it? There are several cubic metres. There has to be an easier way.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Perhaps it really was just a log pile, he thought, and tapped his foot on the concrete floor in front of the lean-to. It made a hollow noise. He went into the garage, edged his way past the dinghy and found a rusty iron bar lying next to a jack. Michael weighed the bar in his hand. It should be strong enough. He went back to Lene, who was pulling logs off the pile, tossing them over her shoulder.

He bashed the end of the iron bar against the concrete
floor, which stretched a couple of metres out into the lawn, and was rewarded with a thudding echo. Lene stopped and looked at him.

‘It sounds like a well,’ she said.

‘Perhaps he’s hiding a whole family down there,’ Michael said.

He ran his fingers along where the lean-to met the half-timbered cottage. There was a gap one finger wide between the roofing felt and the wall; odd, really, because rain and other forms of precipitation would seep down behind the log pile and make it rot. He stuck the iron bar in between a beam in the wall and the roof of the lean-to, placed his foot against the wall, and pulled until his head started spinning and he could feel the cut to his temple opening up. The construction moved a little, but something near the ground was blocking it. He wiped the sweat off his brow and looked at the roof of the lean-to.

‘I think our approach is wrong,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to move the log pile; we need to shift the whole damned lean-to. There’s some kind of locking mechanism at the bottom. All we have to do is find it.’

He kneeled down on the grass and started scraping away the soil where the lawn met the concrete. Lene squatted down next to him to help. She smelled faintly of shampoo and something more bitter. Hair dye, possibly. Michael used the end of the iron bar to dig, and, after a couple of minutes, hit something metallic. He put down the bar and uncovered
a black steel ring in the soil under the turf with his fingertips. A flat piece of iron had been welded to the ring and it disappeared into a crack in the concrete.

Michael leaned back on his heels and studied the device.

Lene looked at him.

‘What are you waiting for? Pull it, for God’s sake! It’s got to be some kind of lock.’

He nodded and pulled. The ring, and the well-oiled steel mechanism beneath, slipped a smooth twenty centimetres out from the foundation, and she nodded to encourage him.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Do you want to have a go?’

He got up and held out the iron bar to her, but she shook her head.

‘Just get on with it.’

Michael wedged the bar behind an upright post and employed all his strength.

The entire lean-to swung across the concrete with surprising ease and speed, and he fell backwards and banged his head against the concrete edge.

Lene turned away while Chinese fireworks exploded behind his eyelids. He had bitten his own tongue and felt the taste of blood in his mouth.

Michael rose up on his elbow and rubbed the back of his head with his other hand, looked at his palm and groaned. If he carried on like this, he would end up in a home for people with brain injuries. Perhaps that wouldn’t be so bad
after all: peace and quiet, regular meals and stimulating conversation.

He realized that she was bent double, crying with laughter, and he sat up, rested his forehead on his arms and looked down between his feet.

Lene eventually regained some measure of self-control, straightened up and turned to him.

‘I’m sorry, Michael. You just looked so … so incredibly surprised.’

She dried the tears from the corners of her eyes.

‘That’s all right,’ he said darkly. ‘It’s natural to become hysterical and mean when you’ve been through what you’ve been through. I’m really glad you found it funny. That you take pleasure from my pain. Really I am.’

She stuck out her hand to help him back on his feet, but he shook his head.

‘No, thanks, I’ll manage … go away …’

‘Michael … I’m sorry …’

He ended up accepting her hand, and was pulled to his feet. He nearly blacked out and had to rest his hands on his knees while she pushed the construction the last stretch across the concrete.

The lean-to proved to be hinged on one side and fitted with wheels or casters under the bottom planks. A galvanized steel sheet appeared where the lean-to had been. The sheet was hinged on its longer side, which faced the cottage, and a heavy padlock was attached to the side that faced the
garden. A channel had been moulded along the sheet to divert rainwater away from the cavity underneath it.

Lene looked at him. Her face had regained its colour and her eyes sparkled in triumph.

‘Yes, you told me so,’ Michael muttered to beat her to it.

‘Yes, I told you so,’ she said contentedly.

He stuck his faithful iron bar through the loop of the padlock and wrenched it open with a bang. Lene bent down, slipped her fingertips under the sheet and tried to pull it upright.

‘It weighs a bloody ton,’ she said.

‘Just get on with it.’

She glowered at him and lifted with all her might. The sheet crashed against the cottage wall, and they stepped closer and stared into the hole.

Kim Andersen didn’t have a family living down there. At most a couple of woodlice that curled up when the torchlight hit them. The concrete-lined cavity was roughly a metre and a half deep, well-drained, and some kind of metal grille had been cemented into the house wall, which presumably led to a crawlspace or cellar under the kitchen.

Lene held her torch while Michael jumped down and lifted out a rucksack made from dark green camouflage fabric.

‘Is there anything else?’ she asked.

‘This.’

A small, green money box wrapped in strong, clear plastic. She took it from him and tucked it under her arm. Apart
from that, the cavity was empty. He bent down and shone his torch through the grille, but couldn’t see anything other than a darkness that seemed to continue under the house.

‘It’s a basement of some sort,’ he said. ‘Did you know that it was here?’

‘There’s a trapdoor in the kitchen floor and a ladder down to a crawlspace,’ she said. ‘We didn’t find anything down there. Just a few bits of junk, that’s all. Water pipes.’

‘But you didn’t notice the grille,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we carry this stuff inside the cottage and take a look at it?’

Michael discovered a heavy-duty jacket with an arctic-grey, white-and-black camouflage pattern at the top of the rucksack. He spread it out on the kitchen floor and searched its many pockets without finding anything.

Meanwhile, Lene had unwrapped the small, green money box and was going through the kitchen drawers, looking for a suitable tool to pick the lock.

He looked inside the rucksack and pulled out a pair of hunting trousers that matched the jacket, and held them up to the light. Michael was able to push a finger through a jagged hole halfway down the thigh. The fabric around the hole was stiff and dark brown.

‘Talking about evidence, this should help,’ he said.

Lene looked at the trousers, his finger and the two holes in the fabric.

‘What else is there?’

‘A cap, gloves, ski mask, a torch headlamp, water bottle. In fact, everything your well-equipped human hunter would need in the Arctic.’

He opened a zip at the top of the rucksack and found three folded, plastic-laminated maps in the scale 1:50,000:
Statens Kartverk series M711: Porsanger Fjord, Alta Fjord
. He pinched them between two nails and put them on the PVC cloth on the kitchen table.

‘Finnmark,’ he said tellingly.

‘But you already knew that. Anything else?’ she asked impatiently.

He glowered at her.

‘I’m starting to understand why you work alone,’ he said.

‘Likewise. Anything else?’ she repeated.

Michael aimed the torch beam inside the rucksack and looked in all the pockets he could find.

‘Nothing, I think. Hold on … There’s another pocket.’

He had felt a small zip under his fingertips in the rucksack’s waterproof cover piece. He unzipped it and found a single A4 sheet.

Lene tried to force the lid of the money box with a kitchen knife. It slipped and she cut her finger.

‘What is it?’ she asked, and stuck her finger in her mouth.

‘The floor plans of Flemming Caspersen’s mansion. There was a break-in a couple of months ago. Someone sawed off the horns of a rhinoceros and ran off with them. They came from the sea at two o’clock at night in a rubber dinghy, cooled the alarm system with liquid nitrogen, and nothing else was taken. The house was empty.’

‘Horns?’

She furrowed her brow.

‘Rhino horns with a combined weight of eight kilos. They sell on the black market for around $50,000 per kilo. If you know the right people,’ he said.

‘Do you think Kim did it?’

‘Well, he’s got a map of the house showing the alarm system and the location of movement sensors and surveillance cameras.’

She wrapped a tea towel around her finger and glared with hatred at the unbreakable green money box.

‘Just to steal a couple of horns?’

Michael shrugged. ‘It’s not a bad hourly rate, in my opinion. I wouldn’t mind doing it myself, if I knew where to sell them.’

‘You’re no thief,’ she said earnestly.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘How are you getting on with that box?’

‘Not very well. I need a skeleton key or something. A crowbar or a screwdriver.’

‘Do you mind if I have a go?’

‘Be my guest.’

She pushed the box across the table; Michael got up and hurled it against the floor. The lid sprang up and its contents spilled out.

Lene didn’t even flinch.

‘Neat,’ she said. ‘I could have done that.’

‘Just taking a short cut,’ he said and squatted down on his haunches.

The loot was disappointing: a CD in a plastic cover and two colour photographs. Michael placed the items on the table and pointed at the first picture.

‘That’s Pederslund in the background. And there we have Kim Andersen with a hunting dog and … is that him?’

Lene had jumped at the sight of the other man in the photograph: tall, dark-blond hair, broad shoulders, white teeth, dark, possibly brown eyes, open-necked, chequed shirt, oilskin jacket, corduroy trousers and hunting boots. And the end of a tattoo that reached up under one ear: the articulated tail of a scorpion. Michael had never seen him before.

She nodded and gulped.

Michael turned over the photograph:
Pederslund 2008. Max and T
.

‘I guess Max is the dog,’ he said.

‘And the “T” stands for Thomas.’

‘Yes. When you know it, you can see that he’s the man at the far edge of the picture from Afghanistan,’ he said. ‘Withdrawn, isn’t he? Thomas Berg, I mean.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And it’s not Jakob Schmidt,’ Michael said.

The other photograph was blurred and taken from an angle. Part of a hand covered the lens. There was a black, slanted bar on one side of the photograph that must have been the column of a car roof. The picture had been taken
late at night. There was a deserted, grey and rain-sodden car park in the foreground, and the camera focused on a woman in a red parka, who had just turned into the doorway to a yellow wooden building. She held a rucksack in one hand while holding open the door with the other. Her mouth was halfway through a smile and a word to a lean, dark-haired man behind her. She had smooth, black hair and regular features. Her expression was simultaneously loving and impatient. Her companion was wearing a black parka, had a rucksack on his back and was leaning a pair of cross-country skis against the wall next to the entrance.

Porsanger Vertshus
, it said in the red neon writing mirrored in the wet tarmac.

He leaned back.

‘Is that them?’ she asked.

‘Kasper Hansen and Ingrid Sundsbö.’ He nodded. Everything fell into place at this moment, he thought with a strange melancholy.

He stuck the photographs in his inside pocket and took the CD out of the plastic pocket.

‘Shouldn’t you have checked for fingerprints before you did that?’ she asked.

Michael held the plastic disc at eye level and studied the surface in the light from the lamp above the kitchen table.

‘There won’t be any, and does it matter now?’

He pushed back the chair and looked at her. Into her green eyes that didn’t blink.

‘Does it really matter now, Lene?’ he asked her again with emphasis. ‘More evidence, I mean? They did it. The question is what are you going to do about it? Do you want to see them in court?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ she mumbled.

She pushed her chair back as well and stared at the floor.

‘It’s hard,’ she then said. ‘Have you ever seen anyone get killed when you could have prevented it?’

*

Michael felt his face get hot. He thought about the two kidnappers in the Netherlands, and the abandoned farm outside Nijmegen; and about Pieter Henryk’s usually kind and youthful face, which had been haggard and grey when Michael, after the rescue operation, had met him on the steps outside the Slotervaartziekenhuis in Amsterdam where his daughter was being treated. The Dutchman’s shirt was one size too big and the navy blue coat hung loosely from his shoulders. Henryk had handed Michael an envelope with his fee. He had turned into an old man in a matter of only a few weeks. His eyes were dull, he moved slowly and unsteadily, and his voice was reduced to a crisp whisper.

‘Thank you,
mijnheer
. Thank you. Also from Julia, my daughter. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’ Michael had looked up at the concrete front of the hospital. ‘How is she?’

The Dutchman dried his eyes with a handkerchief and looked down at the paving stones.

‘She was always delicate,’ he said. ‘Very shy. A dreamer … difficult and artistic. She was a flautist with the Koncertgebouw, Michael. She was a virgin, even though she is nineteen.’

‘But much loved,’ Michael said, hoping.

The billionaire inflated his lean cheeks. ‘Absolutely! When we had time, and it wasn’t too difficult to love her.’

‘Perhaps she’ll get over it,’ Michael said.

‘Yes, perhaps.’

The father didn’t look as if he believed it.

‘But I think she’ll go insane,’ Pieter Henryk said.

*

Michael grimaced.

‘What is it?’ Lene asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘And what I just asked you?’

‘I’ve done it. I have killed people. And I never regretted it,’ he said.

‘Never?’

‘They deserved it. They had lost all humanity. Beyond redemption.’

He brought his newly acquired laptop into the living room and inserted the CD.

The disc held numerous files in various formats. Michael clicked on a random file – ‘Sagarmatha 2006-23-10’ – and leaned forwards.