Trophy (6 page)

Lene turned off the sat nav when she spotted the patrol car at the end of the small forest track. Gærdesmuttevej was the name of the road; it sounded idyllic, and the white, half-timbered cottage with the thatched roof did indeed look cosy and inviting. A box van belonging to a local firm of carpenters, an ambulance, one of the police’s crime scene vans and a brand-new Alfa Romeo with a huge blue ribbon on the roof were parked in front of it. Next to the ambulance was a stretcher with a covered body and, next to that, two paramedics were waiting, watching her car.

As she approached, she noticed the uniformed officer standing under a tree in the back garden and a CSO in white plastic coveralls squatting on his haunches next to the Alfa Romeo, taking samples from a substance that looked like vomit. He dropped something into a test tube.

Lene parked her car on the verge of the dirt track. The garden bordered the woods and there was a long, waterlogged meadow behind the property. A roebuck raised its head and watched her for a moment before it carried on grazing.

She held up her warrant card to the older ambulance man, who nodded to his younger colleague. The younger man pulled down the sheet to the dead man’s hips.

Slim, well-built, muscular. His chest was hairless and the hairs across his stomach pointed down to his belly button in a black triangle. His head had rolled unnaturally far to the left. His cervical vertebrae must have snapped just below the skull, she thought. The rope was tied in a knot under his right ear and had left a deep, blue groove around his neck. Kim Andersen’s eyes were half closed and his mouth open. The body was lying partly on its side, partly on its back; the position was due to the cuffed hands at the small of his back. Lene bent over to study the handcuffs, which looked very similar to the ones she had in a drawer at her office. The CSOs had wrapped the victim’s hands in plastic bags and tied them with string to preserve nail scrapings and other forensic evidence.

The dead man’s body was covered with a dozen tattoos.
Rege et Grege
, it said above a red heart near Kim Andersen’s left nipple. On the body’s left upper arm she found the motto
Dominus Providebit
. Under the crosshairs of a telescopic sight aimed at the head of a Taliban fighter, it said
RLG keeping hell busy
, and under another, empty crosshairs over Kim Andersen’s right nipple,
You can run, but you will only die tired
.

Kim Andersen was wearing a pair of thick, pale blue uniform trousers with a broad white cavalry stripe.

‘The Royal Life Guards,’ said the younger of the ambulance crew.

‘Yes, I can see,’ she said. ‘Thanks for waiting. You can take him away now.’

The body would be taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Copenhagen. Lene would go there tomorrow and with luck be presented with some findings by the forensic examiners. Apart from the obvious, of course.

Red-and-white police tape had been stretched out between the trees in the garden and the CSOs had marked two sets of footprints in the grass with green and red wooden pegs. Lene ducked under the tape, walked past a geometrically perfect log pile under a lean-to and onwards to the young police officer by the oak. Here she studied the upturned white garden chair and the end of a thin braided rope that had been cut off one metre below the branch.

The young, bearded officer pointed to the open garage, where a dinghy was sitting on a trailer.

‘I think the rope came from the dinghy,’ he said.

They entered the garage.

‘The jib sheet is missing,’ the officer explained. ‘Or, more accurately … it’s hanging from that branch.’

‘You sail?’ Lene asked.

‘Yes, I have a small boat.’

He walked in front of her back to the oak.

‘What’s your opinion of that knot?’ she asked.

‘It’s a fine bowline knot,’ he said. ‘The universal knot for everything between heaven and earth, if you sail.’

‘Did you know him?’

The police officer shook his head.

‘Who found him?’ she asked.

‘His wife. She had made coffee for him. She cut him down and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR before she called. The call came in at ten fifteen.’

Lene frowned. This was highly unusual. Most people would have been paralysed with shock, or panic.

The officer pointed to the cream-coloured Alfa Romeo in the drive: ‘Some gift, eh?’

‘You can say that again,’ she said. ‘I should have been a carpenter. Where’s your partner?’

‘With the wife. Or widow, I guess we should call her, though they didn’t even get to be married for twenty-four hours.’

Lene looked at the sandpit and the tricycle by the garage.

‘Yes, I suppose she is. And the children?’

‘With her mother.’

*

She slipped the blue plastic covers over her shoes before she entered the cottage. The first door to the left in the hallway had been hand-painted with African animals and was ajar. Lene pushed it open with a fingernail. It was the tidiest children’s bedroom she had ever seen. Two white beds, one with bed linen from
Toy Story
, the other from
My Little Pony
. Perfect. A boy and a girl. Their toys were lined up on lean-to shelves or stored in plastic crates neatly under their beds. The duvets were tucked under the mattresses, but the pillows
lay on the floor without pillowcases as if someone had taken a dislike to them, torn off the pillowcases and hurled them at the wall. Lene found the pillowcases under a play table, but didn’t touch them. She went outside and asked one of the CSOs to bag them and the pillows.

The man looked at her. ‘What are we checking them for?’

‘If I knew that, you wouldn’t have to check them, Arne.’

Arne groaned and climbed inside the crime-scene van for more evidence bags.

‘What else have you got for me?’ she said to his crouched back.

‘Someone threw up next to the Alfa Romeo,’ he said. ‘And we’ve found this.’ He held up a plastic bag with a CD. ‘It was lying in the grass, but it hasn’t been there for very long.’

Lene looked at the grey plastic disc. ‘I look forward to hearing what’s on it. Tomorrow?’

‘Of course. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than staying up all night subjecting it to every acoustic test I can think of. All I had planned was a dinner party followed by a game of bridge. But don’t you worry about that.’

‘I won’t, Arne. And you’re not the only one who had plans. It just so happens to be my birthday.’

‘Congratulations. The victim’s wife used lopping shears for the rope. We’ll take them with us.’

‘Anything else? How about computers?’

‘I haven’t found any.’

Lene looked at him.

‘Surely everyone has a computer these days?’ she asked.

‘I wouldn’t know. Not these two, apparently.’

Lene threw up her hands. ‘Of course they do. It’s got to be somewhere, Arne.’

‘You’re welcome to look for it,’ he said.

‘Do I have to do everything myself?’

He grinned. ‘You’re the detective.’

‘Jesus! … How about the footprints in the garden?’

‘Two sets. Size eleven, bare feet, and size six, stockings.’

‘Thank you, Arne.’

*

Lene opened the door to the living room. A woman police officer with short blonde hair was perched on the edge of an armchair with her hands folded in her lap and her legs pulled under the chair: one of those positions people instinctively assume when they know their presence is unwanted. Lene had sat like this more times than she could count.

At the far end of the living room, a young woman was pacing up and down with a mobile pressed to her ear. She didn’t look at Lene, but continued her fraught journey between the couch and the bookcase. She held her dressing gown tightly around her throat with her free hand and tears dripped from her round chin. She was shorter than Lene and had a pretty, but pale, drawn face framed by long dark hair. She was wearing delicate flesh-coloured stockings. Lene assumed they had formed part of her bridal attire. Her feet were stained with dew and soil and she still had grains of
rice in her hair. The heavy bridal make-up was ruined: stripes of mascara streaked all the way down to her neck and her lipstick was smeared.

‘I don’t know why,’ she screamed into the mobile. ‘He’s just dead, Mum! Dead, dead, dead! Someone killed him!’

Lene waited inside the door.

The woman stopped for a moment to draw breath through an asthma inhaler.

‘Who are you?’ she asked suddenly, and glared at Lene. Her nose was red and her eyes swollen, but the superintendent still saw a hint of something in her eyes, a glimpse of something rational and cool.

‘I’m Superintendent Lene Jensen from the Rigspolitiet,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘It’s so bloody unfair,’ the young woman whispered. ‘Just so bloody unfair. All those wars and not a single scratch and then … Yesterday was such a great day. I know that we would have been really happy.’

She finished her conversation with her mother, sat down on the sofa and stared numbly into space.

Lene studied a black-and-white photograph of the deceased on the top shelf of the bookcase. Forage cap, full dress uniform jacket, a cheeky, devil-may-care smile, pleasant facial features. The usual. It looked like every other soldier portrait she had seen over the years.
To my darling Louise
, Kim Andersen had written across the picture. Lene shifted her gaze to a larger colour photograph in a silver frame on the second
shelf: a group of soldiers in a distant desert, sweltering in the sun. There were brown, bare ridges in the background and the sun hung vertically above the five men’s heads. It was almost impossible to tell them apart: they were all tall and muscular, and they wore broad-brimmed desert hats that shaded the top half of their faces, and close-fitting, very dark or reflective sunglasses. The soldiers were deeply tanned, long-haired and bearded, and didn’t look like they were dressed according to regulations: two wore sand coloured T-shirts and loose-fitting camouflage trousers, two were bare-chested and the last wore an open uniform shirt hanging outside his trousers. Four out of the five had red- or black-chequered partisan scarves around their necks, and all wore black pistol holsters on their thighs.

Kim Andersen was standing in the middle. Lene recognized his tattoos.

The tallest and strongest of the five was standing slightly apart from the others with his arms folded across his chest. A small, but significant distance. Bare-chested, no partisan scarf, no one’s arm around his shoulder. He was handsome, she thought. And heavily tattooed. Images, text and runes meandered up his arms, over his shoulders, and popped up under one ear. Like the others, he was smiling, but his smile was different. Guarded.

She sat down on the sofa next to Louise Andersen. The widow’s forehead was pressed against her knees and Lene waited until the strangled sobbing finally ebbed out.

‘Louise?’

The head nodded.

‘Where are your children?’

‘With my mother.’

‘Would you like to go and see them?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Then that’s what you should do. Can I ask you a question before you go?’

‘Yes?’

‘You were married yesterday?’

The air was quickly sucked in. Louise Andersen used her asthma inhaler again and wiped her cheeks with the palms of her hands.

She sent Lene a terrible smile. ‘And put asunder today.’

‘They tell me you cut down Kim yourself and tried reviving him. You did really well, Louise.’

‘Thank you …’

‘Have you seen the handcuffs before?’

Louise Andersen curled up again.

‘They were a joke,’ she sobbed. ‘One of his friends gave them to him because he was getting shackled to me for life.’

‘Who?’

‘Someone or other. I don’t know.’

‘Okay. Where is your computer?’

Louise Andersen gestured in the direction of an antique bureau between the windows facing the garden. Lene nodded
to the officer, who got up and raised the lid. She held up a couple of unplugged cables.

‘The computer, Louise, what kind was it?’

‘What?’

‘What make was it?’

‘Toshiba. It’s a laptop. It’s old. Is it not there?’

‘No, but I’m sure we’ll find it.’

‘Can I go now? I want to see my kids.’

‘Of course. We’ll take you.’

Louise Andersen quickly got up, ran through the living room and disappeared into the bathroom.

Lene looked at the police officer. Young. Very young. And completely out of her depth, though she tried to exude a quiet competence.

‘You can take her to her mother’s, can’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I think you need to get her seen by a doctor,’ Lene said. ‘One who can give her a sedative.’

A secretary had booked her a room in a small hotel outside Holbæk. It looked like every other hotel room where Lene spent roughly two hundred and fifty nights a year: tidy and sterile.

She ordered the dish of the day – which five minutes later she couldn’t remember – and ate in the almost empty restaurant with a fine view of the fjord. A small white ferry glided across the dark blue water towards the island of Orø. The slow-moving lights of the ferry and the cultivated voices of the other diners had a calming, almost soporific effect on her. Lene started nodding off over her plate, until the waiter gently asked her if she would like some coffee.

She had received a preliminary report from Arne, the senior CSO. The CSOs had drilled open the gun cabinet and found a shotgun and a hunting rifle with a telescopic sight. Though the weapons were well-maintained, there was a fine layer of dust on the butts, bolts and barrels, and they showed no signs of having been fired for a long time. A couple of unopened boxes of shotgun and rifle cartridges were also covered in dust.

They had searched the bathroom and found a bottle of Sertraline, an antidepressant, and a blister pack of sleeping tablets, a brand Lene sometimes took herself. Both prescriptions were in Kim Andersen’s name. The seals on the packaging had been broken and Lene looked forward to the results of the forensic blood tests.

Arne had given her the prescribing doctor’s name and address.

Apart from that, he said, the place had been unremarkable, furnished like thousands of other Danish homes.

Lene drank her coffee in the deserted hotel bar while she studied her notes and sketches and pondered the inconsistencies. There was more to Kim Andersen, the super-fit carpenter and highly decorated ex-Royal Life Guard, than met the eye. And though the young widow was distraught at her husband’s death – her emotional outburst had seemed completely genuine to an experienced and cynical observer like Lene – her actions after finding his body were downright improbable.

Having drunk yet another cup of coffee at the taxpayer’s expense, she left the hotel via a side exit. She walked around a hedge behind the car park and continued down the tarmac footpath to the fjord. Lene spent a couple of minutes watching the lights in Hørby on Tuse Næs. The ferry was now on its way back to Holbæk. The water was still wintry cold, but the low hinterland was warmer and turned the sea breeze into dense fog.

She shivered and walked back to the hotel. A couple of sleepy yellow streetlights lit up the almost empty car park. A light grey Volvo estate with a solitary figure in the driver’s seat was parked under a lamp post. The windows were rolled down to let out cigarette smoke, and the man’s leather-clad arm hung out of the open window, a cigarette tip glowing between his gloved fingers. He had a mobile telephone pressed to his ear. Classical music from the car radio drifted through the darkness. Lene cast a tired, automatic glance at the figure and saw short, dark hair, a shirt collar, then caught his eyes in the car’s rear-view mirror. They followed her for a moment before his gaze was averted. The man laughed softly at something on the phone, but didn’t speak himself. Lene yawned and went back to the hotel to go to bed.

She removed her make-up, cleaned her teeth, took a quick shower, put on clean underwear and slipped under the soft duvet.

*

She woke up long before dawn and sat up, wide awake, as if something had bitten her. The room was cool. It was raining lightly and drops trickled down the windowpane, leaving bright tracks where the reflection from the streetlights hit them. Her heart was pounding and her body was soaked in sweat. She had to make an effort to breathe, and found her pulse on her wrist. She counted while the second hand on her wristwatch circumnavigated the dial. Far too high.

Every police officer knew this fear. At first you assumed
that the attacks were random, but Lene had learned that they always had a cause: a small leak from the cupboard crammed full of the deaths, tragedies, violence and mutilation she had witnessed during eighteen years of service.

Her pulse started to come down, her breathing relaxed and she leaned against the headboard with her hands folded across her stomach, her knees pulled up to her chest. No, that wasn’t it this time. There were no faces in there, no voices or swearing or sirens or running footsteps. No dead children.

But there was a man’s muscular neck in the sleepy light from a lamp post. A neck with the black, articulated tail of a scorpion crawling under the shirt collar. The neck belonged to the man in the Volvo that had been parked in the car park behind hotel. The man whose eyes had followed her in the rear-view mirror. She had seen that scorpion tail before.

In the forester’s cottage. She was almost certain.

*

The mist drifted white and ghostlike across the meadow; above Lene’s head Ursa Major was halfway through its gigantic rotation. She walked around the dark, quiet cottage, nearly tripped over the ever-present plastic tape put up by the CSOs and swore nervously. She had roused a sleepy duty officer at Holbæk Police Station to get the key.

She was standing in the porch, rummaging around in her jacket pocket for it, when she heard a faint snuffle right behind her. The warm air molecules from a body very close to hers made the tiny hairs on her neck stand up and she
spun around with her pistol drawn and her torch at shoulder height. The beam caught the two round bloodshot retinas in the roebuck’s wide-open eyes. The animal snorted with contempt, gathered up its legs and leaped away with long strides through the mist.

Lene squatted down, pressed the cold steel of the pistol against her forehead and stared at her black brogues. Her heart was beating too fast again and she swore for a long time, fluently, despite her terror, and wished that she had shot the damn thing.

Then she let herself in, walked quickly through the hall, across the living room and stopped at the bookcase.

The desert photograph was still there.

She turned it over, pulled the small metal clips back, and extracted the photograph. Lene sat down on the sofa and studied the soldiers once more in the light from her torch. She focused on the tall, broad-shouldered man standing apart from the others. Legs slightly akimbo, arms folded, muscles bulging under his tanned skin. His eyes were invisible behind the reflective, close-fitting sunglasses. The tattoos continued from the shoulder up under his right ear: the scorpion and its poisonous sting.

A guarded smile at the camera. He was definitely not like the others.

*

The man at the edge of the forest removed his night-vision goggles and the world ceased to be made up of grey-green
surfaces and shapes. He smiled at the thought of the roebuck that had startled the superintendent. He had actually been impressed by her reflexes, though he had seen better, obviously.

He walked back through the forest, wondering if he should have taken her there and then. It was a very attractive, almost irresistible thought. She was alone. The nearest neighbour was more than a kilometre away. He stopped on the narrow forest path and solemnly reviewed every single thing he would have done to her.

Then he walked on. Some other time. Superintendent Lene Jensen was resilient and strong. It would take a long time to reduce her to an animal.