Trophy (9 page)

The doctor’s surgery was located, very conveniently, above a chemist and below an eye specialist, in a white building in Holbæk’s high street. It was like travelling forty years back in time. The corners of the grey linoleum tiles in the waiting room curled up, and Lene inspected the worn furniture critically before sitting down on a sofa that looked as if it were made entirely of green sponge. She had introduced herself to an elderly, shapeless secretary in the front office, but wasn’t convinced that the woman had heard her.

While she waited, Lene watched a small boy in the play corner of the waiting room, with thick glasses and cotton-wool balls in his ears, try to press a square peg through a round hole in a wooden board while his mother read a women’s magazine. As the boy struggled, it struck Lene that this was how returning soldiers might feel: like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.

Without warning the woman got up, grabbed the boy and disappeared through a door. Lene hadn’t heard anyone call out or seen a light go on, and she wondered if only the
initiated could secure an audience with Dr Knudsen. She heard a piercing cry from the doctor’s office, followed by the sound of a mother’s telling-off. A moment later the sobbing child appeared in the doorway, freed from his cotton-wool balls. The mother had a firm grip on his arm and was dragging him through the waiting room.

The door to the office was left ajar, and Lene’s name was whispered from inside.

She closed the door behind her and squinted into the gloom. A pale hand protruding from the sleeve of a medical gown appeared under the cone of light cast by the desk lamp, and the doctor asked her to take a seat.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness and she was able to see Dr Knudsen’s gaunt face. An old, grey computer monitor was sitting in a corner of his desk, and a cheroot was smouldering in an ashtray.

Lene sat down and the doctor retreated once more into the shadow.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Police Superintendent Lene Jensen from the Rigspolitiet.’

‘Hello, Lene Jensen.’

Then nothing.

‘Kim Andersen is, or was, one of your patients,’ she said. She reeled off the dead man’s civil registration number and the doctor flexed his fingers, which emitted a series of small cracks. Lene hated that sound. Her ex-husband had had the same habit. And her father. The doctor’s hands moved across
the keyboard; his drawn face glowed green in the light from the monitor.

‘I heard that he committed suicide,’ he said in a low, almost disappointed voice.

‘He hanged himself yesterday morning,’ she nodded.

‘I’m very sorry to hear that. Such a shame. I’ve known him since he was a boy. He came here very rarely. He was in excellent physical health.’

‘And mentally?’

Dr Knudsen leaned back.

‘As you know, I’m bound by patient confidentiality, Superintendent. I don’t know if –’

‘He’s dead and there are some medical questions in connection with his death that I’d like you to answer.’

‘Are there?’

‘Yes. We found antidepressants in his house. Sertraline. And sleeping pills. The blister pack of sleeping pills was half empty. You had prescribed the medication yourself.’

‘Stilnoct,’ the doctor said. ‘That’s relatively harmless.’

‘For how long had he been taking sleeping pills, Doctor?’

‘A couple of years.’

‘When did he start?’ she asked.

‘June 2011.’

‘And the Sertraline?’

‘The same.’

‘June 2011?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you refer him to a psychiatrist?’ Lene asked.

Dr Knudsen remained silent and she was about to repeat her question when he leaned forwards.

‘He didn’t want a referral, Superintendent. I believe he trusted me. It’s standard practice these days that we, the patient’s general practitioner, undertake the treatment of patients with mild to moderate depression. There aren’t enough psychiatrists and the waiting lists are too long. So many people are prescribed happy pills nowadays that we should consider adding the active ingredient to our drinking water.’

He coughed quickly, and continued.

‘I don’t mean that, of course … but depression has become a national epidemic. Either because we’re better at diagnosing it – and that in turn means that we previously didn’t treat enough patients – or that people today are more depressed than they used to be. Or …’

‘Yes?’

‘That people are better informed of treatment options and consequently demand to be seen. The
Internet
, Superintendent.’

The doctor spoke the word as if it were the name of a disfiguring venereal disease.

‘Or it’s possible that we over-diagnose the condition. It would appear to be an unstoppable trend. According to the current norms into which we must all fit, no one is ever well. If you’re shy, you suffer from social phobia; if you’re naturally
introspective, you’re morbidly repressed; if you’re melancholic or going through a divorce, you’re depressed; the irritating boy with no boundaries has ADHD; and people with a stiff neck or a bad back have got whiplash syndrome or fibromyalgia, or what have you. There’s no longer room for good old-fashioned grief in people’s lives these days, Superintendent. In my opinion. Today we call it post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD. I prefer the word “grief”.’

Lene nodded briefly. ‘And what was he mourning?’

While the doctor prepared his reply, she looked around. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a surgical instrument being sterilized in a glass of whisky, and she tried to imagine a gynaecological examination on the black, antique and cracked examination couch in the corner, but her imagination simply didn’t stretch that far.

‘Who knows? He lost some friends in Afghanistan,’ Dr Knudsen said at last.

‘But he left the army in 2008 and he didn’t start taking Sertraline until 2011,’ she objected.

‘That’s correct. I’m afraid I can’t offer you a satisfactory explanation. But I do know that Kim was assessed by psychologists at the Institute for Military Psychology. I think they all were.’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘I’m afraid not, but they’re based at Svanemøllen Barracks in Copenhagen.’

Lene closed her eyes. She was clearly doomed to spend
the rest of her life commuting between Holbæk and Copenhagen. She could, of course, take up Charlotte Falster on her offer and get a colleague to speak to the military psychologists, Kim Andersen’s superiors and his old army buddies, but she knew that she wasn’t going to. A crucial detail might be missed if several investigators got involved, and deep down, she trusted no one but herself. That was her nature and, besides, she hated depending on other people’s speed and accuracy. They were never quick enough and always did things a little bit wrong.

‘The post-mortem revealed a healed wound on Kim Andersen’s right thigh,’ she said. ‘The forensic examiner thought it was a bullet wound from a rifle or military carbine. They took some tissue samples and the wound is about two years old. Did he ever mention it to you?’

Dr Knudsen’s head moved closer to the computer monitor. His lips moved as he read through his own patient notes.

‘It’s not something I ever treated him for and he never said anything to me. Nor have I received a discharge letter from a casualty department or a hospital regarding a leg injury. I should have. How strange.’

Lene agreed. Strange indeed.

‘Thank you, Dr Knudsen.’

‘You’re welcome, Superintendent.’

The doctor sank back into the shadows.

As always, the CCTV picture quality was grainy, and besides, it looked as if the two thieves knew exactly where the cameras were located on Flemming Caspersen’s property. They stayed in the border between light and dark and moved with speed and confidence. The rubber dinghy emerged from the darkness just before 2.00 a.m. that January morning. The men jumped into the water before the dinghy reached the beach, pulled it up on the pebbles and sprinted through the park. There were no white spots from faces or hands on the footage and Michael presumed that they must have been wearing gloves and some kind of ski mask. They ran through the field of one camera and into the next until they reached the main steps. One of the men was limping very slightly on his right leg.

The taller of them stood still while his partner with the bad leg produced a crowbar from his rucksack. He wedged the crowbar under the hinges of the front door and eased it off. The door fell into the house and it was the man with the crowbar’s turn to stand still while his buddy pulled a
pressurized container out of his rucksack, containing liquid nitrogen no doubt, which they used to cool down the alarm system. The men ran down the steps and vanished behind the garage. A few seconds later they reappeared, holding the gardener’s aluminium ladder between them, and disappeared inside the house.

And that was pretty much it. There were no cameras inside the house.

They had executed the job exactly as Michael himself would have done.

The poor quality of the CCTV footage really was frustrating. The two men – and surely it had to be two men, dammit, judging by their size – had been inside the house for exactly six minutes and twenty-three seconds, according to the digital clock on the recording.

Had they had enough time to plant the DVD?

Unlikely. Besides, there had been no signs of unauthorized access to the safe behind the Venetian mirror, according to Elizabeth Caspersen.

Nigger the dog had been conspicuously absent.

Michael ejected the CD out of his laptop, put it to one side and stared glumly at his mobile. He had spoken to Sara and was tormented by homesickness and feelings of guilt. Their son, Axel, had needed a trip to Casualty after cutting his forehead. Michael should have been there. Sara had had to go there with a screaming toddler under one arm and a four-year-old needing eight stitches under the other.

This was the unintended consequence of his job, but he hated it, cursing himself for not becoming a baker, a chef, a schoolteacher … or something equally useful that was compatible with a normal family life.

When he moved back to Denmark, he had applied for regular jobs, but had either been under- or overqualified, or else his experience had been impossible to define – so that eventually Sara had insisted that he did what he did best: finding people and things. He had attended job interviews with various companies, but the interview always nosedived in exactly the same place: ten years working for a security company in England – what had his job entailed, exactly?

He couldn’t tell them that, unfortunately.

Couldn’t tell them what?

Every time, Michael was reduced to an apologetic smile and a shrug. Shepherd & Wilkins would set the dogs on him if he ever revealed operational information. It was like waking up from a ten-year coma. How did you sell a coma on your CV?

Michael poured coffee into his cup and started looking for missing persons in the Internet editions of Norwegian newspapers. Especially people who had last been seen in the northern parts of Finnmark.

He knew it would be difficult. People going missing attracted readers, while people who were found rarely made the headlines. Nor did there prove to be a shortage of tales about hikers, climbers, skiers, people on snow scooters, berry
pickers or ornithologists who had got themselves lost in the north Norwegian wasteland.

A thirty-nine-year-old Dane had disappeared for almost a week in late July 2011, somewhere near the Finnish border, before being found safe and sound by a rescue helicopter from the Norwegian Air Force. In late March the same year, a young Danish-Norwegian couple had gone missing during a hike in Finnmark. There were several articles about the couple in both Danish and Norwegian newspapers, and there were hyperlinks to various clips on YouTube where the couple’s friends and family asked for information, but Michael paid little attention to this particular case. The victim on Elizabeth Caspersen’s DVD had been alone.

Then he checked the Rigspolitiet’s missing persons homepage, but it clearly hadn’t been updated in the last twelve months. There were very few names on the list. Michael clicked until he found the three heavyweights: the Red Cross, the Red Crescent and the UN’s Missing Persons Tracing Service; finally he tried a dozen smaller organizations, but to no avail.

*

One hour, two cups of coffee and three cigarettes later he discovered that he had read the same eight lines at least four times; they were from the Danish newspaper
Ekstra Bladet
, dated 4 April 2011:

His instincts started flickering. Sometimes they were right, other times not, but he had learned to heed them. Experienced hikers, GPS, satellite telephone … a Norwegian wife. Norwegians learned to survive in the mountains as soon as they could walk. It didn’t add up.

Michael knew he had made a breakthrough. He knew it because something inside him calmed down and his brain developed tunnel vision. Any doubts he might have had vanished when he found a long article in the Norwegian newspaper
Verdens Gang
, dated 3 May 2011, with a sharp colour photograph of the missing couple.

‘D
ANES LOST IN
F
INNMARK
’ was the headline.

The journalist, a man called Knut Egeland, summarized historical incidents where Danes, used only to their flat country, had got themselves lost in the vertical, northern
wilderness. They were usually found safe and sound, but not Kasper Hansen and Ingrid Sundsbö, who disappeared east of Porsanger Fjord in the final days of March 2011. Ingrid Sundsbö was of Sami stock and a very experienced hiker. She was twenty-nine years old when she disappeared. Kasper Hansen was a Danish civil engineer, who had spent many holidays in the mountains with his wife. The couple had left Porsanger Vertshus on the morning of Wednesday, 23 March. Hotel staff had stated that the couple appeared to be well equipped with tent, sleeping bags, hand-held GPS and a satellite telephone. They had left their telephone number with the hotel reception they had last stayed at.

A truck driver who had picked them up remembered them clearly. In his opinion the young couple had been cheerful and excited. The woman had spoken Norwegian, obviously, but her husband’s Norwegian had been almost as good as his wife’s. The truck driver, who was on his way to Murmansk, had dropped them off at a lay-by a few kilometres south of Lake Kajavajärvi. The woman had been wearing a red parka and the man’s was black. Their kit had been top-notch, the driver recalled, and they had seemed happy, healthy and well rested. The driver appeared to have been the last person to see them alive.

Michael studied the photograph accompanying the article: a mountain landscape, unsurprisingly. Kasper Hansen and Ingrid Sundsbö were standing on a hilltop with distant, snow-covered peaks in the background. Kasper Hansen had
his arm around his wife’s shoulders and she looked up at him with a smile. White knitted cap, long, straight black hair, a red parka with a fur collar, slim. Kasper Hansen looked straight at the camera. A pair of snow goggles dangled from his neck. Black parka, dark, short hair, white teeth. Both of them looked healthy and contented, and he had no doubts about the identification: it was the young man from the DVD. Kasper Hansen was the man who had been chased to his death on the shore of Porsanger Fjord.

He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. His fingers were trembling and it took him several attempts to work the lighter. But Ingrid Sundsbö … what the hell had happened to her?

No calls had been registered from the couple’s satellite telephone in the period from 24 March onwards, but there were plenty of incoming calls from Kasper Hansen’s mother, who was looking after the couple’s two-year-old twins, and from Ingrid Sundsbö’s parents.

Norwegian police and army units had carried out a thorough search. At a long, narrow lake called Kjæsvatnet police had discovered the remains of a campfire; an empty leather and wicker creel had been found by a nearby brook. It had the initials KH. There were no other leads that could be traced to the couple.

The weather had deteriorated at the start of April with strong winds and snowfall. The search had finally been called off on 10 April.

Michael logged on to Facebook and studied the pages dedicated to Kasper Hansen and Ingrid Sundsbö. There were numerous pictures of the missing couple and pleas to get in touch if you had information that could lead to any kind of resolution, no matter where in the world you might be. There were pictures of the couple’s now four-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. They were handsome and dark-haired. There were photographs of the couple’s parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters and dozens of pictures from a kind of memorial service arranged by relatives in the Norwegian Seamen’s Church in Copenhagen. It was heart-breaking in all its simplicity and dignity.

The most recent information stated that Kasper Hansen’s mother lived in Vangede, a suburb of Copenhagen, and had been granted custody of the twins, even though Kasper Hansen and Ingrid Sundsbö were still theoretically alive. It could take up to seven years for the probate court to declare the couple legally dead.

Michael visited the homepage of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and checked historical weather charts on a couple of international weather services. Everyone described an unseasonably favourable high pressure area moving from the Karelian peninsula across northern Norway in the last week of March and the first days of April 2011, after which it would disperse somewhere over the Norwegian Sea, between Iceland and Jan Mayen. The weather had been clear and, considering the time of year, warm, and there had
been no significant precipitation in the area around Porsanger Fjord. The nights had been starry, exactly as on Elizabeth Caspersen’s DVD: stars; clear weather; no wind; no whooshing in the microphone.

He searched various Norwegian and Danish homepages to see if there were any hostels near the location, but the nearest official hostel was thirty kilometres from the crime scene. As the crow flies.

Michael switched off his laptop, lay down on the bed, got up again and started pacing up and down the room. Then he called Elizabeth Caspersen, told her to buy a new mobile and a prepaid SIM card, and to call him with her new number. He left a short message on Keith Mallory’s answering service, giving him the time of the couple’s disappearance.

He felt the need to burn off some excess energy, so he put on a T-shirt, shorts and a pair of running shoes, went down to the hotel gym and spent the next hour and a half on the treadmill.