‘You don’t need to come in. Actually, it would be a big help if you could ask the neighbours whether they knew anything about the report, or who might have sent it. It’ll be quicker that way, don’t you think?’
‘Why are we asking them in the first place?’
The barrier tape snaps as Hess opens the door and slips into the dry house. He shuts the door behind him, while the now pounding rain sends Thulin dashing for the first house.
53
The silence is the first thing Hess notices once he’s shut the front door behind him. His eyes try to adjust to the dark. Once he’s flicked three different light switches with no result, he realizes the electricity company must have shut off the supply. The house is in Laura Kjær’s name, her death has been registered, and the legal dismantling of a human life has taken its course.
Hess takes out his torch, walking down the corridor and further into the house. His phone call with the caseworker is still niggling. The truth is that Hess doesn’t know what it means. Or whether it means anything at all. He just knows he has to see the house again. Otherwise their interview of the consultant at the Rigshospital went well. For a while he’d thought they might have found the right place and the right person. Both victims had interacted with the doctor, and his instinct that the children were the common factor had felt right. But then the doctor mentioned the report.
It’s a shot in the dark, searching the place again. The whole thing has been gone over several times by various teams of investigators and techs. On top of that, the report is three months old, so if there has ever been something to find it’s most likely gone by now. But somebody reported Laura Kjær – somebody had been interested enough to write a hate-filled email recommending her child be taken from her – and Hess can’t help hoping the house will give him some answers. As he moves down the corridor, he notices it still bears evidence of the Forensics team’s work. Traces of white fingerprinting powder cling to the handles and doorframes, and there are still numbered markers placed on various objects – objects that might or might not be used if and when charges are brought in connection with the murder of Laura Kjær. Hess wanders from room to room, finding himself at last in a small guest bedroom that evidently served as an office. It’s eerily empty now; the desk has been cleared of its computer, which is still in police possession. He opens cupboards and drawers, reads random notes and scraps of paper, then drifts into the bathroom and kitchen. He repeats the process, but finds nothing of interest. As the rain drums against the roof, Hess picks his way back along the unlit corridor and into the master bedroom, where the bed is still unmade and a lamp is lying on the carpet. He’s just pulled open Laura Kjær’s underwear drawer when there comes a noise from the front door and Thulin reappears.
‘None of the neighbours knows anything. Or heard about the report. They just said, again, that the mum and stepdad were kind to the boy.’
Hess opens a new cupboard and keeps rummaging.
‘I’m heading off now. We’ve still got to check out the doctor, plus what Sejer-Lassen said about having affairs. Bring the key back when you’re done.’
‘Fine. Bye.’
54
Thulin deliberately slams the front door to Cedervænget 7 with a little more force than strictly necessary. Jogging through the rain, she has to dodge a dark-clad cyclist before she reaches her car and clambers inside. Her clothes are sodden after traipsing round the neighbours’ houses. Hess will have to walk to the station if he wants to get back into town, but that’s his problem. The day has been a bust. Still no leads, and it seems like the heavy rain is rinsing everything away while they run around in circles and accomplish nothing.
Thulin turns the key, puts the car in gear and drives swiftly down the road. She has to go through all the feedback from the group that day, but all she wants really is to get back to the station and read through the case files. Start fresh. Go through them again. Find a connection. Maybe contact Hans Henrik Hauge and Erik Sejer-Lassen and question them about Hussein Majid, who knew both victims. Thulin is turning off Cedervænget and heading for the main road when something in the rear-view mirror catches her eye and makes her brake.
She can only just make out the car parked fifty yards behind her. It’s underneath the large spruce trees at the blind end of the road that joins Cedervænget, almost indistinguishable from the trees and the hedge, beyond which is the area with the playground. Thulin reverses until she is parallel with the vehicle. It’s a black estate car. No distinctive features, inside or out. But the faint mist rising from the bonnet in the rain tells her the engine is still warm: the car can’t have been parked more than a few moments ago. Thulin glances around. Anyone with an errand on a residential street pulls up outside the house they want, but this car is tucked away in the little niche just before the dead-end. For a fleeting moment she considers running the plates. But then her mobile rings, and she sees on the display that it’s Le. It dawns on her that she’s completely forgotten she was supposed to pick her up from her grandad’s, and Thulin takes the call and drives away.
55
Magnus Kjær’s bedroom is plain in comparison to the luxury of the girls’ room at the Sejer-Lassens’, but even in the weak glow of the torch Hess can tell it’s cosy. Thick carpet, green curtains, a paper lantern dangling from the ceiling. Posters of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse on the walls, and hordes of plastic figurines on the white shelving, creatures from fairy-tale worlds where good does battle with evil. On the desk is a cup of pencils and colourful felt-tip pens, and it is clear from the small bookcase next to it that Magnus Kjær is also interested in chess. Hess takes out a few books and leafs through them, without really knowing why. It feels like a safe room, maybe the best one in the house.
His eye falls on the bed, and an old habit makes him kneel down and shine the torch underneath it, although he knows his colleagues have already checked there. There’s something wedged between the bedpost and the wall, but once he’s managed to extricate it he sees it’s only a handbook for League of Legends. It pricks his conscience; he hasn’t kept his promise to go back to the hospital.
Hess puts down the handbook and begins to regret not getting a lift with Thulin while he had the chance. For a while the news about the anonymous tipster had seemed like it was going to shed new light on the case, but now he feels like an idiot, not least because he’ll have to trudge back through the rain into the city centre, or at least to the nearest station, or until he can hail a taxi. Fatigue washes over him, and for a few seconds Hess wonders whether he can allow himself a nap on the boy’s bed, where it feels soothing and comfortable, or whether he should head straight back to the police station and spin Nylander some bullshit story about needing to return to the Hague tonight. Or he could just tell the truth, of course. That he isn’t up to the task. That Kristine Hartung and the fingerprints and all that crap has nothing to do with him. That it’s probably only lack of sleep sparking all those nightmarish theories about severed limbs and chestnut dolls. With a little luck, Hess might still make the last flight to the Hague at 8.45 p.m. and be genuflecting before Freimann by tomorrow morning at the latest – right now the idea sounds pretty appealing.
Hess throws a final glance out of the window into the garden and the playground where Laura Kjær was found, and that’s when he sees them. Half-concealed behind the green curtain hang a sheaf of children’s drawings on A4 paper. They’ve been pinned to the wall. The first is a drawing of a house, a drawing Magnus Kjær must have done a few years earlier. Hess walks across and shines his torch on to them. The strokes are primitive. Nine or ten lines depict a house with a front door, above which the sun is shining. Some impulse makes Hess turn to the next page, but all it shows is another drawing of a house, this time painted white, and a little more exact and detailed. The house on Cedervænget, he realizes. The third drawing shows the same subject: the white house, the sun and a garage. So does the fourth and fifth, and with each drawing Magnus is clearly growing older and
better at drawing. For some reason Hess is impressed, and he smiles to himself. Until he comes to the last one. The subject is the same. House, sun, garage. But this time there is something wrong. The garage is disproportionately huge, much larger than the house itself. It towers above the rooftop, its walls thick and black, its symmetry unwieldy.
56
Hess slams the terrace door behind him. The air is chilly, and he can see his breath in the rain as he lights his way across the paving stones in the garden behind the house. As he rounds the corner, he finds himself at the entrance to the garage. The aroma of meatballs hangs in the air, vanishing only when he opens the garage door. He’s about to walk inside when he realizes that although the door was sealed, he didn’t hear the usual sound of the tape snapping as he opened it. Shrugging off the thought, Hess closes the door behind him.
The garage is spacious and high-ceilinged, about six yards long and four across. Built out of new materials, with a steel frame and sheet-metal walls. Hess remembers seeing this model in sales catalogues at the DIY store; it’s big enough to fit more than just a car. Dozens of transparent plastic storage containers take up virtually every inch of the concrete floor. Some of the containers have wheels, while others are stacked into tall towers. He’s reminded of his own earthly possessions, still heaped higgledy-piggledy in cardboard boxes and plastic bags at a self-storage place in Amager, now for the fifth year running. As the rain beats against the roof, Hess edges past the plastic towers and further into the garage, but as far as he can see in the torch’s beam there is nothing remarkable in the containers. Just clothes, blankets, old toys, kitchen utensils, plates and bowls, all neatly organized. Along one wall an impressive and equally neat array of gardening tools hang from large aluminium hooks, interrupted by a tall steel shelf lined with rows of paint cans, implements and gardening supplies. But nothing else. Just a garage. Magnus’s drawing had been eye-catching, but now that Hess is standing in the garage he realizes it was simply further evidence that Magnus Kjær is a dysfunctional child with serious medical issues.
Hess swivels irritably on his heel and is about to edge back towards the door when he suddenly notices he’s stepped on something yielding and dimpled, raised a fraction above the concrete floor. Not much, maybe a few millimetres. Shining the torch at the ground, Hess sees he’s put his foot on a rectangular black rubber mat roughly one metre by half a metre. It lies on the floor in front of the steel shelves, as though intended to provide a comfortable working surface. You wouldn’t think twice about it – unless, like Hess, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. He takes a step backwards, and some instinct makes him bend down and pull the mat aside. But the mat won’t budge. Hess can only get his fingertips two or three centimetres underneath it, and as he gropes along the edge he feels a thin crack running parallel in the concrete floor. Grabbing a screwdriver from the steel shelves, he holds the torch between his teeth, shoves the screwdriver underneath the mat and into the crack, then pushes down on the handle. The section of concrete floor and the glued-down mat lift slightly, enough for Hess to stick his fingers underneath and heave open what turns out to be a hatch.
Hess stares incredulously at the hatch and the black rectangle in the concrete floor. On the underside of the hatch is a handle, allowing it to be shut from the inside, and Hess takes the torch out of his mouth and directs it into the hole. It shines a few metres down, but all he can see is some kind of flooring at the bottom of the ladder mounted to the internal wall. Hess sits down on the concrete floor, puts the torch back in his mouth, places his foot on the top rung of the ladder and begins to climb down. He has no idea what he’s going to find, but his sense of disquiet intensifies with every step he takes towards the bottom. The smell is distinctive, a strange blend of building materials and something perfumed. Only when he feels solid ground beneath one foot does he let go of the ladder and shine the beam around.
The room isn’t large, but it’s bigger than Hess expected. The space is approximately four metres by three, and he can just stand upright without having to duck his head. There are electricity sockets along the skirting board, whitewashed concrete walls, and a chequered laminate floor. Spick and span. At first glance there’s nothing frightening about the room, apart from the sheer fact that it exists. Somebody measured up and dug it out. Bought materials, mounted and installed them, and finished the whole thing with a heavy, noise-insulating hatch. Although Hess left it open, the sound of the rain and of reality above is already long gone. He realizes part of his brain was afraid of finding Kristine Hartung’s limbs down here, but to his relief the room is virtually empty. A nice white coffee table is positioned in the middle of the floor, on it a strangely shaped three-legged black lamp. A tall white wardrobe stands against one wall, a towel hanging from its handle. At the far end of the room, a reddish wall-hanging has been placed over a bed neatly made up with white linen. The torch begins to flicker. Hess has to shake it to get the light back on. As he approaches the bed he notices the lamps pointing towards it, but it’s the cardboard box that catches his attention. Hess kneels down and shines the torch inside. Everything inside is jumbled up, as though flung inside in hurried disarray. Moisturizers and scented candles. A Thermos flask and a dirty cup and padlock. Cables and WiFi equipment. Lots of WiFi equipment. And a portable MacBook Air, still attached to its cable, which leads across the laminate flooring to the lamp on the coffee table. Only then does Hess realize it isn’t a lamp at all. It’s a camera. A camera mounted on a tripod, the lens pointed, like the lamps, towards the bed.
Hess feels a wave of nausea and makes to stand up. He wants to leave, to escape the hole and come out into the rain. But his eye is caught. Suddenly it has registered the faint, damp footprints on the other side of the coffee table. It could have been him who’d left them, but it isn’t. Something hurtles out of the wardrobe behind him with great speed and force. He’s struck across the back of the head, one blow quickly becoming several. The torch falls from his hand, and he glimpses kaleidoscopic streaks of light chase across the ceiling as the blows hammer against his skull and his mouth fills with blood.
57
Hess falls on to the coffee table, half-twisting round. He’s still groggy as he mule-kicks backwards in the dark, connecting with his attacker before staggering on to the bed and smacking his jawbone against the frame. Pain races through his skull. There’s a ringing in one of his ears, and he sways clumsily on the mattress, trying to regain his balance. The sound of someone rummaging in the cardboard box then feet running towards the ladder tells him he needs to get back on solid ground. He stands up, but can see nothing. Reeling through the blackness, his hands outstretched as he tries to recall where the ladder is, he skins his knuckles on the rough concrete wall – but then he feels a rung in his left hand. He senses the presence of his attacker by the hasty movements in the air above him, and his hands and feet remember the climb back up. Nearly at the top, he thrusts his arm into the dark and grabs an ankle, sending his attacker flying into a tower of plastic containers. The man begins to kick, but Hess clings on. He’s dragging himself further up when he notices a MacBook lying on the concrete floor. Then a heel strikes him twice in the face. He feels the man’s weight; with surprising speed, his attacker rams a knee into Hess’s neck, pressing his face into the ground. Hess thrashes, his lower body still in the hole, and gasps for air. His feet twitch as though he’s strung up from a gallows, and he senses the attacker reaching for the screwdriver Hess had been stupid enough to leave on the concrete floor. He knows he’s seconds from blacking out – his vision is already dimming – but, then, he hears a voice. Thulin’s voice. She’s shouting his name, maybe from the road or inside the house, yet no matter how hard he tries he can’t respond. He’s pinioned against a cold garage floor somewhere in fucking Husum with 100 kilograms on top of his windpipe, and the weight isn’t budging. His arms flail, when suddenly he feels something in his right hand. Something cold – something made of steel. He can’t tug it loose and
use it as a weapon, so instead he pulls with all his strength. The steel gives way. There’s a deafening crash as the rack of paint tins keels over and comes tumbling down around his ears.
58
Thulin stands in the terrace doorway, staring through the rain into the dark and silent garden. She’s already called Hess several times – first inside the house itself and now outside – and every time there’s no reply she feels like more of an idiot. It doesn’t matter that she turned around and drove back as soon as she realized who might own that black estate car – what’s annoying her now is that Hess didn’t even remember to lock the front door when he left.
Thulin’s about to slam the door again when suddenly she hears a crash from the garage. She takes a step and calls to Hess. For a moment she thinks it must be him nosing aimlessly around, but then she sees a dark figure bolt out of the far end of the garage and disappear through the rain towards the back garden. In less than three strides she’s in the garden, gun drawn. The figure barrels through the trees at the bottom of the garden and into the playground, and though she runs as fast as she can it’s out of sight by the time she reaches the playhouse. She wheels around, already soaked and breathless, when the sound of an approaching freight train makes her turn. The figure has leapt down the embankment and is running along the tracks; Thulin sprints after it, the freight train looming behind her.
Horn blaring, the train shoots past at full speed, bowling her into the grass. The figure glances swiftly over its shoulder, then just before the train catches up it darts ninety degrees to the left and crosses the tracks. Thulin whirls around. She runs in the opposite direction, towards the end of the train, hoping to cross the tracks and continue her pursuit. But the string of carriages is endless, and at last she has to stop. In the gaps between them, she glimpses Hans Henrik Hauge’s frantic face peering back at her before he vanishes between the trees.
The Chestnut Man Page 16