‘I knew her disappearance would turn the whole country upside down, so I was well prepared. The basement looked different back then, and I’d arranged things so that even if somebody came here and discovered the house they wouldn’t find it. But Kristine was rather surprised, of course, when she woke up down here. Frightened, is probably a better word. I tried to explain that I just needed to give her delicate little hand a quick cut so I could use her DNA to draw the police’s attention towards someone else, and she took it very bravely. But most of the time she was alone, I’m afraid, because I had my job to attend to in Copenhagen. I’m sure you’re wondering how she felt. Whether she was sad and afraid, and the honest answer is yes, she was. She begged and pleaded to be allowed to go home to you. It was very moving, but nothing lasts for ever, and when the storm died down after a month it was time to say goodbye.’
The words hurt worse than the pain in her arm. Rosa sobs again, and it’s as though her whole ribcage is being torn open.
‘That was the second chapter. Now we’re going to take another break. Try not to lose consciousness quite so long this time – I don’t have all day.’
He places the blue bucket underneath her right hand, and Rosa begs him to stop, but all that comes out of her mouth are meaningless noises. The instrument begins to whirr, the sawblades rotate, and she screams in agony again as it sinks into her wrist. Her body tenses into an arc towards the ceiling as she feels it slide along a bone and into a notch, where the blades bite and begin to cut. The pain is inconceivable. And it continues even when the implement abruptly ceases and is switched off. Rosa’s muffled screams are drowned out by a beeping alarm, and that’s the noise that has attracted the man’s attention, making him stop what he’s doing. He’s turned towards the monitors on the opposite wall, the instrument still in his hand, and Rosa tries to follow where he’s looking. On one of the screens she can just make out something moving, and it dawns on her that she’s watching the feed from the CCTV cameras. Something far away is coming into view. A car, maybe. It’s the last thought that crosses her mind before everything goes black.
117
The effort makes the blood from her head wound run down over Thulin’s face, and she has to take deep, violent breaths so she doesn’t pass out. The gaffer tape is wound so sloppily around her head that she can only breathe through one nostril, and her hands are bound, so she can’t rip it off. She is lying on her side in the boot, and as soon as she’s inhaled enough oxygen she starts jabbing her knee once more into the spot in the dark where she thinks the lock must be. All her muscles are straining, her neck and the top of her back wedged against the rear wall. She keeps going, kneeing the lock again and again, as snot and blood bubble through her nostril. But it refuses to yield. Instead she feels a screw cutting deeper into the flesh wound beneath her kneecap, and when the lack of oxygen exhausts her, she gives up and collapses, gasping frantically for air.
Thulin doesn’t know how long she’s been lying in the boot. The last few minutes have felt like an eternity, because all she’s been able to hear is the distant whine of a machine mixed with a woman’s screams. Although the screams are muffled, as though the woman has something over her mouth and the sound is coming from a ventilation shaft, Thulin has never heard such a heart-rending sound. She’d have covered her ears if she could – she can imagine all too vividly what is causing those screams – but her hands and feet are bound, her hands so tightly they’ve gone numb.
After she came to, she wasn’t sure at first where she was. The pitch blackness swaddled her, but by feeling along the sides and the cold metal surface above her she realized she must be in the boot of a car. Probably the one she and Genz had arrived in. When the woods suddenly opened up and they drove into the yard, all her attention had been focused on the farmhouse. She’d climbed out into the untouched snow, observing the tall, old chestnut trees that encircled the yard, and when she caught sight of the inscription above the front door she drew out her service pistol. The thatched farmhouse was dark and inhospitable to look at, and as she approached the outside lights came on, making the CCTV cameras visible. The door was locked, and there wasn’t anyone or anything to see inside, but she knew she’d come to the right place.
Thulin began to walk around the farmhouse, searching for another way to get in, and just as she’d decided to break a ground-floor window and crawl inside, Genz appeared behind her and said he’d found a key underneath the mat by the front door. She wasn’t surprised. In fact, she thought she ought to have checked for that possibility herself, and they went inside the house together. She entered first, and the smell of varnish and fresh wood met her in the hallway. As though it were a completely new house, one that had never been used. But as soon as she reached the stove in the corner of the living room, which wasn’t visible from the yard, it became obvious the place was occupied. Two laptops had been left on a white desk, as well as electronic equipment, mobile phones, bowls of chestnuts, floor plans, round-bottomed flasks and lab equipment. A couple of jerrycans stood beside it on the floor. On the wall above hung photos of Laura Kjær, Anne Sejer-Lassen, and Jessie Kvium. A picture of Rosa Hartung hung at the very top, and there were also paparazzi-like images of herself and Hess.
The sight sent a cold shiver down Thulin’s spine. Turning the safety off on her gun, she prepared to search the rest of the house, and because she didn’t have her phone she asked Genz to inform Nylander immediately of what they’d found.
‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Thulin.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m expecting a guest, and I need to work in peace.’
Genz was standing just inside the living-room doorway. The lights in the yard behind him were still on, so she couldn’t see his face, only his silhouette, and for a moment she remembered the silhouette behind the tarp on the scaffolding opposite her apartment.
‘What the hell are you talking about? Call him now!’
Suddenly it struck her that Genz was holding an axe. Just letting it hang, like an extension of his arm.
‘It was a risk using the chestnuts from the farm. Maybe later you’ll get the chance to understand why it had to be them.’
For a brief moment she stared. Then she realized what he’d said, and she understood how catastrophic it had been to ask him for help. She raised her arm to point the gun at him, but at the same moment he swung the axe, handle first. She jerked back her head, but not enough, and the next time she woke it was with a thundering headache in the darkened boot. The sound of voices roused her – Genz’s, and a frantic female voice that sounded like Rosa Hartung’s. They came from the yard, but then they disappeared, and soon afterwards she heard the muffled screams.
Thulin holds her breath and listens. The machine has stopped. So have the screams, and she doesn’t know whether the silence means it will soon be her turn to undergo the same torture. She thinks of Le and Grandad back home, and it flashes across her mind that she might never see her little girl again.
But out of the silence comes the noise of an approaching engine. At first she doesn’t trust her ears, but then it sounds like a car is driving into the yard, and when it stops and the engine is switched off, she’s sure.
‘Thulin!’
She recognizes his voice. Her first thought is that it is impossible. It can’t be him. He can’t be here – he’s supposed to be going somewhere far away, but the fact that he might be here after all fills her with hope. Thulin shouts back as loudly as she can. The sound that comes out is minimal. He can’t hear her, at least not from out there in the yard, so instead she starts kicking desperately in the dark. Striking one of the sides, she hears a hollow thud, and she keeps kicking the same spot over and over again.
‘Thulin!’
He’s still shouting. Only when the sound fades does she realize he must have gone inside the house. To Genz, who must know he’s arrived, or the machine would never have stopped. With that certainty, she keeps on kicking in the dark.
118
The front door is unlocked, and it doesn’t take Hess long to establish that the ground floor and upstairs are empty. Pistol drawn, he hurries back down the stairs from the first floor and through the unlit house, but there is no sign of life apart from his own wet footprints on the wide floorboards. When he reaches the living room and the workspace by the stove, where there are pictures on the wall of the three victims as well as Rosa Hartung, Thulin and himself, he pauses and listens. Nothing. Not a sound apart from his own breathing, but the stove feels warm, and he senses Genz’s presence everywhere in the house.
The farm’s appearance has astonished him. It isn’t the dilapidated, ramshackle ruin he’s read about in the old police report, and the surprise has disconcerted him. He immediately clocked Rosa Hartung’s car in the yard, though it was almost covered with snow, and he estimates it must have been there for at least an hour. He can’t see the car Genz and Thulin drove in, however, so it must be either concealed or somewhere else entirely. Hess hopes it’s the first option. He noticed the CCTV cameras when he arrived, several of them, mounted near the top of the façade, so if Genz is here then he knows Hess has come. That’s why he did not hesitate to shout, first for Thulin and then for Rosa Hartung. If they are nearby – and if they are alive – there is a chance they’ll hear him. But there was no answer, only the ominous silence; he’s still listening to it now, breathing hard.
Although he’s already been inside, he hastens back to the kitchen, trying to recall the old photo from the crime-scene archive. The two teenagers were sitting either side of a messy table, but that isn’t what interests him. It’s the door he remembers from the background of the image. He assumed it must be the door to the basement where Marius Larsen and the twins had been found, but now, standing in the renovated kitchen, which looks as untouched as a display at Ikea, he can’t find it. The walls have moved, the angles are different. In the middle is a large, unused kitchen island with six gas hobs and a chrome hood, surrounded by an American-style fridge, two white double cupboards, a porcelain sink, a dishwasher and a sizeable oven still covered in plastic film. There’s no door, certainly not one leading to a basement, only the passageway to the utility room.
Returning to the front hall, Hess glances up the stairs and underneath them, hoping that a basement door or floor hatch will suddenly reveal itself. But neither does. For a moment he wonders whether there even is a basement still. Whether Genz, or whatever his name is, has long since filled it in with concrete so it would never again remind him of what happened when he and his twin lived in the house.
A distant thud. He freezes, but he can’t decipher the noise, nor where it comes from. There is nothing moving in sight, only the snowflakes falling in the lamplight outside. He hurries back to the kitchen, this time with the idea of continuing into the utility room and through the back door to the other side of the building to check whether there might be any windows or shafts, anything that might answer his question about the basement. But as he passes the kitchen island, he stops short. A banal idea has come to him. He walks over to the first white cupboard, approximately where he remembers the basement stairs in the old picture. He opens both doors, but finds nothing but empty shelves. Next he opens the adjoining cupboard, and instantly catches sight of the white handle. The shelves and rear wall of the cupboard have been removed. Instead he sees the outline of a white steel door built directly into the kitchen wall. Stepping inside the empty cupboard, he depresses the white handle, and the heavy door opens outwards to reveal a staircase.
Harsh white light pools on the floor at the bottom of the concrete steps, roughly three metres below. It strikes him how much he hates basements. The basement under Odin Park, Laura Kjær’s garage, Urbanplan and Vordingborg Police Station, and now this one as well. Switching the safety off on his gun, he descends the stairs step by step, his attention fixed on the floor at the bottom. When he is five steps down he sees something that brings him to a halt. There is something lying on the next step, something made of plastic, crumpled and sticky, and when he prods it with his pistol he realizes it’s a pair of the blue plastic overshoes he and his colleagues wear at crime scenes. Only, this pair is bloodied and used. Looking at the steps further down the staircase, he notices bloody footprints leading upwards, but only as far as the step where the plastic had been dropped. The significance dawns on him. Wheeling around, he turns his face upwards, but the figure is already in the doorway. Like a pendulum the axe comes whistling down, and the dead policeman, Marius Larsen, flashes across Hess’s mind before it grazes his brow.
119
The basement underneath his grandmother’s house was musty and stained with damp. The stone floor was uneven and the walls rough, dismally lit by the bare bulbs that hung from the ceiling in old, black porcelain sockets with frayed, fabric-covered cables. A tangled world of disorder and clutter, of strange rooms and corridors, a world completely different from the one on the other side of the door that separated the two levels.
On the ground floor all had been yellowed. Heavy furniture, floral wallpaper, stuccoed ceilings, curtains and the stench of his grandmother’s cheroots. Ash piled like some splendid pyramid in the Krenit bowl beside the padded lawn chair in the sitting room, where she sat until the day she was carried out and driven to a nursing home. Hess hated being there, but below was worse still. No windows, no air, no way out but the unsteady staircase, which he would always zigzag back to, darkness at his heels, whenever he’d gone down to fetch another bottle for the little console table beside Grandma’s lawn chair.
It is with that same childhood nausea and sense of panic that Hess awakes in the basement underneath Chestnut Farm. Somebody is striking him furiously in the face, and he feels blood running down over one eye.
‘Who knows you’re here? Answer me!’
Hess has been dragged on to the floor, half propped up against the wall. It is Genz, slapping him with the flat of his hand. He wears white plastic coveralls, leaving only his eyes visible through the gap between the blood-flecked mask over his mouth and the blue hairnet. Hess tries to fend him off, but it’s impossible: his hands and feet are bound with what feels like cable ties.
‘Nobody …’
‘Give me your finger or I’ll cut it off. Give it here!’
Genz shoves him to the ground and bends over him. His cheek pressed against the floor, Hess’s eyes scour the room for his gun, but it’s on the ground a few metres away. He feels Genz press his thumb against the touch ID button on a phone, and when Genz stands up and stares at the screen Hess realizes it’s his. He tries to brace himself for the rage he knows will come, but the kick to the side of his head is so violent he nearly loses consciousness again.
‘You called Nylander nine minutes ago. Probably just before you got out of the car in the yard.’
‘Right, yeah. I forgot about that.’
Hess takes another kick to the same side of his face, and this time he has to spit the blood out so he won’t choke. He promises himself he’ll stop with the sarcasm, but the information is useful. If it’s been nine minutes since he drove into the yard, recognized Rosa Hartung’s car and called Nylander, then it won’t be long before Brink and a squad of police cars from Vordingborg arrive. If it wasn’t for the snow.
Hess spits again, and this time he becomes aware that the pool of blood at his feet can’t be his. Following the trickle on the floor with his eyes, he finds himself staring at the gaping wound at the end of an arm. Rosa Hartung is lying lifeless on a steel table as though in an operating theatre, her wrist in a plastic clamp where her left hand had been. Her right wrist, too, has been sawn into. Only halfway, but on the floor beneath a blue bucket stands ready. Hess glimpses the contents of the bucket, and his nausea surges.
‘What have you done with Thulin?’
But Genz is no longer in sight. A moment earlier he chucked the phone into Hess’s lap and walked to the far end of the room, where Hess can hear him clattering around, while he himse
lf tries to get to his feet.
‘Genz, give up. They know who you are, and they’ll find you. Where is she?’
‘They’ll find nothing. Have you forgotten who Genz is?’
The smell of petrol is unmistakable, and Genz reappears with the jerrycan. He’s already started to slosh the liquid up against the walls, and when he reaches Rosa he splashes it all over her limp body before continuing around the room.
‘Genz has a bit of experience with forensics. There’ll be nothing left of him when they get here. Genz was invented for one purpose, and by the time they figure that out they’ll have missed the boat.’
‘Genz, listen to what I’m saying –’
‘No, let’s skip this bit. Clearly you must have lucked into ferreting out what happened here back then, but don’t bother telling me you feel sorry for me, that I’ll get a milder punishment if I turn myself in and all that bullshit.’
‘I don’t feel sorry for you. You were probably a psychopath from birth. I’m just sorry you ever got out of that basement.’
Genz looks at him. He gives a slight smile, surprised, and Hess has no time to prepare himself before his third kick to the face.
‘I should have stamped you out ages ago. Definitely by the time you were standing with your back turned, goggling at the Kvium whore at the allotment gardens.’
Hess spits more blood, feeling around with his tongue. The taste of iron, and a few of the teeth in his upper jaw are loose. The killer was in the shadows of the allotment gardens, and Hess hadn’t even considered the thought.
‘Frankly, I thought you were irrelevant. They said you were a failed, egotistical arsehole who’d slid downhill at Europol, but then you suddenly show up dismembering pigs or wanting a chat about Linus Bekker, and I realized it wasn’t just Thulin I had to keep an eye on. I saw you, by the way, playing happy families before your little jaunt to Urbanplan. I bet you’ve fallen for that little slut, haven’t you?’
The Chestnut Man Page 39