Dead Souls

by Elsebeth Egholm

  ‘Can you describe him in more detail?’ Mark Bille asked.

  Peter shook his head.

  ‘Just ordinary. Dark jacket. Dark trousers.’

  ‘How tall?’

  ‘About my height, I think. Around one-eighty-five metres.’

  ‘Broad?’

  ‘Perhaps a bit broader. Than me, I mean . . . But it was hard to tell from a distance.’

  They stood on the bridge over the moat for a while. Mark’s next question hit him in the solar plexus.

  ‘Why didn’t you do something? Seeing that you had a hunch something was wrong?’

  Sister Beatrice’s gaze met him with the same question.

  Peter closed his eyes for a brief second.

  ‘It was nothing to do with me,’ he said lamely as he heard himself reel off the world’s oldest excuse.

  He looked at Beatrice and felt her fear transplant itself in him.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Perhaps she’ll turn up,’ Mark Bille said after a pause. ‘Show us which way they went.’

  He led them down to the place where he had observed the two of them walking and told them in as much detail as he could what he had seen. Mark Bille showed him the small bundle of rosemary and Peter squatted down on his haunches. He saw the prints and followed them. Two kinds. There were patches where the blades of grass were flattened. Something took hold of him inside, like when Kaj got a scent and followed a trail. He moved through the grass down to the furthest shore of the moat and found broken twigs and flattened grass on the way. He knew this. This was his territory: nature, the life of a hunter. He knew every birdsong, every plant, every animal. All his instincts were heightened now. He knew he was getting close to something important.

  He had a feeling the others were watching him and perhaps Mark Bille was considering stopping him, so that he wouldn’t ruin any evidence, but he continued to follow the trail through scrub and bushes and grass for quite a while. Then he spotted a black object lying in the damp grass close to the dark, muddy water.

  He found a branch and fished it out. He carefully dangled the shoe in front of the two nuns. Everyone stared at it.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ Mark Bille said.

  Tears flowed down Sister Beatrice’s cheeks. She blinked them away, in despair.

  ‘They’re hers. They’re brand new.’

  ‘All right then.’

  Mark took out his phone and made a call. Peter knew it was to Aarhus Police when he asked to speak to Inspector Anna Bagger.

  They heard him giving her a brief update and discussing the situation. Soon the police would be buzzing around the convent like bees around a flowering rosemary bush. Mark Bille was OK, but Peter had already had an encounter with the officers from the region’s capital and this was not an acquaintance he wished to renew.

  ‘We need that moat trawled from top to bottom right now,’ he heard Mark Bille say. ‘Can someone call the Kongsøre EOD Training Centre?’

  Peter could visualise Anna Bagger’s face at the other end of the line: the perfect lips pressed tightly together and the eyes with ambition written across them in flaming letters over the cool greyish blue.

  ‘Of course I’m not sure,’ Mark said. ‘That’s why we need to take a look . . . Yes . . . yes, probably . . . Right, that’s agreed then.’

  He ended the call and stood for a while staring into the moat.

  ‘Are the divers coming?’ Peter asked.

  Mark made no reply. It was as if the moat was absorbing all his attention.

  ‘She’s down there,’ he said at last, still staring into the black water. ‘Where else would she be?’

  5

  SHE HAD TO be professional.

  That was Kir’s first thought when she saw Mark Bille talking to Allan Vraa down by the moat. His shoulder-length hair concealed his facial expression, but his body was the same: long and sinewy like a runner’s, and he was wearing a leather jacket, jeans and boots. His jerky hand movements and his shuffling feet revealed his restlessness.

  The police officer was clearly briefing the diving team about the assignment. A missing nun, Allan Vraa had said on the telephone when he called. This was very different from diving for munitions on a bright summer’s day in Kalø Bay. But the camaraderie was the same, even though the tone was more subdued, and Kir was pleased to have been given the job. Even if it meant her confronting a man with whom, to put it mildly, she had a complicated relationship.

  She greeted Mark and they exchanged a few remarks, which she knew she would turn over in her head later on when she was underwater. That was the way it always was. She did her best thinking when she was diving.

  ‘OK. This is the situation.’

  She was brought up to speed by her boss. Kir and another diver who lived locally had been called in, and there were also four divers from the EOD training centre in Kongsøre, who had come with a diving truck, dinghy and the whole range of equipment. Allan Vraa introduced her to the new colleague.

  ‘This is John Frandsen, Frands to friends.’

  He patted the new guy on the shoulder. Kir held out her hand in a friendly gesture and received a handshake as though Frands trained with hand grippers in the gym.

  ‘And there was I thinking this was a man’s job,’ Frands said.

  Kir hesitated. She couldn’t work out whether or not he was being serious.

  ‘Kir’s the best there is,’ Allan Vraa said cheerfully. ‘She’s just come back from the Bay of Aden, where she kicked pirate ass.’

  Frands’s scepticism was obvious, but Allan Vraa chose to ignore it.

  ‘Water doesn’t discriminate,’ Kir said. ‘Once we’re down there we’re all equal.’

  She pointed to the moat. She was on the verge of adding that her smaller size allowed her to reach places in shipwrecks that were inaccessible to other, bigger divers. But it would have been stupid to provoke him so she kept her tone light as she said:

  ‘Nice to meet you, Frands.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  It sounded forced. Frandsen’s eyes had the exact same cold, macho expression that tended to be associated with a soldier. And his physical perfection bordered on caricature. He was almost 1.90 metres tall, with a square face and chin and thick knots of muscles in his neck.

  ‘I expect you two to team up,’ Vraa said. ‘The others are doing a sweep with the sonar over on the eastern side. If you start setting up poles here, we’re well on the way.’

  They did as they were told without major problems or exchanges. Frands was obviously professional and knew what he was doing. It didn’t take them long to arrange the poles in a tight grid on the bottom of the moat while the crew in the small dinghy rigged up the sonar and started using it.

  The sonar was an effective tool for searching for underwater objects. It looked like a small torpedo and fortunately it didn’t care about working in a moat filled with mud. It was lowered into the water from the stern of the black rubber dinghy and trailed along the bottom, and it could see thirty-five metres to each side. Two divers manoeuvred the dinghy and watched a computer monitor. White spots on the screen would indicate anything unusual.

  After staking out the poles, Kir and Frands slipped into the water. The water level in the moat was high after the recent weeks’ rain. Visibility was zero, but Kir was used to that. If there was someone on the bottom, she would find them.

  She fumbled around in the mud and algae with one hand while the other held onto the line they had extended.

  While she worked, she remembered the days of sunshine she had spent with her colleagues. A slice of paradise. The only surprise had been finding the box of bones. After speaking to the police, she had delivered it to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, where she had almost been ridiculed. Their verdict had been harsh and took no account of her injured feelings: it was a box of bones for educational use – the kind an anatomical institute might buy from medical equipment companies. It was probably from India and the bones came from a
range of bodies rather than a single one. The forensic examiners had promised to take a closer look at the box, but at the present time their workload was too great.

  Kir smiled behind her diving mask at the memory of the merciless teasing to which Allan Vraa, who had been convinced it was the work of a serial killer, had been subjected. The mood had been upbeat. Sunshine, summer and saltwater. In this atmosphere her colleagues had made her forget Africa in no time. Now, after meeting Mark Bille and this Frandsen guy, she wished she were back there hunting pirates.

  She found various objects on her trawl across the bottom of the moat but left them untouched. Normally she and her colleagues salvaged all sorts of things: old oil barrels, bicycles, car tyres and so on. But time was scarce. The afternoon was on the wane, and soon darkness would close down the operation. She concentrated on one thing: finding a body. Possibly wearing a large amount of heavy, billowing fabric, which in itself would be enough to weigh it down.

  Her disappointment with Mark was at the back of her mind as she worked. They had behaved professionally and greeted each other politely with Allan Vraa as their witness. Mark’s words had seemed just as cold as Frandsen’s eyes:

  ‘Good that you could come at such short notice.’

  She hadn’t been much more welcoming herself.

  ‘That’s our job.’

  He had shifted his gaze away from her.

  ‘I hope you find her.’

  She had spoken honestly:

  ‘We will. If she’s there.’

  He had nodded without meeting her eyes again and had stood there staring into the black, brackish water. Then he had made his excuses, saying he needed to talk to a colleague, and left her alone. Out of the corner of her eye she had caught sight of another familiar figure, Peter Boutrup – the carpenter from the cliff with the dubious past and the big Alsatian. A strange, lonely-looking man who always seemed to be at ease in that loneliness, as though he didn’t need anything or anyone. Boutrup nodded amicably to her before retreating from the moat with his hands buried in his jacket pockets. She had heard he was the last person to see Melissa alive. That thought seemed to be weighing heavily on him.

  Kir turned her attention back to the assignment while the two men, Peter and Mark, flickered like phantoms somewhere in her brain. One fair and one dark. One who had served time and one who sent people to prison. One who had broken the law and one who upheld it with force. You would have thought that the police officer would be the one to exude calm. But he didn’t. Peter did. The man from the cliff seemed like the rock from which his name was derived.

  Kir sensed a commotion in the water behind her and Frandsen swam past like some sinister force. She forced herself to breathe calmly through her diving regulator and let the mixture of oxygen and nitrogen disperse through her body. Elements were close to her heart and she had a habit of dividing people up according to them. If Peter was water, Mark was fire. What John Frandsen was, she hadn’t yet made up her mind, but he wasn’t one she liked.

  Half an hour had passed when her hand felt some coarse, heavy fabric flapping in the water. A few more gropes and she touched what was unmistakably a human body. The hair was covered by cloth. She could feel the face: nose, eyes, mouth. A tongue protruding.

  She signalled to Frands, lowered a weight with a length of rope attached to it so she could find the body again and rose to the surface of the brackish stream, motionless except for the movements of her own body. She trod water while pushing her diving mask up on her forehead and holding up the rope.

  ‘I need a buoy! She’s down here.’

  6

  IT WAS NEVER enough. Nothing was ever good enough.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  Peter set down the toolbox. The door frame was in tatters. It was probably as ancient and decrepit as the rest of the damn place. He slammed his fist into it. How on earth had he ended up working in a convent? He, of all people, who had never believed in the existence of a God.

  And even if he had, then what did that God want from him? It was something he had never been able to fathom. He did his best to live his life without being a burden on others. He also tried to be a good friend to his friends, a good colleague. However, his life seemed to have a built-in contradiction: every time he had chosen to focus on himself, he had been forced to risk everything. Every time he tried minding his own business, the outside world would come back to bite him.

  He started knocking down the old door frame. The wood splintered; sharp fragments flew through the air; old paint flaked off.

  It was two years since he had returned to his cottage after serving his sentence. Four years in Horsens State Prison had strengthened his resolve to live a quiet life, just him and his dog. Look after himself. Do his job. All right, so he had enemies. And he had to take precautions or he was a dead man. But apart from that he never went near anything that smelled of illegality, prison, the slippery slope or bad decisions.

  And here he was. Mixed up in something that might be a murder. Not guilty as far as the law was concerned. But – and this was the irony – guilty of having obeyed his own chosen laws.

  An area had been cordoned off down by the moat. He had spotted Kir being briefed by her boss and had caught a smile and a nod. Her funny, pointed face and red curls usually cheered him up, but even she could not lift the heavy burden of guilt.

  The police had herded people away before the divers went into action. Including him, Beatrice and Sister Dolores. Quite a long time had passed. There had been no official confirmation as yet, but there was already a rumour going round that Sister Melissa had been found at the bottom of the moat.

  When he last saw her, she had been alive. He alone could have prevented her death.

  Deep down, he had known she was in danger. He had known it and he had turned his back on her. He couldn’t even provide a helpful description of the man she had met.

  Felix had summed it up once: ‘You have a namesake in the Bible. He, too, denied a friend.’

  Was that really who he was? A man who denied his friends to save his own skin?

  It wasn’t the image he had of himself. But perhaps it was the truth.

  He heard footsteps and the rustling of heavy fabric. Sister Beatrice was coming down the corridor. She was holding a rosary in her hands. Her face, so animated earlier on, was frozen.

  ‘Peter? Are you still working?’

  She came in and sat down on the piano stool. Slumped, he would have said. Her voice had also lost its melody.

  ‘It has to be done.’

  ‘Does it? Yes, I suppose it does.’

  She sat for a while sliding the rosary between her fingers. He resumed his work, breaking down the door frame, and so barely heard what she said, but caught the meaning clearly.

  ‘I loved her.’

  He lowered his tools and looked at her.

  ‘I loved her in every possible way. I can tell God, of course. But you’re the only human being I can tell.’

  She looked at him with tears in her eyes.

  ‘I loved her and I betrayed her. And I can’t tell anyone, not even the police. I can tell only you.’

  Despite the gravity of the situation, he adopted a teasing tone.

  ‘And you don’t think I’ve got enough on my plate as it is? I betrayed her too.’

  ‘Your betrayal was nothing compared to mine,’ she insisted.

  ‘Is this a competition?’

  ‘I loved her. Didn’t you hear what I said? She confided in me. Confidences I should have passed on. Now it’s too late. Now she’s dead.’

  She wiped away the tears.

  ‘If you know anything, you must tell the police,’ he said.

  She shook her head as she looked at him.

  ‘It’s not that simple. There are our laws and then there are society’s. It’s not often they collide, but sometimes it happens.’

  ‘Do you know why anyone would want to hurt her? Do you know why she had to die?’

  ‘Of course
I don’t. I can’t answer either of your questions. Not with any certainty.’

  She got up and went over to him and put her hand on his arm.

  ‘We’re in the same boat, you and I. God will forgive us, but can we forgive ourselves?’

  Her and her God, he thought, and felt himself being sucked towards a place he didn’t want to go.

  ‘You knew her well,’ he said. ‘Perhaps better than anyone. There has to be a reason why it happened. Something must have happened before . . .’

  Her eyes widened as her hand squeezed his arm.

  ‘She was so frightened,’ she said. ‘She was so terribly, terribly frightened.’

  ‘And you can’t tell anyone else but me?’

  Christ, this was going from bad to worse. He wished he was at home with the dog.

  ‘Things spoken in confidence behind these walls can’t be revealed to the world outside, least of all to a public authority,’ she said. ‘It’s like the sanctity of confession. She begged me to keep quiet. Even if the worst should happen . . . Especially if the worst should happen,’ she corrected herself.

  A big part of him didn’t want to hear what was coming. But another part was enticing him into a very tempting offer, if he did get involved. Forgiveness, absolution, purification of sins. A soul at peace with itself. He was badly in need of that.

  ‘You’re saying she thought someone was trying to kill her?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think that was what she feared most.’

  She rummaged around in her pocket and pulled something out.

  ‘More rosaries?’ he said when he saw what she had in her hand. ‘Isn’t one enough to save my soul?’

  ‘This is a special rosary. Melissa gave it to me. She said it was the key to everything. To her fear and the story behind it, which she never told me in its entirety. I can’t give it to the police, but I can give it to you.’

  For the second time in twenty-four hours she pressed a rosary into his hand. He looked at it. It was different from the first. At the end of it hung a different symbol from the one usually found on crucifixes.