Mark Bille stood in the doorway.
‘I have a warrant to search your house. I hope you’ll cooperate.’
Peter knew this was Anna Bagger’s doing. Mark Bille was just the messenger boy.
‘What’s happened?’
He had to make a guess as he let them in. The dog’s barking had become a growl again.
‘Quiet, Kaj.’
He settled back in his basket, from where he watched the scene as white-clad CSOs started opening drawers, taking books from the bookcase and looking under all the sofa cushions. Two of the officers began checking surface areas for fingerprints with a red powder and a man wearing full breathing apparatus sprayed something on the walls. Blood, Peter thought. They’re looking for the spatter of blood.
He looked away. It felt as if he was being violated and he had to restrain himself from throwing them out. Something must have happened. Could they have found something that linked Melissa’s death to him? He wondered if Sister Beatrice had told them about their conversation and her relationship with Melissa.
‘So much for paying your debt to society and all the other fine words you police love to indulge in!’
‘Relax, Peter.’
‘What are you looking for?’
He was praying they wouldn’t find his weapons or ammunition under the eaves. Mark Bille raised both arms in the air. The gesture indicated a kind of resignation. Again, Peter had to remind himself that this was Anna Bagger’s doing, he was sure of it. His blood boiled with rage at the detective from Aarhus.
‘Why the hell would she think I have anything to do with it? I told you what I saw! I didn’t keep anything back.’
‘Then you have nothing to worry about.’
‘I’m not worried. I’m angry. I’m an easy target and you know it.’
‘I’m going to have to ask you to turn out your pockets.’
Peter shook his head.
‘This is blinking insane!’
He did as he was told and emptied the contents of his pockets on the table. Mark searched through them. There was a ten-krone coin, a packet of chewing gum with two pieces left, a parking ticket and not one but two rosaries. Mark held one up.
‘Get religion, did you?’
‘Why? Is there some law against it?’
‘Why two the same?’
‘They’re not the same.’
‘Where did you get them?’
Mark picked up the second rosary, the one with the strange symbol.
‘And what does this mean?’
‘No idea. They were a gift.’
‘From the convent?’
‘They pay me in absolution.’
‘Then let’s hope it works.’ Mark looked at him sceptically. ‘Are they trying to recruit new members?’
The thought struck Peter that now would be a good time to tell the police about Sister Beatrice and Melissa, and about where one of the rosaries had come from. But his anger prevented him. His anger and his humiliation at being treated like a criminal. And, of course, his promise to Sister Beatrice to keep it to himself.
‘Surely there’s no law against that,’ was all he said.
Then he decided to feed Mark at least a grain of truth.
‘Sister Beatrice worries about the state of my soul. She gave them to me.’
Mark ran a finger across the symbol on the second rosary and stood for a moment as if looking inside himself. Then he put it back on the table and turned to the CSOs.
‘Are you almost done?’
‘We just want to take a peek upstairs.’
The white coverall was halfway up the stairs.
‘Perhaps we could sit down in the meantime?’
They sat down, Mark on a chair, Peter on the sofa, but perched on the edge.
‘Is it Melissa?’ he asked. ‘You think she was here? You think I brought her home?’
Mark made no reply, but Peter read the truth in the way his eyes went off on a wander around the room.
‘Was she raped?’
‘You know very well we can’t tell for certain yet. The autopsy is first thing tomorrow.’
‘Tortured?’
Mark Bille’s face was blank.
‘I didn’t do it,’ Peter said.
Being suspected was like being attacked by a swarm of insects. They crawled all over his body and made him feel dirty. But if they found physical evidence, at least they could eliminate him quickly. They already had his DNA profile on record. They had his fingerprints. It would be so easy.
‘If you say so,’ Mark Bille said with a sigh.
‘Coffee?’
Peter only asked because it would give him something to do. Mark Bille nodded.
‘If you’re making one.’
Thirty minutes later, the CSOs had finished. They had taken prints and samples of fibres and anything they regarded as potential evidence. They hadn’t found the weapons under the eaves. But they did take his computer and his phone before they left the house in convoy.
‘You’ll get them back as soon as we’ve checked them,’ Mark Bille promised as he left.
‘That’s what I call service.’
Peter closed the door after them. He went back to bed and closed his eyes to the mess and the red powder that covered the house like a memory that refused to go away.
12
MELISSA’S AUTOPSY WAS almost as unpleasant as the examination of Peter Boutrup’s house on the cliff top, where they had obviously been wasting their time.
Mark hated autopsies. He couldn’t stand the stench of dead flesh, let alone the smell of someone’s insides and abdominal and intestinal contents as the pathologist bared the organs and took them out en masse. Nevertheless, he had now witnessed quite a few. His eight years with the Copenhagen Homicide Squad had offered an abundance of the bodies he hated to see most of all: young men with healthy, muscular bodies and their whole lives in front of them, cut down in their prime by a stab wound or a bullet. Gang warfare, drug feuds, ethnic conflicts. But it was a fact that in their search for somewhere to belong some young people picked the wrong group. Bad judgement, yes. But in those circles gang membership gave you status, especially if you joined a gang with power and influence. It meant dealing in illegal substances, it meant unlicensed firearms and it meant a high risk of getting caught in crossfire of some kind and ultimately ending up somewhere else: on the pathologist’s steel table.
The woman in front of him didn’t belong to a group he had any experience of. In a way that made it much worse. He wondered if perhaps her clothing was part of it. Sister Melissa was still wearing the heavy nun’s habit, and the police forensics officer and the pathologist were working together to remove it.
Mark looked away. He wasn’t squeamish when it came to women and his lust had sometimes made him take risks and behave like an idiot. It was so unlike him to feel bashful in front of a young woman, but nonetheless that was how he felt.
Sister Melissa had chosen to wear a nun’s habit and its effect on him was the same as a fabric chastity belt. Normally he loved the sight of a naked woman and even during an autopsy could be overcome by curiosity to see beautiful breasts or trimmed pubic hair, but he was conscious that he didn’t want to see this woman exposed.
‘The victim is an eighteen-year-old, Caucasian female,’ the pathologist Sara Dreyer said to the microphone suspended from the ceiling. ‘Her body exhibits normal development. Identifying features include a birthmark near her navel, which measures . . .’ She took a ruler and measured, ‘. . . seven by three millimetres.’
The pathologist continued and identified an appendicitis scar and a second birthmark close to the right breast. Mark stared at the young body in front of him. If he ignored the severely bruised neck and the staring eyes, it was a beautiful female body, harmonious, almost luminous in its whiteness and purity. He was strangely pleased that the pathologist was a woman.
‘Blood effusions on the wrists and . . . ankles. The neck has been encircled by something wide and
sharp,’ Sara Dreyer said. ‘Such as a steel collar or something else made of metal. Lacerations of the skin as a result. The tongue is protruding and blue in colour. The face is swollen with oedema and the eyes . . .’
Sara Dreyer took a small torch and shone it into the open eyes, which Mark could see were frozen in horror mixed with shock.
‘Dotted bleeding in the eyes suggests strong pressure on the airways from the metal object – whatever it was – which has also perforated the skin in places.’
Mark tried to visualise the method of killing. The evidence seemed to indicate that Melissa had been killed in a way that required time, space and a specific instrument of some sort. She hadn’t just been bound and strangled with a pair of tights or a rope. Nevertheless, the divers would have to go back down. There could be other evidence down there.
He thought about Kir. He had tried to harden his feelings when they met. It was better for her and indeed better for both of them if they simply forgot about everything that had happened between them. He had made up his mind to that effect long ago. Yes, he was avoiding her. And he hadn’t replied to her recent emails, but that was because he felt he had no other choice. He had nothing to offer her, he had come to realise that in the months they had been away from each other. He didn’t have the energy for a relationship, it was that simple, and besides, she could do so much better.
Kir was a soldier. An elite one at that, the sort they sent to the world’s trouble spots. He had read about the rescue of the hostages in the waters off Somalia, of course. It had driven him crazy wondering what her role might have been, but there was no doubt in his mind that she’d had a role. She was a killing machine, that was how she had been trained. He knew that none of the four hostage-takers had escaped from the rescue mission alive.
Kir could take care of herself. She didn’t need someone who could barely keep himself upright.
‘Hello, and what have we here?’
Sara Dreyer’s voice brutally dismissed Kir from his thoughts. The cloth around Sister Melissa’s face had now been removed and revealed an abundance of long, dark blond hair which wound round and cascaded down.
The pathologist fiddled with something in Melissa’s ear.
‘How strange, in such a young girl!’
She held the object up to the light.
‘What is it?’ Mark asked.
‘A hearing aid,’ Sara said and carefully put the tiny device in a metal bowl before turning Melissa’s head to the other side and feeling her other ear.
‘Another one,’ she said, sounding surprised. ‘Eighteen years old and reduced hearing in both ears.’
There was total silence in the autopsy room. Then Sara said:
‘Well, it still doesn’t give us the cause of death.’
She and the forensics officer took secretion samples from all external orifices with cotton buds, which were then sealed in small plastic tubes. The officer also took blood samples from the victim’s arm and placed the small tubes, neatly labelled, into a container. Mark was pleased to see the work was done with care and as much respect for the deceased as was possible in the circumstances.
At length, after a silence, the pathologist said:
‘OK, Melissa. Please forgive us, but I’m going to have to take a look at your insides.’
Three hours later, Mark left the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Skejby Hospital, turned on the satnav and drove to an address he had found on the internet, in a suburb called Brabrand. As he drove, on a sudden impulse, he rang the number he had also scribbled down and made a quick appointment.
The girl who welcomed him in the doorway couldn’t have been much more than twenty. She was wearing a short black PVC miniskirt and her stomach was solarium-brown with a piercing in her belly button. A see-through crop top revealed the outline of a minimalist lace bra. She reeked of cheap perfume.
‘Laila?’
She opened the door.
‘Come in.’
He entered through a bright hallway with several pairs of shoes in a tidy line. He noticed there were also children’s shoes.
‘Through here.’
She took his arm and guided him through a cosy living room, which extended into a kitchen, and onwards to a room that was utterly different from the ones he had just seen. The bed was covered with something that looked like a sea of blood, but which turned out to be distressed velvet. The walls had been painted black and were decorated with framed erotic posters and in several places incense sticks were burning in small porcelain holders, emitting a spicy fragrance of warmer, more sensual skies.
‘What would you like?’
‘Whatever’s easy.’
She pushed him down on the bed. On the bedside table there was a bowl of condoms in various colours. She picked it up and offered it to him as if it was a bowl of sweets.
‘I don’t think . . .’
‘Those are the rules.’
‘Yes, but I still don’t think . . .’
He wasn’t good at this. Not any more.
She started to unbutton his shirt professionally and caress his chest. Images from the autopsy crowded his mind. The saw cutting through the chest. The ribs being severed and removed one by one. How fragile the human frame is, he had thought. The bones which are there to protect us can break so easily.
In the end when the organs had been examined and removed, the face had been peeled off as if it were a Halloween latex mask. All of a sudden Sister Melissa was a bloody, unrecognisable lump of bared muscle, tendons, bones and teeth. A zombie grinning up at him.
‘Relax. It’ll be all right.’
Laila cooed with fake concern. He pushed her out of the way with more force than he had intended.
‘It’s no good. I’ve made a mistake. I’m sorry.’
‘There’s no need to get violent,’ she gasped and fell onto the bed.
Mark was soaked in sweat. What if she called the police?
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .’
Before she could make any demands, he reached for his back pocket, fished out 500 kroner and threw the notes on the blood-red bedspread. Then he stumbled out of the door.
It wasn’t until he was in his car and had calmed down again that he called Anna Bagger, who picked up the phone at first ring.
‘Yes, Mark?’
‘She was garrotted. Do you know what that means?’
‘Of course I do. Don’t you think I watch films about hired killers?’
‘Hired killers? In Djursland?’
‘You said yourself it’s hillbilly country. Everything happens under the surface.’
‘But garrotting, being bound to a chair and all that?’
‘We’ve never seen that before,’ she admitted. ‘Not in this country.’
‘There would have been a spike on the metal collar. It pushed against her neck from behind and broke her spine,’ he explained.
The scan had revealed the latter.
‘She definitely wasn’t killed near the moat,’ Anna Bagger stated. ‘He’s hidden her somewhere. You didn’t find anything at Boutrup’s, I gather?’
‘Nope. He didn’t do it. Waste of time.’
‘Oh well, it was worth a try.’
He wasn’t so sure about that. Boutrup wasn’t someone he would like as his enemy.
She said:
‘There’s still the area by the moat. Why don’t you ask your diving chum what she thinks our chances are of finding anything?’
13
‘YOU SHOULD COMPLAIN to the ombudsman,’ Manfred said. ‘Or whatever he’s called.’
‘It’s no use. Best to forget about it.’
Peter balanced on a ledge as he took the aluminium pole which Manfred passed to him. It weighed almost nothing. That was the beauty of erecting scaffolding. It was as fast as building a house of cards, but was much more stable. In no time at all you were ten metres above the ground, whence all the problems of the world seemed small and insignificant.
‘Wait. I
just need to slot it in.’
He used a little extra force to make both ends of the pole go into the appropriate clamps.
He had only told Manfred about his house being searched because otherwise he would have heard about it from another source. He wasn’t trying to involve his boss in anything, but his anger at the police intrusion still rankled. His anger plus the humiliation of always being treated like a suspect.
He made sure the pole was firmly in place. Manfred climbed up to the third level – he was a small, nimble man who could balance like an acrobat. He sat down on the plank-work next to Peter and looked down into the convent courtyard where the Rimsø Carpenters lorry was parked with the rest of the scaffolding in pieces on the back, like a game of spillikins. Then he scrutinised Peter.
‘Are you OK?’
This was Manfred’s way of letting him know that he had detected a change. Peter had glanced at himself in the mirror and seen the haunted, anxious expression on his face and the grey colour it had taken on.
‘It’s a horrible thought that I was part of it,’ he mumbled.
Once he had digested his run-in with the police, it was Melissa’s death that had been foremost in his mind. He had been awake all night thinking about her and what he had seen. Not until the morning, when the rain eased off, had he dragged the mattress out onto the balcony and finally fallen into a deep, confusing sleep, which had done him no good at all.
‘It isn’t your fault,’ Manfred said. ‘You couldn’t have known what was going to happen. You couldn’t have known that man was going to kill her.’
‘From where I was standing, I knew.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Manfred said. ‘It’s just how you feel now. With the benefit of hindsight. It’s not logical.’
Manfred looked at him.
‘And you’re normally a pretty logical guy. So relax.’
Peter was tempted to say that the search and the murder of Sister Melissa were not the only things weighing on his mind. The rosary with the strange symbol on the end was eating away at him too.
Dead Souls Page 7