Dead Souls

by Elsebeth Egholm

  ‘It’ll be all right. Help’s on its way.’

  He stopped. Manfred had his eyes closed now. His face was the colour of the clouds in the sky.

  ‘We’ll soon be hunting in the forest again with the dog.’

  Manfred’s arm reached out and patted Peter’s sleeve.

  18

  ‘THE INVESTIGATION INTO the box of bones is being handled by Oluf Jensen in Aarhus. He’s retiring in the spring,’ Anna Bagger said.

  Mark Bille felt frustrated. That combination did not bode well for the investigation.

  Anna Bagger’s silk blouse flashed icy blue as she went up to the board and placed two round magnets on a photo of Melissa’s mother.

  ‘This lady is something of a nut job.’

  She tapped a knuckle on the picture of Alice Brask, an attractive woman with short dark hair, flawless skin and a classic face with high cheekbones. Her smile was distant.

  ‘Martin and I visited her yesterday,’ Anna Bagger said. ‘An ice queen, if you ask me.’

  Women were often harder on other women than men were, Mark thought. Anna wasn’t exactly like a hot water bottle herself, what with her cool colours – blond hair and shades of blue, which she always wore – and her private, slightly awkward personality.

  ‘Anyway, we’ll save it until everyone’s here,’ she said.

  ‘Have you spoken to Oluf Jensen?’ Mark asked.

  Anna Bagger studied the board again, from where a smiling Melissa – her mother on the edge of the photo – looked down at them. The autopsy photographs had been put up next to the smiling girl. What a macabre line of business they were in.

  ‘I’ve had other things on my mind. Why don’t you contact him?’

  He assumed this was her way of telling him he could take over that line of enquiry. He also assumed it was because she didn’t regard it as important. A sixty-year-old skeleton with a broken spine wouldn’t exactly make an ambitious detective lick her lips. Even if a crime lay behind it, Anna Bagger would score more points both with the public and her superiors if she could tie up Melissa’s killing – uncover the motive, obtain a confession and deliver a case that would stand up in court. Anyone who had killed sixty years ago was likely to be rotting away in a nursing home or be dead themselves. Where was the fun in that?

  ‘OK, I will.’

  ‘If you can find the time, that is,’ she said, tucking a stray lock of hair away from her face. ‘I mean, you’ve still got your own shop to run.’

  He knew she had a habit of speaking in code. This was her way of telling him not to get carried away. She was the head of the investigation and he was the local plod whose job was to catch burglars and muggers and help old ladies cross the road. Who cared if he had more than eight years of experience with the Copenhagen Homicide Squad and was probably better qualified to lead an investigation than she was?

  ‘Don’t worry, I will.’

  He hesitated. ‘But don’t you think there might be something in this old case?’

  She sat with one buttock on the corner of the table and one leg dangling in the air.

  ‘It can hardly be the same killer. Or perhaps you disagree?’

  Did he? Or was he just so desperate to prove himself that he was clutching at straws, because work was all he had left?

  He walked over to the window and opened it to air the room before the meeting.

  ‘It’s an unusual way of killing someone.’

  ‘And we’re definitely talking about garrotting, are we? What if it’s just your old-fashioned broken neck?’

  ‘Not according to Sara Dreyer. The broken spinous process is apparently a unique feature of garrotting.’

  ‘It sounds rather far-fetched to me,’ she said.

  ‘I agree it’s not the same killer,’ Mark said. ‘But it’s the same MO. Melissa also has a fractured spinous process, as you can see from the autopsy report.’

  She nodded to indicate that he should continue with his train of thought.

  ‘It could be a coincidence. Or it could be a trigger.’

  Even he could hear the connection sounded strained. A murder in the present inspired by a sixty-year-old crime?

  Her lack of reaction spoke volumes. He looked away and out of the window. The car park was starting to fill up as her team arrived. Once again Grenå Police Station would provide the setting for a murder investigation. It was only last winter they had fought for space when Anna Bagger and her team had made this station their HQ. This was what happened when there was an unexplained death in the area. Aarhus would come in and take charge while the five local police officers and two receptionists had to huddle together.

  ‘Morning, all!’

  Martin Nielsen was the first to appear in what had become a de facto incident room. He was quickly followed by the other detectives and eventually the whole team had gathered. Chairs clattered, jackets were peeled off, people chatted like kids before a lesson. Thermos flasks of coffee were brought in and put on a trolley with the attendant cups, sugar and milk.

  Mark took a seat, but didn’t feel he really belonged. Anna Bagger opened the meeting.

  ‘Melissa. Let’s sum up what we have.’

  ‘We have a body and we know how she was killed,’ said Kim Svensson, who had red hair and was new and keen and whom Mark had met once before. ‘We have an approximate time of death and the place where the body was found.’

  ‘But we don’t have the murder weapon,’ Martin Nielsen interjected.

  ‘We won’t find that in the moat,’ Mark said.

  ‘But there might be something down there of use,’ Anna Bagger said and looked questioningly at Mark.

  ‘The divers will try again today,’ he confirmed.

  Anna Bagger cleared her throat:

  ‘Who have we talked to?’

  ‘Boutrup,’ Martin Nielsen said. ‘And the abbess and all the sisters. And the staff and the conference guests. No one was of any help other than to provide a fuller picture of Melissa.’

  ‘Do we have a list of staff and guests?’

  Martin Nielsen produced two pieces of paper and handed them to her.

  ‘ScanRapport, an IT company with ten employees, was having a meeting at five o’clock when Melissa disappeared. Everyone attended. Another company, a chain of shoe shops called Healthy Feet, were holding a course for fifteen employees, but they all spent the afternoon sightseeing locally and didn’t return until six o’clock.’

  He nodded to the papers. ‘The rest is in there.’

  Anna Bagger skimmed the list, then put it down.

  ‘We’ve drawn a blank on Boutrup for the time being,’ she concluded. ‘And we can presume the nuns are telling the truth, can we?’

  ‘God’s servants on Earth,’ Nielsen said, scratching his chin. ‘No, I don’t suppose we can.’

  ‘But do we have reason to think that they might know more than they’re letting on?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  Anna Bagger paused in front of the blackboard and chewed her lip. Then she folded her arms across her chest and started pacing up and down.

  ‘I think we need to bear in mind that the sisters might have their own agenda. The reputation of the convent, for one. And the fact that they serve other masters, I mean the Vatican.’

  She pointed to the ceiling. ‘And Him upstairs.’

  ‘Are you saying they might be lying to protect their own interests?’ Mark asked.

  Anna Bagger splayed her hands. For a moment Mark had a vision of her standing in a church blessing her flock.

  ‘I’m not saying that they’re lying. But if it was a choice between following their own internal religious rules and following society’s, I honestly don’t know which they would choose.’

  Everyone seemed to be mulling that one over in the ensuing silence.

  ‘Right,’ Anna Bagger said. ‘Melissa. What kind of victim are we dealing with?’

  ‘That depends on who you ask,’ Martin Nielsen said. ‘According to her mother
she was hard to get to know, secretive. She had her own ideas and she didn’t share them with others.’

  ‘Or not with her mother, at any rate,’ Anna Bagger said. ‘Alice was complaining about that.’

  ‘Perhaps she should ask herself why. After all, she is a journalist,’ Pia Thorsen said. ‘She has a blog.’

  ‘And the day after her daughter was murdered, she wrote about the investigation, thank you, yes, I know.’ Anna Bagger sipped her coffee with an expression of distaste.

  Pia Thorsen made another attempt.

  ‘For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s Third Law. If your mother is a battleaxe who sticks her nose into other people’s business, it makes sense that her daughter will be cautious and private.’

  ‘What about friends and outside contacts?’

  ‘She cut them all off when she joined the convent,’ Martin Nielsen said. ‘For the same reason, she hadn’t seen her mother or brother for six months.’

  Anna Bagger nodded. This was information she already had.

  ‘She’s difficult to get a handle on, our do-gooder Alice.’

  Her gaze swept the room and landed on Mark.

  ‘Mark, why don’t you try some of your down-home charm? Seeing as you’re going to Aarhus anyway to talk to Oluf Jensen . . .’

  Mark didn’t know whether to be flattered or not. She waved her hand in circles:

  ‘You’re the local policeman. Remember, you’re not involved in the investigation. You’re just there to say you’re sorry for her loss, check if she’s OK, was there anything important she might have remembered, blah blah blah . . .’

  She was warming to her own brilliant idea and pointed a finger with frosted nail varnish at Mark.

  ‘She’s fifty-one. She’s vain. She’s good-looking.’

  There was a knock on the door. Jens Jepsen, a local police officer, popped his head round. His gaze landed on Mark.

  ‘There’s been an accident at the convent.’

  The words vibrated in the air before their significance dawned on Mark. Kir! It was his first thought and it washed over him with the force of a tsunami. She must have had an accident while she was diving in the moat . . . Her oxygen tank had exploded . . .

  ‘Some scaffolding collapsed,’ Jepsen said. ‘One person is in hospital.’

  Relief raised Mark from his chair. Boutrup. A shame, of course. But rather him than Kir. He couldn’t control his thoughts.

  ‘Kir Røjel called. She was at the convent when it happened. She thinks we ought to take a look.’

  19

  JUTTA WITHOUT MANFRED was like a junkie without junk.

  Dishevelled and in torment, she was chain-smoking outside the hospital entrance. She had asked Peter to get her some cigarettes and a lighter from the kiosk, although she had quit smoking five years ago.

  ‘You might as well go home,’ she said.

  Her face was drained of colour. Her eyes, which at first had darted everywhere, had eventually calmed down, but it was the ominous calm of someone who knew that the worst was yet to come.

  She pulled the leather jacket tighter around her and blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘There’s nothing they can do right now, they say. My sister will be here soon.’

  She tried to look positive, but failed miserably.

  ‘My mother has promised to look after the kids. And the dog.’

  ‘Otherwise I’ll be . . .’ Peter tried.

  Jutta smiled a mirthless smile.

  ‘You’ve got work to do. I know that’s what Manfred would say . . . That you should take over and get the job done.’

  She flicked ash and it flew all over the place.

  ‘Work is piling up.’

  He could hear Manfred’s voice in her, but couldn’t think of work. Why Manfred? A man with two small children and a young, insecure wife. Why not Peter? It would be more logical. And it would have spared him the guilt that was accumulating on top of all the other baggage he was dragging around. Manfred had spotted that straightaway, of course.

  ‘It was just bad luck it was me,’ he had said as he lay waiting for the ambulance. ‘It could have been you. It’s no one’s fault. You know that, don’t you? Shit happens. That’s life.’

  Peter had nodded, of course. But they both knew it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that. And now he was standing here with Jutta.

  ‘He’ll be fine.’

  He said it as much for his own sake as for hers. ‘He’ll be all right again.’

  ‘Of course he will.’

  She sniffed. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He patted his back pocket to make sure his wallet was still there. It was a habit from a time when this was far from a matter of course.

  ‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’

  She nodded and removed a stray strand of tobacco from her tongue with her cigarette hand. Again, some ash flew off into the autumn wind.

  He went inside and hurried down the corridor looking for a vending machine. On his way he passed patients, relatives and staff in various permutations while the events of the last few hours went round and round in his head. Manfred’s composure when the ambulance arrived and the medics stretchered him into the back. His quiet banter with the Falck crew. And then the silence after they had obviously decided to give him a sedative. The arrival at the hospital where white coats and green scrubs had surged around them and where one staff member had tried to get Peter to sit down so that he could have a look at the cut on his forehead. The scene Peter had caused when he had refused to leave Manfred and the fuss he had made when they took his best friend away. And Jutta hadn’t even arrived yet. Their insistence that it was best to get started as soon as possible and his embarrassing behaviour when he had accused them of being vultures and hypocrites, people who lived off the misfortunes of others.

  ‘What would you lot do with yourselves if we didn’t fall off scaffolding, eh? You’d be out of a bloody job, wouldn’t you?’

  To his surprise no one had seemed annoyed or responded with anything other than quiet, cheerful remarks to the effect that, of course, they spent every waking hour hoping people would fall off ladders, scaffolding and down staircases.

  ‘Sometimes we even go so far as giving them a helping hand to be sure there’s always plenty for us to do,’ one of them said.

  Miriam had rung in the middle of it all. He had forwarded the number of his new mobile to those contacts he could remember by heart. Miriam wasn’t top on his list of people he was pleased to hear from, but nevertheless he told her what had happened. She managed to talk him down:

  ‘They’re just doing their job, Peter,’ she had said. ‘It’s not their fault Manfred got hurt.’

  She had an irritating habit of always putting things into perspective when he least needed it, he thought. He found a vending machine and inserted some coins.

  Again, he reviewed the last couple of working days in his head. Manfred and he were always careful when they erected scaffolding. Neither of them cut corners; they trusted each other. But he had been distracted while they were working, absorbed by the dredging of the moat, by My’s mother and her bizarre arrival, the killing of Sister Melissa and Beatrice’s subsequent revelations. He had felt the rosary weighing heavily in his pocket while he clicked aluminium poles into their clamps and tested their strength every time he laid out boards for a new platform. Had they remembered to lock the castors? He was absolutely sure he had. Besides, they always checked each other’s work at the end. So how could it have happened? There was no wind of any significance in the convent courtyard. Everything had been quiet and peaceful.

  He touched his forehead. Once Jutta had arrived, they had persuaded him to go to casualty for some stitches. Seven in total. The doctor had also shone a light into his eyes and said he might have suffered mild concussion. Fortunately it wasn’t serious enough for the hospital to offer him a bed, so he was discharged with instructions to go home and rest and take paracetamol
if the pain got worse.

  When he returned with the coffee, there was no sign of Jutta. A nurse told him she had been called in to see the doctor, so he sat down and waited and ended up drinking both her coffee and his own before she returned, solemn yet composed. And, if possible, even paler.

  ‘They’re doing some tests, but he still has no sensation in his legs,’ she said. She flopped down onto a chair but immediately jumped up again. ‘They say that the fall could have paralysed him temporarily. But he might also be . . .’

  She gulped. Tears filled her eyes, which were already red.

  ‘He may never get better.’

  ‘How long before they know?’

  ‘They can’t say.’

  Her voice was paper-thin. ‘It varies.’

  His mobile rang just as he was about to get up and give her a hug. It seemed stupid to answer it, but even more idiotic to let it ring. Jutta stared pointedly at his pocket.

  ‘Just answer it,’ she said at length, close to hysteria.

  He quickly hauled it from his pocket and went down the corridor. He gave vent to his irritation when he saw who it was and barked:

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Peter,’ Mark Bille Hansen said.

  ‘Now what? Don’t tell me you want to confiscate this phone as well? This is bordering on harassment.’

  ‘I’m not confiscating anything. We’re at the convent. The scaffolding.’

  ‘I’ll clear it up.’

  ‘Kir has found something. We’re waiting for a forensic report.’

  Forensic report. Alarm bells started ringing. The hospital staff’s jokey comments about giving a helping hand zoomed back like a boomerang.

  ‘From a superficial examination we can see saw marks on the metal,’ the police officer said.