20
THIRTY MINUTES LATER he saw with his own eyes what Mark Bille meant. The scaffolding was still lying in a heap in the convent courtyard. The difference now was that the CSOs had drawn white chalk circles and were busy bagging up the poles that had been sawn through.
‘What’s happening, Peter? This doesn’t look like a message from your biker gang friends . . .’
Mark Bille squatted down and pointed to the saw marks.
‘No.’
He looked up and sideways at Peter.
‘So who is it? Have you made some new enemies?’
Mark got up while Peter reviewed potential candidates.
‘Come on. Help me out here.’
Mark Bille was all right, but the rest of the police force could pack up and move to Greenland as far as Peter was concerned.
‘You have a leak,’ he concluded. ‘As a result, someone tried to kill me.’
‘That’s a serious accusation. Would you care to elaborate?’
‘Someone told Alice Brask, Melissa’s mother, that a carpenter saw something that afternoon. She posted it on her blog.’
‘So you’re saying one of our police officers talked?’
‘Who else?’
‘And someone read that blog and decided you were going to have an accident?’
Peter looked at the collapsed scaffolding. He could still hear it crashing down and see Manfred’s body falling through the air.
‘Not someone. The perp, to use a technical expression.’
He continued:
‘The perp can read. He has a computer, but that’s not all. He’s a narcissist. He follows Alice Brask’s blog to see how she refers to him. And he exploits every piece of information to sabotage your investigation.’
‘Including killing witnesses?’
‘Why not? He’s on a roll.’
His anger followed him until he left the convent soon afterwards to drive to the cemetery. It was late in the afternoon and the sun hung low in the sky. The bouquet on My’s grave looked like someone had flattened it with a steam roller. He felt like picking it up and hurling it away.
He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his work trousers as he stared at the grave. He imagined the worms inexorably munching away under the ground. Just as they were working their way through human remains, his anger was eating its way through him. If he didn’t do something soon, he would end up a hollow shell with his insides rotted away.
He scuffed the gravel with the tip of his shoe. There was still humidity in the air and the ground was sticky and dark.
Things had changed. Melissa’s death had affected so many things, including his relationship with the convent and with Beatrice. But worst of all, he could have lost his best friend, and Jutta might have lost her husband and her children their father.
Even when the ambulance had taken them to the hospital, it hadn’t crossed his mind that it could be anything other than an accident. But the evidence was clear: it was sabotage.
He didn’t doubt for one second that the sabotage had been meant for him. His enemies were out to get him, only this time they weren’t Rico’s foot soldiers. He was certain Melissa’s murderer was behind it. His logic was that if the witness was gone, the perpetrator couldn’t be identified.
That was what had happened. And Manfred had paid the price, possibly with his mobility. Manfred was an innocent bystander. An ordinary man with a family and a job who had made the mistake of choosing an ex-convict and albatross as his employee and friend.
Peter wandered around the cemetery for a while, then left and drove home in the late afternoon. The clouds had disappeared and the setting sun cast low rays across the fields, where the winter seedlings shone a luminous green. Beyond them the Kattegat sparkled metallically and the waves were silver-crested as he drove home along the familiar narrow lanes leading to Gjerrild Cliff.
For a long time now he had said that revenge was not for him. Revenge was for amateurs, for people who couldn’t think of a better way to fill their lives.
Not that he was short of things to avenge in his life, if he had to look. And once upon a time, thoughts of revenge had filled most of it. He and Cato, his old pal from the care home, had had big plans in that respect. The thought and talk of revenge had been the adhesive that bound them together in those days. Anyone they had ever met, who had failed them, would one day experience revenge served cold. Everyone – sadistic care home managers, powerless caseworkers, corrupt doctors and callous parents – would get a taste. It gave them a strange sense of satisfaction to imagine how they would do it.
Cato had never strayed from that course. But Peter had changed. Four years in Horsens State Prison had taught him that revenge was a waste of time. Taking revenge never made anyone happy. He only had to look at the other inmates. Many were inside because they had wanted to avenge something. Bikers taking an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; men who had murdered out of jealousy and in a blood rush; financial disagreements that had been avenged with stabbings and physical violence. It was all on display in Horsens. And it was not a pretty sight.
After his release he had sworn that a thirst for revenge would not be allowed to ruin his life. He had decided, if not to forgive, then at least to let bygones be bygones and forget.
But now everything had changed. Someone had taken Melissa’s life and possibly ruined Manfred’s. Someone was after him. He didn’t want revenge but something akin to it. He wanted this person held to account and confronted with their actions. And yes, the temptation to close his hands around the neck of the guilty person and pay him back in the same coin was enormous, because he didn’t believe for one second that the police could get them justice.
He had to find the someone who was trying to destroy his and others’ lives. An alarm system was no longer enough.
He had reached the pig farm and had just driven past the large silo when a car sounded its horn at him. In his rear-view mirror he saw a small red Chevrolet hopping along the road My’s mother was hooting and waving to him from inside the car.
He stopped and saw her get out and approach him. She was wearing jeans and a soft, light-coloured sweater. He rolled down his window.
‘You’ve been to the cemetery,’ she said.
He just nodded. Here, in his private part of the world, her eagerness irritated him.
‘And you’re back in Djursland,’ he said. ‘That was quick.’
It sounded rude, but he didn’t care. It was a shit day and her presence didn’t make it any better.
Her face fell.
‘You’re annoyed with me.’
He didn’t disagree.
‘I understand, but I promise you I only want what’s best. I just wanted . . .’
‘It’s a free country,’ he said, less angry now. ‘You can come and go as you please.’
She bit her lip. Her hair fell over her shoulder and at that moment the sun caught it and it shone almost golden.
‘I’ve baked a cake. I thought you might like to make some coffee . . .’
He searched for an excuse to say no, but his hesitation allowed her an opening:
‘I heard about what happened to that girl, Melissa. How awful.’
He just nodded.
‘And then I realised that I actually know her, from a long time ago . . .’
‘You do?’
She backtracked.
‘Well, no, not really . . . But I did know her mother. We were practically neighbours. Then the family moved to Randers . . . Anyway, I’m just wittering on. So how about that coffee?’
He nodded.
‘OK.’
The eagerness had returned to her voice.
‘Deal. I’ll just follow you, shall I?’
21
‘I’M MAKING A list of missing persons reported at that time. It’s going to take a couple of days, as you will appreciate.’
Oluf Jensen didn’t appear to be quite as inefficient as Mark had feared. He might be close to retirement, but the eyes b
ehind the spectacles were alert and he had a touch of the old-fashioned detective about him: thorough and conscientious to a T, as he sat there in his corduroy jacket behind the desk at Aarhus Police Station. His teeth were crooked and yellow as if they had gripped a pipe for decades and sucked nicotine into the enamel. His hair was longish and curly without a hint of grey in the ash blond. He looked more like an academic than a police officer.
‘How far are you casting the net?’ Mark asked.
‘Across all of Denmark. But focusing on East Jutland and Djursland in particular, of course.’
‘Perhaps I can help,’ Mark offered. ‘I know the area. Families here tend to stay put within a radius of ten kilometres.’
Oluf Jensen flicked through some papers.
‘I would welcome your help. I am a bit trussless here, if I may put it like that.’
‘Trussless?’
The investigator wafted his hand as if swatting a fly. His eyes glinted.
‘No support. A feeble attempt at humour. My colleagues ignore me.’
The krone dropped with an audible clunk.
‘Ah, support as in back-up. . .’
Oluf Jensen looked at him over the rim of his spectacles with a certain amount of forbearance. ‘Nasty business, those two murders,’ he said. ‘But also intriguing, of course.’
‘Same MO, you mean? Separated by so many years.’
Mark still felt a little wrong-footed. Oluf Jensen nodded.
‘Stirs the imagination, eh, a riddle stretching across so many decades?’
‘And a garrotte,’ Mark said. ‘It belongs to the past rather than the present.’
Oluf Jensen winked behind his glasses.
‘I agree. The garrotte – if that is what we’re talking about – was originally a Spanish invention.’
The garrotte could originate from Timbuktoo as far as Mark cared, but Oluf Jensen had clearly looked into the matter. You probably had time to do that sort of thing when you weren’t trying to run a police station and keep a team of out-of-town detectives happy.
‘The garrotte was Spain’s answer to Madame la Guillotine, a device for executing prisoners. You were sat on an upright wooden chair and a metal band was placed around your neck and tightened from the back with a screw. You were strangled by the metal band while a metal spike was forced into your neck and broke your spine.’
As he spoke, Oluf Jensen tried to demonstrate the executioner’s technique. Mark broke into a sweat at the mere thought of it.
‘Jesus Christ! I’d prefer a bullet – or a full salvo,’ he said.
He had always thought that death by strangulation was the worst way to die. He had been terrified that his cancer would spread to his lungs and slowly deprive him of oxygen. Not that he had ever told anyone that.
‘If their aim is good, yes,’ Oluf Jensen said, not without a certain macabre delight. ‘But the garrotte was actually a reliable method of killing.’
‘Please tell me it’s no longer legal?’
‘Not any more, no. But it wasn’t outlawed in Spain until the early 1970s, when they abolished the death penalty.’
‘Melissa Brask was fixed to a chair. How about our friend in the bone box? Did the same thing happen to him?’
‘Unfortunately, the forensic examiners can’t tell us that.’
‘But surely it can’t be the same person? Who carried out both killings, I mean?’
Oluf Jensen leaned back in his chair and looked at Mark.
‘In theory, everything is possible. But if the forensic anthropologists are right and the bones are from around 1950, we would be talking about a killer who would be in his mid-seventies, at least.’
‘Even so, there must be a certain margin for error, perhaps in our favour?’
‘Nevertheless . . .’
Oluf Jensen took a black ink pen and started drawing on a piece of paper. A few swift strokes and a rigid, high-backed chair appeared. A few more and a girl was sitting on the chair with a metal band around her neck. The band was tightened by a man standing behind her, turning a screw.
‘A little hobby of mine,’ the detective muttered. ‘It comes in handy.’
He sketched a second device. A metal band with a pointed object attached and a stick as a handle.
‘It’s called a Catalan garrotte when there’s a spike on it,’ Oluf Jensen said in a serene voice.
He looked up at Mark.
‘It’s quite an effective way to kill people. It’s still used in some places, as far as I know.’
‘I thought you just said it was forbidden now?’
‘Officially, yes. But there are certain military situations where it has been used. Undercover work, as it’s known.’
‘Where?’
‘In the Foreign Legion, they say . . . As I said, it’s a silent mode of execution. If it’s carried out correctly.’
Oluf Jensen added a few more squiggles.
‘But we can probably ignore that possibility in this case, don’t you think?’
Again there was a glint of good humour behind the glasses. Mark nodded. He knew he should never eliminate anything or anyone, but it was hard to imagine the Foreign Legion striking in Djursland in the present or in the past.
‘If it’s around 1950,’ he said, ‘that makes it a few years after the war had ended. Could it have anything to do with the war?’
For the first time, Oluf Jensen looked at him as though he were a star pupil and not the class dunce, too dim to understand anything.
‘Go back only five years and you have liquidations during the final phase of the war. In the last few months before the Germans capitulated, around four hundred people – informers, if you will – were killed without a trial.’
‘So our victim could be one of them?’
More squiggles on the paper.
‘Now, there’s still the issue of the MO. Most liquidations were carried out by the Danish Resistance movement. They used guns.’
‘But if they wanted to avoid noise?’
‘I believe silencers had been invented back then. But yes. It’s a possibility. We’ll know more when we get the list.’
Mark anticipated quite a workload if they had to check four hundred names plus miscellaneous enquiries. Anna Bagger had made a smart move. He would be kept busy for weeks and thus out of her investigation.
‘Perhaps we could request more help,’ he suggested. ‘To go through that list, I mean.’
Oluf Jensen got up.
‘Resources, my good man. They don’t drop out of the sky and certainly not at this station.’
The detective held the door open for him and they went down the corridor together.
‘Let’s be honest,’ Oluf Jensen said before they parted. ‘It would take a miracle. Both to get more manpower allocated to this case and for us to have a breakthrough. I’ll be in touch when the list arrives. Meanwhile, why don’t you scout around locally for stories from those days . . . See what crawls out of the provincial woodwork.’
Mark wasn’t normally a man who believed in miracles. Nonetheless, he left the police station with a dash of optimism. He didn’t believe in miracles, that was true, but nor was he ready to dismiss them out of hand. He was, after all – as far as he was aware – one himself.
22
‘WHAT A LOVELY house!’
Peter tried to put himself in Bella’s shoes and in a flash he saw what she saw:
An ascetic bachelor home with white walls, sparsely furnished and no superfluous ornaments on the window sills or shelves, but a bookcase laden with books arranged alphabetically. Fortunately, he’d tidied up after the police visit.
There were scrubbed, pale wooden floors, white-washed ceilings and unframed paintings on the walls, most with the same motif: the countryside and the sea right outside the door. The simple life translated from prison cell to freedom.
‘Take a seat. I’ll make some coffee.’
While he was in the kitchen, he could hear her wandering about. He knew she wa
s stopping in front of each painting and reading his signature. He knew she was trying to get to know him and he was pleased he had taken down the other paintings long ago. He always painted in series: the same subject over and over again. The tree outside Titan Care Home, consumed by flames on canvas more times than he could count.
He brought in the coffee and mugs.
‘So tell me about Melissa’s mother.’
She turned around.
‘You paint well. But why do you always paint the same scene?’
‘There are shades of difference.’
As in real life, he thought, and nodded towards the window.
‘It changes all the time.’
The light, the wind and the clouds were better at mixing colours than he was with his palette. He felt that the pictures displayed his shortcomings.
‘I just paint what I see.’
She seemed to accept this explanation. He had no wish to tell her that he was unable to hold any more than this one view inside him. The cliff and the sea were overwhelming to a person who had stared at four cell walls for the same number of years.
‘Are they for sale? I might want to buy one.’
He could do with the money, but he didn’t like the idea of it. You didn’t trade with your enemies – or perhaps you did. Wasn’t that exactly what he was about to do now?
‘They’re not for sale.’
‘Isn’t everything?’
There was a teasing tone to her voice. She had brought with her a Føtex plastic bag. Now she took out a cake dish, put it on the coffee table and removed the tea towel. ‘Voilà! Dream cake.’
For a while they were busy with the rituals of pouring coffee and serving cake. Then he told her about the scaffolding accident and Manfred. He intended to use it as leverage to find out something about Melissa’s mother. And, as expected, Bella’s eyes widened.
‘And you think it happened because Alice wrote about you in her blog?’
She made it sound implausible, so he replied by just staring at her and drinking his coffee.
‘You look like My,’ he blurted out. ‘And yet you don’t.’
‘Tell me about her.’
Dead Souls Page 11