‘And then you gave her Bella’s story?’
She shook her head, avoiding his gaze, and stared into the glass where the bubbles continued to rise in an endless stream. Miriam, who was so private and whom he would never get to know fully. Miriam from the nice family who had cut her off when they learned how she earned her money.
‘I gave her mine.’
31
A TRUCE. MISTEL planes. Liquidations.
Kir grunted the words at every push-up. Exercise was her friend. Pain and effort washed through her body and made her forget there were other ways to use it – exhilarating, sensual ways which could send her into ecstasy, and which she missed.
This wasn’t ecstasy. Far from it. It was an anaesthetic and she knew it. It was one way of surviving and one way of being physical. The only option available to her right now.
Elephant bombs. The Koral Strait. Father and son. Collaborators.
After the abortive dream of love, she and Mark were at least engrossed in the case. They were both convinced the bones in the box had a significance for the here and now. In this way they were united on something, which the world around them didn’t seem to understand. At any rate, not Anna Bagger.
She flopped back on the mat in the garage where she kept her weights and her workout equipment. This was her den. It was also where her diving equipment hung from dedicated pegs or was stored on shelves in colour-coded boxes. The boat on the trailer took up quite a lot of room and there was no space for the car, which was always parked on the drive in front of the summer house.
Her mobile rang and she groaned as she stretched to reach it from the edge of the table. Sweat dripped down on it as she held it to her ear.
‘Kir here.’
‘You all right?’
‘Allan! Where are you?’
Her boss’s voice sang down the telephone. In the background she could hear helicopter rotors and people shouting to each other over the noise.
Adrenaline surged through her and her body tensed in anticipation.
‘Kongsøre. We’ve just come back. But now we’re heading your way.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘SOK is requesting assistance with a fishing vessel that has gone down in the Kattegat, off the coast of Læsø. It’s a high risk operation, Kir. There’s no time to rig up a diving ship.’
‘Count me in!’
She had nothing to lose. No family. No children. Not even a boyfriend. If anyone was prepared to run the risk, it would be her. And he knew it.
‘OK. We’ll pick you up en route. Grenå harbour in twenty-five minutes?’
‘Fine. What’s she called?’
She had a sudden premonition.
‘What? Hang on . . .’
The signal quality was poor. In the seconds that passed she thought about the chubby, spotty boy with the hopeful expression in his eyes. A boy who had just left school with his whole life in front of him.
‘Marie af Grenå,’ Allan Vraa shouted.
The premonition formed a knot in her stomach. Jens Bådsmand and his son. Two good people lost in a storm. It was a cruel reminder of nature’s power.
‘Another fisherman saw her disappear from the radar south-east of Læsø,’ Allan Vraa continued. ‘They barely had time to radio Mayday. He dropped a buoy over the position, so SOK quickly called off the search.’
‘And they found no one on the surface?’
‘Nope. We’re pretty sure the crew went down with the vessel, but there have been some protests that the search was called off too quickly. Some people think that if they were wearing life vests, the crew could have survived longer in the water than the time SOK spent searching. That’s why SOK contacted us. Quite simply, we’re going out to save their asses.’
‘And there was a crew of two?’
‘Father and son, as far as we’ve been told. Anyone you know?’
She swallowed, but then pushed her feelings aside and let pragmatism take over.
‘Jens Bådsmand and his son, Simon, aged fifteen. I chatted to them in the harbour only yesterday. We talked about the weather . . .’
There were no lives to be saved. And yet speed was of the essence.
She gathered her equipment and quickly drove down to the harbour and joined the five mine divers in the helicopter when it landed on the quay. She knew them all, including Frands, who nodded coolly. She considered mentioning her encounter with his brother, but the noise was so loud that she could only talk to Allan Vraa, who was sitting closest to her.
They took off and soon there was only water as far as the eye could see. The waves had calmed down, but a fresh storm had been forecast. They had to hurry.
‘What’s the position?’
Allan Vraa showed her on a computer screen.
‘Forty-five metres down. It’s not easy,’ he shouted over the noise.
Not easy, no. The regulations stated that below thirty metres there had to be a pressure chamber on the diving ship in case of an emergency. Allan Vraa had requested one of the navy’s larger ships kitted out as a diving vessel with a pressure chamber and equipment suitable for deep diving, but SOK, the navy’s operative command, had urged the divers to hurry. From their point of view this was all about putting a prompt stop to the mounting criticism, especially from colleagues of the lost fishermen. There hadn’t been time to prepare the diving ship properly, but they had arranged for a pressure chamber to be made ready at the naval station in Frederikshavn and a doctor and chamber operators to be put on standby. If a diver got the bends, they could soon be transported by helicopter to northern Jutland.
‘The whole thing stinks, but we have to make the best of it,’ Allan Vraa called out. He tried to get everyone’s attention by leaning forward and making eye contact with each of them in turn. ‘Watch out for ropes or nets. We dive in pairs. One diver searches the wreckage; the other stays clear so they can come to the aid of the first. Each team is down for five minutes: the first team locates the wreckage; the second finds the bodies and creates a safe passage to them; the third team tries to recover them. Got it?’
They nodded and each of them gave him the thumbs-up. Five minutes. Was that enough time to recover the bodies of Jens Bådsmand and Simon?
‘Let’s hope it’s pretty accessible,’ Niklas said. ‘But we should expect the wheelhouse to be facing downwards.’
‘We’ll see,’ Kir said. ‘Hope we can locate her.’
‘Visibility is poor after the storm,’ Allan said. ‘As we would expect. You say you know them, Kir? You spoke to them down at the harbour?’
‘There was something caught in a prop.’
‘Any connection, do you think?’
Kir didn’t think so.
‘They got it sorted. Some pound net had got entangled, but Jens had cover with Falck. Otherwise he might have called me . . . or so he said . . .’
They were interrupted by the pilot’s voice over the intercom. They had reached the position. Kir looked down at the metallic blue sea beneath the helicopter. Foam crests rose with rhythmic regularity like a musical note setting off oscillating sound waves. Below, there was a marine vessel whose colour practically matched the water it was bobbing up and down on.
‘Kir! You go first!’
Allan Vraa called out the sequence of the divers being lowered to the deck. She clicked the buckle on the seat belt and stepped into the harness. Less than a minute later she was suspended from a wire above an apparently endless ocean.
32
THE BLACK GOLF GTI was a battered older model, but still fast for all that. Peter watched it corner, tyres squealing, and continue down the road in the residential area as if the devil himself were clinging to the bonnet. He automatically clocked the registration plate. It was a by-product of living a life when he was constantly on the lookout for his enemies.
He drove up in his van until he spotted number 11. Bella’s house in Elev was a typical 1980s red-brick house with small windows, neat angles and a privet hedge around the garden.
A small car was parked in the carport. There were also a couple of bicycles. One of them had been knocked over by the wind.
He was about to ring the bell, then discovered that the door was open, and he carefully pushed it.
‘Bella?’
There was no reply so he took a couple of steps into the hallway.
‘Bella?’
She was definitely at home. It was late in the afternoon, her car was outside, the door was open. Or perhaps she was in the garden – although the weather wasn’t encouraging, even if the rain had eased – or visiting a neighbour. But a vague foreboding that something was amiss made him continue through the house while calling out her name. Fragile was how Miriam had described her, and he too had sensed it and allowed himself to be swept along on a wave of sympathy. But Bella was and always would be a liar. He had to keep that in mind. A desperate mother, a fragile woman, but still a liar.
‘Who is it?’
The voice was delicate, as if it was about to break.
‘It’s me. Peter.’
He walked in the direction of the sound. She was sitting in the kitchen, curled up in a corner on the checked linoleum floor. There was fear in the stare she sent him. Blood was dripping onto the floor from her left hand, which she held awkwardly in her lap. He quickly knelt down beside her and his anger evaporated.
‘What happened?’
She was crying. Tears and mascara formed trails down her cheeks. She held up a hand like a child wanting it to be kissed better, and images of My danced inside his head.
‘He was going to snap off my finger.’
Now the voice broke into a sob.
‘He had bolt cutters.’
Peter carefully lifted her hand. Bella’s index finger hung down limply and the skin was broken.
‘Can you move it?’
She could, just about.
‘Come on.’
He tried pulling her to her feet, but she stayed where she was.
‘I’m taking you to casualty.’
She shook her head vehemently.
‘Leave me alone. It’s fine.’
‘It’s not fine. Your finger’s broken.’
He looked at her. He realised he couldn’t shift her, so he squatted down next to her.
‘Was it the guy in the black Golf?’
She sniffled a yes.
‘Who was he?’
But he knew the answer before he had even asked the question and its implications hit him like a karate kick. A drug debt. Penalty interest. Miriam had been very clever. He could see it all now: Just give Peter a call. He’s in with biker gangs, he’ll talk to them . . .
‘They call him Gumbo,’ Bella whispered. ‘I don’t know what his real name is . . .’
She looked up, despair written all over her face.
‘He says Magnus owed him ten thousand kroner but now his debt is twenty thousand because Magnus hasn’t stumped up.’
He watched her. Miriam had turned her down as a potential employee, but sitting here pressed against the kitchen cupboard, scared witless by a lousy debt collector, she still had a faintly erotic aura about her, from the way she trembled to the eyes that drew his in.
‘Where can I find Gumbo?’
She sniffled again.
‘He sells drugs – cola, they call it – outside the gymnasium. One of Magnus’s friends got into trouble and his father forked out fifteen thousand kroner, but I never thought it would happen to Magnus.’
‘What is it with Magnus, Bella? Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. You were going to find him.’
‘Magnus ran away because he owed money, didn’t he?’
A sob burst out of her.
‘It’s the only explanation I can think of.’
‘Why didn’t you and Miriam tell me that in the first place? Why hide behind that story about My?’
She pulled her knees up under her chin, then ran one hand over her hair and moistened her lips. He could see they were cracked, as if she had been chewing them.
‘My was always a part of it. Part of me. When I saw that photo at Miriam’s, I had no doubt that fate had led me to her.’
‘The same fate that told you to abandon My?’
He had been manipulated. They had lied to him. He was entitled to react.
‘I was a bad mother, I admit it. What more do you want me to say?’
She bowed her head and gave a heavy sigh. He got up.
‘Do you have a first-aid kit? We should at least try to bandage that finger.’
‘In the cupboard above the cooker,’ she said.
He looked around. On the walls there were photographs of children and a couple of framed posters emblazoned with glib slogans: one against wearing furs, another about saving whales. There was also a kind of certificate stating that Bella owned X number of rain-forest hectares. Easier to save the world than your own children, it seemed.
‘What do you want from me?’ he asked. ‘Do you want me to find Magnus, is that it?’
She stared down at the floor.
‘I told you. The police won’t help.’
‘You haven’t even told them, have you?’
She shook her head. Hair fell down and covered her face.
‘Stirring things up only makes them worse. You know what it’s like . . .’
And he did. In theory you were supposed to go to the police, but experience told him that no authority could protect you when it came down to it. You had to do everything yourself. That was what real life was like.
He spotted a red first-aid box in the cupboard and found a roll of bandages and some iodine. There was also a small pair of scissors. Once again he knelt down next to Bella, dabbed iodine on the injury and bandaged her finger tightly.
‘He sends me a card every now and then,’ Bella said.
‘What kind of card?’
Peter cut the bandage and attached the end with surgical tape.
‘A postcard.’
He got up to return the first-aid box to the cupboard. Christ, this was just fantastic. A boy goes missing and sends his mother postcards.
‘Wish you were here, send more money? That kind of thing?’ he asked over his shoulder.
She struggled to her feet and waved her finger in the air.
‘Thanks for this.’
Her voice was slightly more under control now. She went into the living room next door and he followed. She opened a drawer and gave him three postcards.
‘From different places in the country,’ she said, which he could see from the postmarks. ‘No texts or emails. Nothing that can be traced.’
‘Good old-fashioned snail mail.’
He read them. They were all brief but affectionate.
‘I’m all right. Don’t look for me. Love, Magnus.’
‘I love you. Kisses, Magnus.’
The final one was more disturbing:
‘I have to do this. Trust me. Love, Magnus.’
The handwriting was immature but consistent. Same slope, same angles and loops. A young man’s uncertain penmanship, and yet that same young man had made a deliberate decision to leave his home and his family.
‘And you’re absolutely sure that it’s his handwriting?’
‘I’m not stupid.’
He looked at her, wondering. The trails down her cheeks had dried, making her look pitiful and lonely. She took the postcards and was about to put them away. He couldn’t restrain himself; he reached out and took them back.
He turned them over.
‘Can I keep them?’
She nodded.
‘Was he scared? Could you tell from the way he was acting?’
She closed the drawer with a shove of her hip.
‘How do you know with teenagers? What’s going on inside their heads, I mean. I had no idea he was unhappy.’
‘What sort of interests has he got?’
She smiled thinly.
‘Being outdoors. Scouts. He’s not a big lad, but he wanted to be a tough a
dventurer.’
Drugs and the outdoor life. Peter couldn’t make it add up.
‘So he would be able to handle himself outdoors? What about equipment?’
‘He took some with him. A tent and a rucksack.’
Peter remembered that Miriam had said something about a rucksack.
‘And you’re sure he isn’t with his dad?’
She nodded emphatically, her arms crossed and her lips compressed.
‘Absolutely sure. Magnus hates his dad.’
She returned to the living room and rummaged around in the drawer again. When she came back, she handed him a photograph of Magnus. It was the same picture she had shown him before, only in a smaller format.
‘I know. You haven’t promised to look for him.’
She held up the photograph.
‘But there’s no harm in you having this, should you stumble over something.’
He took it, thinking the first thing he would stumble over would be the guy with the battered black Golf GTI.
33
THE ROPE FROM the buoy down to the wreck seemed to go on forever. The first two divers had followed it for a long time and had still not got all the way down before their five minutes were up and they had to resurface without having located the wreck. The next two – Frands and a man called Kim – refused to dive because they thought it was too dangerous. Allan Vraa couldn’t object to that. The mission had proved to be riskier than even he had thought.
‘Kir?’
Kir stared across the waves, which were bordering on stormy. The rubber dinghy bobbed merrily underneath them. The sea was black. It was as if the flecked crests were being quickly swallowed up and sucked down into an endless black hole. Getting down wasn’t the problem. But if the waves worsened, getting the divers back up to the rubber dinghy might prove impossible.
She looked at her boss.
‘If you say no, we’ll call it off,’ Allan said.
It wasn’t a threat; he was simply stating a fact. He would understand if she didn’t want to. Again she looked at the sea where the Marie af Grenå had disappeared. She imagined Jens and Simon lying down there and couldn’t bear the thought of a sunken grave for a spotty young man who had been dreaming about the future that lay before him.
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