‘I’ve got plenty of time.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t go into detail,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you have a job remembering things from those days?’
She was stung by the remark, as he’d intended.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my memory.’
He was absolutely sure there wasn’t. She looked like the kind of person who never forgot if someone had moved the sugar bowl or stepped on the Persian carpet wearing muddy shoes.
‘You were fifteen years old in 1945. Were you at home?’
She nodded to herself.
‘Of course, I lived here.’
‘Here?’
Her head emerged from the carapace as she looked around and waved an all-encompassing hand. ‘This is my childhood home. My father built the house himself.’
‘And you have lived here all your life?’
‘No.’
It was obvious she was waiting for his next question, but he held back. If she could play the long game, so could he.
‘Alfred and I moved in when my mother died in 1967,’ she said after a lengthy pause in which she’d had time to put on her glasses and fill in some squares of her crossword.
‘Alfred? Your husband?’
‘My late husband, yes. He died soon afterwards.’
She drummed her fingers on the table. Her nails were long and grubby. Her eyes peered at him from under her eyelids and they were not friendly.
‘Men tend to die early, don’t they?’
He cleared his throat. She appeared to be mulling over a difficult clue in her crossword.
‘What happened that day in 1945?’
‘Livestock,’ she muttered.
‘I beg your pardon . . .’
‘Six letters. Fifth one is an L.’
He leaned forward.
‘And it starts with a C,’ he said. ‘Cherry red is cerise.’
‘So it is . . . The doorbell went one day and there they were.’
‘Did you know them?’
Another pause. Mark pointed.
‘Empty, eight letters, is deserted.’
She filled in the squares. The pencil was pressed hard against the paper.
‘There were two men. We didn’t know them. They had guns. The bastards took him in their car.’
‘Cattle,’ Mark said.
‘What?’
‘Livestock.’
He pointed again. She put down the pencil.
‘They shot him.’
‘But his body was never found.’
‘Those bones,’ she said. ‘Was that man shot too?’
She was sharp, he thought. A little too sharp.
‘We don’t know for certain yet. To begin with, we’re trying to get the body identified.’
‘After all those years?’
‘We’ve found DNA. Genetic material.’
‘I know what DNA is. I’m not an idiot.’
Not very likeable, either. She was acting as if she was guilty of a crime, but Mark couldn’t imagine what an eighty-year-old lady could possibly have to hide.
‘Is there any family left on your paternal grandmother’s side? That might help us to identify him.’
‘Not that I know of,’ she said, writing CATTLE in the squares. ‘And you can go now. My daughter will be here shortly.’
As he left the drive, he nearly crashed into a red car coming towards the house. He hastily swerved to avoid losing his wing mirror. In the driver’s seat he caught a glimpse of a familiar face: the care assistant who had brought him and his grandfather coffee and biscuits.
45
PETER NOTICED THE red pickup after finishing work at the convent, when he stopped off in Voldby to fill up his van with diesel.
Kir was hidden behind a pillar. She glanced up from putting in petrol and her smile of recognition reminded him of something.
‘I’ve been meaning to call you,’ he said. ‘To thank you.’
She looked confused.
‘For spotting that the scaffolding had been tampered with.’
‘Oh, that.’
She had finished now and shook the last drops from the nozzle.
‘Someone would have noticed it eventually anyway. The police or the forensics officers, for instance.’
He was tempted to say the police and their forensics officers could go screw themselves. She pushed the nozzle into the pump and clicked the petrol cap in place.
‘Shit!’
She held up her hands and took a step backwards. ‘How do you avoid getting diesel all over yourself?’
She was about to wipe her hands on her trousers, which were camouflages with several pockets.
‘Hang on.’
He pulled some paper towels out of a dispenser and handed them to her. He watched her clumsily wiping the diesel off her hands, a dimpled smile in the offing, and he suddenly felt something click between them. They were both soldiers of sorts coping with unique circumstances. She had a brother in prison and another hospitalised after an encounter with a girl gang. Her parents had favoured their useless sons and never noticed their daughter. He had a mother who hadn’t wanted him and a half-sister he had sporadic but friendly contact with. He regarded himself as marginally better off than Kir.
‘How’s Tomas?’ he asked.
He knew that Kir had been fond of her younger brother, even though he had turned out to be a violent psychopath.
‘He’s still in a coma.’
She hesitated. ‘It’s probably for the best.’
‘Do you ever visit him?’
She nodded.
‘Somebody has to. Mum and Dad don’t and Red isn’t able to.’
She looked uneasy, but also a little relieved.
‘Thanks for asking. My family isn’t the most popular on the planet.’
He smiled.
‘You didn’t pick them. This is something I know a bit about.’
‘Ah, that’s right. Do you ever see your mother?’
‘No. I’m probably not as brave as you.’
She blushed slightly. Not because of his words, he guessed, but because he had winked at her.
‘Haven’t you got a sister as well?’
‘Rose. My half-sister. She’s twenty-four.’
The thought of Rose made him feel warm inside. He had only met her twice, but the kinship seemed real and at times they would chat on Facebook. A fact their shared mother loathed. She preferred to handle the relationship between her two children herself.
‘I’ve heard about what happened near Læsø the other day,’ he said cautiously.
‘What have you heard?’
She looked guarded.
‘That a diver got the bends.’
‘That was me.’
She chuckled, almost apologetically, and scraped the tarmac with her foot.
‘I did something really daft. I stayed down too long thinking I was in control.’
He hadn’t thought of her as someone who could lose control. She must have had a reason.
‘I ended up in the pressure chamber in Frederikshavn.’
‘How are you now?’ he asked.
Her face split into a smile. The dimples were very clear now. She was an odd girl, red hair and freckles, flat as a board with a straight back like a boy’s. And yet feminine enough to walk around in camouflage trousers and heavy boots and still make a sexy impression.
‘Fit as a fiddle,’ she declared. ‘Feeling a bit low, though.’
She grew serious again. ‘I’ve just visited a mother up here’ – she swung an arm to indicate the direction – ‘to express my sympathy at the loss of her seventeen-year-old son.’
‘That’s young.’
She nodded.
‘I knew him. I know the whole family. Nils’s mother was my old teacher.’
‘That must be difficult,’ Peter said. ‘Did you recover his body?’
She shook her head.
‘My colleagues did. Along with the other two. But Nils was a surprise. He wasn’t meant to be
on board at all.’
She eyed him assessingly.
‘OK, I’m about to tell you something which might not be made public for a few days, but he was killed in exactly the same way as Melissa.’
The following pause was eloquent. Then she broke it.
‘Two teenagers. A boy and a girl. Weird, isn’t it?’
Peter nodded.
‘Very.’
‘What’s even weirder is that I found a box of old bones in Kalø Bay late last summer,’ she said with a slight shake of her head. ‘The guy in the box had been killed in just the same way: garrotted.’
‘Garrotted?’
‘It’s an old method of execution, from Spain.’
She looked as if she was about to say something else, but swallowed her words. After all, she was close to the police and of course she had heard that they had searched his home.
Then she brightened up again.
‘I’d been meaning to get in touch with you. I’ve got an old summer house in need of repair. I’ve saved up some money.’
She looked hesitant.
‘But perhaps my timing is bad, now that Manfred is in hospital . . .’
‘I can stop by one of these days,’ he suggested. ‘Manfred’s on the mend. They say he can wiggle his foot.’
Her face lit up, then it darkened. She was too good for that police officer who didn’t seem to be so keen on her any more, he thought. She deserved better.
‘All right then, see you, perhaps.’
She gave him her number, got into her pickup and drove off with a cheery wave. He stood for a moment watching the car as it left, then put diesel in his van, feeling strangely abandoned. He pulled himself together and pushed his Dankort into the card machine.
Melissa and Magnus. And now this Nils. What was his story? Peter wondered if his family had also lived in Elev, and if he had known the other two.
The digits on the fuel pump blurred in front of his eyes as he filled up.
Kir had said that Nils’s mother used to teach at Grenå School, where Kir had also been a pupil. It didn’t suggest an immediate link with Elev, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
He drove home to the cliff and used Manfred’s computer to search the Net. On Yellow Pages he found two teachers living in Voldby. One was a man, Henrik Hermansen. The other was a woman called Anni Toftegaard – Nils’s mother.
Three young people. Two of them killed in the same way and the third on the run. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
He took a break and put the kettle on for coffee. Then he fetched his easel and paints and let his thoughts freewheel while he mixed colours and worked on a picture of the grey sea by the cliff, with seagulls circling low and two fishermen in waders fishing for sea trout.
Bella was right. The motifs he chose were limited and the colours were muted. But it was here in this narrow band of colours, which matched the life he lived, that he started to calm down. His muscles began to loosen their grip on his bones. His mind let go of its familiar orbits and soared to places he didn’t normally go.
Melissa was dead. Nils was dead. His only chance was to find Magnus and speak to him, but his search had yet to produce a result. Bella was the wrong person to ask. She only gave him half-answers, even though she desperately wanted him to find her son. Bella – sweet, naive and feminine Bella – wasn’t quite so naive after all. Otherwise she would never have gone to Miriam and survived Gumbo’s visit without falling completely apart. He sensed that Bella had something to hide. If he wanted to know something about Magnus, it would have to be without her help.
Bella clearly hadn’t had an inkling that Melissa and Magnus were in contact until Gumbo had told her. The computer had almost certainly been their lifeline. Melissa’s computer was definitely in police hands, but not Magnus’s. However, he wouldn’t be able to access it without asking Bella.
Peter cleaned his brushes and stopped painting. He switched on Manfred’s computer, went onto Facebook and searched for Magnus Albertsen. There were five different Magnus Albertsens, none with a photograph matching that of Bella’s son, but there was something else. One of the Magnuses had taken a photograph of a campfire and used it as his profile picture. Peter took a chance and wrote a message:
Hi, Magnus. If you read this, I want you to know that I knew Melissa. It was me who saw the man she met outside the convent on the day she died. I know you were friends. Nils Toftegaard is dead.
I really want to help. Hope you will answer this.
Peter
He sat for a long time hoping for an answer. But it was like waiting for a voice from the grave. Nothing came and eventually he logged out and took the dog for a walk. On his return he dragged the mattress and fleece onto the balcony and they went to sleep.
46
‘OK,’ ANNA BAGGER said to the team plus Mark. ‘Nils Toftegaard. What do we know?’
The board had been filled with more photographs. A young man with dark hair and dark eyebrows in a pale face stared at them. A matching photograph of a dead Nils Toftegaard hung beside it. The only similarity was the size of the two pictures. It was hard to see it was the same person. The dead boy’s face was swollen and clearly marked by the brutal garrotting and the subsequent sojourn forty-five metres below the sea. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
The detectives presented the results of their enquiries, one after the other. Mark listened to their descriptions of a bright, well-liked young man who achieved good grades and who, after finishing the ninth class, had hoped to go on to the gymnasium. The family couldn’t afford other possibilities, so Nils had got a job in Kvickly to scrape together some money and get some work experience. Yes, he very much wanted to be a fisherman. The sea had attracted him, as it had done so many local lads, and his friend’s father was a fisherman. On the day of his disappearance they had been down at the harbour watching the Falck divers free the propeller. Afterwards Nils had gone to work at Kvickly in Grenå, right next to the old cotton mill. He had left work when the supermarket shut at seven that evening and cycled home to Voldby. Since then no one had seen him.
‘The big question is: what’s the link between the two victims? Any suggestions?’
No one had any ideas. The two teenagers had grown up in different locations in East Jutland: Melissa in Elev near Aarhus; Nils in Voldby where his mother was a teacher and his father ran an organic farm.
They debated how to proceed and allocated tasks. The lives of Nils and his family had to be gone through with a toothcomb, as always happened in murder cases. Neighbours, workmates at Kvickly, school friends and relatives had already been interviewed without any result. It was and remained a mystery where Nils had been during the twenty-four hours from the time he left Kvickly to when he was found dead in the wheelhouse of the Marie af Grenå.
Mark listened and made polite noises but refrained from mentioning the bones in the box and his work with Oluf Jensen. It would merely cause irritation and be viewed as an attempt to shift the focus away from more urgent matters.
In the end he slipped out, got in his car and drove to the nursing home. This time he went straight to his grandfather’s room.
As before, the TV was on, but the old man looked lost in a world of his own.
‘Oh, so it’s you, is it?’
He muttered these words after Mark had knocked and opened the door. But he didn’t add anything.
Mark sat down on a chair opposite him anyway.
‘How are you, Grandad?’
His eyes were fierce.
‘How do you think I am? It’s a boring life being dumped here.’
‘But they treat you all right, don’t they?’
The old man nodded.
‘As long as you do what you’re told.’
Mark chuckled.
‘And you don’t always?’
A hand clutched the edge of the table – an aged hand with liver spots and more wrinkles than Mark could count. But it was strong, and as it held the table, the knuckles were wh
ite.
‘So what do you want today?’
Mark was pleased his grandfather went straight to the point. In his childhood he had been a distant figure. His grandmother had been the centre of the family. Sometimes it was a curse the way women dominated in matters of relations, as if they had a monopoly on deep emotions. Everyone else had to tiptoe around them in the background like shadows.
He took out a list of names.
‘I’ve tracked down the names of some local people who went missing right after the war,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what this is all about first, though.’
He told him about the box and its contents.
‘Today modern science gives us the opportunity to identify these bones,’ he said by way of heavy-footed explanation, but it was unnecessary. It was clear his grandfather understood.
‘We can’t be sure the man in the box is one of the people on the list, but then again it’s a possibility since these men have never been found.’
His grandfather flapped his fingers as if summoning someone.
‘Show me that list. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Mark said. ‘I was thinking . . .’
The old man tossed his head.
‘Give it here!’
Mark reached into his pocket.
‘My glasses.’
Mark looked around.
‘On my bed.’
He took them from the bedside table where they lay on top of a newspaper. His grandfather put them on and ran his eyes down the list. His hands holding the sheet of paper trembled slightly.
‘Harrumph.’
His grandfather emitted a variety of noises in the seconds it took him to read the names. Mark tried to interpret them. Then the old man said:
‘Allan was all right. A good chum.’
‘You worked together at Tirstrup?’
His grandfather nodded.
‘He was forced into it, just like me. He was young and had a wife and baby to support.’
‘Did you know he was a member of the Resistance?’
Mark’s grandfather shrugged.
‘No one knew anything for certain in those days. It was better that way.’
‘Was he capable of killing, do you think?’
Dead Souls Page 21