‘We all are, if we have to.’
‘But could he have been involved in liquidating collaborators?’
‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
‘Do you know what he was doing at the end of the war?’
Mark asked as gently as he could. His grandfather glared at him.
‘It wasn’t some bloody game. Not for any of us. A few chaps had the guts to do what had to be done. If Allan was one of them, then you and I owe him a debt of gratitude.’
His eyes ran up and down the list again.
‘Falk!’
The name was uttered with obvious contempt. ‘Now there’s someone who deserved to die.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Can’t you guess?’
‘Did Allan do it?’
The old man started to shake. It took Mark a couple of seconds to realise that he was chortling quietly to himself.
‘Kurt Falk. They called him the Cardinal. If anyone ever knew how to look after himself and his own, it was him. He made a packet from selling out.’
‘Why the Cardinal?’
The heavy shoulders heaved and sank.
‘I don’t know. I think he might have been to Spain, but that was before my time.’
Mark wanted to ask more questions, but there was a knock at the door and the woman he had seen recently popped her head round it. Old Alma’s daughter. She had come to the house in the forest when he was leaving.
‘Do you want some coffee, Hans? Oh, sorry, I didn’t realise you had a visitor.’
Mark stared at the woman and remembered her name: Lise Werge.
Afterwards, when he had left the nursing home without catching a glimpse of her, he remembered what his grandfather had said about her the first time: that she was a woman with secrets.
47
PETER HAD WOKEN with a burning desire and a name that drew patterns on the open sky above him.
Bella. Bella. Bella.
It was like a tumble drier with a jammed start switch. He knew she was playing on his weakness for My and damsels in distress in general. Nevertheless, he couldn’t forget about her, no matter what he did. Even if he stood on his head whistling the national anthem, she was still suckered to the inside of his brain. He wasn’t in love, he knew that much. It was a more dangerous cocktail: anger, the urge to protect, desire, all rolled into one.
He would think he had everything under control and then the image of her mouth would appear, supple and red as if she had been wearing lipstick and had wiped it off. She pleaded, she begged, she had no inhibitions. She drew him closer. His mind resisted, but his body went its own way.
He went to work at the convent and was well into his working day when it struck him: 20,000 kroner was far too much money for knowing about Melissa and Magnus’s friendship. Gumbo must have had something on Bella herself. But what?
He deliberated for another couple of hours. During the lunch break his realisation grew so compelling that he left the work to Bronco and his brother, and drove to Gumbo’s hovel in Lystrup. He couldn’t talk to Bella. She would lie and look at him with tears in her eyes. With Gumbo he was on home ground.
There was no sign of life when he got there. Gumbo’s battered old car was parked in a muddy puddle in front of the house. He touched the bonnet: stone cold. He opened the passenger door and rummaged around in the glove compartment. The gun fitted nicely into his hand. He pointed it downwards and concealed it behind his body as he tiptoed around and cautiously looked through the windows. For a moment, he thought the chaos looked the same as the last time. There was a difference, though. He could see that now. The drawers were open, and the furniture had been slashed. Everything had been spilled onto the floor. Someone had been there before him.
He pushed open the front door. It was unlocked and swung on squealing hinges. The stench was unbearable but indeterminate: pungent and sweet, bitter and acrid and nauseating, all at the same time. He breathed through his mouth and disconnected his olfactory senses as best he could.
‘Gumbo?’
He shouted the name into the pigsty of fast-food leftovers and empty cans and bottles. But there was no reply.
He kicked a pile of pizza boxes on the floor and they went flying. There were still marks on the chair from the gaffer tape. Someone had been here and freed the man, but possibly not for a better fate.
Peter fought his way through the mess and found a bedroom that looked like a junkie’s final resting place. And, as he had half-expected, there was Gumbo, stretched out on the bed, swimming in his own body fluids which had soaked into the mattress like some foul-smelling soup. He was naked and his hands and feet had been tied with gaffer tape to the corners of the bed. Someone had amused themselves by doing exactly what Peter himself had threatened to do: only a pool of blood remained where the dead man’s genitals had been. The killer had stuffed Gumbo’s prick and balls into his mouth, down his throat, possibly choking him in the process. Around his mouth, where bits protruded, Gumbo’s face was blood-red, as if he had eaten raw steak and followed it up with a whole bottle of tomato sauce. Lumps of yellow vomit were splattered across his chest and bed and mixed with the red. Gumbo’s expression was one of sheer terror: his eyes were wide with fear, his face contorted as though he had met the very devil himself, which possibly he had.
Peter suppressed the nausea in his throat and touched the body. It was almost as cold as the car bonnet had been, but the blood had yet to congeal. It couldn’t have been long since Rico and his henchmen had been here. That was how it must have been: Rico had sussed that one of his debt collectors was running a little business on the side. He couldn’t allow that, so Gumbo had to die, preferably in a manner that would send a message to everyone that no one went behind the boss’s back and got away with it scot-free.
Peter cast a final glance at the dead man. Trying not to think about what Rico and his men would do if they came back and found him, he left Gumbo to his fate and started looking around. They had been searching for something. They had upended every item of furniture, lifted carpets, pulled out drawers and knocked over anything that moved. He went from room to room. Desperation had sent them around the whole house in much the same way. Which could mean only one thing: they hadn’t found what they were after.
For a long time Peter surveyed the battlefield of wrecked furniture and junkie detritus. There couldn’t be anything here – not after Rico’s treatment, which made the police’s ransacking methods resemble a Sunday stroll. So where? Gumbo wasn’t the brightest man on the planet, but perhaps he’d had a flash of inspiration.
Peter scanned the living room, but there couldn’t have been a single square centimetre that had not been examined. His gaze then floated out of the window and landed on the dealer’s car. He remembered the cut-up seats and the smell of alcohol, vomit and tobacco while he had been lying in wait on the back seat. He also remembered that when the police raided his home, they had failed to inspect his van. Obviously it hadn’t crossed their minds.
He left the house, went out and opened the car door. He stuck his hand into the many cracks in the seat, but found nothing apart from springs and chunks of foam. He got out again and opened the boot. That, too, was filled with junk. He tossed out a pile of pizza boxes and beer cans, pulled up the floor and had a look underneath. There was no spare tyre. In its place, however, was a black cardboard box. He lifted it out, got into his own car and opened it. It appeared Gumbo had a sideline as a photographer, because there was a pile of photographs in a folder. Peter flicked through them. The figures in the pictures were all dressed in black and wore hoodies and held baseball bats or other weapons in their hands. At first he didn’t understand what or who it was. Then he recognised a face. Bella. Leaving her own front door in the darkness with what looked like a pair of bolt cutters in her hand. There were others, too. He recognised a photograph of Alice Brask cradling a baseball bat. Inside the box there was also a little black book, in which Gumbo – who, according to Bella, co
uldn’t read or write – had laboriously entered initials and numbers in a simple and straightforward statement of his accounts.
Peter sat for a while with the box on his lap, fully aware that he was risking his life by staying here. Rico’s henchmen could return at any minute.
But what was this all about? How could Gumbo blackmail women who behaved like this? Obviously they were activists of some kind. But what kind? There were no banners, no slogans, there was nothing tangible. Yet there were photographs of car number plates and of figures dressed in black milling around. And there was a date: 30 October. Perhaps this was an important piece of information, because one thing was certain: none of these women had wanted these photographs to be made public. The entries in the little black book proved that: they had all paid for Gumbo’s silence.
48
THE CARDINAL. SHE had heard the name being exchanged between the old man and his grandson when she was eavesdropping outside.
Lise Werge felt her temperature rising. Another hot flush. The doctor would have to make a decision about HRT soon.
‘Here we go, Hans. Brace yourself.’
She bent forward with the showerhead in her hand and checked the temperature of the water. Unlike her own temperature, which had already resulted in sweat breaking out on her back, the water was a touch cold. She adjusted it and splashed warmer water on the old man’s shoulders and saw it run down his torso and into his groin. He sat naked on the plastic bench in the middle of the bathroom. It took two carers to wash him.
‘Right, Hans. Nice to have a proper shower, isn’t it?’
It was her colleague who asked. Hanne was so gentle and good, and she had probably never had a single wicked thought in her life. Hanne would never dream of spraying very cold or very hot water over an old man just because he had touched a sore spot.
Lise was tempted to direct a jet of cold water right into the man’s face and ask him what he knew about the Cardinal, but she didn’t dare. And anyway, what was the point? What was required was not a crass, vindictive act but a cool, measured approach towards a man she should be able to wind around her finger.
‘It’s all right,’ the old man said, looking as if he hated every minute of it.
Lise understood him all too well. She had often thought she would rather kill herself than end up here at the nursing home where she worked.
Not that it was any worse than other places, but a dignified life was not what she would call it. It was storage, no more, no less. In style, but even so.
They washed Hans, dried him and got him dressed. Then they helped each other move him into his wheelchair with the hoist.
‘Right, Hans. That’s better, isn’t it?’
Lise pushed him down to the communal lounge, where the others were sitting in their wheelchairs.
She knelt down in front of him.
‘What’s this I hear, Hans? Did you really use to work in Tirstrup during the war?’
The old man glowered at her. ‘Why do you want to know?’
She felt skewered by his eyes even though they bore the marks of age and a life lived.
‘It’s exciting for those of us who never experienced it ourselves,’ she lied. ‘And Mark’s a police officer, is that right?’
She chose a light tone of voice, as though being a police officer was the finest career imaginable. She had seen Mark driving away from her mother’s house yesterday, and when she entered the kitchen she had, for once, been met by a shaken Alma. Not physically, of course – she had her nose buried in her crossword – but mentally. Her voice had quivered and her hand trembled as it held the pencil.
‘They’ve found some bones,’ she had said. ‘They’re asking for DNA samples. He wouldn’t tell me where they found them.’
Alma had grabbed her sleeve.
‘I have to know where, do you hear?’
Lise looked at the old man in the wheelchair. How much did he know? How much did she herself really know? Most of it was gleaned from conspiratorial silences and her hunches. Unlike Lone, she had never belonged to the inner circle.
‘A police officer,’ she repeated. ‘How wonderful!’
‘What’s so wonderful about that?’ Hans said, skewering her with his gaze once more.
She gulped. It was all about getting him started. Once Hans got going there was no shutting him up.
‘Do you think it’s true they’ve found some old bones from the war? I’ve heard some rumours.’
The old man’s lips moved silently. She got up for some coffee and a slice of cake while she waited for him to thaw.
‘There you are, Hans. Kringle, just the way you like it. And black coffee, isn’t that right?’
He slurped his coffee and scowled at her.
‘They’ve found a box containing some bones in the Koral Strait,’ he said. ‘They think the bones belong to the Cardinal.’
‘The Cardinal?’ she asked innocently. ‘Who’s that?’
He slurped his coffee again.
‘A real bastard, he was. Pure evil. The devil incarnate.’
Suddenly he leaned forward and grabbed her wrist.
‘He always wore a rosary around his neck. Ha! As if God was on his side.’
She had always known it was only a question of time before old scores were settled. She was a part of those scores whether she liked it or not.
The old man’s hand drew her closer. She could smell his breath and felt a fine spray of saliva over her face as he said:
‘So, what’s your secret? I know you’re hiding a secret!’
49
‘WHAT HAPPENED TO Nils?’
The Facebook message appeared on the screen. Magnus had replied.
Peter’s heart started to pound. He was out there. He was alive. Now it was a question of being careful. Building trust so that Magnus would agree to meet him.
He described Kir’s account of the diving operation and wrote a summary of everything he knew about that side of the case. The other side, about Gumbo and Bella and the mysterious photographs, he kept to himself.
Soon afterwards he could see that Magnus had accepted his friendship.
‘How do you know Nils?’ Peter wrote. But nothing more came from Magnus. The connection, or the hope of it, died.
Frustrated, he sat back, glaring at the screen. Then he checked the list of Magnus’s friends while his head buzzed with ideas. Most murders were not committed at random, that much he knew about police work. The killer was usually someone known to the victim. It could be a close relative, a parent or a son or a daughter. But it could also be someone different and more remote. Someone who lived on the margins.
Magnus had 205 friends. Peter clicked his way through them. He found Melissa and Nils and lots of other people, apparently of the same age. There were not many adults. Those there were appeared to be family. Bella didn’t feature. Then again, which eighteen-year-old would want to be friends with their mother on Facebook? But fourteen-year-old Christian was there – Christian who had been afraid of Kaj, but who had overcome his fear.
Peter sent Christian a friend request and attached a photograph of Kaj.
He took a break from the computer and made himself a cup of coffee. It was mid-afternoon. The sight, and not least, the smell of Gumbo’s dead body hadn’t left him, even though he had taken a lengthy shower. He had also bought a SIM card and tipped the police off about the murder. But he had taken the liberty of removing the black cardboard box. He had to ask himself what it meant and how the photos of Bella and the other women could be relevant to the cases of the dead teenagers. Who were these women – how did they know each other?
After the coffee he took the dog out onto the cliff and let it frolic around. Then he returned to the computer. There was still nothing from Magnus. But his younger brother Christian had welcomed him into his Facebook universe.
Christian had more friends than Magnus. One of them was Anni Toftegaard, Nils’s mother. Another was Alice Brask. A third was Bella.
The mothers! He took Gumbo’s photographs, flicked through them and sat thinking long and hard. He had asked Magnus how he knew Nils, but had not received a reply. Now Christian had given him the answer without realising. There was a connection, which went right back. The children knew each other through their mothers – the mothers who dressed in black and carried out raids under cover of darkness.
He remembered what the head of the nursery had said about Bella, that she hadn’t always had the best advisers. Was her circle of friends downright dangerous? What exactly were they doing? Perhaps he could link Gumbo’s photographs to something more tangible.
He clicked onto Alice Brask’s blog and read it from start to finish, but found no mention of the names Bella or Anni Toftegaard.
However, the blog was filled with opinions for and against all sorts of things. Against nitrogen emissions in agriculture, lengthy transportation of animals, breeding animals for fur, tree felling, even against wind farms, and generally against any initiative made by higher authorities with consequences for ordinary citizens.
It all made a great deal of sense but was expressed in such a sanctimonious tone that Peter was not tempted to join their flock.
Some people, though, loved being part of a group, especially when a leader emerged for them to unite behind. That was all well and good, but who was to say whether the leader always led them in the right direction? Even Alice Brask could be wrong or go too far.
If a woman like Alice Brask decided to set up a network, which wasn’t just about exchanging opinions and attitudes, it could go terribly wrong, Peter thought.
He checked to see if Magnus had replied. He hadn’t, so he switched the computer off.
Peter had hoped to access FrokostBladet’s archive, but unfortunately it wasn’t online yet. He made a couple of calls and arranged a time for him to look through old newspapers on site. Then he fed the dog, took the car and drove to Aarhus, where the newspaper’s concrete bunker was located in a suburb near Skanderborgvej.
Dead Souls Page 22