The mink farmer looked at his hands; they were calloused and had the kind of permanently dirty fingernails you get from working outdoors, no matter how much you scrub them.
‘She was just lying there when I came out. In between two rows of cages. Someone had hit her with something hard – a torch, the police think – and cracked open her skull. There was blood all over the place.’
The rest was history. Peter knew it well because he himself had turned up half an hour later.
‘Who were they? Has Ida said anything?’
‘Women.’
‘Really?’
Peter’s pulse shifted into a higher gear. He thought about the date in Gumbo’s photographs: 30 October. It was the day they had recaptured the mink. The day before Melissa disappeared.
Henrik Hansen nodded.
‘It seems to be some sort of all-woman network.’
‘Young?’
‘Not all of them.’
‘And you don’t have any names?’
Henrik Hansen shook his head. Then he looked across his coffee cup at Peter.
‘Why are you suddenly so interested in this, Peter? It’s not like you’ve got any gripes against them.’
There was the semblance of a warning in his voice, like the dog when it had wagged its tail at him earlier. Peter had his answer ready.
‘Manfred fell from some scaffolding. You’ve heard about that, have you?’
Henrik nodded, now with some understanding in his eyes.
‘Do you reckon there’s a link?’
Peter shrugged.
‘Manfred was one of the first to help you recapture the mink, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, I called him. After what happened three years ago, the neighbourhood network was his idea. Do you really think that . . . Those bitches . . .’
‘I can’t be sure, Henrik. But Manfred’s my friend. I would do anything to protect him.’
He must have touched a nerve because Henrik Hansen gripped his cup so hard the coffee slopped over.
‘Yes, that’s how it is with friends. You would do anything.’
‘Perhaps I could talk to Ida?’
‘I’ll tell her to give you a buzz.’
The whole thing seemed absurd and out of proportion, but people had been killed for handfuls of change, so why not this?
As he drove off, Peter reflected that Henrik Hansen was right. You could never tell. Maybe a middle-aged woman was playing animal rights Superwoman in her spare time and along with other fanatics got a kick out of breaking open mink cages.
But then maybe an angry mink farmer might hit on the idea of avenging an attack on his daughter by subjecting the Superwoman’s daughter to some rough treatment, or any sons and daughters of activists who came near his home and property.
Absurd, improbable. Of course. To those on the outside.
But when he reviewed the events of the last week, there seemed to be a sudden logic to it.
52
‘AND YOU’RE GETTING enough sleep?’
Mark was tempted to roll his eyes, but stopped himself. When did he ever get enough sleep? It was a long time since he’d had an uninterrupted night and the previous one had been no different from the rest. He had woken up feeling feverish and with an almost infinite hatred of a body that would no longer do what he wanted.
‘That’s not the problem,’ he said to the doctor who sat with her nose buried in his medical records. How many people had access to them? How many people could open them and read about his pathetic condition, and then gloat? There it was, written in black and white – he was a mere shell of a man who was not up to anything.
‘So what is the problem?’
The female doctor didn’t exactly exude empathy. But then again he could hardly expect it. He had ranted and raved at her so often out of sheer frustration with the lousy scan results and she probably hadn’t forgotten that. The scans were fine now, but another problem had arisen. One she clearly knew, but appeared to have forgotten or derived a certain satisfaction by asking him to describe.
‘I can’t get an erection.’
He was well aware that he stated this as if it were a personal death threat to her. And she duly arched her eyebrows and looked at him and then at the computer screen behind which she was ensconced.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘So it says.’
He guessed she was somewhere in her late thirties. She was also blonde and attractive in that cool, confident way he used to be able to match and even play up to. But at this moment all he wanted to do was slip away.
‘And how does this manifest itself?’
If he hadn’t already been sitting down, this question might well have forced him to take a seat. His anger began to seethe. How the hell do you think, woman, a voice inside him said, which he quickly suppressed. There was no point making an enemy of his doctor.
‘As a lack of desire? Or as a purely mechanical problem?’
Seriously, was she asking him if he ever felt the desire to have sex? How could he explain to her that he felt an enormous desire to feel the desire? That his lack of desire burned holes in him as big as the ones made by his service pistol on the silhouette targets at the shooting range?
He thought about the fiasco with the hooker after Melissa’s autopsy. About her thighs and her lips. About the panic which had spread through him, like the nauseating incense that had filled her room.
‘Lack of desire,’ he mumbled.
The doctor looked at her medical records again.
‘There doesn’t seem to be any physical explanation for impotence,’ she said, liberating the word he hated most in the whole world. More than cancer. Or a dismissal from the force. More than an icy rejection from Anna Bagger or an ultimatum from Kir. Death would be preferable. And yet here he was.
‘I’m tempted to conclude the problem is up there.’
She pointed to his head. ‘But then again I’m not a sexologist,’ she added.
‘No.’
‘How about Viagra?’
‘How about it?’
‘It might be worth a try . . .’
He bet her husband was a virile consultant whose dong was as hard as a pestle and who wielded it with the precision of a scalpel. Mark hated him.
‘Perhaps.’
She took that as a yes and wrote a prescription and he knew he ought to have been grateful. This wasn’t even her department. She was an oncologist and this was simply a routine check-up. She could have passed him up through the system.
She looked at him with something akin to tenderness as she handed him the prescription.
‘And there are absolutely no situations where it returns? Where you feel . . . stirrings?’
He thought about Kir and sitting close to her on the sofa. Looking at her computer screen and talking about Mistel planes and elephant bombs. He thought about the warmth he felt inside and the stirrings, yes, there had been stirrings. But he didn’t trust anything, least of all his body. It had let him down time after time. It was one big double-crosser and he was damned if he was going to take the initiative only to fail. He had done that once too often.
‘Nothing significant,’ he said.
The doctor rose to signal that the appointment was over.
‘Try to relax a bit more,’ she advised him. ‘You have to get used to the fact that you’re not about to die. The thought of having to live can also be scary,’ she said with a wink. ‘Take it easy and let the others catch criminals, if you can.’
Take it easy. If only she knew that work was the only thing that was keeping him going. And that the thought of succeeding at least in police matters was like a balm to an open sore. If he couldn’t get no satisfaction, as it were, he at least wanted the satisfaction of seeing his work appreciated – in the eyes of Anna Bagger, despite her scepticism regarding the bones in the box, and in the eyes of Kir, despite her moron of a running partner.
Mark staggered out through the hospital door and felt like kicking the legs away from under an old man
who was hobbling along with a Zimmer frame. But fifteen minutes later, when he pulled up in front of a house in Åbyhøj, he had calmed down. He even felt ready to confront a period of Danish history which he had never given much thought to before.
He rang the bell and a woman opened. She looked like an old lady in miniature, elegant and slim but tiny. Her eyes were friendly, analytical and very lively. Her hair was dyed a dark colour and lay like a curly cap against her head.
‘Hello. Mark Bille Hansen. I called earlier.’
She held out her hand and opened the door wide.
‘I’m so excited,’ she said and ushered him into a comfortable living room. ‘I barely slept a wink last night.’
It was the typical home of an old lady, with embroidered cushions and high-backed Rococo furniture and an old bureau. She told him to take a seat on the two-seater sofa. Set out on the table already were delicate porcelain cups decorated with a floral design and a silver thermos flask. There was also a bowl of peppermint chocolates wrapped in green paper.
She took down a framed photograph from the bureau and went over to him with it.
‘He was a handsome man, wasn’t he?’
It was their wedding photo. The bride was wearing a white dress down to her calves. The pleated fabric around her hips was held together by a wide ribbon.
Mark nodded. Allan Holme-Olsen was wearing a dark suit that strained against his broad shoulders. He was only twenty years old but was already a big man with a thick neck and a strong jaw. There was something steely, resolute and at the same time tender about him as he stood there gazing down at his bride. She was petite and slim, but with an abundance of life in her eyes, and a chin that jutted out stubbornly. It wasn’t difficult to recognise her, even though more than sixty years had passed.
‘He was the love of my life,’ said Marianne Holme-Olsen, who was now a widow and lived alone in sheltered accommodation.
‘But times were hard. The war was hard for everyone, especially a newly married couple with a baby. Allan hated working for the Germans, but he didn’t have any choice.’
She got up and fetched a photo album.
‘You wanted to know if I had any photos from the Tirstrup years. I couldn’t find very many.’
Nevertheless, there were some.
‘Here he is on a tractor. And here. That’s the Resistance group. There were three of them.’ She looked at Mark. ‘This one was taken right after the war had ended.’
The three men stood shoulder to shoulder. They wore threadbare suits and looked like overgrown schoolboys. Allan was in the middle. Something in Mark reacted when he recognised the man to the far right. He turned over the picture, and there he saw the names of the three men.
Marianne Holme-Olsen pointed to another photograph.
‘Here they are digging ditches in Tirstrup.’
Mark cleared his throat.
‘Please can I borrow the album for a couple of days?’
‘I don’t suppose that would do any harm.’
The words came hesitantly as if she found it hard to let go of the past. She ran a finger across the edge of one of the stiff pages.
‘And you’re saying his skeleton is in a box?’ she asked, and added, ‘I mean, if it is him.’
Mark told her about the box, this time in more detail than over the telephone.
‘Did Allan ever break his leg?’
‘He got trapped under a horse-drawn cart when he was young. He limped on one leg.’
‘That increases the likelihood that it’s him. Our man in the box had a healed fracture of the right femur.’
He saw her eyes glow and her cheeks flush.
‘It would be good to lay him to rest,’ she sighed. ‘It’s been so many years and of course I knew his disappearance was related to the war. But knowing where he is . . . having a grave to visit . . .’
Her voice wavered: ‘It would mean so much for me to have closure, before my time comes.’
Mark nodded.
‘Of course. Is there any family left on his mother’s side?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘So we can get a DNA sample.’
‘There’s his cousin’s daughter, Lillian. I can give you her number. Help yourself to some coffee and a chocolate in the meantime.’
She got up and returned with a dog-eared address book, its pages loose. Mark poured coffee from the thermos flask and unwrapped a mint chocolate. After some searching she eventually found the information.
‘If we get a blood sample from Lillian, we can hopefully give you some certainty.’
She sipped her coffee and carefully replaced the cup on the saucer.
‘That will be very strange but also a relief.’
Mark cleared his throat.
‘Do you know if he knew a man they called the Cardinal?’
She closed her eyes as if sifting through her memories, but quickly opened them again.
‘Do you mean Kurt Falk?’
She looked down at the black-and-white photographs. A thin parchment-like sheet separated each stiff cardboard page.
‘Allan never said anything, but many of us believed that he and his colleagues killed the Cardinal after the war.’
‘What do you know about Kurt Falk?’
She flicked randomly through the album.
‘He was high on the list of those collaborators who had it coming to them.’
‘Allan disappeared,’ Mark said. ‘What happened to the other members of his group?’
She shook her head and sat for a while staring vacantly ahead.
‘I only know that one of them disappeared as well.’
She pointed. ‘Allan thought the Cardinal was behind it.’
‘Behind it in what way?’
Her eyes widened.
‘They said the Cardinal disposed of his own enemies.’
‘You mean he killed them?’
She nodded.
‘It was something to do with his time in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. It was common knowledge that he’d had a very secret job, reporting directly to the General.’
‘The General?’
‘Franco.’
Mark swallowed. Of course. It was obvious now. The Cardinal hadn’t joined the Republican side, that would have been very unlike him. He had worked for the Nationalists and the army, who would hold the country in its dictatorial grip right up until the 1970s. The Cardinal. The Church’s and the army’s man. The new rulers’ guard dog.
‘So what was his job?’ he asked.
A note of horror entered her voice.
‘Now this might just be an old wives’ tale. But Allan and his friends used to say that he had been an executioner for the Falangists, Franco’s men.’
53
IT WAS LATE by the time Peter finally got home. After his visit to the mink farm he had gone to work at the convent and then over to see Jutta and the children, who were able to update him on Manfred’s progress.
Jutta’s eyes shone with a glow that evoked memories in him of another pair of eyes, another woman who had come back to life after a confrontation with death: Felix, who had brought him back to the land of the living by making him love again.
Where was she now?
He took the dog onto the cliff top in the moonlight and under the stars, which glittered and sparkled, some with great intensity, some less. The memory of Felix was starting to fade, he was aware of that. She had opened the world inside him and it was a brighter place now. But they’d both had to move on with their lives; that had been on the cards from the start. He thought about Kir and her crinkly smile. She and Mark Bille had had something for a while, but perhaps not any more? There might be a chance for him, if he dared.
He looked up at the sky, at Sister Beatrice’s God, who might or might not be up there. You couldn’t trust him, either in love or in war. He was tempted to conclude that this God knew nothing about human beings; otherwise, why take the young ones? Why let their parents raise them in t
he expectation and belief that they would perpetuate life on earth, only to extinguish that hope? It made no sense.
Before he went to bed, he logged onto Manfred’s computer. There was still nothing from Magnus; he must have taken fright. Perhaps he thought his enemy was watching him in cyberspace. As far as Peter could see, there had been no activity on his profile. But he discovered something else. By scrolling down the list of Magnus’s friends, he found a Victor Nimb and an Ea-Louise Vang. The names were too rare for them to be a coincidence. Victor and Ea-Louise had to be the son and daughter of Ketty Nimb and Ulla Vang respectively, who had both been co-signatories to the 2005 letter which Bella, Anni Toftegaard and Alice Brask had also signed as contributors.
He leaned back in his chair as everything clicked into place: this wasn’t just about Magnus and Melissa and Nils. This was a network of teenagers whose mothers were friends, and possibly animal activists as well. They didn’t live within physical proximity of each other, but they clearly had something in common. Perhaps their mothers had held meetings and dragged their kids along. Melissa, Magnus and Nils. And now also Victor and Ea-Louise.
According to Beatrice, Melissa had been receiving threats and unsavoury approaches since she was ten years old. He wondered if that had happened to the others. Was the note threatening Magnus from the same person? Perhaps they were all – just like Melissa – trying to deal with the threats in silence so as to protect their families. Did the mothers even know their children were being put under pressure?
Peter thought about Bella and concluded that they didn’t. Until Gumbo had turned up, Bella clearly had no idea what Magnus was afraid of. She lived in a world of her own – a world she was committed to changing for the better: from stopping mink farming and agricultural pesticides to preventing the extinction of the whales. Bella wore blinkers the size of dinner plates when it came to Magnus. Were all the mothers like that? Was this a story about how children lived in one world while the mothers lived in another? Peter was tempted to think so. But where did that leave the fathers?
Melissa was dead. Magnus had run away. Nils was dead.
Peter didn’t know why someone out there would want to kill the teenagers. But one thing was certain: Magnus had made a wise decision when he ran away and went into hiding. Perhaps he had also tried to persuade the others to string along. Perhaps he had tried to persuade Melissa and Victor and Ea-Louise to join him. Because he had been right. Whether this was about their mothers or about themselves, they were all in mortal danger.
Dead Souls Page 24