He sat for a long time staring at the screen. He thought about calling Mark Bille. But what good had it done him when he volunteered the information that he had seen Melissa’s murderer that day by the moat? He had found himself under attack and his house had been searched. Besides, there were his other enemies to bear in mind. They were still out there somewhere, no matter how many alarm systems he had. He had to be prepared for a backlash after his treatment of Gumbo. The question was, when and how?
He laced his fingers behind his head. The cursor kept flashing, black on white, with an almost hypnotic effect.
Going to the police with his information wasn’t an option for him. He had a criminal record. Anna Bagger would probably be licking her lips if she could bang him up.
Meanwhile, the real killer could eliminate his victims, one by one.
Peter looked at his watch. It was eleven o’clock. He was bone weary and his body was still sore after the run-in with the guy outside his cottage and the collapse of the scaffolding. An assault and an accident. The rosary. The Legion. Bella and Gumbo. How was it all connected?
He blinked, but his exhaustion was too great. His eyes started to close. He did one final search on the Net and found two addresses in Aarhus, one for Ulla Vang, who was a gymnasium teacher and lived in Hasle, and one for Ketty Nimb, who was a nurse and lived in Tilst. Then he settled down on the balcony with the dog by his side.
Before he fell asleep, he made a mental note to call Kir soon and take a look at her house. Perhaps she would invite him in for coffee.
Now what was it she had talked about? Something about old bones and garrotting, and a Spanish method of execution . . .
He fell into a restless sleep with the dog close to him and the stars above covered by clouds while three words pounded inside his head: ‘Viva la Muerte, Viva la Muerte.’
Long live death.
54
KIR WENT OUT with Morten for another run.
It was a pleasure to have him plodding alongside her in the morning air, heavy and stable and reliable.
This was how it should be, she thought, as they cut a corner and temporarily found themselves on the verge. Her life could have panned out like this if she had made slightly different choices. A life with Morten?
In theory it could have been them. In theory they could have shared a life.
All of this, though, was only a sign that she missed someone to share her life with. She was thirty-two years old. She was a mine diver, but she was also a woman and she very much wanted a family. Mark had opted for a truce. Peter wasn’t interested; otherwise he would probably have called about her summer house. So what was so wrong in shining her spotlight on someone else?
The only problem was that she wasn’t in love with Morten. Perhaps she was no longer in love with Mark, either. She barely knew what she was, except restless.
‘You’re one hell of a runner,’ Morten laughed as he panted at her side. ‘I guess I’m making the coffee yet again.’
‘Are you sure you haven’t just become very slow?’
‘Slow? Who, me?’
She was aware that he put in every ounce of strength he had. And, for a couple of seconds, they were neck and neck before she left him standing, but then she throttled back to enjoy their companionship. Her fitness was starting to return after her session in the pressure chamber and she could feel she had to make a conscious effort not to humiliate him totally. He wasn’t in bad shape, she thought, but it was a different class to her speed and stamina. She couldn’t match him in terms of muscles. And he attacked the hills in Polderev Plantation with the obduracy of a tank on a battlefield. He wasn’t the type to quit, he was something else. He was the type she could trust.
‘Did you know that Kasper beats his ex?’
‘No. Who told you that?’
‘She did.’
It felt a bit embarrassing to have to admit that she had performed her own stake-out with no back-up. But she had to share the story with someone. Mark was nowhere to be found – he was probably hunting down potential family members of the guy in the bone box – and Morten knew Kasper Frandsen, who was gradually becoming her prime suspect. Besides, she had plans for Morten.
‘I can’t say that I’m surprised,’ he wheezed alongside her. ‘But should you really be going around spying on people like that? If he can beat her up, he can also beat others up.’
She was touched by his concern.
‘I can take care of myself,’ she said. ‘Besides, Jeanette is my new best friend. I’m visiting her again today.’
‘Watch your back, Kir. Don’t get involved in other people’s private business,’ Morten warned. ‘And you know what they say: battered wives always go back to their husbands.’
‘He’s a bastard.’
‘What else has he done? Apart from irritating you professionally and beating up his ex?’
‘I think it’s him,’ she said as they crossed the road and continued down towards her summer house. ‘I need to know more about him. But I think he’s the killer.’
They had reached her home. As per their agreement, Morten started making coffee. He brewed it in silence, then he turned to her.
‘These are very serious accusations, Kir.’
‘I know. I haven’t told anyone else. For now it’s between you and me.’
‘But, for Christ’s sake . . . the man might be a fool. But a killer?’
Morten pressed the plunger of the cafetière as he said the word. ‘Now that’s a totally different thing. Do you have any evidence at all?’
She held his eyes. He was nice and she liked him. But, in common with most people, he just wanted to think the best of others. Only she had learned the opposite. She had learned there was rarely smoke without fire and it paid off to follow your gut instinct, at least to some extent.
‘I need to know what other secrets he’s hiding.’
Morten was a practical man.
‘How exactly are you going to do that?’
‘I have to get inside his house.’
He rolled his eyes at the ceiling in exasperation.
‘Just listen to yourself, Kir! You can’t just break into people’s homes. It’s a criminal offence, woman!’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Why don’t you ask your police friend? Can’t he get a – what’s it called?’
‘A warrant?’
She sipped her coffee. ‘It won’t work. There’s not enough evidence. No judge would ever grant a warrant because some mine diver had a vague hunch and because the guy beat up his ex.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
She weighed up the pros and cons. She had told him as much as she thought she could without compromising the case, but only because she had needed his help. She had made up her mind after going to Jeanette’s house, where her suspicions had been confirmed when Frandsen’s ex-wife had held a hand over her bruised neck after the attempted strangulation.
‘He loves taking it right to the limit, and when we have sex,’ she had said and looked at Kir with terror in her eyes. ‘I’ve passed out several times after he has handcuffed me and tightened that sodding neck ring.’
From that moment Kir had been itching to put paid to Kasper Frandsen’s activities. She still was.
‘I need to know when he isn’t going to be there,’ she said to Morten. ‘Two hours is all I need. Plus someone who’ll ring me if he unexpectedly decides to return home.’
‘Return? Where from?’
Caution had crept into Morten’s voice. She couldn’t blame him.
‘From an evening out with an old mate, who rings up and suggests they go for a beer,’ she said.
He held up both hands in a defensive gesture.
‘Forget it!’
‘Please.’
He shook his head.
‘This is not going to happen.’
‘You won’t get into any trouble, Morten. If anything goes wrong, on my head be it. All you have to do is call Kasper
and say: “Hi, I saw you in the street the other day and wondered if you fancied going for a beer . . .” How hard can that be?’
‘You’re out of your bloody mind, Kir. Crazy.’
‘OK, so I’m crazy. But help me. Just this once.’
He began to laugh. That was better. A sign that he was softening. She put her hand on his arm and gave him the best doe-eyed look she could muster.
‘This is important to me, Morten.’
She saw doubt and resistance and something she couldn’t fathom in his gaze.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘On your head be it.’
55
‘MARK BILLE HANSEN,’ the chemist called out.
She was young and looked stern in a sexy way, with horn-rimmed glasses, a bob and a serious face. The white coat gave her an authority which, under more private circumstances and in another life, would have made him want to tear it off her.
For now he restricted himself to shuffling up to the counter with his jacket collar pulled up and his hands in his pockets. He had deliberately avoided the chemist in Grenå where everyone knew who he was. Here, at Store Torv in Aarhus, he had some degree of anonymity. Or at least he had until they shouted out his name.
‘Viagra!’ said the woman who looked more like a girl. She was around twenty-five, he guessed. Did she even know what the little blue pills were for?
It appeared she did. She leaned over the counter towards him – slim waist, small, shapely breasts and a low-cut T-shirt under her coat – and opened the packet very carefully with a lot of rustling. Slowly. She had well-manicured nails, not too long, with a neutral polish. She was a girl who wanted to be taken seriously. A diamond solitaire ring flashed on her finger.
‘Have you taken them before?’
Her voice blared out as if from a megaphone. He should have said yes, but he was too slow; of its own accord, his head shook from side to side.
‘No.’
It was a mistake, of course, which he realised immediately. She launched into a lengthy explanation and at a decibel level that suggested she considered him to be hard of hearing. He became acutely conscious of the other customers in the chemist’s. When he entered there had been only a few. Now the place had filled up and they stood close behind him. He was sweating. The young woman’s mouth was going twenty to the dozen and words were pouring out that he barely registered. Until she finally folded the leaflet, slipped it back inside the packet, closed it and dropped it into a bag. He paid for it with his Dankort card.
‘Good luck with it all,’ she called out after him as he left.
Thirty minutes later, but still feeling dazed, he knocked on the door to Oluf Jensen’s office at Aarhus police station.
‘Do come in, Mark.’
Mark was half-expecting his colleague’s X-ray vision to penetrate the chemist’s bag and exclaim with the same voice of authority as the assistant at the chemist’s:
‘Viagra! Have you taken them before?’
But instead Oluf Jensen said:
‘I’m so glad you’re here!’
He looked like a prospector on the trail of gold. His eyes sparkled with excitement. He leaned across the desk with his whole body, his hands fluttering in the air, obviously missing a pipe stem and a bowl of tobacco to cling onto.
‘I’ve got IT on the job,’ he said to Mark.
‘Doing what?’
‘More background research, looking at old police reports and newspaper articles. My nose . . .’
He rubbed his nose with his thumb and forefinger. ‘My nose tells me we’re on the right track.’
He tilted his head to one side and looked at Mark.
‘We’ve been too rigid in our thinking. Because we have an approximate dating of the bones, we’ve been concentrating on the years following the war.’
He flung out his hand.
‘Now that might have seemed an obvious place to start, in the light of all the scores being settled in the post-war period.’
‘Are you saying we have to go even further back?’
Mark had lost perspective of time. He found it hard enough to keep a perspective of his own life.
‘Of course. It was you who gave me the idea,’ Oluf Jensen said.
Did he? As they had agreed, Mark had contacted Oluf Jensen every day. He had also called him to report on his meeting with Marianne Holme-Olsen. And, yes, she had mentioned the rumours about the Cardinal, as he was known. But Mark hadn’t taken them very seriously. Perhaps he had been too focused on the photographs she had lent him, which he had studied all night until his eyes closed from exhaustion. And on the meeting with the doctor and the prescription she had given him.
‘You told me about the Cardinal,’ Oluf Jensen said. ‘A Kurt Falk . . .’
‘Yes, he doesn’t sound like someone you’d want to meet at night down a dark alleyway . . .’
‘. . . working for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, according to the rumours.’
‘Yes, that’s the point. Just rumours.’
‘But surely there must be a way to verify them. You said his daughter was fairly uncooperative?’
‘Very.’
Mark had a flashback of the old woman with her crossword on the greasy kitchen cloth. Her tortoise neck and tiny, peering eyes.
‘Perhaps another family member would be more helpful?’ Oluf Jensen suggested.
‘There is a granddaughter,’ Mark said tentatively as he remembered his grandfather saying: She’s nice enough. But she has secrets.
‘Why don’t you try to get in touch with her? Find out what she knows about her family history? Who knows, you might get a lucky break.’
‘Possibly . . .’
The words buzzed around in his head. Now what was it Marianne Holme-Olsen had said about the rumour that the Cardinal had been an executioner?
‘The garrotte,’ he said. ‘It was still used in those days, wasn’t it? If he was an executioner, then he must have used one.’
Oluf Jensen nodded. Mark continued. The Viagra and the old photographs vanished from his mind.
‘He would have known how it worked, inside out.’
‘He was a skilled craftsman,’ Oluf Jensen added.
His colleague had started doodling, as he invariably did: a horizontal board; a vertical one. A matchstick man on a hard seat. Arms and legs shackled. An iron ring around the man’s neck and a clamp at the back which could be tightened to force the spike into the victim’s neck.
‘He could have brought it home with him from Spain,’ Mark said.
‘It would have been something of a monster to transport up through Europe,’ his colleague said.
Oluf Jensen drew the executioner. Another matchstick man. This one had a firm grip on the clamp. Mark could almost visualise the scene. He could smell the fear and the panic. He could feel the iron ring tightening and see the arms and legs jerking.
He met his colleague’s intent gaze. Oluf Jensen was the executioner who kept tightening the clamp until the insight finally came:
‘He could have built one himself,’ Mark said.
56
TIME WAS RUNNING out.
Peter’s thoughts were running riot as he drove towards Aarhus in his van.
It was already too late for Melissa and Nils. Magnus was on the run. Finding the other two whose mothers had signed the letter to the editor was now a matter of life and death.
Ulla Vang lived in a residential suburb of Hasle. She and her husband both taught at Aarhus Statsgymnasium in Fenrisvej.
Ketty Nimb lived in Tilst in an old farmhouse in dire need of a loving hand. She was divorced and worked as a nurse at Skejby Hospital.
Peter located the houses of both women and subsequently worked out where their children were likely to go to school. Ea-Louise Vang probably went to the Statsgymnasium where her parents worked, Victor Nimb perhaps to Langkjær Gymnasium. Peter decided to start in Hasle. Outside the main entrance to the school some girls told him which class Ea-Louise was in. They gave him
directions to the classroom. After wandering up and down some corridors and asking a few more questions, he finally found it. But when he asked about Ea-Louise, a girl with curly hair shook her head.
‘She hasn’t been to school for a couple of days.’
‘Is she ill?’
The girl shrugged.
‘It’s hard for her to skive off. Especially with her parents.’
She said this with sympathy in her voice.
‘So she really is ill?’
‘Might be. But why don’t you ask Ulla? She would know. She’s just coming . . .’
Peter looked up. Before he had time to say anything, the girl called out to the teacher just entering the classroom:
‘Hi, Ulla! There’s a guy here looking for Ea-Louise.’
They looked at each other for a split second. Enough time for Peter to register a woman who could have been beautiful, if it hadn’t been for her ashen face and taut features which signalled a state bordering on panic. She was thin and looked as if she was cold; perhaps that was why she had buttoned a long black cardigan all the way up to her neck. Her hand shot up to the top button at the mention of Ea-Louise’s name.
‘She’s been gone since the day before yesterday,’ Ulla Vang said as they sat in the head teacher’s office a few minutes later, after Peter had explained his connection with Bella.
Jens Vang had joined them. He was an athletic man in his forties. Peter could visualise him with a football whistle in his mouth, holding up a red card.
‘We’re going out of our minds with worry,’ Jens said.
‘Why haven’t you contacted the police?’
Ulla Vang’s eyes flitted nervously. Her explanation sounded like an echo of Bella’s.
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