She nodded. He heard her gulp and she seemed to be swaying slightly.
‘Are you OK?’
It was a stupid question. She nodded.
‘Never better.’
But now he could see her eyes were really starting to cloud over. He grabbed her and held her against the upright of the garrotte. Her eyes rolled back, revealing the whites.
‘Stay with me, Kir,’ he said.
‘Give me a good reason,’ she mumbled.
‘I’m not one. I’m impotent.’
Her eyes rolled down and stared at him. He quickly continued.
‘You deserve better. A better man than me.’
She smiled.
‘Thanks. At least that’s an explanation.’
She seemed to pull herself together by sheer force of will. She moistened her lips.
‘OK. We’ll hurry but slowly. It’s too risky to tamper with the circuit,’ she explained. ‘I don’t know how he assembled it. We need to remove the detonator near the explosives, so only the detonator will go off. With me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t want it going off while I’m sitting on it,’ she said.
Mark ventured a smile.
‘Right, so what do I do?’
‘Put your hand under my bum. Find the detonator. It’s probably the size of half a pencil. There will be two cables in one end.’
Carefully he slipped his hand under her camouflage trousers. His fingers quickly found what they were looking for.
‘I’ve got it.’
‘Check. Is there more than one cable?’
Warily, he felt around, centimetre by centimetre.
‘Just one.’
‘Good. Very, very carefully, remove the detonator. If it goes off, you might lose your hand, OK?’
‘OK.’
His hands were trembling. He hoped she couldn’t see.
‘Easy does it. Pull the detonator away.’
Sweat was pouring down his neck and off his forehead into his eyes. They misted up. His heart was pounding like a piston as he, very, very carefully, slid the pencil out of the marzipan-like dynamite a millimetre at a time. He had always imagined he would see his life flashing by in a situation like this. But in his head he only had room for her and him. The rest flickered like a defective TV screen.
‘Done!’
She swayed again.
‘Kir!’
‘OK,’ she said in a thick voice and her eyes rolled around in their sockets. ‘Put the detonator as far from the explosives as you can. As you pull me out, that will be the only thing to explode. Take off your bulletproof vest and place it on top of the detonator and put your foot on top so that it won’t slide off.’
He did as she said and mouthed a silent thank you to the head of the Armed Response Unit who had insisted on him wearing the vest when he – like some rootin’-tootin’ cowboy – blurted it wasn’t necessary.
‘And then get me out of this fucking chair.’
He set to work with his foot resting on the detonator under the vest. First, he freed her legs. Then her arms, and finally, he removed the ring around her neck. She blinked lethargically, but then visibly braced herself.
‘Right, here we go. When you pull me off, the switch underneath me will complete the circuit and your detonator will go bang. Have you got that? You might end up with a sore foot. Press down hard on the vest.’
‘Understood. I’ve got you. On the count of three?’
‘On the count of three.’
He grabbed her under the arms.
‘One.’
‘Two.’
‘Three.’
He pulled her off the garrotte. At the same time he heard the bang and felt a small explosion under his foot. He lost his balance as he was propelled backwards with Kir in his arms. They landed on the floor, she on top of him.
A few seconds passed. She lay limp in his arms. She mumbled:
‘Just friends then?’
He sensed the relief.
‘Just friends,’ he said, and stroked her hair.
‘Good friends?’
‘None better.’
Epilogue
23 April
Gjerrild Cliff
PETER READ THE invitation once more and then he stuffed it in his pocket.
‘Stay, Kaj.’
He tried to call the dog. But the hare was proving more interesting, and soon the chase was on across the pale green shoots on the cliff top field, precisely where a farmer’s horses had once refused to plough, or at least that’s what people in Gjerrild said. No carrots or whips could get the working horses back in front of the plough. However, it transpired that the horses knew best. They sensed a landslide was imminent. And, sure enough, half of the farmer’s field vanished into the sea, part of where the plough would normally have been working. This was the area now known as Gjerrild Cliff.
The dog raced in vain after the hare across the field where now there was no sign of a horse-drawn plough. However, there was a team of forensic anthropologists with their assistants in white coveralls that billowed like parachutes in the fierce wind.
Peter took this as an opportunity to walk along the field boundary to collect his dog and have a few words with Mark Bille, who had arrived in a police car. He too stood on the cliff, windblown, his black hair whirling around him, staring at what the forensic anthropologists had unearthed.
‘Ever find your leak in the force?’ Peter asked.
It was cold. He stuffed his hands in his pocket and touched the envelope.
‘Nope.’
The wind took extra hold of the policeman’s hair as if to underline the fact that the untrustworthy officer’s name was still blowing in the wind. Peter wasn’t surprised.
‘Is it true what they say?’
‘What do they say?’ Mark asked.
‘That those are the Cardinal’s bones?’
Mark looked at the bones that had been laid out on a tarpaulin. The forensic anthropologists had reconstituted the skeleton, which appeared to be intact.
‘At least the information about there being a dead man here on the cliff turned out to be correct.’
‘Reliable source?’
Mark nodded. The whole of Djursland knew that his grandfather had confessed to killing the Cardinal, before dying from pneumonia earlier that spring. It was a murder which had been committed in the turmoil after the war: the Resistance fighters’ revenge on Kurt Falk, the traitor who had made a fortune out of collaborating with the occupying Nazis.
‘Fairly reliable,’ Mark said.
‘How did he die?’
Mark pointed to the skull and Peter saw the bullet hole at the back. An execution. Mark’s grandfather must have been as cold as ice.
Mark flashed a half-smile. ‘And you’re still sure you had nothing to do with that incident at the old mill?’
The envelope rustled in Peter’s pocket as he scrunched it up. He stared down at the Cardinal’s bones. In one hundred years all of this would be forgotten. That included these old bones and the invitation from his mother and sister. A summer party. A seventy-fifth birthday. One of them was turning twenty-five, the other fifty. Had the time arrived when he could no longer hide out here in his chosen exile?
He looked at Mark and shrugged.
‘Of course. I don’t know anything about that.’
He thought of another dead person, one lying in the cemetery. My. Bella had relinquished any authority over her daughter’s earthly remains and Peter was content. It was a kind of pact he had entered into with her and Miriam. Winter was over and spring had arrived, and he had reckoned it was time to make his peace. It had taken him this long – five months – to reflect on the women in his life. Eventually he had given up. There was no logic to it.
When he had gone to visit Beatrice in hospital, the others had also been there: Bella and Miriam and the abbess. Together, they had made the ward reek with their sickly-sweet, sticky flowers, like a Turkish whorehouse, and how they
could have so much to talk about was beyond him. Non-stop yackety-yackety-yak. So much for silent, contemplative nuns. He had carefully placed the rosary he had found in Morten’s pocket on Beatrice’s bedside table and made a quick getaway.
‘Here, Kaj!’
The dog slunk back, hare-less and embarrassed. Peter brought his conversation with Mark Bille to an end. But before he drove over to Kir in the twilight and the promise of a fish supper, he stopped by the cemetery and the dog accompanied him down the narrow paths. As usual, he hadn’t brought a candle or a wreath or flowers. Nevertheless, he squatted down, stroked the stone and did some weeding while Kaj roamed around and chewed the odd flower or two.
Peter didn’t say anything. He couldn’t find the words, but felt a little like the horse that had bridled at ploughing the farmer’s field. Something was stirring inside him. It was as if a gust of wind had blown past him and touched his cheek. Then – somewhere out of the corner of his eye – he thought he saw a fleeting figure in a coat several sizes too large, her mousy brown hair flapping in the breeze.
Even the dog appeared to see her. He stopped in the middle of a flower bed, tipped his head back and emitted a mournful howl, as if to call her back.
Time passed, possibly only a few seconds, then an icy blast tore at his clothing and flattened the dog’s ears and the moment was gone.
Peter got up. The dog followed him as he walked back to his car. Hoping against hope, he glanced back over his shoulder, but whatever it was they had just seen had . . . gone with the wind.
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