‘Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke.’
Then she led the way across the white and green marble tiles in the hall and Michael sized her up: a string of pearls, black cashmere sweater, a simple, dark grey skirt and an unusual choice of wine-coloured tights which reminded him of the skinny legs of an oystercatcher. She was too tall to wear anything other than flat shoes, and she was a thinker.
He always divided potential clients into thinkers and doers. There were subdivisions, of course, but he rarely found it necessary to change his first impression. Michael knew that Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke was the heir to a colossal family fortune, as well as being a partner in one of the biggest and oldest law firms in Copenhagen. For that reason alone there could be no doubt that she was academically gifted, but that wasn’t the factor that determined whether she was a thinker or a doer: it was the way the hips connected to the upper body and the legs, the sway of the lower back, someone’s posture, the length of their stride.
From time to time his wife would ask him in which category he would place himself, and every time Michael would feel a tad hurt. He regarded himself as a fortunate combination: sensuous, yet rational – a thinker and a doer.
Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke continued to walk in front of him up the staircase. It was like walking through the Natural History Museum. The walls were covered with stuffed animal heads and every imaginable size and variety of antlers and horns from the deer and antelope family. Vacant eyes watched him from all sides.
At the first turn in the stairs, an African lion reached out his long claws towards him. Above the animal’s front paws, its enormous head came crashing through a mahogany panel, its black lips peeled back over yellow teeth and its mane fluffed out; the furious expression in the animal’s glass eyes momentarily stopped him in his tracks.
The woman glanced over her shoulder.
‘My father called him Louis. Terrifying, isn’t he?’
‘Definitely, Mrs Caspersen-Behncke.’
‘Elizabeth is fine, if I may call you Michael.’
‘Of course.’
He was mesmerized by the animal.
‘Imagine being a little girl with a vivid imagination trying to get down to the kitchen for a midnight snack.’
‘I’d still be having nightmares,’ he said.
They continued upstairs until Michael stopped again, just below a three-metre-high painting of the previous owner of the house, the recently deceased captain of industry, Flemming Caspersen. The portrait was executed with photographic accuracy. One side depicted bookcases with old, gilded volumes and Caspersen – in a contemplative pose – resting his hand on a round table. There were sealed parchments and yellowing manuscripts, maps and open folios, as if the billionaire had been interrupted in his study of the sources of the Nile or the meaning of everything.
A grey grizzly bear rose behind the billionaire and both the man’s and the animal’s shadows merged together on the wall. Caspersen’s virile, energetic face was grave; his white hair stood up in short bristles, his brown gaze was directed at the spectator and the elevated position of the painting and his tall figure ensured him a regal dignity. His tie had discreet grey stripes and his suit fitted him as if it had been developed in a wind tunnel. ‘My father enjoyed playing the Renaissance man,’ Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke said. ‘Though I doubt if he ever read a work of fiction. He used to say that his life was exciting enough as it was. He found fictional lives dull.’
Michael pointed to a rhinoceros head hanging six metres above the floor. The animal squinted tragically at the grey, flat stumps that were all that was left of its horns.
‘What happened to him?’
‘Someone broke into the house a couple of months ago. They put the gardener’s ladder up against the wall, cut off the horns with a hacksaw and scarpered. My mother was in hospital and the house was empty. According to the police, it was a professional job. We really ought to take him down. A rhino without its horns is really rather pointless.’
She drew his attention to a cupboard down by the front door. ‘They forced the front door with a crowbar and cooled the alarm system with liquid nitrogen.’
Michael leaned over the banister and studied the cream-coloured wall below the amputated trophy. He could actually see a couple of dark marks from the ladder.
‘I’ve read that natural history museums and private collections are experiencing an epidemic of horn thefts,’ he said. ‘It’s said to cure everything from impotence to cancer.’
‘Its horns were impressive,’ she said. ‘My father shot it in Namibia in ’73. It’s a white rhino. Or rather, it was.’
‘I thought they were an endangered species – protected by law?’
‘This animal was shot for research, which everyone knows is just another word for bribery. My father always got what he wanted.’
Michael stayed where he was. The prehistoric animal roused a strange kind of empathy in him.
‘The horns weighed eight kilos and they were worth their weight in cocaine,’ she said. ‘The street value is exactly the same, incidentally. $52,000 per kilo.’
Michael was impressed. $400,000 for half an hour’s work was a good rate. Superb, in fact.
‘And they took nothing else?’ he asked.
‘My mother’s jewellery is in a safe deposit box and the only cash we ever keep in the house is for paying the gardener and the cleaner.’
She led the way down a passage on the second floor. They passed a darkened bedroom and Michael caught a glimpse of an emaciated female face on a pillow, large birdlike eyes turning to the doorway. A nurse was in the process of attaching a bag of fluids to a drop stand.
‘Flemming? Flemming?’
The nurse closed the door.
The voice kept calling out.
‘My mother,’ Elizabeth Caspersen explained. ‘Alzheimer’s.’
Michael smiled sympathetically.
She opened the next door and Michael collided with the blinding sunlight bouncing off the surface of the Øresund.
‘A beautiful room, isn’t it?’ she said.
The windows measured at least six metres from floor to ceiling.
‘Amazing,’ he said, shading his eyes with his hand.
He recognized the interior of the library from Flemming Caspersen’s portrait. An intricate wrought-iron walkway ran along the bookshelves three metres above the floor and formed the gallery. High above his head the huge, stuffed bear sparred with its front paws.
‘A Kodiak bear, Alaska ’95,’ she said laconically.
‘I’m starting to understand why they’re threatened with extinction,’ he said.
‘You don’t hunt?’ she asked.
‘Not animals.’
‘My father would have argued that if it weren’t for the safari industry there would be no money for reserves and gamekeepers in places such as Africa, and poachers would have killed anything that moved long ago.’
‘He would probably have been right,’ Michael conceded.
She walked over to the windows, folded her arms across her chest and chewed a nail. This probably wasn’t normal behaviour for a Supreme Court barrister, he thought, and positioned himself by her side to offer a kind of silent support.
The tall white wall cordoned off the park from the neighbouring estates. He noticed thin alarm wires running along the top of the wall and several white surveillance cameras that would appear to cover every inch of the grounds. The problem didn’t lie with the house’s security, as far as he could ascertain. The weak spot was the open sea.
Out in the park, a black Labrador was sitting next to a flagpole with its nose pointing at the spring sky, whining pitifully.
‘Nigger, my father’s dog,’ Elizabeth Caspersen mumbled. ‘It has sat there, howling, ever since he died.’
‘Nigger?’
Elizabeth Caspersen smiled forlornly.
‘He wasn’t a racist. He only cared about whether someone could do their job. I think he found it amusing to walk ar
ound a neighbourhood like this and call the dog. Out loud.’
Michael continued to examine the alarm wires and the cameras on the garden wall.
‘Did the cameras record the break-in?’
‘Yes. Two men arrived from the sea at two o’clock in the morning in a rubber dinghy. Hoodies, ski masks and gloves. They ran across the lawn and around the house, found the gardener’s ladder and broke down the door.’
‘And Nigger?’
She looked down at the grieving animal.
‘He was probably just grateful for the company. He’s a lonely dog, very friendly. Why don’t we sit?’
He put his shoulder bag on the floor and took a seat in an armchair. Elizabeth Caspersen sat down in the chair next to his, crossed her red legs, looked out of the window and began flexing and pointing her foot.
He leaned back.
She moved her foot faster.
He had seen this before, of course: the hesitation before exposing your life and secrets to a stranger. The client would either change their mind at the last minute and end the meeting before it had even started, or they would take the plunge.
This would appear to be something in between.
‘You’re not an easy man to find,’ she said. ‘What do you call yourself? A consultant?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t look like a private investigator,’ she said.
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘What? Oh, I see. Coffee? Water?’
‘No thank you,’ he said.
‘Are you married?’
Her fingers got very busy with the string of pearls.
‘Very happily,’ he said.
‘So am I.’
Elizabeth Caspersen pressed her fingertips against her eyelids.
‘So you don’t follow cheating spouses, loiter behind people’s garages with a camera at night or rummage through their bins?’
‘Only at the end of the month,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry … I …’ She blushed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that this is all very difficult. You were recommended to me by one of my father’s English lawyers who knew of a Dutchman who had used the services of a Danish security consultant. Everyone became awfully secretive and it took a long time before the Dutchman replied.’
‘He called me before he contacted you,’ Michael explained.
‘I didn’t think people like you even existed in Denmark?’
‘I believe there are a few of us,’ he said. ‘But it’s not like we have a trade union.’
‘Your name is Michael Vedby Sander?’
‘Yes,’ he lied.
‘And you know Pieter Henryk?’
‘Of course …’
*
He had tracked down two incompetent kidnappers – father and son – to an abandoned farm south of Nijmegen in the Netherlands for Pieter Henryk. They had decided to kidnap the very wealthy Dutchman’s youngest daughter, which was their first mistake.
Involving the police, risking media attention and a scandal, was unthinkable for Henryk, who was old-school and preferred a more discreet, permanent solution.
The kidnappers had raped the nineteen-year-old girl repeatedly while passing the time. They had shaved her head, beaten her up, stubbed out their cigarettes on her back, and she was more dead than alive when Michael and Henryk’s team reached her. Michael’s task had been to find the girl, while Pieter Henryk’s men dealt with the kidnappers.
Michael had sat in his car at the edge of the wood a few hundred metres from the farm and seen her carried across the farmyard in the arms of a Serbian mercenary. The huge man delivered her to a Mercedes, where her father and a doctor were waiting. She was naked, limp as a rag doll and looked like a flayed animal. The car left the farm with gravel spraying from the tyres.
He waited. Half an hour later, a truck pulled up in the farmyard and the mercenaries started hauling bricks, mortar and buckets into the house where the kidnappers were still assembled.
Michael left the scene. He knew what was coming and he knew Pieter Henryk’s crew. They were Balkan veterans and had seen everything. If they were feeling merciful, they would throw a gun with two bullets over the new wall – before laying the last brick. If they were in a bad mood, they would tie up the pair, brick up the wall and wait until the mortar had dried.
*
She clapped her hands with a bang that snapped him out of his memories.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I want you to work for me,’ she repeated.
‘And I may well want to,’ he said tentatively.
‘Henryk said I could trust you unconditionally.’
He nodded. ‘That’s essential if we’re to get anywhere.’
‘You’d be able to bring down me and my family if it turns out that you can’t be trusted, Michael. We would have no future.’
‘That’s often the case,’ he said evenly. ‘Perhaps I should tell you how I work. If I accept an assignment, I work on it 24/7 until I’ve achieved the desired outcome or you tell me to stop. My fee is 20,000 kroner per day, plus reimbursement of my expenses for other expert assistance, bribes, travel, food and accommodation. We won’t sign a contract and I won’t provide you with any receipts, you’ll just have to trust me. I’ll give you the number of my accountant’s client account and he’ll report the payments to the tax office. Is that acceptable?’
‘What does the small print say?’ she wanted to know.
‘Not very much. I don’t perform serious criminal acts if they go against my view of right and wrong. I decide how far I’m prepared to go on a case-by-case basis.’
‘Regardless of the size of your fee?’
‘Yes.’
‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘So why are you so incredibly hard to find?’
‘I’m picky,’ he said.
His wife sometimes asked him the same question. You wouldn’t find Michael Sander’s one-man consultancy anywhere on the Internet. Stubborn individuals might find the latest version of the firm’s homepage somewhere in the Dark Web, the basement of the Internet, which wasn’t accessible to search engines like Google or AltaVista, but only to specialized, vertical robots such as technorati.com. It was possible he lost out on clients by being so exclusive, but this was how he liked it. He knew of a beautiful, Danish escort girl in London whose intimate services cost as much as the Greek budget deficit, and she used the same method. It was a question of her and her daughter’s safety, she said.
His homepage was brief and basic. It stated that Michael Sander was an ex-soldier and former police officer, and that he had worked as a security consultant for ten years for Shepherd & Wilkins Ltd, a well-known British security company. His remit had included personal security, hostage negotiations, financial investigations and so on. His contact details gave only a mobile phone number, which was replaced at least once a month, usually more often.
‘What do you know about me?’ she asked.
‘I know that you’re the only child of Flemming and Klara Caspersen,’ he said. ‘I know that your father originally trained to be a radio mechanic and later studied civil engineering. I know that in the 1980s he took out a series of ground-breaking patents for what later became known as the ultrasound Doppler, miniature sonar and laser rangefinders, used in virtually all military weapon systems from submarines to fighter planes, but also in civilian meteorological early warning systems. Quite simply, it’s the core technology behind modern range calculation and target identification. The technology is crucial and has never been surpassed. Your father founded Sonartek in 1987 with a university friend, Victor Schmidt, and the rest, as they say, is Danish corporate history. A success story.’
‘One evening in Frederiksberg he heard an ambulance siren and spent the rest of the night sitting on a bench pondering how the siren’s echo told him the exact location of the ambulance. That was the start. Then he started studying dolphins, bats and the then fairly elementary Doppler technology. He improved and developed it.’<
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‘As far as I’m aware, only Sonartek’s research and development department remains in Denmark, while production and distribution have been …’
‘Outsourced to China, India, Poland and Estonia,’ she said. ‘It was a business decision.’
‘And, finally, I know that your father suffered a heart attack and died a couple of months ago,’ he said.
‘He had run a marathon only two days before. In just over three hours,’ she said. ‘He was seventy-two years old, but in really good shape. I don’t think he ever took a pill in his life. He always said that genes were the only thing that really mattered.’
She got up and walked over to the windows. The dog’s inconsolable howling could be heard from the garden. Michael didn’t stir and he said nothing.
Elizabeth Caspersen dried her eyes and turned around.
‘Bloody dog,’ she muttered.
‘And your mother is ill?’ he said.
‘It started four years ago and it has progressed incredibly quickly. She owns a large share of a company with subsidiaries in thirty countries, but she no longer remembers my name. She doesn’t even know that my father is dead.’
‘What happened to the company?’
‘The shares fell when my father died, of course, but they soon recovered. Sonartek produces great equipment. My father had been in charge of most things, and anything he didn’t decide, Victor did.’
‘Victor Schmidt?’
‘Yes. My father was the inventor and Victor the salesman. It was a brilliant combination.’
‘Did they get on?’
‘I think so. When the business went public, Victor got his hunting lodge down at Jungshoved and my father this mansion.’
‘Are you on the board of Sonartek?’
‘Yes, and as long as my mother can’t represent her own interests on the board – which she’ll never be able to – I represent her as well. My father was Chairman of the Board of Directors; Victor is currently acting Chairman and will be elected the new Chairman at an extraordinary board meeting next month.’
‘So the family is secured?’
‘Not necessarily. Children or grandchildren of the company’s founders aren’t entitled to board representation or a job with the company. They must be “suitable”, as it says in the articles and memorandum. The board decides if they are. I would appear to meet the criteria. No one wants a family feud, or to have some imbecile decide the company’s future just because their surname is Schmidt or Caspersen. Then again, my mother did inherit my father’s shares in Sonartek’s holding company, so now I represent – through her – an actual majority share.’
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