Trophy

by Steffen Jacobsen

  ‘Did your father want you to join the business?’

  ‘Oh, yes! He was over the moon when I qualified as a solicitor. He had it all planned and I expected him to shoot me when I said no.’

  Michael smiled. He was impressed. ‘And he didn’t disinherit you?’

  ‘He came round to my point of view. Like I said, I had prepared for the worst, but when push came to shove, he took it rather well. In that respect, he was really quite all right. Perhaps he always knew that I would end up working for Sonartek at some point. That I would come home. When I started attending board meetings, I did it mostly to please him.’

  Elizabeth Caspersen sat down. Her face was animated; several expressions were trying to upstage each other.

  ‘Victor Schmidt has two sons?’ Michael said.

  ‘That’s right, Henrik and Jakob.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Henrik is Sonartek’s sales director and has replaced Victor, who has taken over the day-to-day management of the company. He’s hard-working and has built up an excellent network. He spends most of his time in New York or Washington courting the American defence industry. He’s a workaholic and has no vices. Jakob …’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know what he’s doing at the moment. He’s the black, but much loved, sheep. He was an officer in the Royal Life Guards. Now he’s a logistician for large aid organizations. He’s a free spirit and prefers being on his own, outdoors. The brothers don’t see each other that often, but they have both been in Denmark ever since my father died. My father adored them and they’re very upset.’

  ‘Adored?’

  ‘Very much so. Their picture is over there.’

  She pointed to the wall behind the spiral staircase.

  Michael rose and studied the black-and-white photograph mounted in a fine silver frame. He lifted it off its hook. The wallpaper around the picture hadn’t faded. Either it hadn’t hung there very long, or it was frequently taken down. There was a faded patch around the photograph next to it; it showed a long-dead leopard in the grass and a smiling Flemming Caspersen, in a safari suit, squatting on his haunches by the animal’s head.

  He examined the small picture in the silver frame: a grinning, gangly, dark blond boy of around thirteen was sitting at the rear of a canoe with a shiny fish as long as his arm. Behind the boy a sun-shimmering lake spread out. The boy was sitting on the border between the sunlight and the shade from a tree that hung low over the glittering surface. His brother sat on the trunk; a couple of years younger, very blond, skinny upper body, shorts, white teeth and bare feet dangling over the water. There was a tent in the foreground and the picture had a timeless, carefree summer feel to it.

  ‘He took it in Sweden,’ she said.

  ‘Your father did?’

  ‘Yes. Victor never took a holiday, so he left the boys to my father who taught them all the usual boys’ stuff: sailing, fishing, hunting.’

  ‘Is Victor married?’

  ‘Monika. Swedish landed gentry.’

  ‘A trophy wife?’

  ‘Far from it. She worked for Sonartek as a sales person. She’s clever and well educated. She breeds horses now. Danish Warmbloods. Unless that’s a contradiction in terms.’

  A bitter smile formed on her lips.

  ‘My father was jealous of Victor’s sons. He called me the third prize.’

  ‘The third prize?’

  ‘First prize is a boy, second prize is a disabled boy, and third prize is a girl, he used to say.’

  Michael was starting to like Flemming Caspersen less and less. He would wait for the daughter to explain the job, as a matter of courtesy, but he had already decided to turn it down. Yes, Sara and he could do with the money, but they could also manage without it. They could tighten the belt another notch while he freelanced for Shepherd & Wilkins, even if it meant his travelling to some godforsaken hellhole in the Yemen, Nigeria or, God forbid, Kazakhstan. And be away for at least one month. Michael had a standing offer to freelance any time he wanted, which sounded fine in theory, but meant in practice that he ended up doing the jobs that full-time staff avoided like the plague.

  ‘This “third prize” quip – is that another example of your father’s catalogue of eccentric humour?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. I don’t think he really meant it. He was just …’

  A callous, megalomaniac old bastard, Michael thought.

  ‘Why am I here?’ he asked.

  The question appeared to take her by surprise.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  She looked at him and started saying something. Then she shut her mouth and steeled herself.

  ‘You’re here, Michael,’ she then said, ‘you’re here because I think – no, because I know, that my father killed a man. For fun. For sport. On some kind of sick, twisted, depraved manhunt. That’s why you’re here.’

  She got up and took out a DVD without any label or title from the bookcase behind them – and burst into tears.

  Chapter 2

  She didn’t move at all or say one word during the three minutes the footage lasted, but she never stopped crying. Without trying to hide it. Michael didn’t stir, either.

  He sat in the darkest corner of the library with his laptop on his knees as he watched the execution of a young man on a mountain. He heard men sing and saw an object fly through the air: a black sack tied with white cord. The hunted man caught the sack, stuck his hand inside it, and pulled out an object, which his body concealed from view.

  The recording equipment was first-rate – picture and sound both crystal clear – and the camera was steady as it zoomed in on the man’s ashen face. He limped as he ran out into the darkness, pressing something to his chest. The singing ceased – and half a second later the rifle rang out.

  Only one shot was fired and it was impossible to see whether the man was hit. Then the camera found his body on the narrow, stony shore below the cliff. The victim’s hand just about touched the water, but the object in the sack had disappeared. The light was turned off. Above the moonlit water he could see the starry night sky for a few seconds before the camera was also switched off.

  Michael ejected the DVD from his computer, taking care to touch only the edge with his fingertips. Then he placed it on the keyboard and got up.

  ‘Do you have a lavatory I could use?’

  She didn’t look at him. ‘Third door to the left … I’m sorry … I’m so sorry …’

  The large house was cool, but sweat was breaking out between his shoulder blades. Michael walked down the passage with the high ceiling, locked the door to the bathroom behind him and splashed cold water on his face. His teeth chattered and his stomach churned, but he refused to throw up.

  He had just seen a man hunted to his death, in sharp, natural colours, and he thought with a shudder about the indefinable, but chasm-deep difference between the most convincing Hollywood representations and the real thing.

  However, it wasn’t the DVD that made him feel sick, though he didn’t doubt that the recording was genuine. It wasn’t the film. It was the song. It took him back to Grozny, the dead capital of Chechnya …

  *

  In September 2007 Michael and his regular partner on the job, Keith Mallory, had spent endless days in a rat-infested, partly collapsed church attic in a suburb of Grozny. Keith, who had a limp after a close encounter with a roadside bomb in Iraq, had been a major in a famous elite British regiment before becoming a senior consultant with S&W. He enjoyed literature, was Michael’s immediate superior, and they had become good friends.

  The Brit said it was the strangest conflict he had ever seen. To the north, a few hundred metres from the church, rested and well-fed Russian forces waited passively, while to the south, Muslim rebels strolled around without a care in the world among the city ruins. A row of singing women swept the street between derelict and long-abandoned tenement houses. Everything was surreal and everyone seemed temporarily indifferent to each other. The people w
ould appear to simply be enjoying the clear, warm late-summer weather and the lull between bouts of fighting.

  Michael and Keith had reached a stalemate in their negotiations with the Fedayeen about a suitable ransom for a British Red Cross medical team whom the Chechens had abducted from a field hospital a couple of months earlier. S&W were negotiating on behalf of an international insurance company who counted the Red Cross among its clients. They had one suitcase full of used dollar bills for the hostage takers, and a smaller suitcase for the corrupt officer in the Russian Air Force who would arrange for a helicopter to pick them up when they needed to get the hostages and themselves across the border to Azerbaijan. They had a floor covered with a thick layer of dried pigeon droppings, a shortwave radio, plaster angels and icons that had been evacuated from the church space below, machine guns, ammunition, their kit, a roll of plastic bags which served as their latrine, plenty of water and astronaut food.

  There was currently a few thousand dollars between offer and acceptance, but the issue had become a matter of pride, and was impeded by faltering chains of command.

  ‘He fishes ’cause he can’t fuck Lady Ashley,’ Michael remembered Keith saying a moment before the song began.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jake Barnes, for Christ’s sake,’ Keith said, sounding tired as he pointed to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the dog-eared paperback currently helping him pass the time.

  ‘Right.’

  The former major sighed and put down the book. He was still hoping to persuade his young Danish colleague to read something other than weapons catalogues, ballistics tables and car magazines.

  Then he tilted his head to one side. ‘Who’s singing, Mike?’

  Michael had put his eye to the telescopic sight of the sniper rifle overlooking the Russian lines. Keith crawled under the low ceiling on his hands and knees and used his own binoculars.

  Three hundred metres away a tank crew had grabbed a young Muslim mother and her daughter, who looked to be around seven. Spetnaz elite soldiers, easily recognizable in their blue-and-white striped T-shirts, jumped up and down on the tank and bounced and stomped their way through the old Queen classic ‘We Will Rock You’. The woman was thrown between the soldiers in front of the tank. They tore off one colourful embroidered piece of clothing after another. The daughter was sitting between the legs of a soldier on the turret, turning her face away. The soldier had forced the girl’s hands behind her back and put a gun to her neck while he tried to kiss her. By now the mother was naked, screaming, terrified.

  Keith started pulling him away.

  ‘It’s not personal, Mike. It’s terror. Now get the hell away from that window!’

  The first soldier raped the mother against the side of tank. His camouflage trousers lay bunched around his boots, and the back of the woman’s head bashed rhythmically against the armoured tank. Michael could see her limp arms and spread legs either side of the soldier’s pumping body. The soldier’s forearms and neck were tanned, while the rest of his body was white around his amateurish blue tattoos.

  Four other men were queuing up.

  The man on the turret had pushed his gun into the girl’s mouth while he unbuttoned his flies.

  For the second time Keith had grabbed his arm hard. Michael knew that he could send a bullet through the rapist’s bobbing head from the church attic without hitting the mother.

  But it meant losing the Red Cross team.

  He had already slammed a cartridge into the chamber when Keith wrenched the weapon out of his hands. Then Keith Mallory had put on the headset, even though the radio was dead, and Michael crawled into the furthest, darkest corner of the attic and pressed his hands over his ears.

  *

  When he returned to the library, Elizabeth Caspersen was twisting a handkerchief hard between her fingers. He sat down on the armchair beside her, folded his hands in his lap and suppressed a shudder.

  ‘What’s your reaction to the film?’ she asked him.

  ‘I think the recording is real,’ he said, looking down at his hands. ‘What I’m saying is, I think someone filmed a crime. My guess is that the DVD must be some kind of hunting trophy.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  She looked at the ceiling, and fresh tears rolled down her face.

  ‘I presume that’s what you thought as well,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’

  She stared at the handkerchief, wound around a finger.

  ‘Yes, only I was hoping … I don’t know what I was hoping. Yes, I was hoping that you’d say that it was staged, that it was a movie … Just a really weird movie.’

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  She got up and walked over to a Venetian mirror, swung it out from the wall and pointed to a white steel door with a keypad.

  ‘My father’s lawyers are winding up his estate. We’ve emptied the safe deposit boxes in town; all that remained was his private safe.’

  ‘Did you know the code?’ he asked, wondering why the DVD had been kept in Caspersen’s private safe. In his view it belonged in a nuclear-proof underground bunker.

  ‘The undertaker. My father had the code tattooed on the inside of his upper arm.’

  She blew her nose.

  Michael frowned. ‘Really? If he went for a swim, anyone with a telephoto lens or good pair binoculars could –’

  ‘Only if they also knew that the numbers must be multiplied by eleven and divided by three then followed by his date of birth,’ she said.

  ‘Okay.’

  He still thought it was too obvious: like having the dog’s name as the password for your computer.

  ‘What happened to his body?’

  ‘He had asked to be cremated.’

  ‘Was there an autopsy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing. They said he had a coronary.’

  ‘I see …’

  He rose and inspected the safe. It was a recent Chubb ProGuard model. An excellent safe, designed to be impossible to open in under three hours, even by Chubb’s own engineers. The door was white, smooth and undamaged.

  ‘Have you shown the film to anyone else?’

  ‘Of course not! I can’t even begin to understand that my father could do a thing like this. Although in some ways … unsurprising, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  The tears dripped slowly from her eyelashes.

  ‘How the super-rich … I know how easy it is to lose touch with reality when you lead a sheltered life, as my parents did at the end. Neither he nor my mother knew the price of a pint of milk.’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s typical. We can’t even be sure that it was your father.’

  She stared at him. ‘But then why would he have it lying around? It must be him!’

  ‘I can see half a sideburn, part of an ear, a hat and a bit of a sleeve, and a wrist,’ he objected gently. ‘It could be anyone.’

  ‘He had a hat like that! I know it was him.’

  ‘All hunters have hats like that,’ Michael said.

  She swung open the door of the safe, took a flat jeweller’s box from a shelf and flipped open the lid. The dark blue silk was embossed with the words ‘Cartier-Paris’ in gold.

  ‘It was in here.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t touched it,’ he said.

  She looked at him, then it sank in and she nearly flung the box aside.

  ‘Easy now,’ he said.

  Michael took a clear plastic bag from his shoulder bag and she dropped the box into it.

  ‘And I’m supposed to be a lawyer,’ she said. ‘Of course, fingerprints. God help us.’

  ‘And hairs, fibres, cells, dandruff and so on,’ he said. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s like a doctor ignoring a tumour about to grow through their own skin. It’s a kind of blindness.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ she said.

  ‘What do you want me to do with the DVD?’

  She hesitated. />
  ‘I want you to find out if that really is my father. I want you to find out the identity of the man they killed. And I want you to find out who else was there. That’s why you’re here. I have to know if that young man had relatives who need my help.’

  ‘Financially?’

  ‘In every way,’ she said. ‘How about you? Do you still want the job?’

  He looked out of the window.

  ‘I’d like to take the job, even though it’s complicated and will require considerable outside assistance,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t say yes if I didn’t think I had a chance to work it out. The job doesn’t contravene my personal rules. Your father is dead and can’t be prosecuted.’

  ‘Not in this world,’ she muttered.

  ‘Quite. I’ll find out the victim’s identity and as far as the hunters are concerned, I’ll track them down, and when I do, they can be punished.’

  ‘If you can prove anything,’ the lawyer said. ‘Or make them confess.’

  ‘The latter might prove easier,’ he said. ‘My first impression is that they have military training. They use laser sights that are also available to civilians, but it seems unlikely that they would all come equipped with them if they were just a bunch of stir-crazy hunters on a quest to kill a random victim. You can also see the sleeve of the person standing next to the cameraman. That sleeve is from a military camouflage uniform. Then there are other, less specific factors … such as the song. I’m fairly certain that they’re soldiers, or ex-soldiers.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of hunting people as a sport? It’s insane. Sick.’

  A safari with human prey? Michael had never heard of any such thing and previously he would have dismissed the suggestion as an urban myth, like the one about snuff movies on the Internet. Now he was faced with both, and he was sure that the film was real.