She glanced at her watch and got up.
‘I’m off.’
Josefine worked in a café near Frederiksberg Town Hall and wouldn’t be back until two o’clock in the morning. Though the café was only a fifteen-minute walk away and Josefine was twenty-one years old, very sensible and perfectly capable of looking after herself, Lene knew she would lie awake until she heard the key in the door.
When the front door had slammed shut downstairs, Lene went to the kitchen, lifted the lid of the saucepan containing Josefine’s spaghetti carbonara and cautiously sampled the food. It actually appeared to be edible so she helped herself to a plateful, opened a bottle of red wine and sat down on the sofa in front of the television with a rug around her legs. She channel-hopped until she found Hitchcock’s Notorious starring Ingrid Bergman as the Nazi honey trap and Cary Grant as the world’s most attractive and foolish agent. She had seen the film many times before, but she loved it. She always feared that the fleeing couple would be exposed at the last minute and caught on the endless stairs in the Brazilian Nazi palace.
After the film and two glasses of red wine, she dozed off, as her subconscious continued to process an inconsistency just beyond her reach. She had seen something that didn’t add up, didn’t make sense, but though she knew it was important, she couldn’t pin it down. The harder she tried, the more the missing piece seemed to elude her.
*
He was squatting on his haunches next to his motorbike, whose engine cowlings were spread across the pavement. He had a torch between his teeth and heard her stop one metre away. She had to clear her throat before he looked up. Josefine Jensen smiled as she gestured towards the engine cowlings and the bicycles leaning against wall, blocking the rest of the pavement. He returned her smile, got up, muttered an apology and let her pass. It was a cool evening and the girl tightened her thin jacket about her. She smelled nice.
Twenty metres on, she stopped again and glanced over her shoulder at him, but he pretended once more to be completely absorbed by the engine, which was in fact in perfect working order. When she disappeared around the corner at Falkoner Allé, he quickly reattached the cowlings, started the motorbike and pulled down the visor of his helmet. He saw the girl run across the road a few hundred metres in front of him; he counted to fifty and pulled out into the street. The girl weaved fluidly in and out between the evening’s pedestrians.
In another context she would have made a fine trophy, he thought.
He followed her to the café where she worked. She sprinted across a pedestrian crossing, ignoring the red light, and a taxi sounded its horn indignantly. She didn’t look back and the man on the motorbike smiled when she gave the taxi driver the finger behind her back as she ran on without breaking her stride.
He took a deep breath before he opened the door to the café, mentally preparing himself for the unfamiliar noises: the ecstatic, self-important chatter of young city dwellers, clattering glasses, cups, cutlery against plates, excessively loud music. He hated cities and knew that people’s eyes would be on him.
He found a vacant table at the back near four young women. He hung his biker jacket over the chair, took a newspaper from the stand and ignored the women, who were discreetly checking him out. He was used to it. Women had told him that he was handsome, though he couldn’t see it himself. He never paid much attention to his appearance. He rarely shaved, didn’t shower every day and cut his own hair whenever he thought it had grown too long. Home was currently an old camper van.
Josefine Jensen emerged from the kitchen behind the bar, tying her apron around her waist and pulling her hair into a ponytail. There were no customers at her end of the bar, so she started putting glasses into holders above the counter. Her face showed no emotion and her movements were fast and practised. The other waiter whispered something to her and they both laughed out loud.
He got up, crossed the room and waited until she noticed – and remembered – him before he smiled. He sat down on the bar stool and picked up a cocktail menu. He knew that she had recognized him because she began moving with a slight hesitation. She reached up on her toes and her breasts pressed against her thin, white shirt.
He closed the menu, put it aside and looked at the shelves behind the counter and her figure in the mirror. Fine waist, nice arse, long legs.
She had finished putting the glasses away and was looking at him.
‘Did you get your bike fixed?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your motorbike. I just saw you on Kong Georgs Vej with most of the engine in bits all over the pavement?’
She gestured towards his hands.
He saw the oil stains and smiled. ‘Was that you? Sorry. Yes, it’s fine. It’s just old and temperamental.’
He opened the menu.
‘You’ll stain it,’ she said.
‘What would you order?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Are you driving?’
‘Yes.’
She took the menu from his hands, even though she could have taken one of the other half-dozen, brushed a blonde strand of hair away from her eyes and frowned. He leaned forwards and spotted a book on a beer crate behind her. Lonely Planet Guide to South America.
Brilliant.
‘A mojito?’ she suggested.
‘Too many plants,’ he said.
‘Black Russian?’
‘Do I look like someone who drinks Kahlúa?’
She looked at him closely.
‘No, not really.’
She turned over the menu, furrowed her brow again, and he wondered if she might be slightly short-sighted. She had her mother’s green eyes.
‘Singapore Sling?’
‘Pineapple juice? I don’t think so.’
She grinned.
‘No …’
He looked at the whisky bottles behind her.
‘Give me a double Glenlivet with ice,’ he said.
‘All right, but didn’t you just say you were driving?’
‘I’ll walk.’
She took a glass from above the bar, poured the whisky and started looking for a spoon for the icebox.
‘Use your fingers,’ he said.
She looked at him and dropped three ice cubes, one by one, into his glass with her fingers. She placed it in front of him and he paid with a new 200-krone note.
‘How about one for yourself?’ he asked.
Josefine could feel her colleague’s eyes on her back.
‘I’ve got to last a few more hours.’
‘Some other time?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said as she gave him his change. The coins dropped slowly into his large hand. She slammed the till shut and smiled at a woman in a fur coat behind him.
He didn’t move. He kept watching her until she was forced to look at him.
‘Some other time?’ he repeated.
She gave him a deadpan look.
‘Will you be here tomorrow night?’ he asked.
‘I guess so,’ she mumbled.
‘I’ll wait for you outside. Tomorrow,’ he said.
He grinned, slid off the bar stool and went back to the table with his whisky. Josefine took the oil-stained menu and put it behind the bar.
‘Sorry, what did you say again?’ she asked the next customer.
The woman in the fur coat looked at her: ‘Two lattes,’ she repeated very clearly.
*
He had gone back to reading the newspaper and sipping his drink when his mobile vibrated in his pocket. He glanced at the girl behind the bar when he had read the message. She blushed under his gaze; her clear, green eyes avoided looking at him while she served the line of queuing customers.
Pity.
He put his mobile back in his pocket and emptied his glass. The superintendent had spoken to Kim Andersen’s widow at Holbæk Police Station for a long time. Far too long, it would appear. Her investigations had to be stopped.
It was a matter of indifference to him. He was paid so we
ll that he could live the way he wanted to most of the time, and freedom always came at a price. It was a no-brainer.
*
Lene woke up when she heard the key in the door. The television was a flickering, grey surface in the darkness. She felt even more tired than before she fell asleep. She sat up and looked at the luminous hands on her watch. Two thirty. The light came on in the passage and she heard Josefine hanging up her jacket, the door to the bathroom, a rustling of toilet tissue, the tap and the electric toothbrush; soon afterwards the door to the living room was opened.
Lene turned on the lamp next to the sofa.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ she mumbled.
‘Hi, Mum, did I wake you? You really don’t have to wait up for me. I can find my own way home.’
‘I don’t mind. Christ, I’m knackered. How was work?’
She patted the cushion seat next to her.
Josefine flopped down on the far end of the sofa and stretched out her legs until she was almost horizontal.
‘Fine.’
Lene yawned behind her hand and watched her daughter’s quiet face.
She recognized the symptoms so easily.
‘Who’s the lucky guy, sweetheart?’
Her daughter shot her a belligerent look.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, come on, Josefine …’
‘What?!’
‘Nothing. Your dinner was lovely. The spaghetti tasted great.’
Her daughter got up.
‘You’re welcome. Good night.’
‘Sleep tight.’
The door to her daughter’s bedroom was shut with slightly more force than strictly necessary.
Lene emptied her glass. The red wine tasted bitter. She was angry at herself, of course she was … but, for crying out loud! Hadn’t she been just like Josefine? Or was she a little bit jealous? She dismissed the thought. Josefine was no angel, and Lene didn’t expect her to be. Lene hadn’t been exactly sexually restrained herself until she met her husband, Niels, and there had been a few occasions during their marriage when … oh, well, she sometimes longed for another body, other hands, another’s mouth. She was aware that she was turning into a workaholic, and she would definitely welcome romance back into her life if she actually tripped over it. Only it was never the right time, or she couldn’t be bothered to play the dating game or lacked the energy to bounce back from a new, complicated and protracted disappointment. Perhaps she ought to find herself a married lover, but she knew that she wasn’t the type. Sex without a minimum of feelings and healthy expectation was death.
Lene switched off the light, left the living room and opened the door to her daughter’s room a crack. Josefine was lying on her stomach, the duvet twisted around her legs and she was hugging a big pillow. Lene sighed and closed the door.
Chapter 17
‘Norse paganism?’ Lene said in disbelief. ‘Are you kidding me?’
The chief psychologist at the Institute for Military Psychology, Dr Hanne Meier, smiled. Lene had discovered that smiling came easy to her.
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Thor and Odin, Loki and the whole shebang. If you took away their uniforms, you would think you were seated at a table in Valhalla or on a longship with a bunch of Vikings. They’re covered with runes and old Norse designs and the tattoos are historically accurate. There’s no street cred in sporting the wrong ones. They’re a tribe.’
‘What do the army chaplains say?’
‘They deal with it surprisingly well. I think some of them have even studied Norse rituals and ceremonies so they can perform them, if needs be.’
Lene, who was baptized and confirmed and went to church as often as she could, was horrified.
‘But they’re pagans!’ she exclaimed.
Hanne Meier was a woman of her own age. She looked at the superintendent and they burst out laughing.
‘If the army chaplains can live with it, surely so can we,’ the psychologist suggested very sensibly. ‘Not all of them share that belief, of course, but many of them do.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why Norse paganism.’
‘It’s a very militant faith, don’t you think? A warrior religion. They’re warriors. It all fits. They’ll meet again in Valhalla. I can’t really see them as Buddhists or Taoists, can you?’
Lene still couldn’t see the attraction and wondered how deep the soldiers’ transformation really went. Did they return to more traditional values when they left the army, or continue to see themselves as a chosen tribe with its own, sovereign rules?
‘What happens if they’re killed? I don’t imagine they’re launched in a boat with a funeral pyre lit by a burning arrow shot from the shore?’ she asked.
‘No, but the Ministry of Defence will go far to meet their wishes, both while they’re alive and if they die. Military personnel make their wills before they’re sent out and they write letters for their next of kin in case the worst should happen. If they have specific wishes for their funeral, the army will try to accommodate them. Within reason, of course.’
The psychologist smiled to herself.
‘There was a major who wrote that he wanted to be cremated and his ashes dissolved in Dom Pérignon.’
Her infectious laughter erupted again and Lene joined in.
‘Wait!’ Hanne Meier held up a hand. ‘That’s only the half of it. He also requested that the champagne be drunk by Naomi Campbell. He wanted permanent residence in her body!’
‘I hope he came back in one piece,’ Lene said.
‘He did. And thank God for that. That would have presented us with something of a challenge.’
‘How do you feel about it?’ Lene asked. ‘Norse paganism?’
‘As long as it helps them, I don’t care if they believe in Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny. Of course, there is a point where they stray too far from the world which has deployed them and expects them to come back. But, as far as I know, no one has crossed that line yet. Danish soldiers are very good. They know perfectly well why they have been sent out. They know it’s a foreign policy decision. They’re some of the best soldiers in the world. Everyone says so. They’re democratic and creative. The segregation in the mess into privates, non-commissioned officers and officers is only for show. I’ve been to Afghanistan myself and it wasn’t unusual to see a junior officer deep in discussion with the chief of a battalion in the officers’ mess over a beer. That just wouldn’t happen in other armies, possibly with the exception of the Israelis. They’re professionals and they know and respect the chain of command. Serious disciplinary problems are very rare.’
‘So they see themselves as modern-day Vikings?’ Lene asked.
‘Apart from the bit about raping and pillaging and stealing the church silver, well, yes … I think so. A cross between Vikings and aid workers.’
Lene nodded and looked around the austere office. There were removal boxes labelled ‘2007’ in a corner. The building in Svanemøllen Barracks had an atmosphere of permanent transition; as if the Institute couldn’t make up its mind whether to stay or go.
‘A brotherhood,’ she said slowly.
‘Very much so. And highly skilled.’
‘You screen them prior to deployment?’
‘Yes, we’ve started doing that. And we debrief them when they come home. We’ve no experience of the horror stories you may have heard about Vietnam veterans in the US who have become marginalized and live as outcasts in the woods. Many of them suffer with mental health issues or are downright psychotic, insane. And have never been treated.’
Lene frowned.
‘But surely some of them fall apart. Mentally? I mean, how well can you really prepare yourself for war?’
Hanne Meier leaned back.
‘It’s not often, but you’re right. A few go mad. They experience psychotic episodes. It has happened.’
‘What do you do with them?’
‘If it ha
ppens at the base or in the field, they’re cuffed, sedated and sent back to Denmark on the first plane.’
‘Come again?’
‘Army doctors carry plastic ties. Plastic handcuffs. You use them as well, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right, they’re cuffed, given a shot of Ketalar – that’s a sedative – and, well … they’re flown home as quickly as possible.’
‘Who are the ones who can’t handle it?’
‘As we gain more experience, we become better at spotting them. Active field duty is like a microscope, for better and for worse, and there’s nowhere to hide. Your strengths will be magnified, as will your weaknesses. So if you’re a victim of neglect or abuse and have a fragile sense of self, even if you now inhabit the body of a bodybuilder, it will out. Not surprisingly, some of them can’t cope when their mask is torn off. They’re confronted with their own inadequacy. They collide with reality,’ the chief psychologist continued. ‘Sometimes people lose it when the gap between who they thought they were and who they really are proves to be too wide. I think we all know that feeling. If your whole sense of self comes crashing down while you’re on active service, you can go insane. At least temporarily.’
‘How do you treat them?’
‘The most important thing is to tell them … convince them that even if they weren’t born to clear dark houses of Taliban guerrillas in labyrinthine villages, even though they’re scared of leading a patrol in an area notorious for roadside bombs, even if they break down when they see their best friend maimed or killed, yes, even if they’re not the perfect combat soldier, they can still be a worthwhile human being.’ Hanne Meier nodded pensively. ‘That’s what we do.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Sometimes. Usually. It’s not macho to have a nervous breakdown; surely you know that from your own line of work?’
Oh, God, yes, Lene thought as she thought about colleagues whose masks had been torn off over the years. She wondered what had happened to them and how close she herself had come.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘But I imagine we also need people who are unemotional and possess certain qualities which would get them into trouble in civilian life, but are useful in war … who will thrive in combat, but nowhere else?’
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