Lene parked outside the arched gateway in one of the wings, got out and took in her surroundings. One man’s hopeless fight against decay, she concluded. No wonder he had sounded resigned and beaten. There were half-finished repairs to the brickwork and the wooden fence, small heaps of building materials everywhere, covered by tarpaulin, battered by the winter storms, and an old blue tractor with no wheels, still attached to a rusting harrow. The sky was clear and blue, and swallows swooped out of the air and sliced sharply over the roofs and trees. The only evidence of strict order and regular maintenance was the ruler-straight rows of beehives.
She walked through the gateway and into the cobbled farmyard. She had expected the beekeeper to meet her, but there was no sign of anyone in the uneven farmyard or in the shadowy rooms behind the barn doors. She crossed the farmyard and tried the front door to the main building. It didn’t budge.
Lene wondered if she should ring Allan Lundkvist – but for crying out loud, she had only seen him a moment ago. She stepped onto a raised manhole cover below a window, reached up on her toes, cupped her hands around her eyes and tried to peer inside, but the casement windows were dark and strangely lacking in transparency, and she couldn’t see anything. She walked along the house and continued through an opening between the main building and one of the barns. There should have been a door in the gap, but it was leaning up against a shed without its hinges. There were posts for a washing line, but no line, a lawn invaded by weeds, and some old, spreading fruit trees that should have been pruned long ago. She dragged a plastic garden chair up to the house, climbed it and tried looking inside again.
Yellow curtains with brown edges covered the window. Lene frowned when she heard a dull, low-frequency hum behind the glass. Then the glass moved and she could suddenly make out individual insects in the living mass right in front of her face. She pulled back her head and nearly fell off the chair. Yellow and black, crawling and fighting individuals: tens of thousands of bees were teeming and scrambling all over each other’s bodies in a thick carpet.
She hauled the chair to the next window and saw another quivering, undulating mass covering the glass. She tapped the pane gently, the bees retreated and she caught a glimpse of the white figure with the beekeeper hat, sitting on a chair in the middle of the room. She couldn’t see the face behind the veil. The bees covered up the hole again so she knocked on the glass a second time. Harder. The swarm pulled away. The man didn’t move.
Lene ran around the house, stopped outside the front door, took a deep breath and kicked the wood below the lock as hard as she could. The wood splintered and the door opened until it was halted by a security chain. She kicked it again, and the chain was torn off the door frame along with its fittings.
‘Allan? Allan?!’
The intense hum from thousands of buzzing insects filled her ears. The sound was like water being forced through a concrete pipe.
In the hall she saw a rug, and a row of pegs holding an oilskin jacket and empty dog collars. Lene took out her pistol, went through the loading procedure, released the safety catch, but kept her index finger away from the trigger and along the barrel, and raised the weapon in the prescribed two-hand hold with the muzzle pointing to the ceiling. The noise rose and fell. She decided to take a step back rather than run straight into … what?
‘Allan, for God’s sake! It’s me, Lene!’
A staircase led to the first floor and there was an oppressive and muggy smell. There was a white door to the left. She pressed her ear to it and the infernal humming rose. She looked at the door handle, carefully put her hand on it and hesitated again. Did bees attack? What an absurd idea. Surely only if provoked? Busy little workers that they were. Slowly she opened the door to the living room fully; all the insects froze for a moment and watched her as one.
Then the room became alive once more. The bees covered the windowpanes and the curtains like a carpet, and formed thick, moving cakes in every corner. The angry buzzing was deafening and the brown-and-yellow swarm had swaddled the man’s legs and lower body like cloth. The floor, however, was clear, and Lene approached the figure from behind in a large arc. She was terrified that the insects might view her as a threat, come at her and crawl into her ears, nose and mouth. Smother her.
The man was sitting on an ordinary, high-backed dining chair, and Lene could now see the strips of silver gaffer tape keeping him tied to it. His head slumped down onto his chest, with a deep, dead sigh when she put a hand on his shoulder, his hat cocked over one ear. The hands on his lap were covered with bees and in between his hands she could make out the obscenely bloated, white, egg-laying rear bodies of the queens, surrounded by hordes of serving drones and workers.
This was why the bees had clustered together: to defend their queens, which someone had removed from the beehives and put in the man’s lap.
She stopped on the bare wooden floor and looked at the man’s profile behind the veil. The face was reflective and solemn. Dried blood had trickled from a small, ridiculously small, circular hole between his eyebrows. His eyes were half open and seemed to study his hands and the living, squirming queens they were cradling. The blood had stained the suit all the way to his lap.
Lene was about to touch the body again when the realization hit her: the man in the chair had been dead a long time. And she had seen a figure dressed in white walk up and down between the beehives only minutes ago.
She never heard a noise, and the moment between insight and darkness lasted only a fraction of a second.
Chapter 29
Opening her eyes intensified the pain at the back of her head to an unbearable level, but she had to keep them open. She would never do anything more important than this in her entire life. She owed it to herself, to everyone, to the whole world, to keep those eyes open. It felt as if someone had rammed an iron bar through her head and down her spine. She had bitten her tongue and the blood tasted warm and salty. It was completely dark outside her field of vision and nothing would have been easier, nothing would have made more sense, than to embrace the darkness and let it carry her away. Her stomach heaved and bitter gall trickled from the corners of her mouth and her nostrils. Lene spat it out and breathed in spasms.
She was sitting on a hard chair. She was completely naked and she saw in disbelief the strips of silver tape keeping her legs together and tied to the chair, exactly like the dead man in the living room. She couldn’t move her head and, for a moment, she believed that she was permanently injured, that her neck was broken and that she would never walk again.
She closed her eyes and thought furiously. Reconstructed the events, forcing herself to feel everything. A hard edge chafed her chin and she realized that her unseen attacker had fitted her with the kind of neck collar paramedics used to stabilize the vertebrae of people injured in car crashes. She could move her feet, she could press her lower legs against the unforgiving tape and she could feel the rough floorboards under the soles of her feet. She wasn’t paralysed. Her neck wasn’t broken.
She sensed the stranger behind her, even though he had no sound or smell. A floorboard moved under the chair and she tried to turn her head until the sharp, white pain shot up her neck and out through the back of her head again. She groaned softly in time with her laboured breathing. She couldn’t help it. The pain demanded an outlet.
‘Can you see, Lene?’
She opened her eyes and spotted a computer on a chest of drawers right in front of her. Something white and red was moving across the screen, and a voice was coming from the laptop: metallic, flat and not of this world. She stared at the screen and identified a raw, concrete wall, with a high ceiling and deep shadows, which the floodlights carved out of the darkness.
The camera settled on a pair of suspended, bloody feet tied to a broom handle, which kept them apart. The feet were swaying lightly and there was the faint squeaking of a chain. The camera zoomed in on a slim, right foot. Neatly applied, coral nail polish. Nice, even toes.
Her te
ars blurred her view of the computer, and the lightly swaying feet on the screen, and she blinked hard.
The voice spoke. ‘Can you see?’
Lene blinked harder and stared.
The white toes were pulled into view. The nail polish. She refused to recognize the colour. She refused to recognize a foot that looked so much like her own.
‘Can you?’
Her muscles tensed against the unforgiving tape, and the chair rocked. She tried to get away from the picture, though she knew that it was forbidden, and heard movement through the air right before her attacker’s clenched fist hit her ear. The chair jerked sideways and she heard her own scream.
‘Do you see, Lene?’
‘YES! … yes …’
A warm trickle of blood ran from her ear and down her neck. A shrill howling came through the perforated eardrum and she could hear the vibration and friction of every air molecule.
Or so it felt.
‘YES!!’
The camera zoomed out. The body appeared on the screen, one centimetre at a time, a hanging, bound, graceful and slim body, white and brown where the blood had dried in a pattern that looked like the veins on a leaf. The camera lingered on a narrow strip of blonde hair over her groin. Her stomach raised and fell slightly with the body’s shallow breathing. The legs were spread wide apart by the stick.
A black, gloved hand at the end of a dark sleeve appeared in the picture. The fingers spread across the girl’s abdomen and pushed it. The body moved back, the hand disappeared from the picture and the body swung forwards.
Lene cried out again and heard movement behind her despite her screams. She expected another blow, but it didn’t come.
They let her scream.
The body on the screen swung back and forth: a strange fruit hanging from a branch, drooping in the wind. The camera slowly moved upwards. Lene closed her eyes and the camera stopped.
‘Lene,’ the voice said. ‘I can see you, you know. There’s a camera in the laptop in front of you and I want you to open your fucking eyes right now.’
She shook her head vehemently.
‘No? Oh well, we’ll do it as a radio play,’ the voice said. ‘You keep your eyes closed and I’ll try and get you to open them. It’s a good game. I know you can’t see it, but I’m showing you a piece of freshly cut bamboo. It’s old school, but still the best.’
Lene heard the bamboo swish through the air.
The voice sounded flatter, more dispassionate.
‘Let’s try it out on her. See what she’s made of, eh, Lene?’
Lene flung herself against the back of the chair when the cane struck the girl’s flesh with a wet smack which went right into Lene’s brain and soul. The deepest, the very deepest of places.
And she heard the raw cry from a young woman who was beyond all consciousness and whose body could react only to even stronger pain.
Lene opened her eyes. A fresh, red welt had been drawn across the body and groin of the suspended girl. The cane had cut through the thin skin and blood was pouring from the edges.
‘Can you see it? Lene?’
‘Yes … oh, YES!’ she sobbed. ‘Stop!’
‘Do you want to see the rest?’
‘Yes. Oh, God … yes.’
She heard a click from the loudspeakers. Music? Lene was convinced her mind must be playing tricks on her, that something inside her had broken, but the music continued and grew louder and louder. It bounced off the walls in the hall and gathered around the young, suspended body.
She had danced to this song with Niels. At one of the first parties where he had noticed her and she had noticed him. They had smiled to each other across a table covered with glasses and bottles – and he had nodded his head in the direction of the small dance area in the living room of a mutual friend, and she had got up. The camera zoomed in on the body, picking out and highlighting details: a pink nipple, a shaved armpit, an upper arm whose muscles twitched and pulsed under the skin. Long trails of blood down her arm, a wrist with a piece of surgical tape and a cannula, white hands, broken and blue below the shiny handcuffs, a rusty chain that continued upwards into the darkness. The camera rested on the hands and paused before finding blonde, bloody and matted hair and an earring with a pearl and a small dolphin.
The camera zoomed out; she couldn’t see the face behind the hair. The chin had fallen down on the chest. The gloved hand gathered up a handful of blonde hair.
‘Can you see it, Lene?’
‘Yes.’
‘Those are your earrings, aren’t they?’
She whispered something.
‘I can’t hear you. This is very, very important for you. And … for her.’
‘YES … They’re my earrings.’
The head was yanked up and the hair fell away from the girl’s face. Lene moaned.
‘Jose … oh, God, Jose …’
It was no longer a face; it was no longer her daughter’s face, but a swollen, discoloured, grotesque and disfigured lump. A broken mask. The intact eyelid twitched, the eye opened, and the green iris was aimed at the camera and at her. There were haemorrhages in the white membrane of the eye and it was stripped of expression. The crooked, swollen mouth opened to reveal a black hole where her teeth used to be.
The hands let go of the head and, without support, it flopped back onto the chest. The song continued, but the camera had shifted from the hanging figure to the floor where blood and urine had gathered in a puddle.
‘Lene?’
She shook her head.
‘You can stop this now,’ the voice said calmly.
‘There will be others,’ she said.
‘You can stop it now, Lene, close the case. I’m talking about you. No one else. If anyone takes over, we’ll communicate with them. Do you understand? Do you want it to stop, Lene?’
The cane swooped through the air before making contact.
‘YES!’
‘Thank you. Thank you for that.’
A man appeared on screen, but all Lene could see was a black boiler suit, black gloves, a shapeless outline and a strange, tight-fitting black leather mask of the kind bondage aficionados and fetishists would wear, with a zip in front of the eyes and mouth. He lifted her daughter’s head by her hair again, pressed a gag, in the form of an obscene, red rubber ball, into her bleeding, distorted mouth, and tightened it behind her neck with a leather cord.
‘She’s a lovely girl, Lene. Aren’t you lovely, Josefine?’
‘DON’T TOUCH HER!’ Lene screamed, but the man ignored her. She saw his gloved hand glide up her daughter’s thigh and two fingers being pressed hard up and inside.
A low, mournful sound erupted from her daughter.
The man walked up close to the camera. The leather mask filled the screen. She looked at his smiling, blue eyes behind the slits. He showed her a narrow, double-edged knife, went back, and placed the tip of the knife under Josefine’s breastbone. The tip made a depression in the elastic skin.
‘The strange thing, Lene, is that they always … always hope. They keep hoping that it isn’t going to happen, even when it does and the knife goes in. They’re so surprised, so incredibly confused and disappointed when their life ends, and it was all for nothing.’
The screen went blank.
Chapter 30
The superintendent didn’t notice him, even though he stood only one metre away from her. Her eyes were fixed at the black, shiny computer screen.
He saw only defeat and shock in her face, and he left the bedroom. He walked round to the back of the farmhouse and called his boss.
‘It’s done,’ he said.
‘Sure?’
‘Totally. She’s finished.’
‘Right, then I’ll get out of here,’ the other one said. ‘You should probably do the same.’
‘Do what?’
‘Make yourself scarce. I’ll contact you if I need you. I probably will.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure. Good
bye.’
‘What about the other one?’ he asked.
‘Michael Sander?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll deal with him. At least he’s interesting. Safe trip.’
‘Thank you. But why does he show up now?’
‘I’ve no idea. Really I don’t. I found his homepage with a specialized search engine. He’s a professional and we shouldn’t underestimate him. But we could let him lead us to Kim’s stuff.’
‘The movies?’
‘Kim was the only one who knew where those sodding films and pictures are,’ the other one said.
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Perhaps I should have a word with Kim’s widow,’ his boss wondered out loud.
*
When he returned to the bedroom, he put a blackout fabric hood over the superintendent’s unmoving head and tightened the cord a little. Then he packed his things into a suitcase, put the suitcase by the door and looked around. The angry bees were still buzzing around the living room.
He put a handwritten piece of cardboard on the floor next to her chair with the address of the abandoned warehouse in Sydhavnen, cut the cable-ties around her wrists and put the craft knife next to the chair. He turned her chair so that she would see the knife, and removed the hood from her head.
Then he picked up the suitcase and left the farmhouse.
Chapter 31
‘Good sleep?’
‘Not really,’ Michael replied.
He sat down opposite Elizabeth Caspersen at the kitchen table. The indefatigable Mrs Nielsen was busy at the Aga, and there was a lovely smell of scrambled eggs in the kitchen.
Elizabeth Caspersen spread a thin layer of butter on a piece of toast very methodically and gestured towards a jar of marmalade near Michael’s hand. He passed it to her as the housekeeper came over to the table.
‘Scrambled eggs?’ she asked him politely.
‘I won’t, thanks. Just some black coffee, please.’
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