Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “Is this your car?” asked the Ukrainian.

  “Yes,” said Søren.

  And then Babko’s laughter exploded, loud and unreserved.

  Søren considered the light blue Hyundai and didn’t think it looked especially funny. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  Babko shook his head. “No, my friend. Nice little car. All is well.”

  Søren sighed. They might in theory speak the same language, or at least something closely related, but the cross-cultural understanding was still far from perfect.

  “Get in,” he said. “We’re going to a place called Hørsholm.”

  THE COLD BEGAN to eat its way through the soldered seams of Søren’s North Face jacket as soon as he got out of the car—so much for being “designed by mountain climbers and athletes.” The sun, which had offered a certain illusion of warmth earlier in the day, had disappeared behind a dark grey, snow-heavy cloud cover, and an arctic wind blew across the hedges.

  Tundra Lane. The name fit. Even Babko, who presumably was used to these kinds of temperatures, swore and shivered in his suede jacket. He took a small, round, knitted cap out of his pocket and pulled it down so that it covered the tops of his ears.

  This wasn’t the quiet residential street that Søren had imagined. True, there had been a suitable number of symmetrical housing estates just before the GPS directed them down a narrow side road. But this part of Tundra Lane was little more than a wheel track with snow-covered bogland and forest on one side and soft, hibernating golf course hills on the other. It was surprisingly isolated, considering that they were only about twenty miles from the center of Copenhagen.

  Vestergaard’s house turned out to be a big box of a McMansion, made of white brick with panorama balconies in the gables and wide, shiny squares of double glazing. Several police cars were parked out front, including the incident van. It looked more like a moving van than a police vehicle, thought Søren, in spite of the orange stripe with the POLICE label. He showed his ID to the frozen uniformed officer who stood by the police tape, then went over to knock on the door of the van.

  “I have an appointment with Mona Heide,” he said when a young guy in a black down jacket opened the door.

  “She’s still at the scene,” said Down Jacket. “But you can wait in here.”

  Søren nodded. Even though he was curious, he had known ahead of time that the investigators were unlikely to let people they considered irrelevant stomp around the scene of the crime. He crawled up the ladder-like steps and introduced Babko in English.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Down Jacket. “Asger Veng, North Zealand Police.”

  The inside of the van was somewhat reminiscent of a building site trailer, thought Søren. One end was set up as a kind of miniature cafeteria, with a dining table and minimal kitchen facilities; the other served as office and command center. Between the two sections there was an even more minimal toilet. The facilities were not particularly cutting-edge technology-wise, and the comfort was pretty limited, but at least it was warm, and an industrial-strength coffee machine stood gurgling by the sink.

  “Coffee?” asked Veng, who’d noticed the direction of his gaze. “They have just concluded the on-site inquest, so it won’t be long now.”

  “Where did they find him, exactly?” asked Søren.

  “A few hundred meters into the bushes behind the golf course. He was sitting in his own Mercedes, wearing a seat belt and everything, but in the passenger seat.”

  “So he probably wasn’t driving.”

  “No. And the only purpose of that drive must have been to get away from the house. It’s not a real road, just a track for working vehicles—tractors, that kind of thing—almost impossible to navigate in this weather. Getting the car out of there again should be really interesting …”

  “Who found him?”

  “The neighbor. She was out walking her dog. Thank goodness for dog walkers. If not for them, any number of bodies would remain unfound.” Veng poured coffee into white plastic mugs and waved a hand in the direction of a pair of black folding chairs at the dining table. “Have a seat.”

  They had barely had time to follow orders before there was the sound of steps in the snow outside.

  “There she is,” said Veng a bit unnecessarily. The door opened, and something that looked like a slender and athletic Teletubby swung into the van. Police commissioner Mona Heide pulled the protective suit’s hood off with an impatient gesture and revealed a becoming short, ash-blonde hairdo and a pair of tasteful gold earrings.

  “Heide,” she said, offering her hand. No first name, no invitation to collegiality. She projected authority and professionalism that was in no way softened by the gold earrings or the confident, but not exactly subtle, makeup.

  “Kirkegard,” Søren said, instantly provoked into the same formality.

  “It’s nice of you to sacrifice your weekend.” She didn’t ask him why directly, but she was clearly wondering.

  “No problem,” he said, ignoring the unspoken question.

  “We’re happy to have the help in any case.” She gave a short nod at Babko, who returned the nod politely but with a bit of reserve. He still didn’t know why they were there.

  “I understand that you can help us with the Ukrainian connection?” Heide continued.

  “Probably,” answered Søren. “I assume you already know that Lieutenant Babko and his colleague Colonel Savchuk are here because of a death in Ukraine back in two thousand and seven?” He used their names on purpose so that Babko would know they were talking about him.

  “Yes, Natasha Doroshenko’s husband. We are, of course, interested in hearing more about the particular circumstances.”

  “Is she your chief suspect?”

  “Let us say that we consider it likely that she is involved.”

  “More than one perpetrator?” he guessed.

  She didn’t answer at once. He could feel her reluctance to bring others into the confidence of her small, well-functioning group. She didn’t want to discuss her murder theories with him. He waited without pushing.

  “We believe he was killed where we found him,” she said at last, “and that there were at least two people at the scene of the crime. A woman and a man.” And as if this admission had resolved her internal debate, she offered him the rest freely. “Michael Vestergaard was found at a quarter past eight this morning by his neighbor, Anna Olesen, who was out walking her dog. She called us from the crime scene on her cell phone and stayed there until the police arrived. Pretty impressive for a lady of more than eighty, you have to admit. The coroner believes time of death was sometime between eight and eleven, but there’s a significant factor of uncertainty because of the cold. It’s hard to judge what is rigor mortis and what is just deep freeze.”

  “But the neighbor was sure that he was dead?”

  “Yes. His throat was cut. That doesn’t leave much room for doubt.”

  “Were there any other marks on him besides the cut throat?” asked Søren.

  “Several blows to the face, some broken fingers—seven or eight. We won’t know for sure until we get some X-rays taken.”

  Broken fingers … it sounded like the sort of coincidence that wasn’t one. Still, Søren would like to make the link a certainty rather than a question mark.

  “Are there any photos that Lieutenant Babko could have a look at?” he inquired.

  “Not yet. Why?”

  “Pavel Doroshenko had four broken fingers. It’s apparently a common form of torture. It would be nice to know if Vestergaard’s killer did it in the same way.”

  Another reflective pause. Then Heide abruptly got up and opened one of the steel cabinets that stood along one wall of the bus. She tossed two protective suits in crackling plastic onto the table.

  “Here,” she said. “You can look at him in the hearse. They’ll be bringing him out in a little while.”

  WHEN YOU’RE GOING to see a dead person in a hearse, you expect them to be lyi
ng down. Michael Vestergaard wasn’t.

  “We couldn’t get him out of the seat without damaging him too much,” the coroner said apologetically to Heide. “It was easiest to cut the bolts and bring the lot.”

  Michael Vestergaard sat straight up in his car’s front seat, which had been cut free and then secured inside the white Ford Transit. It had been sixteen degrees below zero the previous night, and the chill was immediately evident. Vestergaard’s once-white Hugo Boss shirt now created a dark armor of ice and frozen reddish-brown blood across his chest. The head lolled backward and to one side, and the lower part of his cheek was stuck to his shoulder, frozen solid. His well-trimmed hair was white with frost.

  “Isn’t he unusually … frozen?” asked Søren. “Of course, blood freezes, but—”

  “Blood, waste and other bodily secretions. But it also looks as if water was poured over him,” said Heide. “Possibly to wake him from a faint or as a form of torture in itself. They weren’t exactly gentle with him.”

  Søren suddenly had a flashback to a POW exercise in the distant days of his youth. The abrupt cooling, the short sensation of drowning when you inhaled water instead of air. It wasn’t quite as cruel and systematic as waterboarding, but in the right—or perhaps the wrong—hands, a simple bucket was a pretty effective instrument of torture. With the current chill factor, it could also be a murder weapon, but Vestergaard had not lived long enough to die of cold.

  “His hands?” said Søren. “Is it okay if Lieutenant Babko has a closer look at them?”

  “Be my guest,” said Heide in English.

  Babko apparently understood the ironic English phrase, because he climbed into the hearse with Søren.

  The frozen body curved in a way that somehow contradicted the backward-lolling head, as if two opposing forces had been at work at the moment of death. Automatically, Søren’s mind began to replay the scene. He sensed the threat that made Vestergaard crouch forward, cradling his ruined hands against his stomach. Then the grabbing of his hair, the head that was wrenched backward, the knife slicing through tendons and arteries and throat cartilage. What Natasha had not managed a year and a half ago was now completed in one abrupt slash without hesitation or failed attempts.

  “The hands,” he said in Russian to Babko. “Is it the same sort of damage as to Pavel Doroshenko’s?”

  Both hands were swollen, blue-black and bloody, and on the left, especially, there were several obvious breaks. The cold and the stiffness of death had frozen the damaged fingers into a position that looked more like some marine life-form than a human hand—a meat-colored starfish, maybe, or a shattered coral formation. The outermost joints of the little and ring fingers were bent all the way back. On the middle finger, the tip was simply missing, and you could see the bone sticking out through the tissue.

  With a careful, plastic-gloved finger, Babko bent the shirt’s frozen cuff back to get a better look at Vestergaard’s wrist. “There,” he said. “You can see the mark.”

  There was a deep, dirty groove along the cuff edge. Thinner than a rope, thought Søren, perhaps a cable or a wire of some sort.

  “Method is same,” said Babko in English so Heide and the technicians could understand him. “Same, Doroshenko.”

  “Punishment or interrogation?” asked Søren, first in Russian and then in Danish.

  Heide tilted her head a bit as she thought about it. “That hurt,” she said. “If it was to make him talk, he was either very tough—or he couldn’t give them what they wanted because he didn’t know.”

  “Poor devil,” said the technician.

  Søren didn’t say anything. Instead, he studied the shattered hands one last time. He had read the reports from the trial against Natasha, including the doctor’s testimony that described in detail what Vestergaard had done to his then-fiancé. Maybe someone, somewhere, considered this fair retribution.

  “Are you okay?”

  Magnus leaned against the doorframe with a coffee cup in one hand and a well-worn copy of Car Magazine in the other. The lines in his good-natured, dog-like face had begun to take on a permanent nature lately, thought Nina. Concern lines—was that a word? Like worry wrinkles, only more altruistic.

  “Yes,” she said, attempting to convince the machine to deliver a cup of instant coffee with powdered milk. “Rina has eaten a banana, and we are working on a cheese sandwich.”

  “What was that about her father?”

  “She hasn’t really said anything else, and I don’t want to press her. But apparently it’s true. I asked one of the guys from the Mondeo gang. He actually blushed and admitted that they had discussed it while Rina was listening. They didn’t think she spoke Danish. What did they imagine? She has damn well lived here for more than two years.”

  “She doesn’t say much,” said Magnus. “It’s easy to read her incorrectly. Those guys are actually pretty nice.”

  “That’s what you think about everyone,” Nina said.

  “No,” he said with a crooked smile. “Only about the ones who deserve it.” He swatted at her with the magazine, looking almost frisky—like an overgrown foal with giant, knobby knees and a stubby tail. Where did all this awkward enthusiasm come from?

  Sex, of course. What exactly was it that happened to men when they got a bit of not particularly fantastic sex? Now that it appeared Rina’s physical crisis was over, Magnus exuded well-being. Why didn’t Nina feel that way at all? Why the hell couldn’t it be like that for her—as easy as taking a hot bath and feeling recharged afterward?

  The phone vibrated in the pocket of her jeans. She answered it with a small, apologetic grimace in Magnus’s direction.

  It was Søren Kirkegard, the PET-man who wasn’t an idiot. She felt a tug in the pit of her stomach. Why on earth had she called him? He was PET, damn it, not a lifeline in a quiz show. And not at all a friend.

  “I wanted to update you,” he said. “And ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind?”

  She couldn’t really say no. After all, she had called him. “Yes. Okay.”

  “Good. How long have you known Natasha?”

  “Since she came to the camp for the first time. It must have been … oh, I don’t remember exactly. October or November, two thousand and seven.”

  “And how would you describe your relationship?”

  Nina had to think about that. “It mostly centered on Rina,” she said, stirring the liquid in her white plastic mug with her white plastic stirrer. For some reason the water in the coffee machine never got as hot as it was supposed to, and the powdered milk had a tendency to just float on top in small, yellowish lumps. “She had asthma even back then and … certain psychological problems. Nightmares. Anxiety attacks. It’s of course not that unusual among the children here, but … well, anyway, we did our best for her.”

  “I understand that you were the one Natasha called after her attempt to kill Vestergaard?”

  “How do you know that?” The words flew out of Nina, hostile, distrustful, before she had time to consider. He didn’t answer her directly, but he didn’t need to. He probably already had a whole pile of reports lying on his table. Why had she called him?

  Because you needed help, she told herself.

  She glanced at the clock above the serving hatch. Morten and the children were presumably eating dinner now. It wouldn’t be pizza or some other kind of junk food—Morten was good at all that healthy stuff, always making sure they got enough vegetables and slow carbohydrates. She closed her eyes a moment so she couldn’t see the clock’s digits. She knew that her time-checking was more than a bad habit. “OCD Lite,” so to speak. Not quite on par with the poor people who scrubbed their hands bloody for fear of germs, but … she had to get it under control.

  She saw the minute hand move down to 18:21. Tomorrow it was Fastelavn Sunday. Not content with merely importing American Halloween customs, Denmark still stuck stubbornly to her own homegrown equivalent as well, so now there were twice as many costumes to be produce
d by long-suffering parents. Except this year, Nina wasn’t long-suffering, she reminded herself; Morten would have seen to Anton’s outfit for the school carnival. But she would still get to see Anton, and maybe even Ida too, if it wasn’t beneath the dignity of a fourteen-year-old to participate.

  “I’m just trying to get a clear picture,” said Søren the PET-man on the phone. “You called emergency services, but you also went out there yourself?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t sure … sometimes people get flashbacks. Or hallucinations. Natasha was pretty incoherent on the phone; I didn’t know how serious the situation was.”

  “So you were, in fact, present just after the EMS got there?”

  “Yes.”

  It came rushing back: the heat that felt more like August than September, the dark hedges, the house with the front door wide open and all the lights on. The police hadn’t come yet—just the ambulance. It was parked in the driveway, its back doors open. The EMS people were already rolling in the gurney, and she could hear the bastard shouting hoarsely.

  “She stabbed me! She goddamned stabbed me!”

  Natasha just sat in the middle of the lawn with her skinny bare legs pulled up toward her chest, gazing up at the moon as if the activity around her had nothing to do with her. She barely looked at Nina, even when Nina touched her shoulder and asked if she was okay.

  “Take care of her,” was all she said, and she didn’t need to explain who she meant. “You take care of her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Neighbor. Neighbor Anna. Nice lady. She is safe there.”

  That was part of what had later been used against her at the trial—that she had carefully arranged for Rina not to be in the house that night. A premeditated, well-planned act, the prosecutor had said.

  “Did you get any sense that there might have been other people present at the house? Besides Natasha and Michael Vestergaard?”

  Nina had never been asked that question during the entire unbearably long police and court procedure afterward. “No. I’m pretty sure they were alone.”