Fatal Crossing

by Lone Theils

  Bill Hix. The black, almost hypnotising gaze that had skewered her. The sudden pain to the back of her head. The barking of the dogs.

  The door opened and a tanned nurse entered.

  ‘Good morning, Nora. May I call you Nora? I’m Melinda.’

  Nora tried nodding, but the slightest movement caused her nausea to surge. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘At St John's Hospital. You’re concussed. The doctor will be making his round in half an hour. How are you feeling?’

  ‘How did I end up here?’

  The nurse flashed her beaming smile. ‘You arrived here late last night. You’ve had a good night's sleep, and now you’re under observation for concussion. And just to be on the safe side, we’ve given you a tetanus shot for the bites.’

  ‘Bites?’

  ‘Yes. Dog bites.’

  Nora tried taking it all in, but Melinda interrupted her.

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  Having learned her lesson, Nora kept her head still this time and avoided nodding. Instead she answered yes.

  Melinda tipped two pills into a small plastic cup and handed it to her. ‘Wash them down with water,’ she said.

  Nora did she was told, and could feel herself slipping back into sleep.

  ‘My mobile,’ she managed to say, ‘... where's my mobile?’

  ‘I don’t know. But then again, it's probably not important right now. Besides, you’re not permitted to use mobiles in this ward. However, a man has called us several times to find out how you are.’

  ‘Spencer?’ Nora asked.

  ‘No, that wasn’t his name. Andre ... Andreas, something like that? He was very persistent.’

  Nora smiled. Then she fell back into the darkness.

  She awoke briefly when the doctor did his rounds, but could manage only monosyllabic answers. After a brief consultation the young doctor, whose name Nora didn’t catch, announced that she would be staying at the hospital for another twenty-four hours. ‘Complete rest,’ he ordered her as he moved on.

  Nora drifted off again. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself looking into Spencer's face.

  ‘Miss Sand,’ he said sternly. ‘The next time you go off on one of your adventures, please advise the relevant authorities. It could have gone very, very wrong. For you. For us.’

  Nora tried to reply, but managed only a small squawk. She reached for the water glass, and Spencer leaned forwards to help her pick it up.

  ‘What happened?’

  Spencer sat for a while rubbing his face. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept last night. And possibly not the night before that, either. His shirt was relatively clean, he had probably brought an overnight bag and changed this morning, but otherwise he looked more crumpled than Nora had ever seen him.

  ‘Hix is on his way back to Wolf Hall. A woman called Mrs Rosen is in custody. We found her in the house, along with Hix's mother. His mother is in shock. Mrs Rosen hasn’t said anything yet. But she will. We found a dead woman in Mrs Rosen's office at the care home.’

  Nora felt a dart of compassion for Lulu. A life that had gone wrong, almost from day one, and now it was over.

  ‘We discovered Bill Hix in a shed trying to free himself from a wheelchair. A mystery which you can hopefully help the forces of law and order solve?’ Spencer said with raised eyebrows.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  He shook his head. ‘Well, you didn’t exactly make it easy.’

  Nora looked at him quizzically.

  After a few hours when I hadn’t had confirmation from Summers that you were OK, I had to do something. To be frank, I was furious that we had to waste resources intended for our investigation on something so trivial.’

  ‘But —’ Nora tried to interject.

  ‘I think you should let me do the talking right now,’ Spencer announced. ‘You’ll get plenty of opportunity to explain yourself later.’

  There was a knock on the door. Three quick taps.

  Spencer looked up. ‘Ah, DC Summers. Do come in. She's awake.’

  DC Summers turned out to be a tall, angular woman with short, dark hair and grave eyes under a pair of bushy brows that reminded Nora of Frida Kahlo.

  ‘Miss Sand. I thought we were meeting for lunch?’ she said with a wry smile.

  Nora smiled back. ‘I’m sorry. I would have called. But...’

  Spencer explained how DC Summers had received a call from two Welsh amateur ornithologists walking along the coast. They had spotted the damaged, yellow rental car and used their binoculars to read the registration plate. Summers was about to trace the registration number and contact the rental firm to find out whose name was on the contract, when she got a call from Spencer about protecting a Danish journalist, the very same woman Summers was meeting for lunch. While Summers waited for the emergency services, Spencer got his technicians to trace Nora's mobile.

  ‘We tried calling you repeatedly, but without success. At the same time, we were able to establish that your mobile was switched on and that it wasn’t in the rental car. When we finally got through and someone other than you answered the mobile, we knew for certain that something had gone wrong.’

  ‘But you never called?’

  Spencer smiled acidly. ‘We’re not total amateurs. I could hear immediately that it wasn’t your voice answering the phone. Gareth from Vodafone? That was me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Nora said quietly.

  Summers pulled up a chair to the bed and sat down. ‘Miss Sand, how much can you remember of what happened up until that moment?’

  ‘All of it, I think.’

  Spencer produced an old-fashioned Dictaphone from his pocket and turned it on. Nora looked at him.

  ‘We’re in a hospital. Mobiles have to be turned off,’ he said with a shrug.

  For the next half an hour Nora told them everything she could remember. Spencer filled in the gaps, and Summers went down to the kiosk for cold Cokes when Nora's voice was on the verge of giving up.

  Nora tried to focus, but one thought kept going round the back of her mind: Andreas had called.

  The last thing she remembered was Melinda's voice, which somewhere from the other side of the earth said: ‘Right, that's enough for today ...’

  39

  Spencer had organised a relatively comfortable police car and a young officer to take them back to London. The young officer gripped the steering wheel hard and kept his eye on the speedometer, while Spencer sat in the front passenger seat.

  He half-turned and continued his interrogation of Nora, who had been allowed to curl up in the back with a pillow and a blanket. Only two days had passed since she had been tied up in a basement, waiting to have her tongue torn out, and she hadn’t had enough time to shake off the memory of the scary room with the terrifying freezer.

  The road whizzed past the window. Every time she tried to settle on a fixed point to alleviate the worst of her nausea, it would disappear again at a dizzying speed. She tried focusing on her mobile, which was now lying silent, and charging from what had once been a cigarette lighter.

  When she had been discharged from the hospital, Summers had solemnly handed her both her laptop and her mobile. They had found the laptop in Lisbeth's office.

  ‘Mrs Rosen or Lisbeth Mogensen as we now know her, will be remanded in custody. Even if she refuses to talk, there's enough evidence to keep her behind bars forever. And then there's Lulu Brandt's account to you. I don’t know if we’ll be allowed to use it in court, but it will form the basis for our investigation. Hickley was masterminding everything from his cell, we think,’ Summers had explained. That was all she was prepared to say.

  Nora kept quizzing her, but Summers knew the law well and pointed out that any information she gave might prejudice a future trial — reeling off the stock phrase, which Nora suspected all police officers had to know in their sleep before they were allowed to issue as much as a parking ticket.

  Spencer wasn’t any more forthcoming. Not even here in
the car was he willing to say much, no matter how hard Nora tried to squeeze him between her fits of nausea.

  ‘What will happen to Vanessa Hickley?’ she asked during one of the pauses where her nausea had retreated only to come back twice as strongly.

  Spencer shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps she’ll end up at Cedar Residence. She's old and confused. She thinks that Lisbeth is her daughter and doesn’t understand where she is. We believe she threw out the suitcase without knowing the pictures were inside it.’

  ‘But how did it end up in a skip behind Cedar Residence?’ Nora asked.

  ‘Miss Sand, for the umpteenth time: I’m asking the questions,’ Spencer ordered her with a paper-thin smile.

  ‘But I just want to know if Hannelore and Helmuth will find peace,’ she said at last, thinking about the elderly German couple who travelled to London every year to plead with Scotland Yard to keep investigating the fate of their daughter Gertrud.

  Bullseye.

  Spencer turned back and stared out of the windscreen for some time.

  ‘Yes, I think they’ll find peace now. A kind of peace. Our forensic technicians are still busy, but this was where they ended up, the girls. They were here all the time. Vanessa Hickley inherited the house and the dogs from her father when he died, but no one from the original investigation knew that. We’ve started digging up the kennel. There's much forensic work to be done. It’ll take months. But I believe that Hannelore and Helmuth will find as much peace as they can after all these years,’ he said eventually.

  After a short pause he continued: ‘All those trips to Underwood that Hickley arranged to look for the girls,’ he said bitterly. ‘He must have been laughing at us the whole time. A picnic footed by the taxpayer — and all that grief. All that heartache.’

  He pulled himself together and continued in his normal voice: ‘I’ve given James McCormey permission to interview Hickley. I think the man deserves it. He may well contact you at some point,’ he said.

  ‘How much of this will I be allowed to write about?’ Nora interjected.

  ‘Most of it, I think,’ Spencer said. ‘You’ll have to accept that the story is everywhere. However, you have first-hand knowledge of Hix. It's the crime sensation of the year. We’ll stop off at a newsagent on our way back to your flat. However, I strongly advise you not to speak to anyone,’ Spencer said dryly.

  Nora nodded off again. Exhaustion took over and she had time to disappear into a black abyss before she was jolted awake by the bells of Big Ben. They had finally reached an area with mobile coverage, and the first to realise that was of course the Crayfish.

  ‘Bloody hell, Sand. What's going on? You haven’t called me for days. And now suddenly you’re at the centre of the biggest crime story since the Yorkshire Ripper.’

  The Crayfish was never one to waste time on small talk.

  Nora could feel how the journalist in her snapped back into place, concussed or not. She outlined the case and briefly explained her own part.

  The Crayfish was uncharacteristically quiet. Or maybe mobile coverage had disappeared again as they drove along the motorway. Nora checked her screen. Four bars.

  ‘Well I never. Concussion, eh?’ she heard him say eventually. ‘But you’re all right now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I can still write, if that's what you mean.’

  The Crayfish held a tactful pause, which made it clear that that was precisely what he had been worried about. ‘Now I’m not saying it's urgent. The deadline isn’t until Friday, so ...’

  ‘Mmm,’ Nora said.

  ‘Yes, so how about Friday after lunch? And stress your own role in this. That's a unique angle we can offer our readers. Otherwise we’ll just be reporting the same news as everybody else.’

  She was overcome by a strong urge to open the window and hurl her mobile on to the verge with its soggy pizza boxes and empty beer cans, and never ever come back for it. But then she remembered that she was in a police car, and that it would be a complete waste of time to try to open the window.

  As promised Spencer got the silent driver to stop at a petrol station when they reached London. He returned with The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, and the Sun. The two tabloids had plastered the murders across their front pages with blurred black-and-white pictures of a demonic-looking Hix.

  ‘The serial killer's groupie!’ screamed the Sun in huge letters. The Daily Mail's photographer had walked right up to the yellow police cordons and taken a picture of the kennel where forensic technicians in white coveralls were working away, so the paper could serve up the macabre detail to its readers of how the girls had ended their lives with the not terribly sensitive headline ‘Missing Girls Eaten by Mad Killer Dogs’.

  When the car pulled up at her flat in Belsize Park, a group of photographers had gathered outside the front door. Nora didn’t have the energy to deal with them. Why would they want a picture of a shattered journalist getting out of a car? She had never pursued that kind of journalism herself, and had privately always wondered at the way it was portrayed in the movies. Surely photographers couldn’t be that frenzied in real life. Now, however, she was on the receiving end of ten cameras herself, and shouting men constantly trying to make eye contact through the lens: ‘Nora, over here! Hey, Nora, over here! Is it true that you caught the killer? Nora Sand, did you know the girls?’

  Everything merged into an impossible cacophony of noise that forced her to the ground. If Spencer hadn’t grabbed her arm, she would have collapsed on the spot. The moment she stumbled, the camera clicking increased.

  Spencer took charge. ‘That's enough, gentlemen. As you can see Miss Sand is clearly tired. If you want any comments, you’ll have to contact her paper.’

  The clicking subsided, but only marginally. Nora fumbled in her pocket for her keys and handed them to Spencer. He let them in and helped her up the stairs and into the flat. There was a stuffy smell inside it. She leaned over the sink, turned on the cold tap and drank and drank. The dizziness refused to go away.

  Spencer opened a couple of kitchen cupboards and inspected her fridge. ‘There's no food. This won’t do. You’re still not well.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be all right,’ Nora squawked feebly. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Then you won’t get better,’ Spencer said firmly.

  Nora pushed a pile of clothes off an armchair and flopped down on it.

  ‘I’ll send the driver out for essentials. You have to be able to make yourself a cup of tea or civilisation, as we know it, will end. And bread. And bacon. And bananas. You don’t have to face the photographers again, of course. He’ll only be ten minutes,’ Spencer announced in a tone that brooked no contradiction.

  When he had extracted a promise from her to turn up at Scotland Yard in three days’ time and closed the door behind him, Nora slipped out of her clothes, plodded to the bathroom and crawled into her old, pale blue Marks & Spencer dressing down. It was as soft as a hug from a teddy bear, and she realised how physically exhausted she still was when she put on the kettle to make some tea and searched randomly for a packet of cheesy biscuits she thought she might have left in a corner of a cupboard somewhere. She abandoned her search when the kettle boiled and started looking for tea instead. She found a scrunched-up chamomile and vanilla teabag, a free sample from a magazine, and dropped it into the nearest mug.

  She carried the tea to the armchair, blew on it, then put the mug on the floor so the tea could cool own, and closed her eyes briefly. She awoke with a start when she heard three hard knocks on her door.

  Her first thought was Hix, and her heart beat wildly in her chest. But she was safely back in her own home, of course. Then she remembered the photographers. Oh, no. She sat up. Her head ached and her face felt puffy. For the first time since moving in, she wished she had a peephole. Then she realised that it had to be the driver with her shopping. Her stomach rumbled from hunger. She smoothed her hair, composed herself, tied the cord on her dressing down
and went to open the door.

  40

  He said nothing. He just stood there. And she stood stock still, as if someone had turned off all connections between her neural pathways, downed tools and gone home.

  ‘I thought you were getting married?’ she said at last.

  ‘I never said that. I said that she wanted to get married. For a journalist, you’re one crap listener,’ he said, taking a step towards her.

  Nora remained rooted to the spot.

  ‘But I —’

  ‘Will you shut up for once,’ he said.

  And then his lips met hers, and it was like falling and being weightless at the same time. Somewhere in a distant corner of her mind, she was aware that she was still standing, but it didn’t feel like it. It was as if she had melted into a small pool of butter at his feet.

  And then there was the white shirt, which was quickly removed, there was the bed, his arms, his eyes above hers, and the inscrutable smile she had seen a thousand times before, yet never like this.

  X

  The next morning they found a loaf of stale bread and a pint of lumpy milk in a bag outside the door. Andreas decided to go out for fresh supplies.

  While he was out, Nora looked up BBC News on her mobile. It was the only broadcaster so far to discover the real connection between the two missing Danish girls and Hickley's carnage. They had interviewed McCormey, the investigator who had almost cracked the case, and could now look forward to its resolution. She copied the link and clicked through her list of contacts until she found Bjarke and forwarded the link as a text message saying only: ‘Best wishes, Nora’. He replied a minute later.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be in touch.’

  She dozed for a while until Andreas appeared in the doorway with a loaf of fresh bread and a completely idiotic smile, which she simply had to kiss away as quickly as possible.

  41

  Before she began writing the story, she called the jeweller's in Lyngby. Benita Svaneholm answered the phone immediately. Nora told her about Oluf's fate.