The Killing 2

by David Hewson

  There was a black Ford by the door. A parking badge in the front window that looked familiar: the Politigården. A man about her age stood by the door. Taller than Jan Meyer, more wiry. But with the same kind of clothes: black leather jacket and jeans. Same worn, pale face, short cropped hair and a couple of days of stubble.

  Jan Meyer had pop eyes and big ears. This one had neither. He was handsome in an understated, almost apologetic way. Thoughtful behind the professional, distanced mask the job made him wear.

  A cop through and through, she thought. He might as well have been wearing a badge on his chest.

  ‘Hello?’ he said in a bright, almost childlike voice as he followed her into the office.

  Lund turned off her walkie-talkie, put it in the drawer. Got a cup of coffee.

  He was in the door.

  ‘Sarah Lund?’

  The coffee tasted stewed as usual.

  ‘Ulrik Strange. I’ve been calling you lots of times. Left messages. I guess you never got them.’

  She took off her cap, let down her long dark hair. He didn’t take his eyes off her. Lund wondered if she was being admired. That hadn’t happened much in Gedser.

  ‘There’s coffee in the flask if you’re feeling brave,’ she said and filled out the night log: two lines, nothing to report.

  ‘I’m Vicepolitikommissær . . .’

  Details, Lund thought. They always mattered.

  ‘You mean Vicekriminalkommissær?’

  He laughed. Looked friendly when he did that.

  ‘No. Things have changed in two years. Lots of reforms. Can’t smoke in the building any more. We’ve got new titles. They dropped the word “kriminal”. I guess it was thought to be a bit . . .’

  He scratched his short hair.

  ‘Judgemental.’

  Cup of coffee in hand, he toasted her. Lund checked the entry in the log and closed the book.

  ‘There’s a case we’d like to discuss with you.’

  She walked out to the clothes racks. Strange followed.

  ‘A woman was murdered ten days ago. In very strange circumstances.’

  Lund got her plain jacket, blue jumper and jeans.

  ‘I’ll wait till you’ve changed.’

  ‘Keep talking.’ She squeezed behind the lockers and climbed out of the cold, wet uniform.

  ‘You probably read about it. Mindelunden. A woman murdered in the memorial park. We’d like you to go over the case records to see if we missed something.’

  ‘We?’ Lund asked from behind the lockers.

  ‘Brix asked for it. We need a new angle. He thinks you can give us one.’

  Lund sat on her chair and tugged on her long leather boots.

  ‘I can stay till midday,’ Strange offered. ‘Brief you here if you like.’

  ‘I’m a border guard. I don’t work murder cases.’

  ‘We’re pretty sure we’ve got our man. The victim’s husband is in custody. We can’t keep him for more than another day or so, not without charging him. You’ll be paid for your time. It’s fine with the people here.’

  She got up, didn’t look at him.

  ‘Tell him I’m not interested.’

  He was in the door, didn’t budge.

  ‘Why not?’

  Lund stared at his chest until he moved then walked past and grabbed her jacket.

  ‘Brix told me you’d say no. He said I should stress how important this was. That we need your help . . .’

  ‘Well.’ Lund turned to look at him. ‘Now you’ve done it, haven’t you?’

  Strange clutched his coffee mug, lost for something to say.

  ‘Make sure you close the door when you leave,’ she added then walked out to her car.

  When the call came Thomas Buch was alone in his MP’s office in the Folketinget, bouncing a rubber ball off the wall. A habit he’d had since he was a kid. It annoyed people and so did he.

  Some thought Buch an interloper, someone who’d only got into the Danish Parliament on the back of a better man lost to the nation. Buch was thirty-eight, had been a successful chief executive of a farming corporation in his native Jutland, outside Aarhus. Content with the countryside, running a company his family had built over the years until it employed more than four hundred people.

  Then came the second Iraq War. Jeppe, his elder brother, the bright one in the family, slim, handsome, articulate, the media star who would soon enter politics, decided to rejoin the army.

  Jeppe cast a long shadow. It seemed to loom ever larger after he was murdered by insurgents who attacked his unit as it delivered medical aid to a hospital on the outskirts of Baghdad.

  For reasons Thomas Buch still didn’t quite understand he agreed to fight the seat his brother had been promised in Parliament, exchanging the complexities of the Common Agricultural Policy for the intricate, prolix detail of Danish parliamentary law. Which was not so different, he discovered, as he gently prospered in the middle ranks of Centre Party MPs, tolerated mostly, suspected in some quarters, always thought of, he felt, as ‘Jeppe’s fat little brother’.

  He missed his wife Marie who stayed at home in Jutland with their two children, hating the cynical, urban atmosphere of the city. But duty was duty, and the family company remained in good professional hands.

  The idea of advancement within the rungs of government hadn’t occurred to him. Overweight, with a gentle walrus face and wispy ginger beard, he was never a figure the media warmed to. Buch half hoped that once his present term had expired he could slink back to the quiet fields of home and become anonymous once more. In the meantime he would deal with what legislation came his way, the needs of constituents, the daily round of parliamentary duties.

  And bounce the rubber ball against the office wall, always trying to judge the way it would respond to each careful change of angle. Watching that little object react to the tests he gave it helped him think somehow, and the call he’d had gave him plenty to consider. It was a summons, to an execution or an elevation.

  A tie and a jacket were called for. So he bounced the ball one last time, judged precisely the way it would return from the wall, placed it in his pocket, dragged off his sweatshirt, and retrieved the best clothes he had from the little wardrobe by the window.

  There was egg yolk on the tie. The one clean white shirt too. Buch scrubbed them but the yellow stain was persistent. So he found a black polo neck instead then walked out into the cold November day, crossed the cobbled space that separated the Folketinget from the Christiansborg Palace and walked up the long red staircase to the office of Gert Grue Eriksen, Prime Minister of Denmark.

  The bungalow was bitterly cold however high she turned up the puny heating. Lund knew she wouldn’t sleep. So she fried some bacon, burnt some toast, checked the train times.

  Bus to Nykøbing Falster, then train. Two and a half hours. Regular departures.

  Since the Birk Larsen case she’d scarcely been home at all. The city didn’t frighten her. It was the memories. The guilt. In Gedser her life was bounded by the grey sea of the Baltic, the boring routine of work at the port, her lonely hours in the bare little cottage, watching the TV, messing round on the Web, reading, sleeping.

  The city was different. Her life was no longer her own, became driven by exterior events beyond her control, full of dark streets she longed to walk down.

  It was the place, not her.

  You brought Meyer to that building late at night. You forced Bengt Rosling out of your life. Chased away Mark, his father too. Took all those wrong turnings trying to work out who killed Nanna Birk Larsen.

  She hadn’t heard that voice in a while.

  Mark’s photo was pinned to the fridge. She hadn’t seen him in five months. He’d be even taller.

  There was a sweatshirt she’d bought from Netto for his birthday. A cheap gift on her pathetic salary.

  She ought to see her mother sometime. For reasons Lund didn’t understand the war between them, once so heated and constant, had abated since the Po
litigården fired her. Perhaps Vibeke had found a strand of sympathy, of pity even, that her daughter had never noticed before. Or they were both just getting older, and lacked the energy to maintain the perennial bickering that had divided them for as long as Lund could remember.

  A look at the calendar. Three clear days off work. Nothing to fill the time.

  Lund picked up her laptop, looked at the news sites. Read what they had to say about the murder in Mindelunden. It wasn’t a lot. Lennart Brix seemed better at gagging the media now than he was two years before, when half the politicians in the Copenhagen Rådhus were trying to avoid the fallout from the Birk Larsen case.

  Brix.

  He wasn’t a bad man. Just an ambitious one. He hadn’t fired her straight out. He’d offered a way to stay inside the police, if only she’d been willing to swallow her pride, say lies were truth, bury things that deserved to be left out in the harsh, unforgiving light of day.

  She wasn’t going to do this for Brix. Certainly not for his charming messenger boy, Ulrik Strange. For Mark maybe. Even for her mother.

  But if she was going to do this, she’d do it for herself. Because she wanted to.

  A reminder was blinking on the phone. The message: Mark’s birthday was today.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, racing for the cheap sweatshirt, realizing the only wrapping paper in the house had reindeer on it.

  While she bundled paper and tape round the gift she called home. Vibeke was out. Usually was for some reason these days.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ Lund said. ‘I’m coming back for Mark’s birthday like I promised. Just till tomorrow. One day. See you soon.’

  Then she got a battered shoulder bag, stuffed in the first clothes that came to hand and headed for the bus.

  This was once the King’s office, or so the secretary who welcomed him said. Palatial chairs and a large desk, signature Danish lamps. There was a view out to the riding ground where a solitary coach with two of the Queen’s horses trudged round and round in the mud. The state of Denmark was mostly run from the buildings on the tiny island of Slotsholmen, once a fortress that was Copenhagen in its entirety. The Christiansborg Palace, the Folketinget, the offices of the various ministries . . . all these were crammed into a series of loosely linked buildings that sat upon the remains of the castle of the warrior-bishop Absalon, the roads and lanes that joined them open to the public, a reminder of the liberal nature of the modern state.

  Buch liked it here mostly, though he wished Marie and the girls would visit more often.

  He had his rubber ball in his pocket and briefly wondered what it would be like to bounce it off the panelled walls of the office built for the King of Denmark. But then Gert Grue Eriksen walked in and something on his face said this was not the moment. A government minister was gravely ill in hospital. The anti-terror bill stood beached in the Folketinget, caught up in the labyrinthine complexities of coalition politics. Grue Eriksen was the captain of the ship of state, charged with navigating a vessel that had many hands on the wheel. A short, energetic man of fifty-eight, silver-haired with a dignified, amicable face. He had been at the highest level of Danish politics for as long as Buch could remember, so much so that the man from Jutland remained a little in awe of him, like a child in front of the headmaster.

  Nor was he one for small talk.

  Brief greetings, the usual question about family, a shake of the hand.

  ‘You heard about Monberg?’ Grue Eriksen asked.

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘He’ll live they say.’

  The Prime Minister waved Buch to the chair in front of his desk then took the grand winged leather seat opposite.

  ‘He won’t be coming back to office. Not now. Not later.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Buch said with some genuine sympathy.

  Grue Eriksen sighed.

  ‘This is bad timing. We need this anti-terror package. And now we’re trapped between right and left. Krabbe’s so-called patriots in the People’s Party. Birgitte Agger’s bleeding hearts among the Progressives. Without some leeway from both the bill will fall. Monberg was supposed to deal with this.’

  Grue Eriksen gazed at him expectantly.

  ‘So, Thomas. What should we do?’

  Buch laughed.

  ‘I’m flattered you should ask me. But . . .’

  He was not a slow man. Thomas Buch’s mind had been turning all the way up the long staircase to Grue Eriksen’s office.

  ‘But why?’ he asked.

  ‘Because when you leave this room you will go to see the Queen. She must meet her new Minister of Justice.’ Grue Eriksen smiled again. ‘We’ll find you a shirt and tie. And don’t play with that bloody ball in her presence. Then you’ll find some way to get our anti-terror package passed. We need a vote next week and right now this place is like a zoo. Krabbe keeps demanding more concessions. The Progressives will use any excuse . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Buch interrupted. ‘But there’s something I must say.’

  Grue Eriksen went quiet.

  ‘I’m honoured to be asked. Truly. But I’m a businessman, a farmer. I came here . . .’

  He looked out of the window, back towards the Parliament building.

  ‘I came here for the wrong reasons. It was Jeppe you wanted. Not me.’

  ‘True,’ Grue Eriksen agreed.

  ‘I can’t possibly . . .’

  ‘You’re the one we got. Not Jeppe. I’ve watched you over the years. Noted your quiet honesty. Your dedication. Your occasional . . .’ He pointed at the black polo neck. ‘. . . difficulty with protocol.’

  ‘I’m not a lawyer.’

  ‘I’m not a Prime Minister. It’s a job life gave me and I try to do it as best I can. You’ll have the most skilled civil servants in the country. And my full support. If there’s . . .’

  ‘I have to decline,’ Buch insisted.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m not ready. I don’t know enough. Perhaps in a few years, when I’ve been here longer. I’m not my brother.’

  ‘No. You’re not. Which is why I’m making this offer. Jeppe was a bright star. Too much so. He was rash and impetuous. I’d never have offered him this opportunity.’

  Buch took a deep breath and looked out of the window at the two horses going round and round on the muddy riding ground, the coach behind them, the man with the whip in his hand. Held gently. Unused. But a whip all the same.

  ‘I’ve staked my reputation, my premiership on this anti-terror package,’ Grue Eriksen continued. ‘You more than anyone know why it’s needed. Knock heads together in those corridors across the square. Make them see sense.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘This is war, Thomas! We don’t have time for faint hearts and modesty. They’ll listen to you, in a way they never listened to Monberg. He was a journeyman political hack. He carried no moral weight.’

  Grue Eriksen nodded at him.

  ‘You do. I can think of no one better.’

  ‘Sir . . .’

  ‘You have the ability. I don’t doubt that. Do you really lack the will? The sense of duty?’

  Duty.

  It was a hard word to sidestep.

  The Prime Minister got up and stood by the long window. Buch joined him. The two stared out at the rainy day, the horses and the trap ploughing through the mud in the square beyond.

  ‘I could appoint someone else from within the group,’ Grue Eriksen said. ‘But then the whole bill might be in jeopardy. Do you think that would be in Denmark’s interest?’

  ‘No,’ Buch said. ‘Of course not. The package we have is justified and necessary . . .’

  ‘Then see it through for me. I will ask one more time only. Will you be our new Minister of Justice?’

  Buch didn’t answer.

  ‘White shirt, conservative tie,’ Grue Eriksen declared, calling for his secretary. ‘We’ll find you something for now. Best send out for more, Minister Buch. The days of polo shirts are over.’

  Half j
ail, half psychiatric institution, Herstedvester lay twenty kilometres west of Copenhagen, a long boring journey, one Louise Raben had come to loathe.

  She knew the routine. Bag through scanner. Body check. Permission slips.

  Then she was through security, walking into the visiting quarters, wondering where he was, what he’d been doing.

  Two years inside, every request for parole turned down. Jens Peter Raben was a soldier, a father, a husband. A man who’d served the Danish state for almost half of his thirty-seven years.

  Now he’d become nothing more than a prisoner in a penal psychiatric institution, locked up as a danger to himself and the society he once thought he served.

  Two years. No sign of the agony ending. If he’d been convicted of a simple crime – a robbery, a mugging – he’d be home now. Back in the army perhaps – and this was her secret wish, not that she’d voiced it to her father – finding a job in the civilian world. But Raben’s mental state after he was invalided back from Afghanistan precluded the promise of freedom allowed to ordinary criminals. The idea of redemption was denied those deemed unsound of mind.

  A terrible thought lurked at the back of her head more and more. What if they never let him out? What if her husband, Jonas’s father, stayed in Herstedvester for ever?

  Their son had just turned four. He needed a man around. They both did. She was young. She missed his friendship, his physical presence too, the warmth, the intimacy between them. The idea he might never return sparked thoughts in her head she’d never wanted to countenance.

  If he didn’t come back what price loyalty? Fidelity?

  Louise Raben came from an army family, had grown up in barracks houses as her father worked his way up through the officer ranks. There were women who waited, and women who seized the opportunity to control their own lives. She didn’t want to make that choice.

  The guard walked her into the visitors’ block. Outside she could see the prison wing and the hospital, a separate building, beyond it. High walls everywhere. Barbed wire. Men with walkie-talkies and guns. Then they let her into the private room, the one reserved for marital visits. Cheap wallpaper, a plain table, a sofa bed by the wall. And a man who was beginning to seem distant, however hard she tried.