by David Hewson
‘Not yet. Do you think I can trust him? He’s going to send me back to Gedser.’
‘We can stop that! Let’s have a talk with him. Both of us. You’re not going back to Gedser. But . . .’
His grizzled head lowered, his bright eyes bore into hers.
‘You can’t rock the boat for ever. We drop off Raben. We go back to the party. We have a few beers. Then tomorrow . . .’ She remembered the time they’d almost kissed. He looked like this. Young and vulnerable. ‘Tomorrow you decide. About everything.’
‘Tomorrow,’ she murmured.
‘Can I have the keys? Can I drive?’
She looked back towards the graves and the memorial plaques with their endless lines of names.
‘I couldn’t find your grandfather on the wall.’
Strange blinked. Shuffled on his feet.
‘I couldn’t find his name in the memorial yard in the Politigården either,’ Lund added. ‘And that’s odd. Every police officer who died under the Nazis is there. Even the ones who went abroad to the concentration camps.’
She looked up into his face.
‘Why is that?’
No words. And his eyes were different. The way they looked in Helmand. Another Ulrik Strange was with her at that moment.
‘I wasn’t asking out of curiosity,’ she added. ‘I know the answer. I just want to hear it from you.’
Buch couldn’t work out why he still had a ministerial car. But there it was waiting for him when he came out of Plough’s house, Karina sitting in the back, arms tightly folded, face furious.
‘Maybe we should get a taxi,’ he said, sticking his head through the door.
‘Why?’
She wasn’t in a good mood. That was obvious.
Because this belongs to them, he thought. Like everything else. There could be a bug in the roof. Something that relayed everything he said straight back to the silver-haired man, the father of the nation, seated in the old king’s office over the muddy riding ground where the horses went round and round. Just like him. Going nowhere.
‘Just get in, will you?’ she said.
He did and sat silent for ten minutes, thinking as they moved slowly through the night traffic. Then told her what Plough had said.
‘That can’t be true,’ she cried, next to him in the back. ‘You know Plough. He wouldn’t leak a damned thing. It’s not in his genes. Besides—’
‘He did it, Karina.’
‘I was with him every single day.’
‘He did it! He told me!’ The residential streets were long behind. This was the city now. Lights and noise and people. The grey island of Slotsholmen where Absalon once built his fortress and created a city called Copenhagen was getting closer. ‘He was proud of it.’
‘For God’s sake why?’
There was a kind of logic there. Buch had to admit it.
‘Because all he wanted was revenge. In his own head Rossing was to blame. Never Grue Eriksen. Not the grand old man.’
She howled with fury.
‘He’s not that stupid, Thomas! He must know something that implicates the Prime Minister. Something—’
‘He doesn’t.’ Buch’s gloomy stare silenced her. ‘And even if he did he wouldn’t say. Plough’s part of the system. It brought him up. Made him what he was. It’s hard enough to tear down one little part of it. To ask him to pull the rug from under everything . . .’
Buch put his hand on her arm, tried to make her see.
‘We haven’t been up against Rossing. Or Grue Eriksen. Certainly not Plough. We’ve been fighting . . .’
Slotsholmen. There it was beyond the windscreen. All the buildings, the ministries and the Folketinget, the little converted houses for the civil servants, the garden with its statue of Kierkegaard.
‘We’ve been fighting that,’ Buch said, waving his hand at the grey shapes ahead. ‘Plough thinks he did the right thing. He was loyal. To the system to begin with. To his son in the end.’ He glanced at her. ‘And what were we?’
She was a smart, ambitious, dangerous young woman, Buch thought. He hadn’t spoken easily with his wife Marie in days. A part of him, a part he hated, had looked at Karina, thought of Monberg, and wondered . . .
‘Thomas,’ she said very slowly. ‘We know for a fact the Prime Minister was involved in a conspiracy that killed people. Killed them!’
‘True,’ he agreed as the long black car pulled into the Ministry entrance.
‘We can’t let him get away with that. How could you live with yourself?’ Her hand fell on his, soft and gentle and warm. ‘I know you well enough now . . .’
Buch took his fingers away, looked at the door he’d never walk through as a minister again.
He liked that job. He was good at it.
‘I don’t give a damn about my career,’ she whispered, watching him, every expression on his jowly, bearded face.
The car stopped. The driver was waiting for instructions.
‘I’m not giving up!’ he said, too quickly. ‘Believe it.’
‘Good.’ She patted his knee. ‘So what do we do?’
Buch got out. The night was cold but there was no rain and the twisting dragons he’d learned to live with looked as if they were dancing in the clearest moonlight he’d seen in weeks.
He walked to the entrance, opened the door for her.
‘What’s Grue Eriksen up to now?’ he asked.
‘Talking to people about the reshuffle. He wants you there. To get your reward for keeping quiet.’
‘How soon can you put a press conference together?’
‘If I’ve got something good to dangle on the hook . . . thirty minutes.’
‘Do it, please,’ Buch said, then turned right to begin the long, interior march through the labyrinth of Slotsholmen, right and left, up and down until he found himself in the Christianborg Palace. There he asked a couple of questions. Found the room.
The Prime Minister was on his own. Slightly hunched, shoulders rounded, not that Buch had noticed before. Face so familiar most of Denmark seemed to have grown up with it. Benign. Dependable. Indulgent. A man to be relied upon.
Gert Grue Eriksen smiled when he walked in.
‘Hi, Thomas.’ He gestured at the seats round the table. ‘Take one, will you? We’ve fences to mend, haven’t we? I want this reshuffle fixed this evening.’ Hand outstretched, Buch took it without thinking. ‘I’m glad we’ve got the chance to talk first like this. That trouble with PET . . .’
The Prime Minister frowned.
‘I’m afraid those officers became a little overenthusiastic. They seemed to blame you for König’s dismissal. Which is unfair and now they know it.’
For some reason Buch found himself staring at his hand after shaking Grue Eriksen’s. Sweaty, ugly, fat fingers marked by the scars of his early farming days. The hand of a labourer, not a politician. Cautious, common men who didn’t shake with anybody, not without looking them up and down first. As he had once.
‘I owe you an explanation,’ Grue Eriksen said as Buch sat down.
‘Why can’t you let things go?’
Strange stood in front of her, back to how he’d looked in Helmand now. A soldier. A man of duty. Forcing all emotion from himself. Getting ready to serve. To fight. To rage.
‘I can let them go when they’re finished.’
‘Some things never finish, Sarah. It’s best to walk away.’
‘Your grandfather wasn’t a hero. He was a stikke. He worked for the Nazis. He was the one torturing them in the basement of the Politigården. Bringing them here so they could be tied to these stakes and shot.’
Strange folded his arms and nodded.
‘And then one day,’ Lund went on, ‘a group of Resistance fighters called the Holger Danske caught up with him outside Central Station. Gunned him down in the street.’
He didn’t move, didn’t speak.
‘It’s all there in the Politigården records,’ she said. ‘Not the Frihedsmuseet. I checked. So
I guess . . .’
Thinking. Imagining. This was what she was good at.
‘I guess one day a young police cadet comes in for work experience. He thinks his dead granddad was a hero. Because that’s what his father told him. So he decides to look up the records for himself.’ She moved closer to try to see into his eyes. ‘And when he finds the truth he goes home and does what any kid would. He spills it.’
‘You’re not normal,’ Strange murmured.
‘This isn’t about me. It’s about you. Who you are.’
The eyes did flicker then, stared hard at her.
‘It doesn’t hurt any more. Sorry.’
‘Did your father lie to himself too? Did he pretend . . . ?’ she asked.
‘We all want heroes. We just don’t like to think of the cost.’
‘And then you run away to the army. God . . .’ She shook her head. ‘They must have loved you. All that inherited guilt. Talk about someone with a point to prove. An army man from an army family and what a secret to live with. When you brought Dragsholm here did it make it even? One stikke for another? How did it feel when they said that wasn’t enough?’
Nothing.
Lund went back down the slope. He slunk after her.
‘Come on, Strange. You said it yourself. You’re a foot soldier. Not a leader. Someone put you up to this. Someone gave you the code to the munitions store in Ryvangen. Fixed that forged dog tag. Told you to kill those people and make it look so hellish we’d think some fake terrorist gang murdered them—’
‘Cut it out.’
‘You didn’t enjoy that part, did you?’ she went on. ‘Torturing Anne Dragsholm. Cutting Myg Poulsen and the priest to ribbons. Locking a man in a wheelchair inside his own—’
‘Give it a fucking rest for once!’ he yelled at her, alive and jumpy.
Lund went quiet. Scared. At him in part. But more at her own growing fury.
Slowly, like a cat stalking its prey, he came over, walked round her once, returned to look in her face.
‘You’re not right in the head,’ he said.
She didn’t blink. Couldn’t have done if she wanted.
‘About this I am. Why did you go along with it?’
His hand came up, touched her cheek, ran across her dry lips, brushed the soft lines of her throat. Left her.
‘Why?’ Lund asked again.
‘Because sometimes things come back to bite you.’ He looked at the stakes, the little ramp above them. His voice had turned soft. He sounded younger. ‘I was at a court hearing last summer. It was hot.’ A shrug. ‘I had a short-sleeve shirt. The Dragsholm woman came over wanting to talk about Helmand. Halfway through she saw the tattoo. All these questions. She must have looked in my face and . . .’
Strange nodded.
‘She was like you. She wasn’t going to give up. She knew. I knew. We all thought that nightmare had been buried. But . . .’
Lund got out her phone.
‘You need to come in now. I’m calling Brix—’
He snatched the mobile from her fingers, flung it down on the grass below.
‘You don’t know what happened! Don’t think for one moment you do.’
‘I know five people got murdered. That’s enough for now. I know you didn’t do this on your own. Someone put you up to—’
‘You don’t understand a fucking thing!’
‘Just tell the truth, Strange,’ she said calmly. ‘How hard’s that?’
‘I told my father the truth once. He didn’t want to hear it either. Look where that got me . . .’
‘Five people dead—’
‘Every one of them a stikke!’
The noise, half shout, half scream, echoed around them in the little grove of Mindelunden. She couldn’t think for a moment. Not even when she saw he had a gun to her chest.
‘Don’t you shoot me in the head?’ Lund asked, looking him in the eye. ‘Isn’t that the way they teach you?’
No movement. No expression on his plain and ordinary face.
‘You couldn’t kill me before. You’re not doing it now.’
She pulled away from him, turned her back. Aware he wasn’t moving. Looked through the grass for the glint of an LCD screen. Found the phone, picked it up. Walked towards the three upright stakes.
No sound from behind. She put the phone to her ear.
Glanced to the end of this small open space in the Mindelunden trees.
Another figure there, where the riflemen would once have been. A body position she recognized. Legs apart, arms outstretched, a weapon held with both hands.
Lund was listening to the centre operator talk in her ear when it happened. Yellow flash of fire first, then the sound.
From behind a shriek of pain. She turned.
Ulrik Strange was on his knees. Hands to his chest. Mouth oozing blood.
Another explosion. He bucked back with a movement so violent it was like a puppet getting jerked on a piece of string.
The phone fell from her fingers.
Lund wheeled round.
One flash and when the shot hit her it was so powerful she staggered back, fell against something that could only be the first stake, stopped there, pinioned like a target under the bright silver moonlight.
Gasping for breath. Struggling to think.
Then another vicious burst of fire, an impact that threw her wheeling round clutching at her chest, leaving the stake for the thick cold grass, the darkness, the stink of grass and mud and death.
‘No.’ Buch shook his head angrily. ‘I don’t want to hear it. I’ve had enough of this. You can keep your ministerial offices. Your bribes.’
Grue Eriksen’s eyes registered that news.
‘I know Plough gave you the ammunition to blame everything on Rossing. One more puppet for you to manipulate, huh?’
The weakest, most political of smiles appeared on Grue Eriksen’s face. He walked over to the door, closed it, made sure they were on their own.
‘Do you think you can get away with anything?’ Buch yelled. ‘You can’t bury this one. I’m calling a press conference. I’ll tell them everything. Then I’ll tell it to the Folketinget, the police, PET. Anyone who’ll listen.’
‘Thomas . . .’
Grue Eriksen thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, looked exasperated.
‘I’ve got the documents,’ Buch went on. ‘I’ll distribute them. Lock me up for breaching the Official Secrets Act if you want. The damage is coming . . .’
‘Please—’
‘You’ve been covering up for murder. People died because of you.’
‘I’m the leader of this country. We’re at war. The same war that killed your brother—’
‘Jeppe died in Iraq!’
‘Same war,’ Grue Eriksen said quietly. ‘It just goes on and on.’
Buch was thrown for a moment.
‘Don’t give me that shit,’ he said. ‘Don’t . . . I know you were behind all this. I can prove it.’
He got up, went for the door.
‘Do you really want to walk out of here without knowing why?’ the Prime Minister called as he left. ‘I find that hard to believe. You’re such an inquisitive man. God knows we’ve all learned that . . .’
Buch stopped, fingers on the handle.
‘I’ve been fed so much bullshit.’
‘You have,’ Grue Eriksen admitted. ‘And much of it from me. It seemed right at the time. Perhaps I was mistaken. But . . .’
Buch started to leave.
‘We weren’t covering up the killing of civilians,’ Grue Eriksen said in a loud, insistent voice. Enough to stop him, make him turn.
The Prime Minister frowned, folded his arms, leaned back to sit on the polished table behind him.
‘Ordinary people die in war,’ he said ruefully. ‘Sometimes it happens by accident. Sometimes by mistaken design. But in the end . . . people forgive. They understand.’
‘What then?’ Buch demanded, marching back towards him.
&
nbsp; ‘The problem was the officer. You see . . . he wasn’t there.’
‘Riddles, riddles . . .’
‘That’s just what they are,’ Grue Eriksen agreed. ‘Exactly. Do you think I sit at my desk in there and watch the whole world pass by in front of me? That I say yes or no to everything? Even with the domestic agenda I’m at best a distant captain, delegating to good men like you. As you delegate to others—’
‘Don’t flatter me, please.’
‘I wasn’t. The officer wasn’t there. He was working on a secret mission. It hadn’t been cleared with the Security Committee.’
Buch’s finger rose.
‘You have to do that. It’s the law.’
‘It’s the law,’ Grue Eriksen concurred. ‘Tell that to the men and women we’ve got on the ground in Helmand. Let’s say . . . they know a certain minor warlord is bankrolling the Taliban. Providing information, weapons, funds.’ He looked at the ceiling, as if inventing all this. ‘Let’s imagine we get word that he’s about to flee. He knows we’re onto him, you see. So our forces have maybe a day, two at most to get in there. Interrogate him. Take him into custody. Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘When Operational Command comes to me what do I say? Do I tell them to wait until we’ve managed to check through all our diaries, ticked off our committee meetings, our lunch dates? Our evenings at the opera? In Monberg’s case his assignations with his various mistresses? Do I say to these brave men and women fighting a hopeless war in a brutal distant land . . . wait a week or so, and maybe then I can get back to you with a yes or no?’
Buch said nothing.
‘What would you do, Thomas? The moment a secret decision’s committed to paper here it’s a day away from the streets of Kabul. That I guarantee.’
‘You knew who that officer was all along . . .’
‘No, I didn’t then and I don’t now. Do you listen to what I say at all? I don’t want to know. I wouldn’t ask. All I understood was I had a decision to face. We were short of money. Short of troops.’
‘You could have done something to stop it. When Anne Dragsholm was murdered—’
‘This is the real world!’ Grue Eriksen barked at him. ‘Not the one we’d like. Denmark’s at war and we’re losing. The Taliban gain strength all the time. They exploit our every weakness. If we hand them a scandal on a plate . . . what do you think they’d do? Sit round the table and look for a solution? How do you think the mothers and fathers of soldiers coming home in a coffin would feel? Would they thank you for this? Or me?’