by David Hewson
‘Pernille . . .’
The van bounced. He looked at the lane in the headlights. Gravel. What looked like ditches by the side. In the grey light cast by a moon behind clouds the outline of a wood.
A dim memory, fuddled by beer.
Vagn Skærbæk interrupted it.
‘Do you remember when we used to go out fishing at night?’
‘Fuck fishing, Vagn. Where’s the damned dog?’
Trees now. Bare silver bark. Slender trunks rising like dead limbs from the earth.
‘It was always freezing. We never caught a damned thing.’
The van had slowed almost to walking pace. It kept running in and out of black potholes.
Birk Larsen felt slow and drunk and stupid.
‘You said Pernille would think we’d been drinking if we didn’t come back with some eels. You should have seen your face when I got some. You never asked where they came from.’
‘Vagn—’
‘I just went and stole them from someone’s trap.’
‘So what?’
Skærbæk nodded.
‘Yeah. So what? So long as things get fixed. Then they never come back to haunt you. What’s it matter?’
He found the place he was looking for. Stopped the van. Pulled on the brake.
Silver peeling trunks in the faint moonlight. Deep ditches both sides of the road. No sign of life.
Skærbæk leapt out, went to the back of the van, opened the doors.
Birk Larsen sighed. Took a swig of the beer. Decided he wanted a piss anyway.
Climbed out of the passenger side, walked round the side.
Vagn Skærbæk had dressed. He stood there in full hunting gear. Long black galoshes, long khaki coat. Over his shoulder was a shotgun on a strap.
He pulled another pair of rubber boots out of the back.
‘You need to put those on, Theis.’
‘What is this?’
‘Just put them on, will you?’
Then he picked up a heavy piece of timber, held it in both hands.
‘Let’s go home,’ Birk Larsen sighed. ‘Pernille . . .’
He didn’t see it coming. The lump of wood struck him on the temple, bloodied his eyes, sent him reeling against the van door, stumbling down to the ground.
Skærbæk prodded him with the barrel of the shotgun.
‘You’re OK. Get up.’
He pulled a big electric lantern out of the back, turned on the light. Closed the van doors.
‘Forget the boots,’ Skærbæk said. ‘Start moving.’
Then pushed him towards the trees.
Ten minutes later Lund parked by the bridge where Nanna’s body was found, walked towards the forest down a long straight path, Pernille striding beside her. Some way behind there were flashing lights. The sound of radios and men. A helicopter was sweeping overhead, its bright beam penetrating the darkness of the Pentecost Forest.
All she had was a single, weak torch and the wan moonlight that seeped through the thin cloud.
The phone rang.
‘I sent a couple of cars and a dog team from the airport,’ Brix said. ‘They’ve got the van. It’s empty.’
She remembered the woods from before. A maze of paths and tracks, criss-crossed with ditches, patches of swampy marsh, and canals. Logging piles blocked some forest roads. Others would be a quagmire from the recent rain.
‘The dogs . . .’ Lund started.
‘The dogs have got a scent. They’re onto it.’
‘How many people have you got?’
‘Five patrols now. Where are you?’
‘Inside the forest. Ahead of you I think. We need to hurry.’
She could hear the sound of barking. Make out torches. Waited. Saw a direction.
Pulled out the map she’d picked up from the boxes the nature reserve left everywhere.
Remembered Jan Meyer grinning with a dead animal beneath his arm, a wire round its neck and a cub scout scarf.
Lund walked.
Pernille followed.
Theis Birk Larsen stumbled.
Vagn Skærbæk, shotgun in hand, behind him.
‘Come on,’ he barked, watching the big man lurch against a silver trunk. ‘Move it.’
The trees grew thicker, spindlier. They marched through bracken and rotten leaves.
The sound of dogs. Men’s voices.
Birk Larsen lost his footing going over a puddle, fell to the wet earth, floundered in the mud.
‘Vagn . . .’
Skærbæk looked at the puzzled, damaged face of the man on the ground.
‘What is this, Vagn? What the fuck—?’
Skærbæk fired, put a shotgun blast into a bole of fungus and mildew a step from the hurt and wallowing figure in front of him, watched the yellow fire and flying mud.
Dogs barking. Voices getting louder, nearer.
‘Get up. Keep walking,’ he said. ‘Don’t stop now. Not far. Not long.’
Lund heard the shotgun. Pernille loosed a high, faint shriek.
No more shots.
‘Where are they?’ Pernille gasped. ‘Theis . . .’
A voice in Lund’s ear.
Brix said, ‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How close are you?’
‘I don’t know. I—’
Jet engines drowned her words. Drowned her thoughts.
A ditch, green with algae. Birk Larsen stumbled, fell face in, got lifted by Skærbæk’s hands.
Stumbled through dead branches, through the mire. Climbed out of the other side, panting. Bleeding.
The trees got thicker.
The trees thinned out.
Lights nearby. The staccato sound of dogs anxious to follow a scent. Shouts of their handlers, cries in the dark.
A patch of clear ground ahead. Tall grass. Broken branches. A circle amidst the silver trees.
In his green hunting coat, Skærbæk looked around, said, ‘Stop here.’
Cast his eyes around the woods. The distant flicker of approaching torches.
Turned back to the big, stricken man with him. The blood ran down from Birk Larsen’s left temple, around his eye, around his nose and stubbled cheek like a gory mask.
‘Theis. In a while they’ll tell you all sorts of things.’
Birk Larsen stood hunched and stupid.
‘I want you to hear it from me.’
Torch in left hand, shotgun slung low in right, Vagn Skærbæk listened, again, shook his head, laughed for a moment.
‘Things just happen sometimes. You never know. You never see them. Then they’re there and nothing you can do can stop them. Nothing . . .’
The big man with the bloody face stared at him.
‘Leon called to tell you he’d picked up Nanna, dropped her at this flat in Store Kongensgade. I knew she was up to something. I saw them at the station. She was going away with that raghead. The stupid little Indian kid.’
Skærbæk waved the gun at him.
‘Going away. You get me?’
Birk Larsen grunted something wordless.
‘I knew what you’d say. But you weren’t there. So I went and found her.’
His voice rose.
‘I’m a reasonable man! You know it! I went to talk her out of it. To make her see sense. But not Nanna.’
He ripped off his hat, looked at Birk Larsen with pleading eyes.
‘Not Nanna. She’s got your blood in her, huh? She wouldn’t listen. She came at me screaming with her nails.’
Birk Larsen stood as still as any tree.
‘You know what she was like. Your blood. Me?’
Skærbæk shone the torch on his own face.
‘I thought about you and Pernille and the boys. What you’d think. How you’d feel. Abandoned like that.’
A part of the mask fell. His eyes began to water. Voice crack.
‘We all loved her. But she didn’t care. Not Nanna. Not about you. Not about me. You know that’s right, don’t yo
u? You know, Theis. Yeah.’
No words from the shambling man, blood congealing on his rigid face.
‘Theis . . .’
Voices getting closer. Flashing beams of torchlight on the silver tree trunks behind.
‘Sometimes things just happen. You can’t tell. You don’t know where they come from. They just do.’
The shotgun waved, pointed.
‘You know that. Don’t you?’
He looked around.
‘No explaining. No apologies. You just . . .’ Vagn Skærbæk wiped something from his eyes. ‘You just have to fix them. Do your best to make things right.’
He heaved the weapon to his shoulder, checked it had shells.
‘You understand what I’m saying?’
No answer.
The shotgun came down, indicated the ground.
‘We came here. This spot. She was scared. I knew you’d never understand.’
Young eyes, young voice, no silver chain, no red overalls any more.
‘I couldn’t kill her. I couldn’t.’
He sniffed. Shrugged.
‘So I carried her to the car and pushed it into the water.’
Gun up. Birk Larsen stared it.
‘Here.’
Vagn Skærbæk threw it. Watched the long barrel twist in the air between them. The stock fell straight into Birk Larsen’s massive hand. His fingers closed automatically around the wood.
The magic weapon. The gun that closed things.
Big man, black jacket, bleeding face.
‘Come on, you dumb bastard. Go on. Get it over with.’
Racing footsteps. Voices.
‘Do it!’
A woman’s voice broke from the night.
‘Theis Birk Larsen, put the weapon down.’
The two men turned and looked. Saw Sarah Lund beyond the tall dead grass. Weapon in hand. Ready. Next to her Pernille in her fawn coat.
Vagn Skærbæk opened his hands, smiled at the man with the shotgun.
The explosion tore through the dark. Lund firing into the sky.
‘Walk away from Skærbæk now,’ she ordered. ‘We know what happened, Theis. Drop the gun. Walk away.’
Skærbæk was laughing.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘You think they know, big man, huh? Or did I get it wrong?’
No words. Theis Birk Larsen was never good at those. But he could look.
‘You’ll never move into Humleby now,’ Skærbæk threw at him with that same sarcastic smile. ‘That’s where I did it. Can you imagine?’
‘Put down the weapon, Theis!’ Lund shrieked
She was beyond the grass. They could both see the black Glock in her hands. More bodies too. Lights behind her. Dark figures sweeping through the silver trees with their peeling bark. Dogs and torches, gathering round, encircling the two men in the bare patch where they stood.
Birk Larsen held the gun at his waist. Forty-five degrees.
‘Theis,’ Lund cried. ‘There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.’
Fawn coat striding through into the clearing.
‘It’s finished now,’ Pernille said. ‘Theis . . .’
For a brief moment he shifted his attention away from the man in the green hunting coat, saw her.
‘It’s over now.’
‘It’s not over,’ Skærbæk snarled. ‘Not yet. Even a big stupid lunk like you knows that. Don’t you? Come on. You’ll be out in a couple of years at most. What’s there to lose?’
A brief, hard laugh.
‘You’ll be a hero. Theis Birk Larsen. The avenging angel. You’ll like that, won’t you?’
From beyond the circle, fast approaching, Pernille’s soft and frightened voice pleaded, ‘Let’s go home, Theis. Let’s go home to the boys.’
The gun relaxed.
‘The boys. Look at me. Look at me. Step away from him.’
Birk Larsen took a stride back, let his eyes roam round the small circle in the Pentecost Forest. Torches and men ringed them on every side like a crowd for a spectacle. Like an audience for the arena.
Getting closer.
Lund’s hard, scared voice chanting, ‘Drop the gun, Theis. Drop the—’
‘I covered my ears,’ Skærbæk said suddenly. ‘Because I couldn’t stand the way she screamed. Can you imagine?’
Birk Larsen glared at him, heard nothing else.
Skærbæk’s face was different now. Scared and desperate. Still determined.
‘When I pushed her in the water. On and on it went . . . Christ! She begged and screamed and . . .’
Skærbæk’s high, weak voice broke. His head twisted from side to side, in fear, in agony.
‘Nanna just kept pleading for me to get her out of there.’
Gun rising, Skærbæk’s anxious eyes on the big man with the grizzled face.
‘She called for you and Pernille. Pathetic. I can still hear it.’
A shrug of the shoulders of the green hunting jacket.
‘But I mean really. It was too late then, wasn’t it? She could scream all she liked but what the fuck could I do . . . where are your balls now, you cowardly jerk?’
The gun rose, yellow fire in the night, smoke and a high-pitched shriek.
The man in the long coat flew back. Clutched his chest. Fell on a hummock of low rushes. Face up to the night sky.
Up to Theis Birk Larsen, ignoring the calls around him. The woman, Lund. Pernille. Ignoring the black figures racing towards them.
Sees nothing but the man on the ground.
Gun to shoulder. Face set. Blinking into Skærbæk’s scared eyes.
Someone screaming, not that it matters.
Blood on the green coat. Blood on Vagn Skærbæk’s open, gasping mouth. Still breathing. Still alive.
‘You owe me,’ the stricken man says, the words coming with scarlet bubbles as he fights to speak. ‘You owe me now, you big idiot—’
A second shot sends the night birds scuttling through the branches in the dark wood where the dead trees give no shelter.
Then Theis Birk Larsen stands back.
Throws the hunting gun on the ground. Stares at the broken, contorted shape at his feet.
Then retreats.
No words. No need for them.
Around him dark figures circling.
Barking orders. Holding steady weapons.
He rolls round his pained, confused head, like a cornered beast, looks about him and sees.
There is a woman in a black and white jumper and she’s weeping.
A woman in a fawn coat. And she’s not.
Thirteen
Friday, 21st November
Five in the morning. Brix was in his office.
Lund waited by a window in the circling corridor outside, staring down into the yard in front of the prison cells that now held Theis Birk Larsen on a charge of manslaughter.
Soon it would be daylight, and with it a need for explanations. Press conferences. The case of Nanna Birk Larsen would be closed for good.
Brix looked at the lonely woman by the glass, lost in her thoughts. Lost in everything except herself. He wished, against his own instincts, he’d got to work with her more. Not know her better. That was a challenge beyond him. Beyond most, he felt.
‘Lund!’ he called, and beckoned her in.
She was still in her blue anorak and woollen jumper, caked with mud from the Kalvebod Fælled.
‘Did you find the photo?’
‘No. Take a seat.’
‘Leon Frevert . . .’
‘Lund.’
He tried to smile.
‘Forensics have matched residue on Skærbæk’s sweatshirt. We know he was the one who shot Meyer.’
She stared at him with those large, all-seeing eyes.
‘Bülow still wants your blood. He’ll complete his report. You can expect consequences. Especially for what you did in the car.’
‘Svendsen wouldn’t listen.’
‘You pulled a gun on him.’
> She repeated, very slowly, ‘He wouldn’t listen.’
Brix waited for a moment.
‘Bülow isn’t the only one involved. I have some say. They’ll take into consideration the nature of the case. And the investigation.’
She was looking round the office, eyeing the evidence bags.
‘Your situation’s very serious.’
He noticed the door was still ajar. Brix got up and closed it.
Came and stood over her.
‘I can present you with an opportunity. It won’t stay open for long. You need to think about it.’
She stared at her filthy hands.
‘This case has caused a lot of difficulties. Everyone wants them to go away. For good.’
Hands in pockets, speaking confidently.
‘Certain aspects of the investigation will be omitted from the reports. Your allegation that someone was protecting figures in the Rådhus. The idea that there are other missing-person cases connected to Skærbæk.’
He sat down again.
‘The Nanna Birk Larsen case is dead. It’s going to stay that way.’
No answer.
‘In my view this is a good solution for you. For all of us.’
Lund folded her arms, said nothing.
‘I advise you to accept it.’
No answer.
‘Sarah, you solved the case. That’s the only thing that matters. If you agree you can get a job somewhere else. I can give you a reference. You can start—’
She got up, walked to the door, opened it.
‘Lund?’
Carefully, slowly, she brushed some of the muck from the sleeve of her black and white jumper.
‘The people upstairs are waiting for an answer.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ she said, then walked down the black marble corridor, past the office with the toy police car and the basketball net, past Jansen, past the noisy room where the homicide men gathered to tell their dirty jokes.
Out into the dark, cold morning.
At six o’clock Troels Hartmann woke in his office. A winter wind was howling. The tape on the broken window had worked loose. The icy gale was working its way into the room.
Stinking head, stinking breath. The empty brandy decanter on the floor, along with the papers, the speeches, the posters. Pretty much everything he could throw around on that long and bitter night.
Crouched on the floor and aching he pulled out his phone, called Brix.
‘I’m busy,’ the cop said. ‘I’ll get back to you when I genuinely have nothing better to do.’