by Lotte Hammer
Benedikte Lerche-Larsen sat at Henrik Krag’s laptop. She half pushed the picture with the dotted grid under the keyboard, so only the information was visible. She opened his internet browser and typed ‘y’ into the search field. A drop-down menu of a list of hyperlinks of recently visited homepages starting with the letter ‘y’ appeared. Youngwannabes.com/audition/louise.html was number two. The mouse clicks followed swiftly and without hesitation; five clicks and she had a list of the laptop’s temporary internet files, the telltale signs of what Henrik Krag had been up to online in recent weeks. She sorted the files, according to size and soon found what she was looking for. He had renamed it Bennedigte.flv. She double clicked and maximised Windows media player, but muted the sound. When Henrik Krag came back with her coffee, she was sitting at his dining table staring emptily into space, incredulous disappointment etched deep into her beautiful face.
He put the mug in front of her. She knocked it over. The hot liquid flooded the table and splashed onto the floor. Then she swept the mug aside, sending it crashing in pieces.
‘What are you doing? Why are you being like that?’
She nodded at his laptop by way of reply. He cringed.
‘Give me back my penguin, you bastard.’
CHAPTER 56
You couldn’t tell from looking at Benedikte Lerche-Larsen that a few days ago, she had been deeply betrayed by Henrik Krag.
If she felt bad, she didn’t show it. And she had been like this for many, many years. That girl is impossible to read. Who knows what’s really going on in her mind? Various teachers had said so ever since she started school, swapping concerned remarks, convinced that her closed mind was a negative trait. Since then she had developed and polished her appearance to near perfection, ably aided, of course, by her beauty. Some people – usually men she had turned down – thought she was nothing but her appearance, a decorative but empty shell. Others believed that her introversion, her hype and stage persona, as they liked to call it, reached well beyond vanity and should definitely be viewed as a psychological defence mechanism. This view somehow made her more human, possibly even attainable, so it was definitely the theory with the greatest number of supporters. Only two people knew the truth, one of whom was dead and the other was herself – and she wasn’t saying anything.
On Saturday, 30 May Benedikte Lerche-Larsen had a lie-in, and it was past ten in the morning before she stepped out into her parents’ garden, dressed in old clothes and smiling at the sun. She wore a pair of worn Italian loafers, jeans and a lumberjack shirt, not an outfit she would normally be seen dead in, but for the next hour she wanted to cut the grass.
Manual work, whether in the garden or elsewhere, wasn’t usually her thing, and she avoided it whenever she could, which was pretty much always. But lawn mowing was the exception. She enjoyed walking around and around in regular patterns, trailing a band of freshly cut grass behind her. Raking up the cuttings afterwards, let alone pulling out dandelions or other weeds, she couldn’t be bothered with, but the mowing itself was another matter. She had a standing agreement with the gardener that he was only allowed to cut the grass when she told him to.
She started the lawnmower, but hadn’t managed even two rounds before she was stopped by Jimmy Heeger, the man Svend Lerche had recently hired to replace Jan Podowski. He was in his thirties, well built, with gel in his hair and a flashy dress sense that made him look like a cheap movie gangster. Benedikte Lerche-Larsen couldn’t stand him. Firstly, because she hadn’t been involved in hiring him; her father had interviewed him on his own, even though she was the one who had found the man’s name on Jan Podowski’s computer. Secondly, because he spoke to her arrogantly, almost as if he were her superior, which pissed her off no end because he wasn’t, he wasn’t even her equal. He bent down and turned off the lawnmower.
‘You can do that later. We can’t hear what we’re saying.’
He pointed to the open window of her father’s study. She didn’t deign to reply, merely shook her head – did he really think she would take someone like him seriously? She bent down to restart the lawnmower. But to her astonishment, he pulled her upright with a firm grip on her upper arm, showing no respect, as if she were some schoolgirl.
‘Listen, didn’t you hear what I said?’
Jimmy Heeger was angry; he was quite obviously a man with a short fuse and a big ego, a bad combination. He shook her before he let her go. Then he encroached severely on her personal space by shoving his face right up close to hers. His hair gel smelled sharp, cheap and unpleasant. She smiled sweetly at him, scratched her cheekbone, then jabbed her finger straight into his eye, quick and hard. Her finger went in as though she had pricked a balloon without puncturing it. The man howled in pain and clutched his eye; she patted him on his cheek, and said almost cheerfully:
‘Yap, yap, yap . . . You can bark, but don’t bite.’
Then she restarted the lawnmower and carried on mowing, knowing full well she was unlikely to complete many more rounds before her father would appear.
Benedikte Lerche-Larsen beat her father to it; she was on the offensive and fuming.
‘You and I have our disagreements, I know that. But I’m your daughter no matter how we look at it, and it’s completely unacceptable that an employee attacks me physically. What the hell were you thinking? This isn’t just about my authority, it’s very much about yours also.’
‘Keep your voice down, think of the neighbours! There’s no need to involve the whole street.’
He had dragged her down to the terrace, and he too had grabbed her by the arm, but that was somehow different, and she accepted it.
The sun was bright and hot and there was a light, shifting breeze from the south. Svend Lerche struggled to put up the parasol; he loathed direct sunlight. The parasol continued to play up. Benedikte Lerche-Larsen seized the moment to reinforce her point of view.
‘If you can’t control your underlings, I’ll find somewhere else to live. Either that or I want a bodyguard, someone who can teach our staff to keep their hands off me.’
Svend Lerche finally succeeded with the parasol; he sat down in the shade and took control of his anger. Partly because nothing good would come from arguing with her, and partly because he had to admit she had a point. He could see that now, but hadn’t been able to do so earlier when he had reacted purely to her attack on his new man.
‘I think he needs a trip to Casualty. Did you have to poke him in the eye? Was there no other way?’
By way of reply she peeled her shirt over her head revealing her bra, a silky number with French lace around the triangular cups. Her father protested, outraged: ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get dressed at once.’ She ignored him and showed him the red marks on her upper arm, where she had been held and shaken. They didn’t look terribly serious, but they were there, that couldn’t be denied. She said in a low and lethal voice:
‘Make sure that never happens again, Svend.’
He mulled it over. When she was younger, she could wrap him round her little finger, make impossible demands and threats she didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to carry out. Only a year ago she would have insisted that Jimmy Heeger be sacked, but she had grown smarter, much smarter. There was no denying it. As it happened, he too was very unhappy with the new man, who had quickly shown himself to be unnecessarily brutal and cruel, something Svend had been in the process of telling him when they were interrupted by the lawnmower.
‘OK, Benedikte. It won’t happen again, I promise. Now put on your clothes, I don’t want to sit here with you looking like that.’
‘Then go away, I didn’t drag you down here.’
Despite her words, she did put her shirt back on. When she had done so, and after a period of reflection, Svend Lerche said:
‘Maybe you moving out isn’t such a bad idea after all. Your mother and I have talked about it possibly being better for you.’
She concealed her astonishment; pretty much everyone
except her father wouldn’t even have noticed it. She was silent for a few seconds and then matter-of-factly addressed the air, as though she wasn’t speaking to him at all.
‘Mum has an IQ as high as the room temperature, and she doesn’t give a toss about anyone but herself.’ She turned her head abruptly and caught his eye. ‘Neither do you, Svend, you’re just better at pretending that you do.’
‘I want to help you buy something decent. I’m presuming you’ll want to move into Copenhagen.’
She ignored him and carried on her own sharp analysis.
‘But you’re scared shitless that I might quit. Because you would then be forced either to cut down your business considerably or let major areas drift.’
He swung around and answered her with the same cold, distanced air she had adopted.
‘You’re overselling it, I’m not scared shitless, as you put it. But you’re right, your work is of great importance, it would be foolish to deny that. On the other hand, I trust your greed, your love of money. In this area you’re so wonderfully banal and predictable.’
She nodded to herself. Yes, indeed I am, indeed I am. Balance, equilibrium, guarded neutrality, the rest was nothing but words – words that changed nothing when push came to shove. She said:
‘I’ll think about it, it might not be a bad idea.’
‘Fine, but don’t take too long.’
It sounded fair: don’t take too long. She went back to the lawnmower and had made up her mind before finishing the next round.
CHAPTER 57
The cogs in the police machine whirred into action, and they did so effectively. Once the investigation knew Jan Podowski’s name, his life was revealed in a matter of days. It was a simple question of resources and Konrad Simonsen could allocate enough. His investigation, which had seemed hopeless to him, had taken an extremely positive turn, and like an old circus horse smelling sawdust, he was starting to trust that he would have a result in the not-too-distant future. The same applied to his staff. Not that they discussed this openly, that would be tempting fate, but the mood in the Homicide Department was clearly optimistic.
The pieces in the puzzle that made up Jan Podowski’s life had pretty much fallen into place except for an ugly and significant hole in the records of the man’s activities in the last ten years, but it would eventually be filled in, Konrad Simonsen had every confidence.
Jan Podowski was born in 1955 in Copenhagen. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to a cabinet maker, and qualified almost five years later in 1975. Then he worked for three years at Claus Pedersen Furniture Makers in Frederiksberg where he assembled and varnished designer dining chairs. He left the factory in 1978 after one of his colleagues had a serious accident. Klavs Arnold explained in his presentation to Konrad Simonsen:
‘His mate had removed the shield on his saw in order to cut a concealed slot. Then the sheet flipped and his hand was severed at the wrist. After that experience Jan Podowski was out of there. He thought there had to be easier and less risky ways of making money. We can say with some certainty that he chose crime.’
‘Excellent, let’s move on.’
Klavs Arnold leafed through his papers laboriously; it took some time, but finally he found what he was looking for.
‘The poor man only got thirteen thousand kroner in compensation.’
Arne Pedersen sighed, though he often agreed with his boss that the Jutlander could be long-winded. The presentation continued: in the 1980s Jan Podowski had worked as a driver, often for criminal ringleaders. Alongside this, he had also worked as a bouncer for Copenhagen nightclubs where, on several occasions, he had been charged with selling illegal substances, but the charges had been dropped every time. For a long period he had also worked as a stagehand at the legendary Madame Arthur, Copenhagen’s wildest nightclub in the 1980s, the home of gay men, drag queens, transvestites and everyone who liked to party hard, until AIDS eviscerated the place at the end of the decade. In the 1990s, he was involved in the illegal importation of bootleg goods and the smuggling of cigarettes. He was also suspected of robbing trucks and of ram-raid robberies, but without ever ending up behind bars. He had either been lucky or clever or possibly both.
Arne Pedersen had taken over from Klavs Arnold.
‘Where do we have our information from?’ Konrad Simonsen asked.
‘Informants, but it has been independently verified. Many people in the Copenhagen, and for a time also the Odense, underworld remember him clearly. He was well liked, incidentally, if that’s in any way useful to us. A man whose work you could trust – that was his reputation.’
‘What about addresses, girlfriends, finances?’
‘We know all of that: do you want me to read it out loud? There’s nothing very interesting.’
There was no need. Instead Konrad Simonsen said:
‘But we lose him towards the end of the 1990s.’
It was a statement rather than a question; Arne Pedersen confirmed it:
‘His last known address is a bedsit in Brannersvej in Charlottenlund. He moved out in 1996, and since then hasn’t been listed at any other address. There can be no doubt that he tried putting up barriers between his working life and his private life, as well as disappearing from public registers. He has paid no tax since 1994. In 2002 he sells his car and closes all his bank accounts, he receives no state benefits and lives in Karlslille under the name Philip Sander . . . yes, he did a thorough job. But we still don’t know why, and we still don’t know what the last job he did was.’
Konrad Simonsen was hopeful.
‘We’ll find out, it’s only a matter of time. How about children, family, anything like that?’
‘No children that we know of, but two sisters he never sees. One lives in Belgium, by the way.’
‘So his blind girlfriend is right when she claims not to know what his job was?’
Arne Pedersen had his doubts about that, so that question had to be left open for the time being. But he had no doubt at all that the Countess would uncover the answer to that question and many more.
CHAPTER 58
The break-up with Benedikte Lerche-Larsen hit Henrik Krag like a kick to the stomach.
It was a vacuum, a sub-pressure, sucking him in, eating him up, driving him to despair whenever he thought about it, which he did many times every day. He rang her constantly, especially in the weekend after the break-up, but she didn’t pick up when he called, and he could have saved himself his tortuous text messages – he received no replies. Even so he carried on, spelling his way through the words on his computer, where he could have his message read out loud: I’m sorry, Benedikte. I love you, Benedikte. I’m so sorry, Benedikte. I can’t live without you, Benedikte. Ironically, Ida read them for him. Afterwards each letter would have to be transferred to his mobile, checked and double-checked, before he felt confident it was all spelled correctly and he could finally hit send. But all to no avail.
Several times he tried using another phone, mobiles belonging to colleagues or friends, but no luck there either. Benedikte, please don’t hang up . . . He never got any further before she hung up, her voice as she said her name fading in his mind far too quickly.
He drank more beers in the evenings than were good for him, but they didn’t soothe his longing in the slightest; in fact they almost made it worse. Even so, he would often buy a six-pack on his way home from work, more recently two. He avoided his friends.
Nights were better, more honest in a strange way; they made no promises they couldn’t keep. He wouldn’t have called her at night, even if things had been the way they used to be; at night she slept. He hoped. Familiar jealousy pierced him from all sides, and painful images formed in his brain. Sleep was chased away. Benedikte with another man, Benedikte naked, uninhibited, groaning, sweaty . . . just like the footage he couldn’t help viewing, which was the author of his misfortune, and which he still, still, still couldn’t help looking at – it was beyond belief. Why did he
do it? He was an idiot that was why, he couldn’t see through anything, understand anything . . . but not even his traditional escape mechanism worked. He sat up in bed and punched the wall, the pain shooting up to his elbow, and he reached out for another beer. On Monday morning he called in sick.
Monday evening they had been due to meet at his flat, and he hoped sincerely that she would still turn up. Four days had passed since she had stormed out in anger. He spent the whole day trying to convince himself that as she hadn’t cancelled and in view of their important, shared project, she would turn up after all. Of course she would. How could she not? He listened to noises on the stairwell, peered out of the window for her car; she didn’t come.
Early Tuesday morning he drove to Solrød Strand; he couldn’t sleep. Nor could he stand being at home. On the way there he thought that if he was stopped and breathalysed, he would lose his licence. He also realised that he no longer cared.
He walked on the beach. The sun was blurred and foggy, still low on the horizon, and the few boulders cast long, pale shadows across the sand. If they were in his way, he kicked them aside in an impotent, destructive rage. Yet another day that just had to be endured. He spat at a squashed milk carton the sea had washed up. And missed.
Later, when he felt relatively sober, he drove home, parked his motorbike and went to the kiosk where he bought a carton of Prince cigarettes, a bottle of whisky and a crate of beer. Then he went to see his mother. She opened the door in her nightdress and was pleased to see the whisky and the cigarettes. She fetched glasses, they drank. Tell me, how are you doing, Henrik? She refilled their glasses. He opened two beers. I’m good, Mum, I’m good. She turned on the television; she liked it droning on in the background. And suddenly – he barely knew whether he had been there an hour or three by then – she had a rare moment of clarity. As a cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth, with the glass she had just refilled in her hand, her laser-cutter voice that had caused such him embarrassment since he was a child, said: