The Lake
Page 40
Both statements were lies, he didn’t send his love, and many evenings was a huge exaggeration. His conversations with Henrik Krag had provided very little information, and Simonsen had stopped going; they weren’t worth his time. Nonetheless, a couple of minor details had further strengthened his suspicion that Benedikte Lerche-Larsen was much more heavily involved in the Hanehoved crime and its many offshoots than had been revealed. But how and to what extent he didn’t know, and probably never would.
‘You must have a very special body.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Please excuse me for discussing your personal life, but I know that the first time you slept with Henrik Krag was Sunday the seventh of June, and only twelve days later you announced you were pregnant. I’ve checked with an expert, and it’s just about feasible, but I don’t think you’re even a little bit pregnant, Benedikte.’
She wasn’t in the least surprised to hear this, and quickly flipped the situation:
‘Perhaps I should take another test to be absolutely sure. That’s a really good idea, thank you so much.’
‘And then there’s another interesting thing about you: when you dream about your father, which according to Henrik, you often do, your dreams always have a remarkable similarity to famous film scenes. Don’t you have the imagination to come up with your own dreams?’
She laughed. Is that the best you can do? There was nothing forced about her laughter, she really was enjoying herself, and Konrad Simonsen felt humiliated. He considered telling her that she was a bitch, which he was entirely convinced of. But he didn’t. Instead he said slowly:
‘I’ll be keeping an eye on you from now on, Benedikte. I’ll keep coming back to check what you’re up to, see if the relationship between you and your husband changes over time so that he might want to tell me more about you than he’s currently willing to do.’
That didn’t shake her either.
‘You’re welcome, then perhaps we might meet again.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you do. You and so many other men.’
She smiled, this time icily, then turned around and walked to her car.
CHAPTER 99
Benedikte Lerche-Larsen drove to the car park in Rudersdal where she had seen her father for the last time. She got out of her Audi R8, strolled leisurely past Næsseslottet and picked a path at random in the romantic country park without knowing whether or not it was a public right of way. It was sunny, but not unpleasantly hot, and to her right grey rain clouds were gathering, though it was hard to decide if they were drifting in her direction. The wind played lazily with her dress, which felt nice.
She tried as honestly as possible to evaluate her own role in the events of the last few months.
It had taken time, but it hadn’t been difficult to produce the picture of her and Henrik Krag in Hanehoved Forest carrying the stone between them. She had waited until the anniversary of the hooker’s death and then gone to the same spot, wearing the tracksuit she had worn on her first visit. With the remote control timer on her camera she had taken countless pictures of herself posed as though she were carrying the spruce branch with the stone. The milestone itself had been depicted in several newspapers, from which she had scanned it. Henrik’s hands and arms she had found in an advertisement. The rest was sheer hard Photoshopping, and the result had been good. When she had finished, she had reduced the picture to a coarse mobile-phone format, and then enlarged it to the final photograph, which she sent to herself, along with the front page of Poker Player and a letter. Unless you were an expert, and Henrik Krag most definitely wasn’t, it was impossible to see that it was a forgery.
The other major technical challenge was the synthetic voice that Henrik had called Ida. The majority of the messages, which she claimed to have recorded with herself as the recipient, were easy to produce and it was even easier to call Henrik and let Ida give him his tasks.
But the very first exchanges at Jægersborg Library, where she’d needed to talk to Ida in front of Henrik, they were difficult. Technically it wasn’t a challenge; it was only a question of getting the telephone card in her computer to call her at a given time and play the two sound files she had already recorded with Ida. But it was incredibly difficult to time the conversation, so that it sounded natural. She had practised many, many times, before she mastered it, and would never forget the four sentences, even if she lived to be a hundred:
‘State your name again, your first name and your surname.’
‘Benedikte.’ Wait, wait. And then: ‘Lerche-Larsen.’
‘Why is there an echo?’
Wait for a long time, pretend to be thinking about it, then: ‘There are two of us on speakerphone.’
The rest was a matter of Henrik becoming so strongly attached to her that he reached the point where he would do anything for her. Things that would fatally undermine her father and thus her mother in Bjarne’s eyes, until he saw no other option than to eliminate them. But Henrik had been easy, and she had played her role so successfully that for a time it had become a part of her, so much so that she had really enjoyed her time with him. Except for her own two tasks, which were obviously unpleasant, but necessary.
She had also been lucky, she was happy to admit that. Take Jimmy Heeger, for example. Now she might have been the one to tell her father that the man’s name was listed as a potential employee on Jan Podowski’s computer, and she might have undertaken a massive piece of research reading printouts of previous offences to find the biggest psychopath she could, but she had never dreamed for one moment that he would actually kill Jan’s widow.
However, not everything had gone according to plan. She had expected Bjarne to also eliminate Henrik, but that hadn’t happened. The irony was that it was possibly because she herself had fought so fiercely for him, but by then she had had no choice. If Bjarne Fabricius had had even the slightest suspicion that she might have been happy to see the back of her husband, it could very easily have proved fatal to her. There was no room for any kind of double-dealing, she had had to give Henrik everything she had, and that, combined with his enormous loyalty to her, had been enough to save him. On the other hand, he was fine where he was, and unlikely to present much of a problem, at least not for many years.
Then there were her errors, because she had made a few of those and she had to acknowledge them if she wanted to do better next time. Her pregnancy announcement had been a mistake, it was badly timed. Of course she would have to tell Henrik that she had miscarried. She had planned to do so all along . . . how terrible, suddenly there was blood everywhere, etc. . . . but with Simonsen in the wings, that would be more difficult and not as straightforward as she had imagined.
It had also been a mistake to leave some of the research into the politician Helena Holt Andersen’s son and his girlfriend to a random poker player. Perhaps the biggest mistake she had made. By now the poker player must have guessed what his information had been used for, given the press coverage of the attack on the two young people in Vallensbæk. And if he had contacted the police – although he had been strongly advised not to do so – things could have gone very wrong for her. Especially while her father was alive. Fortunately, that hadn’t happened, but she certainly couldn’t take the credit for that. She had been so incredibly tired and simply hadn’t had the time to do everything herself, but it was a poor excuse, which had again resulted from poor planning.
Sleeping with Bjarne had been her final mistake. She should definitely not have done so, or rather, she should have waited months at least. As it was, she had now been unfaithful to Henrik and it was vital not to upset Bjarne’s view of her and Henrik’s love. Besides, the encounter had proved to be a waste of time, not that it mattered. She had hoped that her openness – she smiled – would rub off on their business relationship, but that hadn’t happened, not at all.
She sat down on a bench and studied the ashes of a bonfire directly in front of her on the far side of the path,
before a beautiful rainbow across Lake Furesøen caught her attention. She checked that she had remembered everything. She thought she had. Perhaps there were a couple of missed details, but they would probably come back to her some other day and if not, they couldn’t be that important. Overall it was an excellent result: she had gambled with high stakes, the way she loved to do, she had won, which she loved even more, and now she had money, power and freedom, which she loved most of all.
She got up again although she had just sat down, unable to make up her mind, a touch restless. She would grant herself the rest of the day off, she had earned it. She began to walk back to her car with a wonderful feeling of having the world at her feet.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHORS
Lotte and Søren Hammer are a sister and brother from Denmark. Younger sister Lotte worked as a nurse after finishing her training in 1977 and her brother Søren was a trained teacher and a lecturer at the Copenhagen University College of Engineering. After Søren moved into the house where Lotte lived with her family in 2004, they began writing crime novels together. To date they have written six books in the series of which four have been translated into English. The Hanging is the first, The Girl in the Ice is the second, The Vanished is the third and The Lake is the fourth.
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATOR
Charlotte Barslund translates Scandinavian novels and plays. Recent translations include The Son by Jo Nesbø.
Also available by Lotte and Søren Hammer
The Hanging
The electrifying first instalment of the Konrad Simonsen series
On a cold Monday morning before school begins, two children make a gruesome discovery. Hanging from the roof of the school gymnasium are the bodies of five naked and heavily disfigured men. Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen and his team from the Murder Squad in Copenhagen are called in to investigate this horrific case – the men hanging in a geometric pattern; the scene so closely resembling a public execution. When the identities of the five victims and the disturbing link between them is leaked to the press, the sinister motivation behind the killings quickly becomes apparent to the police. Up against a building internet campaign and even members of his own team, Simonsen finds that he must battle public opinion and vigilante groups in his mission to catch the killers.
A nerve-wrenching look at justice and retribution, The Hanging is a spectacular crime tale straight from the heart of Scandinavia.
‘Much praised by Nordic crime fiction aficionados … This serious, complex novel raises disturbing issues’ The Times
Click here to order
The Girl in the Ice
The second in the international bestselling five-part Konrad Simonsen series, a chilling tale from the authors of The Hanging
Under the heartless vault of the Greenland’s arctic sky the body of a girl is discovered. Half-naked and tied up, buried hundreds of miles from any signs of life, she has lain alone, hidden in the ice cap, for twenty-five years. Now an ice melt has revealed her.
When Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen is flown in to investigate this horrific murder and he sees how she was attacked, it triggers a dark memory and he realises this was not the killer’s only victim. As Simonsen’s team work to discover evidence that has long since been buried, they unearth truths that certain people would rather stayed forgotten. But the pressure is on as it becomes clear that the killer chooses victims who all look unsettlingly similar, a similarity that may be used to the investigators’ advantage, just so long as they can keep the suspect in their sights…
‘The best Danish crime fiction in years’ Lars Kepler
Click here to order
The Vanished
The third in the international bestselling Konrad Simonsen series
A man is found dead at the bottom of his apartment stairs. His death appears to have been a tragic accident.
But when Superintendent Konrad Simonsen discovers images of a missing girl plastering the walls of the man’s attic, the case takes a sinister turn.
The homicide team is forced to delve deep into a disturbing past, dragging up skeletons that would sooner be forgotten…
‘Spine-tingling’ Tatler
Click here to order
First published in 2012 in Denmark as Pigen i Satans Mose by Gyldendalske in Copenhagen
First published in Great Britain 2017
This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Liselotte Hammer Jakobsen & Søren Hammer Jacobsen & Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag A/S, Copenhagen 2012
Published by agreement with the Gyldendal Group Agency
English translation © Charlotte Barslund, 2017
Liselotte Hammer Jakobsen and Søren Hammer Jacobsen have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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