She squeezed Gregers’s hand and he squeezed back. He understood. And thus they sat squeezing back and forth with their eyes on the dimly lit towers and spires of Copenhagen. Then Gregers took a deep breath.
“I never knew you wrote books?”
“I don’t anymore. Not the kind of books I thought I would write, anyway.” The thought of ever writing anything again at all seemed absurd at the moment.
“Really? Well, it’s just that I’ve helped print books, but I never actually knew anyone who wrote one.”
“I’m afraid you still don’t, Gregers.”
“No, but maybe someday. Right?”
We’re becoming friends, Esther thought. After all these years. She looked at him. Old skin over strong bones, watery eyes, a friendly gaze. Maybe he was just a little rusty from having lived alone for so many years, like herself.
“Gregers, I’m going to have to sell the building.”
The words left her mouth before the thought was fully conscious but as soon as she said them, she knew they were true. She pictured her childhood bedroom with its sloping walls, her mother at the old gas stove, back when the kitchen was facing the courtyard. She sat on her father’s lap in the wing-back chair as he read her the newspaper, his pipe smoke billowing up around them, and she drew with chalk and played with the other kids in the street. In that house she had seen her mother’s face for the first time and the last, had her first kiss and carried her only child, and she had never even considered leaving it, not for a second. It wasn’t just a home to her: it was her entire history.
“I can’t live there anymore,” Esther said. “It’s impossible.”
“I understand,” he said, bowing his head.
“You do? It’s your home, too. I’m reluctant to—”
“I’ve had that same thought. It’ll never be like before.”
“I fear it will never feel safe again.” She spoke with a lump in her throat. “Not for me, anyway. So once this case has faded some, the building will get a makeover by some cleaning company and then I’ll sell it. It shouldn’t be hard despite the… murder.” She forced herself to say the word.
Gregers sighed. “I’m being discharged tomorrow or the next day as long as there aren’t any complications.”
Esther nodded cautiously. Her ribs hurt, her head ached, and her jaw was still swollen, but she was also hoping she would be able to go home in the next couple of days.
“But”—he sounded heartbroken—“now I don’t know where to go.”
“Gregers, I have an idea,” Esther said, patting his hand. “Maybe you and I could take a little vacation after we get discharged. Somewhere warm with good food and wine and maybe an ocean we can sit and look at. Then we can think about where we want to move.”
“We? Well, I’ll be—”
He looked at her, looked away again, tried to speak, but couldn’t. When he finally regained his composure, his voice was unsteady.
“Just so you know, I’m not up to anything with loud music or weird food by the pool! And by golly, I’m going to want a proper cup of coffee when I wake up in the morning.”
Esther smiled at him.
“I promise you, Gregers. We’ll find a place with proper coffee.”
CHAPTER 38
Jeppe inhaled the scent of the Danish summer night, stopping briefly to savor the mild twilight in front of the national hospital. He was exhausted, his back and soul aching from the past few days’ encounter with utter depravity. He and Anette had just conducted yet another fatiguing interrogation of Christian Stender, who had at first refused to believe Kingo was actually dead, then broken down and threatened to drown himself in the nearest toilet bowl. By then Anette had been so furious that she had offered to hold his head down for him.
Finally, Stender admitted to the deal he had made with Kingo. He would turn himself in to prevent the police from arresting David Bovin. In return, Kingo would make sure that Bovin died in gruesome agony. He had connections; he could make that happen. Quite the favor. But what wouldn’t a man do for his crocodile bird?
Jeppe had halted the questioning and turned off the recorder with a heaviness in his body he had never felt before. He had reached his limit of human corruption for one day.
Anette was uncharacteristically pale, just as tired and disillusioned as him. They had retrieved their things from the office in silence and let themselves out of Homicide to descend the stairs together, still not speaking. As they stood on the sidewalk, Jeppe contemplated whether he ought to try and hug her, but she sketched a wave and walked to her car before he got that far. Svend was surely waiting for her at home with open arms and a pot roast. Jeppe knew she was in good hands.
No one was making dinner for him and that was just as well. He needed to get a conversation out of the way before morning. Esther deserved to know the truth. Although he hadn’t been able to protect her from Bovin’s abuse, now he could at least offer her some peace of mind. Jeppe drove through the city’s soft summer dusk, back to the national hospital.
He found her in a wheelchair by a window overlooking the city. She had a lap blanket over her legs and was sitting so still he initially thought she was asleep. When he slid a chair next to her, she moved.
“Good evening, Jeppe,” she said. “What are you doing here so late?”
“Hi. Why are you sitting here alone in the dark?”
“If you sit somewhere long enough, it eventually gets dark. I don’t want to go to bed.”
“Neither do I.” He sat down beside her. “Did you hear about Kingo? And Bovin? That they’re—”
“I heard.”
Jeppe looked out the window at a sky nearly indistinguishable from the rooftops. “Are you in pain?”
“It hurts like the dickens,” she moaned. “But they’re giving me this amazing painkiller, OxyContin, I think it’s called.”
“My favorite!” He grinned.
She grinned, too. Then they were quiet.
Jeppe took a deep breath and said, “I had a chat with Oscar and Penelope Kingo, Erik’s son and daughter-in-law, and I think you should hear what they had to say.”
She didn’t react. Jeppe felt a pang of nerves, as if he were about to take an exam. As absolutely gently as he could, he told her the truth about Julie giving up her newborn daughter for adoption to Erik’s adult son. The words flowed from his mouth, out into the darkness around them, and perhaps because of the darkness, they seemed innocent, as if they belonged to another time and place.
“Everyone was actually satisfied with the arrangement, apart from Julie,” he explained. “I think she regretted giving up the baby, but of course that’s just conjecture. At any rate, she contacted Oscar and Penelope when she moved to Copenhagen, wanting to see Sophia. It appears to have been quite innocent, but the family found it extremely disconcerting she wanted to be in touch—especially once Hjalti Patursson got mixed up in things and started asserting his parental rights. That must have pushed Julie toward asserting her right, or maybe Hjalti put her up to it to begin with. In any case little Sophia doesn’t know about her background, and her parents had no desire to let her biological parents into their idyll. What if they decided to ask to have her back?”
“That sounds awful,” Esther said, sounding distant and crisp.
“They made it clear Julie wasn’t welcome, but she kept contacting them. The last straw was apparently when she sent Sophia a teddy bear and signed a card to my Star Child. The parents freaked out. Erik Kingo promised to take care of it. Oscar explained they thought he was just going to talk to Christian Stender about it.”
“But he didn’t?”
“Oh, maybe at first,” Jeppe said. “But the situation escalated, probably when he and Julie met at your dinner party last March. I wonder if she put extra pressure on him there? She might have threatened outright to reveal that he was his own granddaughter’s biological father if he wouldn’t help her see Sophia. That revelation wouldn’t have gone down well with his son and daught
er-in-law. Or with his old friend Christian Stender.”
He could hear her fiddling with her blanket and swallowing noisily as if she were struggling with her own emotions.
“That damn dinner party! That was the night I opened up about giving up my own baby for adoption. My story was parallel to Julie’s and could also work as a plausible carrot for David Bovin, who was searching for his own biological mother. I played right into Kingo’s hands.”
“Yes, he must have enjoyed the symbolism and the drama of that coincidence. Bovin turned out to represent a unique opportunity to clear Julie out of the way in a spectacular manner.”
“And hurt me at the same time.” She sounded calm, almost apathetic. Maybe it was just the painkillers that took the edge off her reaction. “But if Bovin wanted to exact revenge on me, how then did Kingo convince him to kill Julie instead?”
“Your book. The manuscript was a gift from above. In it you described the murder of a young woman in your own building, so if the murder actually happened, it would be ruinous for you. Esther de Laurenti, discredited and under suspicion. That’s how he must have pitched it.”
“That sounds ridiculous,” she protested.
“Even so, that’s what must have happened. Bovin won over Julie’s confidence, thanks in part to knowing intimate details about her that Kingo must have shared. The significance of the epithet Star Child for instance. Julie told you about her love for the man she had met in the street, and you yourself made up the murder for your book based on her information.”
“Building blocks of fiction and reality, alternating all the time. I couldn’t have written it better myself.”
Her voice was so heavy with grief that Jeppe hesitated. She was a wounded elderly woman. There were limits to what she could take.
As if she had read his mind, she said, “I do want to know, Jeppe. It’s painful but I don’t want to be handled with kid gloves… So my writing Bovin into the manuscript gave him a formula for the actual murder, which was better than anything Kingo could have dreamed up. What went wrong, then?”
Jeppe looked toward the dark figure in the wheelchair beside him and sensed her anxiety. They both knew what had happened.
“Kristoffer got in the way. We can only guess what he knew and why he contacted Bovin instead of calling us. But my theory is that he recognized him when you had your fingerprints taken. When Bovin planted the tape dispenser in your apartment too, by the way. He must have seen Bovin with Julie. Kristoffer did follow her on the night she was murdered, so why not on earlier occasions? I think he wanted to confront Bovin with what he knew. Maybe even get revenge. He did really care about her, didn’t he?”
Jeppe cast his last sentence as a question—but Esther didn’t answer. There was nothing to say. The darkness made it easier to reach over and take her hand. She squeezed it gratefully but also a little impatiently as if to ask him to get it over with.
“When Kristoffer was found in the chandelier, Kingo must have known that the plan was starting to spin out of control,” Jeppe continued gently. “He offered to punish Bovin himself if Stender would stall for time by turning himself in. He couldn’t risk Bovin being questioned… Of course, we’re never going to able to prove any of that. Just like we’ll never be able to prove that Stender pushed Julie’s Faeroese lover off a cliff, even though that’s probably what happened.”
“More murders? Is that one from a book as well, or did it happen in real life?” There was a touch of gallows humor in her voice.
“Sadly, real enough. One has to wonder why that poor Faeroese guy had to die. So much death. And all of it for one little child.”
She made a little sound, somewhere between a sigh and a smile.
“Isn’t that the only thing worth dying for, Jeppe? A child?”
* * *
IT WAS A clear night. After Jeppe had left, Esther de Laurenti could sleep even less. He had been considerate and refused to leave until he was sure she was okay. In fact everyone had been so nice to her, the doctors, the police and the nurses, nice and understanding. Earlier in the day a crisis counselor had even been by and spent ample time helping her put words to her feelings. But Esther didn’t have any trouble saying it out loud: I’m scared, I’m grieving, I regret. That didn’t make the feelings any easier to bear.
A woman in the bed next to hers made a rattling sound. Even at night the room smelled of overcooked chicken and cauliflower. She thought of Kristoffer’s bouillabaisse, which he used to spend a whole day making. Only for special occasions. When she retired from the university, he had cracked crabs, fileted monkfish, and made rouille from early in the morning. The aroma of fresh shellfish had driven the dogs crazy.
Esther wrapped the washed-out hospital blanket around her and shuffled slowly and unsteadily out to the visitors’ room, where during the day patients and family members pretended illness was not an issue. Now it was empty. An armchair was pulled over to the window, maybe the very same Jeppe had sat in a little while ago. She lowered herself tentatively and pulled her feet up under the blanket like a young girl, got comfortable and then carefully laid her head back.
When she was little and her grandmother passed away, her mother had told her that we turn into a star when we die. The thought had scared her; imagine hanging there all alone in the night, lonely and cold! Still, whenever she had missed her grandmother she had talked to the star, and then she had actually felt a little closer. When I die, my family dies with me, Esther thought. Not even the building will stand as I know it. My things will be thrown away or sold. No one will remember me and look for me in the sky.
In that moment, a falling meteor drew a long tail across the August sky.
“Oh!” she said aloud. Grasped the pendant she wore around her neck. As if on cue, another falling star appeared. And another, and all of a sudden the sky exploded over Copenhagen in a shower of shooting stars. Esther fed off the shimmering lights with the euphoria of those rare moments in life when you know you’ve been specially chosen. She saw the young people shining and dancing and glimmering in the sky. Julie. Kristoffer. The daughter she had never known. And just like that the tragedy was bearable, inexplicably relieved by the light from the starry sky. The grandeur of the universe.
Yes, we’re all going to die, she thought. But I’m not dead yet.
* * *
THE SUMMER NIGHT had long since embraced Copenhagen by the time Jeppe could finally crawl into his car and drive home to Valby. He was so tired he wasn’t sure he could even drive, so tired he felt sick.
His neighborhood was dark and quiet, the way only a suburb after midnight can be. Jeppe turned off his car and walked up the front path, his legs heavy, his footsteps dragging, unsure if he had enough strength left to lift the key up to the lock.
Something made him lift his gritty eyes from the front door. Intuition maybe, a whisper from above. The sky over him exploded into a white meteor shower, silent and violent at the same time. He watched for a moment, dumbstruck, then closed his eyes and saw the shooting stars on the inside of his eyelids. Heard his father’s voice.
Nice, huh?
Jeppe smiled and let the lights burn into him and brighten his mind. Felt his father’s hand in his own and remembered watching the August Perseid meteors together. The “Tears of Saint Laurenti.” But maybe the memory was just a figment of his imagination. We invent so many things.
After closing the door behind him, the first thing he did was check his phone and find that, as expected, Anna had not responded. Of course not. Yet another disappointment, but one of the minor ones. All relationships contain one part tenderness and one part hurt. All things considered, he had come out of this one with more of the former.
Jeppe washed down two ibuprofen tablets with some lukewarm red wine from a bottle that just might have been sitting open for several weeks, and immediately felt that pleasant tingling in his lips. Brought the bottle into the living room and lay down on the sofa.
After they knew the fertility tr
eatments weren’t going to work, he and Therese had gone through the adoption approval process. They had gone through countless agonizing interviews and weekend stays of edifying lectures, and he himself had been at a point where he would have paid any amount to find a nameless little baby on his doorstep. If for nothing else than to stop Therese’s tears.
Jeppe rubbed his dry eyes. The case was over, he should feel some degree of relief.
The bedding was still on the sofa smelling musty. He sniffed and flung the comforter away in disgust. Looked at the dusty bottle of wine, his vision swimming with fatigue and medicine. Was this peak patheticness, or did he still have further to fall before he reached the bottom, before things turned around?
Like a shot he got up and stormed into the bedroom, tipping over the wine bottle and permanently ruining the rug he hated anyway. Without thinking, he went for Therese’s old nightstand and grabbed it with both hands. He could live with her boxes in the garage: the LPs she hadn’t picked up, her letters and mortarboard, left behind like bad graffiti of what used to be. But this particular memorial he was done with! In firm resolve, he carried the nightstand with its Kama Sutra book through the house and to the back door, where he tossed it into the darkness. It crackled loudly as it landed on the grass. The Tivoli picture of Therese followed promptly thereafter.
Then he locked the door, lay down in his bed, and fell asleep.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 14
CHAPTER 39
Tuesday morning Jeppe woke up with a sadness so monumental that he couldn’t get out of bed. He sensed that the feeling would take over completely if he even tried to get up, so in the end he just stayed put. It had to be acceptable for him to take a day off and leave the press briefing to the superintendent. He rolled onto his side and closed his eyes to the world.
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