Three Dog Night (25 page)

He owed her a smile and she got it, but it was hard to keep it up.

‘Two girls without faces,' Kir said.

He nodded.

‘Two girls, same killer?' she asked.

It wasn't her business, but even so he told her what little he knew: what Gry had told him about the three women and a first name she'd given him which had helped them to identify the dead body.

‘I'm sure she knew more.'

‘And that's why the two of you had to take a room?'

He shook his head, ready with his defence, but she clearly didn't want to hear about his moral qualms.

‘Someone must have seen something,' she said. ‘Don't they have CCTV at the hotel?'

‘Not at this time of year.'

The provinces. No one expected anything out of the ordinary to happen, and certainly not in the winter when the cold kept people indoors.

‘You can see everything from the pub,' she persisted. ‘Red didn't close until late. Try asking him. Someone must have seen something.'

‘What about him?'

‘I've asked him.'

She looked away and he sensed a distance between brother and sister. Mark waved to Red, who nodded.

‘There were a couple of guests I didn't know. But I can get you a copy of their credit card receipts.'

He sent his sister a look. Soon afterwards he put a couple of beers in front of them.

‘On the house. You look as if you need them.'

The beer glasses were dewy. Outside, in the glow from the street lights, a Falck hearse pulled away heading for Århus and the Morgue? The dove-blue SOC van was still there, with two police vehicles and Anna's and the pathologist's cars. At the entrance to the hotel, red and white police tape fluttered in the winter breeze.

‘I hope they check for prints on the window in the room,' Kir said. ‘He could have jumped out. It's only one floor up.'

He nodded.

‘I'm sure they will.'

‘And then there was that customer she was arguing with. The man who was the reason you went outside.'

She didn't miss a thing.

‘You saw him close up,' she said. ‘You must be able to give a description.'

And added: ‘You being a police officer.'

He was, but a bad one, because he'd forgotten all about that row. He was fairly sure the customer had nothing to do with the killing, but of course they should talk to him. He called Anna Bagger on her mobile, outlined the incident and described the man.

‘Was he in a car?' she asked.

‘Yes, but I didn't see the model and I didn't get the number, either. I've given you everything I've got.'

She sighed.

‘Your mind was probably on other things. We'll look into it.'

He drained his glass and it struck him how quickly death could strike when it wanted to and how it could prolong the agony at other times. He hoped Gry's death had been quick. He was all too familiar with the fear when it dragged on and he knew what he would prefer – if he'd had a choice.

‘I
SHOULD GO
back to my place,' Felix said.

‘You're not going anywhere.'

He held her by the shoulders. He could still feel her bones, but a protective layer was forming around them even though she was still very thin.

‘Not until we know what all this is about,' he said. ‘Have you found anything in the boxes? Remembered anything?'

She shook her head.

‘I'm going round in circles.'

He made meatballs for them, with stewed white cabbage. That would put some more weight on her, he thought. After they had eaten, they sat on the sofa with tea and coffee like an old married couple and switched on the television.

He had never owned a TV and hadn't missed it, but his neighbour on the farm had bought a flat screen and given him his old one. TV2 was showing local news now. He sat up when he heard that a girl had been found dead at the Strand Hotel in Grenå. They showed footage of Kattegatvej; the hotel from the outside, parked police cars and officers carrying bags and boxes from the building. A detective, Anna Bagger, said a few words to a reporter. The girl's identity had yet to be established, but she was young and had checked into the room the previous night with a man who had now been identified. The police thought there might be a connection with the body found in the harbour, which had now been identified as an eighteen-year-old girl, Tora Juel Andersen from Nykøbing, Mors.

‘Strand Hotel. That's where we had dinner,' said Felix. ‘We saw that policeman.'

She looked at him with dark eyes.

‘What does that mean?'

He couldn't give her an answer.

‘Listen.'

She tucked her legs beneath her and listened. The first gust of wind took hold of the woodwork and howled around the house corners. The predicted snowstorm had arrived. Peter turned off the TV and got up to fetch the chart. He unfolded it on the coffee table and she leaned over and studied it.

‘This is where we crashed.'

She pointed to the area around Hesselø. ‘That's why I'm living here,' she said. ‘I wanted to get away, yet I wanted to be close to where it happened. Does that sound like a contradiction?'

He smiled.

‘It sounds like a tricky exercise.'

But he understood her. After he'd been released from prison, his first move had been to return to the woods around the care home. He had imagined he was looking for a future. But he had merely been seeking out his past.

He pointed to a line on the chart crossing Lille Lysegrund.

‘I think the boat must be near that. Brian's
Molly
.'

‘We need the other coordinate. We need to know precisely, otherwise we won't find it.'

‘And what if we do find something? What do we do with it?' she asked.

He was in no doubt.

‘We hand it over to the police.'

That was possibly what they should be doing now – just giving them everything they had. But there were too many loose ends and too many people he felt responsible for and whom he couldn't betray. Most of all her.

For the umpteenth time he wondered how it was all connected and in particular what Erik Gomez's role had been, if indeed he'd had one. Why would a man like him contact East Jutland Prison? She reckoned he'd known Ramses. But the date was wrong. At the time Erik had applied for a prison visit permit, Ramses had already been released. So who was he keen to visit? And why?

He had spent two years in the new East Jutland Prison after the closure of the old Horsens Prison. Cold and damp and outmoded though it had been, it was a lot less frightening than the new, modern, escape-proof facility where everything was so impersonal and computerised that even the warders seemed like robots. He had hated the place. He had hated the hierarchical separation into strong and weak prisoners that was allowed to flourish. He had hated seeing gang members recruit new disciples and make them run errands for them, and hated the fact that highly dangerous prisoners were allowed to serve out their sentence at a prison of their choice, where they had a substantial measure of control over their lives, could go shopping, cook meals and keep slaves. Whereas others who wanted to leave the gangs and provided the police with information were kept in the old remand cells for their own protection, with no other facilities than a loo and a hard bed. He had survived as he always had. Survival was his speciality. But he had never hated anywhere more than that prison and had sworn never to return.

He drank the last mouthful of coffee and put the mug on the table. With everything that had happened, including the killing they had just learned about on the television, it was now an oath he would have to break. But it wasn't the only one. Once he'd also sworn his weeks as a kidney patient in hospital would never return and gain a hold over him. He hadn't lied to Mark Bille Hansen: there had been a time when he only wanted to be left alone and either die – or if there was a miracle – learn to live with someone else's kidney. And when he'd left the hospital a healthy man, he'd had no desire to look back.

But you had to be careful with the promises you made, he realised that now. As a kidney patient he had met people who had changed his life. He hoped the reverse was also true as he picked up his mobile and called the ward to make an appointment with his old nurse.

F
ELIX KNEW THAT
Peter hated leaving her on her own. It was as if he feared a relapse and was scared the memory of the crash would weaken her. She was starting to remember more and more.

She watched as he drove off in the morning. She would have liked to stop him worrying, but she couldn't find the right words. Whenever he looked at her there were so many other things queuing up to be said, and underneath it all was the urge to cling to him. She fought it as best she could.

She sat down with the boxes from Erik's office. She knew perfectly well what had happened to her brain; she had learned the clinical terms during her hospital stay. She had suffered from both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Which was simply a nice way of saying that she didn't remember what had happened in the time leading up to the accident, nor the accident itself, nor the time that followed. Her memory had gone into protective mode and had tried to shield her from what had happened by tricking her into forgetting it. But she had known all along, of course. And she had also, on a purely intellectual level, known how to jog her memory. In a half-hearted attempt to help the Air Accident Investigation Board and the police she had put up the cuttings on the wall. But in truth she hadn't wanted to remember. Not until now.

Her rage helped her. The papers, the boxes from the office and what she had seen in her house would be her tools. Every little scrap of information, whether a taxi receipt or the sight of Erik's handwriting, would press a button which evoked a fragment of her memories.

She knew from her stay in hospital that it was a balancing act deciding how much you should delve into the past. For some people their experiences were so dreadful that reliving them would be more than they could bear. One of her fellow patients had had a breakdown and tried to commit suicide. She had fled from Sierra Leone where she had been tortured. The thought of reliving the memory of her torturers and what had happened in the torture chamber had been too much. Sometimes you had to accept that the brain knew best.

At other times a post-traumatic amnesia patient could find it a release to recover their memory, the psychiatrist had told her. As painful as it was to remember, it might help them to move on, possibly into a grieving process, which might later result in their returning to normal life.

Her memory loss had postponed her grieving. She hadn't started to grieve properly until she had woken up to the sound of the organ that day and afterwards sitting by the grave. And now she needed it like she needed sleep after countless sleepless nights. Grief would help her move from her zombie existence among survivors to a life among the living with her eyes open.

She emptied the last box on to the floor. Erik had worked for the company for over ten years so he'd accumulated a great deal: diaries, notebooks, folders, books. The company had, of course, retained all the commercial documents.

Felix flicked through Erik's 2008 calendar. His handwriting was elegant, with confident strokes and a slight slant. It had energy, as he'd had, and she remembered the love letters he had sent her over the years – little vignettes with affectionate or suggestive turns of phrase, but always with style. Those letters were probably still lying in a chest of drawers in her room, but she hadn't given them a thought in years.

She went on rummaging and checking everything in detail: shaking books upside down to see if they contained hidden notes, rifling through boxes of paper clips, staples, reams of paper and boxes of matches and Post-it notes. The items from the noticeboard were in a separate bag. She remembered Erik's noticeboard in his study and lingered over the familiar photos of Maria and her and Erik together. He had loved her once, she was sure. When had it stopped? What kind of life was it that he had kept hidden from her? He'd had mistresses, she knew that. But had there been anything else?

She thought about the expensive house. Two expensive cars. The boat. Numerous luxury holidays. Where had the money come from?

Erik didn't come from a rich family. He came from a family where you took chances, and once it had fascinated her. His father had run his construction company into the ground when she and Erik met. But they'd both lapped up the father's stories: stories of entrepreneurial daring, crushing your rivals without scruples, balancing on the edge of credit with banks as willing collaborators and living the high life. Exclusive wine, caviar, silk sheets at the Grand Hotel, a waiter waiting on you hand and foot at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, poker tournaments, women with voluptuous figures and red lips: sun, sex and non-stop champagne. He had made it sound so exciting. She and Erik had dreamed of life in the fast lane. And suddenly it was there. From one day to the next they frequented more and more expensive restaurants. The Toyota was replaced with a BMW, Erik's suits were now made by Armani, holidays were no longer taken on European beaches, but at the world's most exotic resorts and at legendary hotels. Armed with Erik's Platinum card she would go clothes-shopping and take her pick of expensive designer shops. Her childhood in Spain with a constant lack of money had left its scars. She'd sworn she would be rich one day. Now her dream had come true and she loved it. So much so that she swept all her doubts aside.

Felix sipped her tea. She had been naive in so many ways. Here she was in jeans from H&M and a sweater from Kvickly supermarket in Grenå. All her designer clothes hung in the wardrobe in Skåde and she no longer cared about them. It had turned out that Erik owed money to everyone. The bubble had burst, with the financial crisis. But it didn't matter any more. It had been there and now it was gone. And here she was in a cottage on a cliff at the end of the world, with a neighbour who was quite unlike anyone she'd ever met.