Three Dog Night (27 page)

The girl was clearly giving the question some thought.

‘Tora said he had a pal called Ibrahim. She was scared of him.'

‘Why?'

‘Something about Ibrahim lording it over Swatch or something like that. I didn't really ask. I didn't want anything to do with it.'

‘When did you last see her?'

Another pause for thought. They could hear the girl taking a drag of a cigarette.

‘Three, four weeks ago, I think.'

‘December the tenth?'

‘That sounds about right.'

‘The last photos her parents got via the Internet were taken that day. They show you and her at a café in town. Who took the picture?'

‘Tora got the waiter to take it. We were in Bruuns Galleri. In the coffee bar.'

‘Didn't you wonder why you didn't hear anything from her?'

‘Nope.'

There was another silence, then the girl said: ‘She came straight from the gym that day. I think she worked out at fitness.dk up in Banegårdsgade. I think her boyfriend was a member there, too.'

Anna Bagger pressed stop. She scanned the assembled officers.

‘We need to find Swatch and Ibrahim. We can start at the fitness centre. We also have to show photos of Tora at the kind of cafés and restaurants in the centre of Århus where young people go.'

A couple of detectives were assigned to the job and packed their things to go to Århus.

Anna Bagger pointed to the photos of Gry.

‘They're all connected. As previously mentioned, Gry knew Tora as one of the three girls who came from nowhere and spent time with them. One of the others might have been called Lily. She was short and dark with lots of piercings. The third girl is vaguer and described as tall, with a square face and a mullet haircut, as it's known, layered at the top and long at the back. Someone must have seen those girls. They must have been staying somewhere.'

She looked at Mark and he knew what was coming.

‘Mark, we need your local knowledge.'

There wasn't a hint of irony in her words, but even so he detected an obvious unrest among the other officers, although he wasn't able to say who was responsible. They knew everything, of course. They knew he had been one of Gry's punters. Fortunately, they also knew that the receptionist at the hotel had confirmed his story about the Coke. He wasn't the last person to see Gry alive, but he had acted irresponsibly. It wasn't something people respected.

Anna Bagger cleared her throat.

‘See what you can dig up. What do Gry's colleagues have to say? When did they last see Tora? Under what circumstances? Who else was she seen with?'

She pointed to two officers in the back row.

‘Go and talk to Gry's parents. They live in Rønde. What kind of girl was she? Who were her friends? What was her life like?'

‘Where did Gry live?' Mark asked.

Anna Bagger flicked through some papers in a file likely to include a list of the contents of Gry's handbag. She held up a yellow health insurance card.

‘Fredensgade twenty-seven. We went there last night, obviously, and it has been cordoned off, but why don't you go and see what you can discover.'

‘What kind of property is it?'

‘Private landlord,' she said. ‘A small flat. There are four flats in total and the landlord lives in one of them. The other three are rented out to young girls who might be in the same line of business as Gry, but we need to determine that. Their names are …'

Anna Bagger looked down at her notes and straightened up again: ‘Helle Bjergager and Iben Bank. We've interviewed Iben Bank but we didn't glean very much. She says she was in Århus visiting a sister all of December and the sister has confirmed that. But we still need to speak to Helle, who wasn't at home last night.'

‘Anything else?' Mark asked.

Anna Bagger hesitated.

‘We haven't found any receipts for rent paid anywhere. I guess it's probably cash in hand. But perhaps the landlord and the tenants had come to a somewhat different arrangement.'

Ten minutes later he was shown into a dilapidated old house in the northern part of the town by a middle-aged man with a beer belly, a stained jumper and days-old stubble covering several chins. His trousers were old-fashioned men's slacks in an indeterminate shade of grey, held up with a piece of red string, not a belt. Under the camel-coloured jumper he wore a red checked shirt in heavy duty cotton.

‘Asger Toft?'

‘The police again?'

He eyed Mark from head to toe. Mark nodded.

‘Is there some place we can talk?'

The man shook his head, but opened the door for Mark to pass into the dark hallway. There was a smell of filth and damp. The plaster was flaking off the walls.

‘Are you the owner?'

They entered a sitting room with furniture jammed in so close together you had to navigate around it with great care. The place looked like something from a car boot sale. Asger Toft explained that he'd inherited the property from his mother, who had died in 1997. Gry had lived there for six months, the other two girls for nine months.

‘Did they know each other, the three tenants?'

‘Of course they did.'

‘Are they in the same line of business?'

‘I wouldn't know anything about that. They just live here. Lived.'

Something inside the man's mouth made a clicking sound as he spoke. Mark wondered if it came from his teeth.

‘Did they ever have visitors in their rooms?'

The man shrugged.

‘I didn't keep track of that. But they weren't allowed to have anyone staying over. Unless they paid extra.'

‘How much was the rent for Gry's flat?'

There was a brief hesitation. Then the mouth clicked: ‘Three thousand kroner.'

‘Can I see the rent book, please?'

‘She was in arrears.'

‘If she was in arrears, why was she still living here? Or perhaps she paid you in some other way?'

The man looked at him. Small eyes hidden in pouches of fat.

‘Is that illegal?'

Mark nodded.

‘It's procuring. Good as. You accepted sex as payment. Did you also take a share of her earnings?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about. Like I said, guests cost extra.'

There was a noise from the stairwell. Mark quickly got up and opened the door. Outside stood a girl who was just as pathetic and skinny-looking as Gry.

‘Is your name Helle?'

‘Who wants to know?'

He recognised her as the girl who had been working in the harbour alongside Gry. Then he nodded and introduced himself. Reluctantly she agreed to invite him in and he left Asger Toft to his own devices. The flat was small, possibly twenty-five square metres. The furnishing was austere, a sitting room-cum-bedroom. The bedspread was burgundy, distressed velvet, as were the curtains. There was a circular table with a white embroidered tablecloth and three square black candles of varying heights on a small metal tray. There were two high-backed chairs that could have belonged to his grandmother.

‘You know Gry is dead, don't you?'

She nodded. They had sat down on the chairs facing each other. She sat with her legs together like a schoolgirl. Her face had been made up to look tarty, but underneath the make-up she might have been beautiful. She had a small, delicate snub nose and her lips were full in a sulky sort of way, yet looked as if they could easily break into a smile. Her hair was blonde and cut very short to reveal a finely shaped head with small ears close to her head.

‘How old are you?'

‘Twenty-three.'

He sat for a while without saying anything. She just looked at him with a gaze which was so direct he struggled to return it.

‘What do you want to know?' she asked.

‘Did Gry have any regular customers?'

‘You.'

A quick smile flitted across the face and a dimple appeared. But then she grew serious again.

He had deserved that.

‘Do you know anything about the three girls who were here right before Christmas? Such as where they lived?'

She shrugged. ‘Sometimes they stayed here. Either with Gry or with me. Otherwise I don't know where they would …'

‘What were their names?'

‘Tora, Lily and Lena.'

‘What else?'

She didn't know.

‘Why did you let them stay here?'

She shrugged, uninterested.

‘They had money and they were fun to hang out with.'

‘Where did the money come from? Did they have jobs?'

She looked as though he'd asked her an obscene question. She shook her head.

‘Drugs?'

‘A bit. Some coke and so on. Nothing major.'

‘Did they have friends in town? Do you know what they were doing here?'

Her face took on an expression that didn't suit her. She was far too young to look like that, Mark thought.

‘They hung out with all sorts of people,' she said, vaguely studying nails that looked too perfect. They'd probably been bought in some cheap salon.

‘The three of them had a plan,' she said, apparently testing the strength of the nails by clicking them against each other. ‘They wanted us to help them, but Gry and me had to work.'

‘How were you meant to help them?'

The girl shrugged her shoulders.

‘Sometimes they would get on their high horses. Talk about standing together, that sort of thing.'

‘What were you supposed to understand by
standing together
?'

Helle chewed at a nail and eyed him.

‘It's important,' he said, urging her. ‘Gry's dead. She lived a life exposed to all kinds of dangers. Like you do.'

She looked down and concentrated on picking at a cuticle, then she sighed.

‘OK. They needed help to find a treasure. They promised there would be money in it for us.'

‘Where was the treasure supposed to be?'

She squirmed.

‘Somewhere on the seabed, they said.'

Mark thought about Ramses and about the body of Tora recovered from the harbour. Could this really be about a treasure?

Helle quickly added: ‘Of course we didn't believe them. They were usually drunk when they talked about it.'

E
NNER
M
ARK, AKA
East Jutland Prison, near Horsens, was situated in a barren and hostile icy landscape. A glacier where no life could grow.

But there was life here. Peter knew that from personal experience. Not a happy life, but a life, one that fitted the place the way it looked today, with the wind howling and the snow blowing in Arctic gusts across the open terrain. Low yellow buildings lay like oversized rectangular Lego bricks, abandoned in the middle of a snowstorm by a petulant child and surrounded by a 1,400-metre perimeter wall and two fine-meshed metal fences. The homepage promoted the prison's numerous facilities as though it were a five-star hotel you could book for a holiday in the Mediterranean sun. However, a stay at Enner Mark guaranteed no sunshine; on the contrary, it meant an impersonal sojourn in the shadows.

He was examined at close quarters and asked to identify himself by the guard, who was new and fortunately didn't recognise him. He was processed through security as though he was a dangerous terrorist at a high-tech airport. No mobile, no bags. He had brought two packets of Camel as a gift. They, too, were scanned and treated as though they contained explosives.

Normally he would have had to apply for permission to visit the prison and various letters would have gone back and forth. But Peter's old friend, Matti Jørgensen, had used his influence from his past life as a prison officer. Matti had also grown up at Titan Care Home and Peter had been very surprised to meet him again when he was sent to Horsens Prison. Big, good-natured Matti, who had been such a frightened child, had been the one person who made his last months in prison bearable. He was the reason why Peter was now following hard on the heels of a prison officer who opened various doors simply by running a finger across the fingerprint scanner. No heavy bundles of keys here. Everything was just how spacecraft were conceived in the Nineties: silent apart from digital clicks and beeps. Artificial, sexless and claustrophobic.

He was led through long corridors to the visitors' section, where the pale wooden furniture was upholstered in blue, which brought him back with a bump to his time in the carpentry workshop. Naturally enough the interior was furnished with its own products and the result was a clumsy, autocratic, institutional attempt to create cosiness.

He was told to wait. The room was much too hot and he could feel sweat starting to trickle down his forehead. His whole body itched and he had to force himself to breathe in and out calmly, more calmly than he felt.

There was a Thermos flask of coffee on the table and a couple of cups. He poured himself one purely to keep himself busy and noticed that his hands were shaking slightly. He was locked inside, but kept telling himself that he could get out. This time he could get out. All he had to do was call the prison officer and say he had changed his mind and a few minutes later he would be back outside in the cold, feeling the wind on his face and sucking it into his lungs.

He put down the coffee cup, closed his eyes and could almost feel the wind and frost. In this way he fought against the walls closing in on him. He was able to push against them. He wondered how Cato, who was now serving his sentence in this place where Peter had once been, dealt with his claustrophobia. All his brothers and sisters who had grown up at Titan Care Home suffered from a fear of enclosed spaces. He himself had managed, Peter thought. He had a system. If he felt he was on the verge of suffocating and if he was mentally back in time, trapped in the Box, he thought about the
family
and disappeared into a fantasy of a happy life. He could handle his fear and had done so during the four years he was in prison. But My would never have survived here. They would have found My hanging from her sheets one morning, he had no doubt about that.