Three Dog Night (32 page)

As though by mutual agreement, they both looked at the briefcase.

‘Let's take another look at it,' he said. ‘Have you got a knife or a pair of scissors? I think we're going to have to destroy it.'

‘Do you think that he slit the leather to hide drugs inside?'

She answered her own question. ‘Surely you can see there's no room. There can't possibly be any money or drugs anywhere. It would take up too much space, don't you think?'

He agreed.

‘It's a wild goose chase,' she said. ‘I risked life and limb on a wild goose chase.'

‘Possibly. Now get me those scissors.'

He watched her go into the kitchen, a tiny figure in an oversized jumper with ski socks on her feet, gliding across the floor.

‘Here you are.'

She passed him the scissors. He took them and started cutting away the lining of the briefcase.

‘Your sister in Barcelona will be upset,' he said as the scissors sliced through the silky fabric.

‘I don't have a sister. And certainly not in Barcelona.'

He arched his eyebrows.

‘I'd forgotten what a good liar you are.'

‘Necessity teaches naked women to spin wool, as you say in Danish.'

He looked at her. She was right. That was what she was. Naked. Despite the jumper, the baggy jeans and the socks. So exposed and naked he could almost see her heart valve flaps opening and closing.

‘You're staring at me.'

She sounded very uneasy. He had nursed her and seen her body in every possible situation. He couldn't help smiling as he tore the lining from the briefcase in one piece. There were no banknotes or drugs, but he did find something else. Written in black felt tip pen on the red leather under the lining was a series of numbers: 561562 N 011 34 22 E.

Felix frowned.

‘The first bit looks like my dad's mobile number except that he has two-eight at the start and six-zero rather than six-two.'

‘That's the number on Stinger's arm.'

‘The second half could be my aunt's birthday, except that she was born in 'fifty-four and not 'thirty-four.'

She gave him an almost apologetic look.

‘When I did accounts and worked with numbers, I always had to find a system. Is that the location of the treasure?'

He nodded.

‘N is for North and E is for East. The numbers are degrees. We should be able to find it on the chart.'

‘Erik never could memorise numbers,' she said. ‘He could barely remember Maria's birthday. Or our wedding anniversary,' she added.

Peter got up and fetched the chart he had got from the chandler's. He unrolled it, put it on the table and held the corners down with an ashtray, a mug and two apples from the fruit bowl. It didn't take them long to find the spot where the two lines intersected. It was just like the fisherman in Grenå harbour had said.

‘Lille Lysegrund. A depth of ten to twenty metres,' Peter said, putting his finger on the chart. ‘An hour's sail from the harbour. It's perfect.'

Felix stared at the intersection on the chart. Her lips moved as though trying to memorise the position.

‘How did Erik get hold of these numbers?'

He turned to her. He could see her thoughts following his.

‘Ramses,' she said. ‘He's the link between Erik and the boat. He has to be.'

She slumped down on the far end of the sofa. Her gaze and her whole expression turned inwards. She took the briefcase from him, put it on her lap and ran her hands across the leather, playing with the key and the handle, clicking it open and shut.

‘I met him twice. No, I didn't meet him,' she corrected herself. ‘I saw him twice. Twice that I can remember. The first time he came to our house and was with Erik in his study. It seemed like an ordinary business meeting, but he did look a little unusual, as though he had made an attempt to dress up. Put on a suit, you know, and possibly a tie, yet it was obvious he wasn't an ordinary business associate.'

‘Do you know why he was there? Did he bring anything?'

She shook her head and clicked the lock again.

‘I don't remember. I only remember his face. His black hair, the sleepy eyes and the long lashes. He was a handsome man, as you know. The kind of man women notice.'

For a brief moment he wondered what she had noticed about him.

‘And the second time?'

She shut her eyes.

‘The second time was a few days before the helicopter trip.'

She spoke with her eyes closed as she had done when she was dancing.

‘He rang the bell and I let him in. He asked to speak to Erik, but he seemed stressed. Unshaven and scruffy. It was a very brief meeting.'

She opened her eyes.

‘He looked like a man on the run.'

Peter reckoned Stinger had been set up big time. Ramses hadn't known just one coordinate; he had known them both. He had known the location of the boat all the time, and perhaps that had been his death sentence.

‘S
HOULDN'T YOU BE
at home in bed?'

Anna Bagger looked hard at Mark. She probably meant well, but her attitude merely served to irritate him. As did her appearance, the blue silk blouse matching her eyes and signalling control, and the fact that apparently she felt entitled to make assumptions about his health.

‘I've got cancer. Not flu. Crawling under the duvet and taking paracetamol isn't going to make it go away.'

She blinked.

‘What's so urgent?'

The case wasn't progressing as she had expected. Neither was he. She was losing her grip, and part of him felt sorry for her while another part jumped for joy. They had been lovers once and she had left her mark on him. Perhaps he was only trying to get his own back.

He gestured towards the screen.

‘I'm watching a film.'

It was the truth. He had remembered the string of robberies carried out in Grenå just before New Year. Corner shops and even a bakery had been robbed by masked intruders who had terrified staff and forced them to empty their tills. It had suddenly occurred to him that the staff in every single case had been female. He had contacted businesses in town and in particular those shops which had been affected. All five victims had independently stated that the robbers hadn't spoken. Each time they had produced a note stating that it was a robbery. They had also been wearing ski suits, which convinced the victims that at least one of them was a man. Each robbery had been carried out by two or three perpetrators, and that was what had made the alarm bells go off.

‘CCTV footage? Where from?'

She looked over his shoulder.

‘This is from the bank next to the bakery where the robbery was.'

He explained his theory. Three women had arrived in town at around the time the robberies took place. Perhaps they had needed money. Perhaps they were the ones who had robbed the small shops, the ones with only a few assistants and cameras.

‘So obviously they wouldn't have risked robbing the bank,' he said. ‘But there's a fifty-fifty chance that they passed the bank's CCTV. They must've approached from the left or the right.'

She nodded. He continued.

‘The bakery was robbed on the twenty-second of December, just before Christmas. I know it's going to take time, but in my opinion there's a good chance we'll find them on the footage.'

She straightened up. Right now she had no choice but to accept his help, he thought. The case had become so complex that she had to rely on his experience. She had to relinquish some of her control, and he knew she loathed the idea of it.

‘Let me know what you find,' she said. ‘If we can identify the two others, we have an idea what happened to Tora. We need to find out when she disappeared and why. Who are their enemies?'

He felt a surge of satisfaction. He thought about Tora and Gry, who were dead, and about the missing Nina, who was very likely to be dead, too. As long as he kept his focus on the dead women, his mind was clear. So that was what he intended to do.

‘What about Gry's post-mortem?' he asked. ‘Can you tell me anything about the time of death?'

‘Not accurately, but somewhere between two and six a.m. the day she was found,' she said.

‘Have you found the murder weapon?'

Anna Bagger leaned towards his desk.

‘No, but the pathologist found quite a lot of DNA. No semen, though. Death was by strangulation. Her face was removed after death.'

Melancholy laid its heavy hand on him.

‘Same as with Tora.'

Her voice was, as always, cool and considered, but he detected a slight tremble. Same killer. It had to be.

‘I talked to people in the pub,' Mark said. ‘No one saw anything.'

She perched on his desk, although she didn't look like she had any intention of staying.

‘We're still looking for the man Gry had a row with. But he probably doesn't feel any great need to say he was out buying sex that night.'

‘Did you speak to Elise Røjel about the property in Fredensgade?' Mark asked.

‘We sent a man out there. Did you know she's the mother of that frogwoman?'

He nodded.

‘She sounded almost surprised to learn that she owned the property,' Anna Bagger said. ‘I think it's her husband's investment and he just put it in his wife's name.'

She got up and headed for the door.

‘We spoke to him as well, but he referred us to his lawyer and said he hadn't been to the property since before Christmas and he had no idea what was going on.'

‘Do you believe him?'

She turned and shrugged her shoulders.

‘Difficult to tell. But I find it hard to imagine that an old pig farmer would carry out a murder like Gry's. It doesn't really add up, does it?'

He shook his head. It didn't add up. There wasn't much that did. He thought about Kir's description of her family.

Anna Bagger hesitated before pressing the door handle. The moment stretched out and he knew what was coming.

‘What are the odds?' she asked.

He nodded towards the screen.

‘Same as here. Fifty-fifty, according to the doctors. They're going to give me some alternative treatment. The kind they offer you when traditional methods fail.'

He could tell from her face she thought it sounded dubious. As did he. He said nothing more, and she waved briefly and left.

Long after she had gone he was still concentrating on the screen, fast forwarding his way through the bank recordings.

His back straightened as three girls passed under the camera. And not only that. They came back again and stood for a while discussing something. Then one of them seemed to spot the camera and pull the other two away. He pressed freeze-frame. One of the girls had long blond hair and was slightly taller than the other two. Tora, he guessed. The other two girls were very different. One was wearing black punk clothes and had short black hair and a petite boyish body. The other had a mullet and broad features.

S
HE CAME TO
him at night, a dark shadow in all the blackness. He lay awake on the balcony listening to her footsteps on the stairs. Without a word, she slipped into his sleeping bag.

She was so thin; her breasts were small, practically non-existent. He had seen her frail and sick, but she had a strength he hadn't previously known and in her ecstasy she held him so tight and gave voice to pent-up lust, both hers and his, with an energy that had to originate from an atavistic past. He entered her in an explosion; she pulled him down towards her and caressed him.

Afterwards they lay stomach to stomach in his sleeping bag covered by the duvet. It almost felt more intimate than what they had just done.

‘They're looking for the coordinates, aren't they?' she said out of the blue. ‘They're not looking for me at all.'

He didn't quite know how to say it, but thought he might as well be honest: ‘I think they want both. The position because there might be valuables hidden in the boat on the seabed. And you because you're starting to remember more than they want you to.'

‘But how do they know that?'

He didn't know so he could only hazard a guess.

‘You've started to get out and about. You and I found Ramses. You were in my house when someone broke in. You went to pick up Erik's stuff from the office. You went to your house in Skåde. You tracked down the briefcase.'

She shuddered and her nerves spread to him.

‘Do you think someone has been watching me all this time?'

‘It's beginning to look like it.'

Her body was both hot and cold, just as it was both soft and hard. She snuggled up to him, reminding him of water seeping into every crack and crevice. Harmless on the surface, but with a force and a direction that could be overwhelming. He wondered if he would be allowed to keep her in his life.

‘Tell me about My,' she said, as though able to read his mind.

He looked up at the stars and searched for the words.

‘She died. She lived and she died. She was twenty-six years old.'

Felix turned her face up towards him. In the darkness all he could make out was her eyes.

‘Were you in a relationship?'

‘You couldn't be in a relationship with My.'

‘But you loved her?'

It was a word he would never have chosen himself. Not because it wasn't accurate, but because it was a word My wouldn't understand. For her, life was concrete. It was about the next meal, going for a walk with Kaj, sleeping on someone's sofa and avoiding her fears of the past, especially the Box. My had been absolutely terrified of the Box at the care home.

‘She was like a sister to me. We grew up together.'

Felix pressed herself against him and put her head on his shoulder. It stayed there, as light as a feather. As light as My's, but in an utterly different way he couldn't even begin to describe.