Death Sentence (30 page)

‘You’re sure you’re feeling better?’ he asked and got up.

I nodded.

He kept looking at me. ‘The power of phobias is extraordinary,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen grown men break down in aeroplanes and police officers run away from a domestic spider … By the way, haven’t you written a novel based on phobias?’

I tried to swallow the last drops of water from the glass.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘
In the Red Zone
.’

‘
In the Red Zone
,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll make a note of that. Phobias are fascinating, perhaps I ought to read it.’

My breathing had almost returned to normal, but my heart was still pounding like a marathon runner’s.

‘I think you should,’ I said and managed a smile.

‘Right,’ Vendelev exclaimed. ‘I’ll leave you in peace so you can recover. We can always discuss Verner’s pet project some other time.’

I nodded and smiled, even though I knew that if I ever saw Sergeant Vendelev again, it would be in handcuffs.

THE FIRST THING
I did when Sergeant Vendelev had left me alone in my hotel room was to take off my clothes and have a shower. My body smelled of sex and death and Linda Hvilbjerg’s blood was still smeared across my legs. I showered for more than half an hour before I felt clean again.

I put on a fresh set of clothes and sat down on the sofa with
Outer Demons
. My strongest feelings of horror had subsided and been replaced by a sense of purpose, prompted by my discovery. I had found out what motivated the killer: factual errors in my books. Now I had to think of a way to stop him.

Outer Demons
was my third book and I hadn’t put much effort into researching it. Verner had helped me with minor aspects, but the book had practically written itself and I didn’t want to wreck it by making it technical or didactic. Consequently, I might be looking for several factual errors; it was only a question of which ones had offended the killer the most.

After its publication I had received quite a few letters,
but
I couldn’t remember anyone complaining about specific details. Many felt it was a disgusting book they could barely bring themselves to read to the end, but this was because of the graphic violence, not because it was unrealistic.

I stared at the photo of my daughter. I was gripped with panic and it spread through my body. I placed the picture on the coffee table face down and concentrated on the book. I started flicking through it page by page. There were no notes, no marks or clues to guide me. When I had finished, I closed the book and pressed it to my forehead as if I could extract its secret through the power of my mind.

Outer Demons
is a book about a monster, Henrik Booring, a rich man who has inherited the family fortune and need never lift a finger for the rest of his life. He can buy anything he wants – houses, cars and women – and he does so with no regard for the cost. Slowly, his tastes become more and more perverted and other people become his playthings. When he tires of straight sex, he pushes his limits with sadomasochism, sex with men and domination, but nothing really turns him on. After all, it’s only a game, an arrangement between consenting adults, and what he wants is the real thing, real pain, unadulterated horror. Booring’s first project is his neighbour’s daughter, a busty 15-year-old he has been spying on while she sunbathes. He tortures her in his newly built dungeon but, due to his inexperience, she dies far too quickly. Disappointed and dissatisfied, he starts to practise. He abducts several teenage girls and takes detailed notes during their torture
to
refine his methods. By closing up wounds quickly, transfusing blood, administering different types of medicine and even a defibrillator, he can keep his victims alive for longer, and he feels ready to attempt to crown his achievements: the Princess. He has become attracted to a 13-year-old beauty, the daughter of one of his domestic staff, and he knows instantly that he must possess her … fully.

In the meantime, the Flying Squad has started investigating the case. Inspector Kenneth Vagn is its public face, a thankless job as the media quickly lose patience and demand that the case is solved. Booring takes pleasure in the police’s frustration and taunts Inspector Vagn. Through a complex network of intermediaries and a series of riddles, a line of communication is established so that the two opponents can write to each other. Booring hints that soon he will be ready for the Princess, the object of all his efforts and the last girl he intends to abduct. He has perfected his methods of torture and thinks he can keep her alive for as long as he wants to. Inspector Vagn senses that time is running out and works on the case day and night. He is a walking zombie existing on coffee and pills. The Princess is abducted and Booring sends Vagn detailed descriptions of what he is doing to her, observed with the precision of a forensic examiner and a thriller writer’s talent for generating horrifying images. The inspector wears himself out following up every lead, no matter how vague or insignificant it appears, and in the end his persistence leads to the breakthrough. A builder who helped construct the dungeon in Booring’s house noticed several unusual features, including extensive
soundproofing
, air filters and a complex locking and alarm system. When the recent victim can be linked to Booring through her father who works for him, Inspector Vagn strikes. On his own, he pays a visit to Booring, and it ends with a showdown in the dark corridors of the dungeon where the inspector finally kills the murderer with a fatal shock from the defibrillator.

The Princess is still alive, but will never have a life.

Torture scenes and detailed descriptions of how the victims die made my career, but I was failing to make a breakthrough now and see where I had gone wrong.

The photo had been inserted on
see here
, roughly halfway through the book. I leafed back and forth a couple of pages, searching through my own words to find the hidden meaning.

This section didn’t, unlike the other passages the killer had selected, concentrate on the actual killing or the torture of the victim. It took some time before that particular penny dropped. This was significant, but how? Frantically, I flicked back and reread the whole section. My frustration grew. I stood up, went back to the start and read the text aloud to myself while I gestured with my free hand.

No matter how many times I read the passage, I couldn’t understand what I was looking for.

It was a description of the police tailing one of the go-betweens for the correspondence between Inspector Vagn and the killer, an operation that turned out to be a dead end as the courier knew nothing about anything. The physical handover took place via a PO box – a
rather
antiquated means of communication today, but the internet wasn’t particularly widespread when I wrote the book and an anonymous email address wouldn’t have provided the same possibilities for suspense.

I tossed the book aside.

Had I been mistaken? Was the place where the photo had been inserted irrelevant or had I just failed to find the clue? I sank into the armchair beside the coffee table, leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

The post office where the PO box was located was in Østerbro. It was a majestic-looking building with broad steps and columns either side of the oak front door. I tried to replay the scene in my head. Plainclothes police officers were watching the post office, a relatively straightforward task as the building faced Fælledparken. In front of the entrance was a large gravel square with several benches where the observers could sit down. The courier, a young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a ponytail, cycled down Østerbrogade and turned into the post office.

I opened my eyes. Something didn’t add up.

I leapt up and went to pick up the book, which had landed on the floor by the window. The title page had been bent after its flight. With shaking hands I found
see here
. The description of the courier was correct and he did indeed cycle down Østerbrogade.

However, in real life the post office was located on the corner of Blegdamsvej and Øster Allé, not Østerbrogade as in the book.

I frowned. It was an almost unforgivable mistake. The geography of my novels is always thoroughly checked so it was beyond me how this howler had slipped through
proofreading
and several editions. It was one thing that I had made a mistake, that was embarrassing in itself, but that no one had spotted it was unbelievable.

I went over to the console table where the telephone stood. In one of the drawers I found the telephone directory and opened it at the front, where there was a map of Copenhagen and the area of Østerbro. Ten seconds. That’s how long it took me to verify the location of the post office.

The description in
Outer Demons
was wrong.

MY COMEBACK NOVEL
,
A Bullet in the Chamber
, was fairly successful, but it would have had more of an impact if I had been willing to promote it. I stayed in the cottage and let my editor talk to the press. Finn was unhappy. He preferred his authors to flog the goods. Let the punters see the rabbit.

He was, however, delighted with the book.

‘Great craftsmanship,’ he said several times and that was precisely how I saw it. I had no deeper feelings towards
A Bullet in the Chamber
than a builder towards a floor he has laid or a carpenter for a shed he has put up. Yet the publication marked a turning point in my career as a writer. If I had once kidded myself that I was destined to write world-class literature,
A Bullet in the Chamber
was my epiphany. I now knew that I would never write the great Danish contemporary novel, but I could easily see myself as the kind of bread-and-butter writer we had always despised back in the Scriptorium days. In a way, I was relieved.

My neighbour was downright chuffed. Bent threw
himself
into his own promotional tour around the holiday resort. In the months that followed publication, he always carried spare copies in his old Fjällräven rucksack. He was never modest when it came to explaining his role in the creation of the book, and many people must have got the impression that he was really my ghostwriter or that I had simply taken dictation from him. Not that I cared. Bent was due some of the credit that the book had been written at all, so he deserved a pat on the shoulder. I had certainly no need for attention.

Whether it was Bent’s enthusiasm or Finn’s marketing that did it, I don’t know, but the novel sold well, although without ever reaching the heights of
Outer Demons
. It received a fair amount of press coverage. Some interpreted it as a critical response to Denmark’s participation in the first Iraqi war – completely unintentional from my side – but the association stuck and has haunted the book ever since. Because of this I received numerous letters from soldiers who had been posted to Iraq, and again later when Denmark joined in for the second half. Many of them told of physical and psychological trauma. They were surprisingly frank about excess drinking, family problems and the difficulty of readjusting after returning home.

A few letters contained direct threats against my life, either because I, in the sender’s opinion, had given a completely distorted picture of serving in Iraq, or because the sender felt that outsiders shouldn’t be allowed to write about it when they had never been there and seen comrades killed by IEDs or had snipers take pot shots at them.

I kept all these letters in a box like old family photos
you
haven’t got the heart to throw out. I sensed a kinship with those lost souls who now lived alone with only the bottle for company and the memory of a family who no longer wanted to know.

But at least I had something to do, something that could occupy my thoughts for several hours every day and provide me with a living. Writing became my fixed point and I adhered to my working routine with military precision.

I quickly discovered that being a writer is the world’s best excuse for being alone and I often used it as justification for getting rid of guests. Sometimes I would use it to stop people from visiting in the first place. If I pretended I would be writing all day, people respected it and didn’t disturb me.

Apart from giving me something to do, writing also became an outlet for the anger I discovered inside me. My divorce from Line took place through lawyers and it was a bitter experience to see my former life disappear like that.

As a result, I wrote
Nuclear Families
, a story about a group of housewives who are taken hostage by a robber in a supermarket. They overpower the robber, who dies when he is impaled on an umbrella stand, and the women discover they have something in common. Apart from being resourceful, they share a passion for morbidity and are all trapped in unhappy marriages. They start to meet in secret and strike a deal to murder the husbands while each wife has a rock-solid alibi. It quickly turns into a sport, one murder becomes more spectacular than the next, and the more the husband suffers the better. A police officer,
a
male chauvinist and a bragging caricature of Philip Marlowe, suspects a link between the murders. He has his own marital problems and it isn’t until he finally uncovers the group that he realizes the conspiracy is greater than he first presumed. His own wife has arranged for his female boss to kill him while she herself is at bingo. The police officer dies in a shooting accident on the last page of the book, just as his wife wins a full house.

Nuclear Families
was a furious attack on all women and their sisterhood. It was my antidote to the injustice I felt when Line took my children from me. It wasn’t a very good book, nor was it terribly popular with my readers, but it did its job. The critics slated it, but I was used to that by now and it didn’t upset me. A sole critic enjoyed the stereotypical gender depiction and was of the view that it was a big fat ironic response to the wave of girl power that had started to spread. But there was no truth in that. It was simply a bad book.