Disgrace (50 page)

‘Today’s the day we all get freed,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’

‘You there,’ she said, looking straight at Carl. ‘Kick that leather leash over to me.’ She showed him where it was, shoved halfway under the hyena’s cage.

‘Come here, little one,’ she whispered into the cage, where the injured animal was breathing heavily, not once letting the three men out of her sight. ‘Come and have a snack.’

She threw the meat into the cage and waited for the animal’s hunger to overcome its fear. When it approached, she picked the leash up from the floor and inserted it carefully between the bars, so that its noose encircled the slab of meat.

Confused by all the people and the empty silence they created, it took some time before the hyena gave in.

When it dropped its head to the meat she pulled the strap so the animal was caught in its noose. Ditlev Pram took off, running towards the door to the angry protests of the other two.

She raised her pistol and fired. Pram dropped heavily, his head banging against the stone floor. He groaned loudly. With some difficulty she tied the strap to the bars, and the animal twisted its head from side to side, trying to get free.

‘Get up, Ditlev,’ she said quietly, and when he couldn’t, she led the other two over to him and made them carry him back.

Carl had seen shots halt a fleeing man before, but nothing as clean and effective as the wound that had split Pram’s hip socket in two.

His face was white as a sheet, but he said nothing. It was as if she and the three men found themselves in the middle of a private ceremony that no one was permitted to leave. Something silent and unspoken, yet understood by all.

‘Open the cage, Torsten.’ She looked up at Assad, still hanging from the top. ‘You were the one who saw me at the central station. You can come down now.’

‘Allah be praised!’ he said, as he unhooked his feet from the bars. When he landed he could neither stand nor walk. Every part of his body was numb, and had been for some time.

‘Get him out, Torsten,’ she said, following his every movement until Assad lay outside the cage on the floor.

‘Now you three get in,’ she said quietly.

‘Oh God, no. Let me go,’ Ulrik whispered. ‘I never hurt you, Kimmie, don’t you remember?’

He tried to arouse pity by pulling a pathetic face, but she didn’t react.

‘Move,’ was all she said.

‘You might as well kill us,’ Florin said, as they heaved Ditlev Pram inside. ‘None of us will survive in prison.’

‘I know, Torsten. I hear you.’

Pram and Florin said nothing, but Dybbøl Jensen whined, ‘She’s going to kill us, don’t you get it?’

When the cage door slammed shut, she smiled, leaned back and threw the pistol as far behind her in the hall as she could.

It landed with a smack, metal against metal.

Carl looked down at Assad, who lay rubbing his legs, smiling. Except for the blood still dripping slowly from his hand, this was a truly welcome turn of events.

It was at this point that the three men began shouting at once.

‘You there, get her!’ one shouted to Assad.

‘Don’t trust her,’ Florin urged.

But the woman didn’t move an inch. Just stood observing them, as if an old film was playing that had long been forgotten but had now somewhat reluctantly resurfaced.

She went over to Carl and pulled the tape from his mouth. ‘I know who you are,’ she said. Nothing else.

‘I know who you are, too,’ Carl said, and took a deep, liberating breath.

Their exchange of words made the men cease with their protesting.

Florin came up right beside the bars. ‘If you two policemen don’t do something now, she’s the only one here who’ll be breathing in five minutes. Do you realize that?’
He looked Carl and Assad in the eyes, one after the other. ‘Kimmie’s not like us, OK? She’s the one who kills people, not us. It’s true that we’ve assaulted people, that we’ve beat them senseless, but Kimmie is the only one who has killed.’

Carl smiled, shaking his head. Survivor types like Florin were like that. No crisis was to be viewed as anything other than the beginning of a success. No one stayed down for ever, until the day the Grim Reaper paid a visit. Florin was used to fighting, and he did so without scruples. Hadn’t he and his friends just tried to kill Carl? Hadn’t they thrown Assad into the hyena’s cage?

Carl turned to Kimmie. He had expected to see a smile, but not this joyous, icy grimace. She stood there as if in a trance, listening.

‘Yeah, just look at her. Is she concerned? Does she look like she has any feelings? Look at her finger. It’s dangling. Does it make her whine? No. She won’t whine about anything, including our deaths.’ The words came from the floor of the cage, where Ditlev Pram lay with his fist stuck into his nasty wound.

For a moment the dreadful events the gang had called forth filed past in Carl’s mind. Could they be speaking the truth? Or was it just part of their fight for survival?

Then Florin spoke again. He wasn’t a king now. Wasn’t a leader. He was simply himself. ‘We acted on Kristian Wolf’s orders, you understand? We found the victims according to Kristian’s instructions. And we beat them all together until we weren’t having fun any more. And all the while that evil woman stood there with her head back, waiting for her turn. Well, naturally, once in a while she
took part in the punishments, too.’ Florin paused and nodded, as if he could see it all before him. ‘But she was always the one who did the killing, you’ve got to believe us. Apart from the time Kristian had an issue with her old boyfriend, Kåre, it was always Kimmie. We prepared the way for her, nothing more.
She
was the killer. Only her. And that’s how she
wanted
it.’

‘Oh God,’ Dybbøl Jensen groaned. ‘You’ve got to stop her. Can’t you see that Torsten’s telling the truth?’

Carl could feel the mood shifting in the room – and deep within himself. He watched Kimmie open her shoulder bag quite slowly, and he could do nothing, bound and exhausted as he was. The men held their breath. Carl saw that Assad was now closely following events in anticipation of what was to come, and with all his strength was trying to get to his knees.

She found what she wanted in the bag and pulled out a hand grenade. She held the safety latch and pulled out the pin.

‘
You’ve
done nothing, my little friend,’ she told the hyena, looking directly into its eyes. ‘But you can’t very well live with that leg, you know that, don’t you?’

She turned to Carl and Assad as Dybbøl Jensen screamed his innocence from inside the cage, promising he would accept the punishment he deserved if only they would help him.

‘If you value your lives,’ she said, ‘you’ll step back a bit.
Now!
’

Carl protested, but did as he was told, with his hands bound behind his back and his pulse racing. ‘You, too,
Assad,’ he said, and watched as his partner crab-walked backwards.

When they were far enough away, she stuck the hand holding the grenade into her shoulder bag and in one movement slung it through the bars into the furthest corner of the cage, then leaped aside as Florin threw himself on the bag in a vain attempt to toss it back through the bars of the cage. It exploded, leaving the hall an inferno of fearful animal cries and endless echoes.

The blast threw Carl and Assad against a number of smaller cages that fell on top of them and which a moment later shielded them from a downpour of glass shards.

When the dust had finally settled and only the noise of the animals remained, Carl felt Assad’s arm reach out and touch his leg through the wreck of metal cages.

He pulled his boss towards him and made certain that Carl was OK before reporting that he, too, was OK. Then he tugged the tape from Carl’s wrist.

It was a dreadful sight to behold. Where the cage had once stood there were now metal pieces and body parts, a torso here, arms and legs there. Frozen expressions in dead faces.

Carl had seen a lot in his time, but never anything like this. Usually by the time he and the crime-scene techs arrived on site, the blood had stopped flowing and the bodies lay lifeless.

Here the border between life and death was still visible.

‘Where is she?’ Carl said, turning his eyes from what had once been three men in a stainless-steel prison cell. Forensics were certainly going to have enough to
rummage through. ‘I don’t know,’ Assad said. ‘She’s probably lying here somewhere.’

He hoisted his boss to his feet, and Carl’s arms were like two dead appendages that had nothing to do with him. Only his throbbing shoulder had a life of its own.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, moving towards the doorway with his friend.

That’s when they saw her standing there, waiting for them. With wild, dust-filled hair and eyes so deep they seemed to convey the sorrows and unhappiness of the entire world.

They told the dark-skinned men to withdraw. That they wouldn’t be held responsible for any of this and were out of danger. That they should concentrate on getting the animals out. And extinguish the fire. The women pulled their children close while the men stared at the hall, from which smoke now poured, black and threatening, above the shattered glass roof.

Then one of them shouted a few words, and suddenly they were all in motion.

Kimmie walked along voluntarily with Assad and Carl. Showed them the path to the firebreak. Pointed at the hasps that opened the lock. She was the one who, with few words, led them down sun-splashed forest paths to the train tracks.

‘You can do with me as you wish,’ she had said. ‘I’m no longer alive. I admit my guilt. We’ll go down to the train station. My bag is there. I’ve written down everything I remember.’

Carl tried to keep pace with her as he told her about the
box he’d found and about the terrible uncertainty that relatives of the victims had lived with for years, which could now be put to rest.

She seemed remote when he spoke about people’s sorrow at having lost a loved one. About how not knowing who had murdered their children or how their parents had disappeared had scarred them for life. People Kimmie hadn’t known. The others who had suffered besides the victims themselves.

None of this seemed to register with her. She simply wandered ahead of them through the forest, her arms limp at her side and her broken finger jutting out. The killing of her three former friends had clearly also meant the end for her as well. She had said as much herself.

People like her don’t survive long in prison
, he thought to himself. He just knew.

They reached the railway a good hundred yards from the platform. Here the tracks sliced through the forest as if drawn with a ruler.

‘I’ll show you where my bag is,’ she said, heading towards a bush close to the rails.

‘Don’t pick it up, I’ll do it,’ Assad said, forcing his way ahead of her.

He gathered up the duffel bag and walked the last twenty yards to the platform, holding the bag away from his body as if some mechanism inside would spear him if he shook it too much.

Good old Assad.

When they reached the end of the platform, he unzipped it and turned it upside-down, despite her protests.

Sure enough, there was a notebook inside. A quick riffling through it revealed that the first few pages were packed with descriptions of locations, incidents and dates.

It was an incredible sight.

Then Assad reached for a small, cotton bundle and yanked at its corner as the woman gasped and raised her hands to her head.

So did Assad when he saw what was inside.

A tiny mummified person with empty eye sockets. Its head completely black, its stiff fingers sticking out. Dressed in clothing scarcely bigger than a doll’s.

They saw her rush to the child’s corpse and made no move to stop her from snatching it up and clutching it tightly.

‘Little Mille, little Mille. Everything’s OK now. Mummy’s here and she will never leave you again,’ the woman sobbed. ‘We’ll always be together. You’ll get a little teddy, and we’ll play together every single day.’

Carl had never experienced that definitive, interconnected feeling people have when they hold their offspring in their arms immediately after birth. But he’d felt the absence of that feeling, at least theoretically. At a slight distance.

Now he looked at the woman and felt a sharp pang of regret and loss, so deep in his heart that it made him able to understand. And he raised his injured arm to his breast pocket, pulled out the small talisman – the teddy bear he had found in Kimmie’s metal box – and handed it to her.

She said nothing. Stood as if paralysed, staring at the toy animal. Slowly she opened her mouth and cocked her
head. Stretched her lips as if she were about to cry, vacillating for an endless moment between a smile and tears.

At her side stood Assad, uncharacteristically disarmed and vulnerable. With a wrinkled brow and an inner stillness.

She reached cautiously for the teddy bear. As soon as she felt it in her hand, she loosened up, filled her lungs to capacity and threw back her head.

Carl wiped his nose, which had begun to drip, and tried to look away so he wouldn’t surrender to the tears. Glanced down the tracks to where a group of travellers was waiting for a train, and where Carl’s car was parked beside the whistle-stop’s shelter. He turned around and saw the train creeping towards them from the other side.

He focused again on the woman, who was now breathing calmly and hugging the teddy bear and the child’s corpse close to her.

‘Well,’ she said, exhaling a sigh capable of loosening decades of emotional knots, ‘now the voices are completely silent.’ She gave a short laugh as tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘The voices have ceased, they’re gone,’ she repeated, raising her eyes up to the sky. Suddenly she radiated a peacefulness Carl didn’t understand.

‘Oh, little Mille, now it’s just you and me. It has finally come to pass.’ A sense of release sent her spinning around and around, embracing the corpse in a dance without steps that seemed to make her levitate.

And when the train was ten yards away, Carl watched as her feet danced to the side and hit the edge of the platform.