Life and Limb (13 page)

S
he would be punished, of that she was certain.

Kiki Laursen waited in her car outside the flat in Jægergårdsgade, debating the situation. She had sat there for thirty minutes and he had yet to appear. A neighbour had told her he was at work. The same neighbour had also been kind enough to tell her about the two police officers who had accompanied him from the flat and returned him three hours later.

‘In a police car?' she had asked.

The neighbour – an elderly man with a Cairn terrier on a lead and sallow skin from what looked like a hard life – had given her a knowing look.

‘Nah, civilian. They think we don't know who they are. But you can smell a cop a mile off.'

A chill crept over her, and the leather seat felt like ice. So far this summer had offered mostly rain, wind and autumn temperatures. She was half expecting the leaves to start falling from the trees.

She made up her mind, turned on the engine and reversed the car. Then she drove down towards the port, up Nørrebrogade, along Nørre Boulevard, to Peter Sabroesgade.

She parked outside number 9, where she waited and watched people disappear through the glass doors while others emerged, returned to their cars and drove off.

She lit a cigarette and rolled the window halfway down, even though she was cold. Why was she doing this? Why wasn't she at home with her husband and her children, vegetating in front of the television, living a normal life so that tomorrow she could discuss the latest episode of a series with the girls in the office? Where did it come from, this eternal, restless quest that writhed like a snake inside her, beckoning to her, pushing her onwards – just one more step – towards the abyss?

It had been there for as long as she could remember. It was her demon and her companion. Her shadow. Just like in the old Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.

She didn't know where it came from. She only knew that it was there and that she didn't feel alive without it.

She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and threw the butt out of the window. She had heard that some people were born without the ability to feel pain. An entire family – from somewhere in Italy, she believed – were the subjects of major research because they carried a unique gene that prevented them from feeling physical pain. A hand on a hot plate, a stomach tumour, a broken leg – no reaction until the body literally broke down.

Kiki opened the car door and got out. The wind shook her coat and she had to steady herself against the car to keep her balance.

Did she carry the gene? From her father perhaps? A gene which meant she couldn't feel alive like other people? A diminished ability to feel pain – not physically, but mentally? The biggest question was how much her mind could cope with before it gave up.

She looked up at the red-brick building and knew that he was inside somewhere. He was her chosen instrument of torture, sharp and finely honed, ready to inflict maximum pain in minimum time.

She took a deep breath and started walking towards the entrance. He was more than that, and that was possibly where the danger laid – the real danger.

She asked for him in reception and was referred to a staff office, where two men in green hospital tunics and trousers were sitting.

‘He's taking a patient to X-ray,' one of them said. ‘If you hurry you might just catch him.'

They pointed her towards the basement and gave her directions. When she got out of the lift the walls started closing in on her in sharp flashbacks. She had completely forgotten. She had been here before.

The corridor quickly began to slope downwards and she took wary steps in her high heels. There were no windows – only the red walls and vinyl on the floor, which had a stippled line down the middle like a road marking. She heard a whoosh and had to flatten herself against the wall as a vehicle came towards her. A porter was riding a kind of train pulling a hospital bed. There was a child under the sheets. Kiki caught a glimpse of her pale face moving past at high speed and felt the draught.

How could she have forgotten?

She was seven years old, and the only two things she could remember were the pain and then this: the tunnels under Aarhus Kommunehospital. Now it seemed that her entire hospital stay had been one long journey along the hospital's subterranean corridors from building to building, from examination to examination. No one had known what was wrong with her. No one could discover what had been causing the pain in her stomach. But she had screamed. Christ, how she had screamed – she could remember that. The screaming and the endless trips back and forth; the ceiling rushing past above her; the sudden braking when meeting oncoming traffic; the menacing, claustrophobic feeling that she would never see the light or inhale fresh air into her lungs ever again.

She took a deep breath. She should never have come.

The sound of squidgy tyres could be heard from around the corner and a porter appeared pushing a man in a wheelchair. The man had a large brown envelope on his lap. X-rays, she thought, and focused on the details. On the colours and the sound of the wheelchair's tyres, now fading into the distance; on the porter's clogs; on various doors she passed. There was nothing to be scared of any more – not in that way. Her childhood was over. It had gone for good and thank God for that. She was in control now.

She heard the sound of squealing tyres and found herself face to face with him. He was sitting astride the locomotive. An empty bed was attached to the vehicle. She hardly recognised him in the green porter's uniform, looking so surprised.

‘What the hell are you doing here?'

There was something different about him but she couldn't pinpoint what it was.

‘Looking for someone.'

She spoke in spasms.

‘Who, just anyone?'

She gulped. She was leaning against the wall, which felt cold.

‘You.'

‘Me?'

It took him a moment to compose himself. She could see that his facial features needed time to settle into the right expression. Then he drove the vehicle close to the wall, dismounted and came over to her.

‘Have I given you permission to come here?'

She shook her head. She wanted to look him in the eye, except she was too scared.

‘I was worried,' she confessed. ‘We had agreed to meet. You weren't there.'

‘And?'

‘And then I met your neighbour, who told me that the police had picked you up and brought you back again and that you had gone to work.'

He watched her for a moment.
He's weighing me up
, she thought.
He's deciding how to punish me.

His hand grabbed her wrist.

‘Come. In here.'

He pulled her into a dimly lit room that smelled of medicine. She felt his hands on her body, his breath against her, the pressure of him that was squeezing all the air out of her.

It took a moment before she realised that he was being gentle. Almost tenderly he lifted her up and carried her to a bed by the wall. Otherwise it looked like a storage room. There were piles of boxes and plastic bottles, possibly containing cleaning fluid of some sort. All kinds of mess. The bed had a strange smell.

They had regular sex. No threats, no whips and no pain. The only tension was the thought that someone might open the door and walk in on them. Afterwards they sat next to each other.

‘What did the police want?' she asked tentatively, studying his hands, which were fumbling with a forbidden cigarette. What were those hands capable of?

‘Bastards think I did it. Killed that girl at the stadium.'

He turned to her.

‘What do you think?'

‘Why would you have anything to do with that?' she said.

Her voice was trembling, but she hoped he couldn't hear it.

‘Because …'

Suddenly the light poured in. It took a moment before she realised that somebody had opened the door. A man in a porter's uniform was standing in the doorway.

‘What the hell ...'

He was very tall and the green uniform hung off him as if it was three sizes too big in the width, but it was far too short for him. He had a long face with acne scars and deep-set eyes.

Kiki quickly buttoned the last button of her blouse, knowing full well that the tiny room reeked of sex.

‘Hello, Charon,' said her lover and tormentor, ignoring the man's stares. ‘Allow me to introduce you to Kiki.'

S
he couldn't find the boots and was close to panicking. She had looked for them everywhere, but someone had moved them and now she desperately needed them: the heavy, black lace-up boots with the yellow stitching.

She knew with absolute certainty who the killer was: her mother. Her mother had disposed of the boots, and that needed avenging. She crept up on her. Her mother was sitting at a table, looking innocent. When questioned about the boots she shook her head and claimed she knew nothing, but she was lying. She had to be killed. The rage surged upwards like champagne against a cork as she grabbed her mother by the hair and shook her. She was brutal with her; there was no resistance and she smashed her head against the table again and again. The less resistance her mother offered, the greater her anger and violence.

‘Where did you put them?' she screamed, but there was no reply.

Then came a voice from far away, accompanied by caresses. A hand was stroking her back.

‘Wake up. You're having a bad dream,' Bo mumbled drowsily.

She opened her eyes.

‘Where are the boots?'

It wasn't until she said it that she understood the absurdity of it.

‘Well, neither of us is wearing them,' Bo said.

She sat upright and forced herself to breathe calmly while she told him about the dream. The urge to shake another human being to death was still so overpowering that it was making her tremble. Remorse and shame came hard on its heels and blackened the dawning day.

‘Do you think I could do that? What is going on inside me?'

For a while Bo's fingers played with her hair. He sent her a look that was more of an admonishment than she cared to think.

‘I think everyone is capable of killing in the right circumstances. You should know that better than anyone.'

‘Self-defence is different.'

She knew they were both referring to the incident a couple of years ago when she had been forced to choose between killing or dying. He nodded.

‘Even so. Killing your mother could be a kind of self-defence. In theory.'

She flung aside the doona and stood up.

‘Very much in theory,' she retorted.

She knew full well that the dream had come from somewhere in the slipstream of her conversations with Torsten and Anne. Could it be that simple and so absolutely horrific at the same time? Were the mutilated victims in Kosovo, Poland and Denmark the result of such an irrepressible urge to kill, to silence an inner voice that demanded control of the chaos, either by finding your boots or some other, and on the surface equally insignificant, detail?

The dream continued to haunt Dicte and it didn't leave until much later, when she went to interview a middle-aged couple who sounded as if they had a good story for her series of articles. There was the added benefit of being able to get away from the stifling newspaper offices.

Jørgen and Marie Gejl Andersen were angry. So angry that they had gone to the press. They had e-mailed her about a strange experience in connection with the death of Marie's father, who, according to his wishes, had been cremated. They hadn't wanted to come to the office and it suited her fine to drive into the countryside, to Harlev, where they lived in an idyllic thatched cottage with sheep and a couple of goats grazing in a field bordering their home.

A narrow country lane took her the last 200 metres to a small property where she was welcomed by two fox terriers which inspected her with great enthusiasm. A woman in wellingtons and a Barbour jacket soon appeared from what was probably an old stable.

‘Plet, Strit. Down, boys!'

The woman approached Dicte. There was a touch of English rural aristocracy about Marie Gejl Andersen. Her face had once been beautiful when she was a young girl, and now, untended and exposed to wind and weather, it had grown beautiful in a different way. Her abundant grey hair fluttered in the wind, and intelligent eyes reflected the sky, which at that moment was blue with dark clouds.

‘You must be the journalist. Do come in, I've made some coffee. Have you got a dog?'

Dicte slammed shut the car door and let the dogs sniff. She nodded.

‘Bitch?' Marie asked.

‘About to come on heat.'

They looked at each other, understood without any need for further conversation and went inside the cottage with the low ceiling, closely followed by the dogs. A man wearing a brown cardigan, with keen eyes behind his glasses, welcomed them. He smelled of smoke and made her think of a retired teacher.

‘Jørgen, my husband,' Marie said by way of introduction, and he and Dicte shook hands.

The coffee was served in the old-fashioned drawing room with its grandfather clock in the corner and a white lace tablecloth on the table. Only then did Marie clear her throat.

‘I hope you understand that we're not interested in having our names in the paper. We're normally very law-abiding citizens, of course, but in this case we felt that personal considerations should stand above the law.'

Dicte nodded. Marie's father had requested that his ashes be scattered in the garden of the cottage which had been his childhood home. The couple had scattered the ashes in a rose bed at a private ceremony, but they hadn't applied for the necessary permission.

‘And you're saying you found something in the ashes?'

The woman nodded, stood up and left the room. After a while she returned with a chequered handkerchief tied into a small bundle. She put it on the table, untied it and revealed two small, misshapen balls.

Dicte leaned over them. The woman turned them over with one hand as they lay there.

‘What are they?'

The man reached for his pipe from a stand on the bookcase behind him, where there was also a tobacco pouch, and he started tamping his pipe with deliberate movements. His voice betrayed enormous annoyance.

‘That's exactly what we want to know. They landed on top of one of the red Ingrid Bergman roses and nearly broke it.'

‘It certainly isn't the kind of thing one should find in an urn,' his wife added, placing the handkerchief in her palm and showing the contents to Dicte, with a nod to indicate that she was allowed to take a closer look. ‘It seems quite grotesque to find lumps in the ashes.'

Dicte picked up one of the balls. It was smooth, matte blue and white; the colours merged into each other. She tried to guess the material.

‘It can't be plastic. But it's not metal, either.'

‘Glass,' the husband said. ‘It feels like glass or porcelain.'

‘How on earth did they end up in your father's urn?' She looked at the woman. ‘Have you asked the crematorium?'

Marie shook her head and put the handkerchief back on the table, leaving Dicte holding one of the lumps.

‘We didn't really want to cause a fuss, given that we didn't have permission to scatter the ashes in the garden. I'd like my father to be able to rest in peace. Anything else would be disrespectful.'

Dicte could understand that, but she couldn't see what the authorities could do about it now.

‘And you're quite sure that these lumps have no business being in the urn?' She placed the ball back on the handkerchief.

Jørgen cleared his throat. His wife retied the bundle.

‘We would like the matter cleared up,' Marie said, indignation simmering in her voice. ‘We thought you might take them with you and write a story about our experience. It ought not to have happened and how can we even be sure that the ashes in the urn really are my father's? That's what worries us the most.'

‘What if others have scattered the ashes,' Jørgen added, ‘or are keeping them somewhere in good faith and it turns out they're the ashes of Marie's father? That would be outrageous. It
matters
. Even though they are dead – rather,
precisely
because they're dead and cannot speak for themselves. It matters how we treat each other's earthly remains when we die.'

When Dicte returned to the newspaper offices it was with an extra little consignment: a plastic bag in her handbag containing the handkerchief with the two balls. She had agreed to investigate the matter and had just put her hand on the telephone to call the crematorium when it rang.

‘Dicte Svendsen.'

‘I called earlier and left my name, but you didn't phone back,' said a voice that vibrated in the air like a delicate string. ‘My name is Peter Boutrup.'

She was reminded of Bo's note.

‘I was going to call you. How can I help?'

His laughter was so much stronger than his voice.

‘Let me just say that I think we can do a deal.'

‘And what kind of deal would that be?'

There was silence for a little while. She could hear the man breathing heavily and with difficulty. He could be young, but he could also be old; she was unable to say. Her unease grew with every word.

‘You want to solve the mystery of the body found at the stadium,' the voice said.

‘And?'

‘I think I can help you. Actually, I know I can.'

‘And what have I got that you want?'

Once more, without knowing why, she was reminded of lambs and the bloodbath.

The voice returned and again it was reedy and devoid of strength, but even so it made an impression.

‘We can talk about that when we meet.'