Life and Limb (23 page)

T
hree identical killings, all linked to stadiums and possibly with right-wing extremists involved as henchmen of some sort. Patients dying from virulent infections after straightforward operations. Pure business? What kind of business could it be? And how was Peter Boutrup mixed up in this – if he actually was? Was it possible that he was just bluffing?

Dicte drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as she drove to Skejby Hospital.

There had to be a connection somewhere and she wondered if surgery might be it. After all, the damage to the three dead bodies could be described as a kind of surgery. As far as she had been able to ascertain, the mutilation had occurred after death on all three occasions, but even so, removing thighbones and eyes was not something one just did. It required a knowledge of anatomy.

She took the exit to Skejby Hospital and once again had to waste time searching for a park. While she drove around she told herself – as she had already done countless times – that she wouldn't give a kidney to this peculiar man. It was out of the question. She had made up her mind: she owed him nothing.

If that was really true, however, why had she agreed to the appointment that was due to take place in a few minutes?

Once she eventually succeeded in finding a parking space, she sat in the car for a little while. Only once she had convinced herself that the appointment was part of her efforts to get to the bottom of the stadium murder did she feel she could open the door and leave the car – but her legs were shaking and she was far from sure she knew what she was getting into.

‘Benedicte Svendsen?'

The nurse was an impressive woman with a very warm voice. She was tall and round, but in spite of this still very feminine in a maternal way.

‘We can go here,' the nurse said.

She opened the door for them to an office that looked as welcoming as her voice; nevertheless, Dicte didn't feel reassured. She stopped in the doorway and tried to get her breathing under control, but it was as if the air was being forced up her throat.

‘Don't be nervous. We're just going to have a chat today.'

The nurse held out her hand.

‘My name is Inger Hørup. I'm a transplant nurse here at the hospital.'

Dicte nodded.

‘I'm Peter Boutrup's biological mother,' she said.

She had to make herself say it, and it didn't sound right, either. She sounded nothing like the mother of a sick and possibly dying child.

‘I understand that Peter was adopted?'

Dicte nodded again and sat down in the chair that the nurse indicated.

‘Am I right in thinking you don't know each other at all?'

‘I know about his illness.'

‘And you're considering donating a kidney, I understand?'

Another nod.

Hørup rummaged around the desk and found a couple of leaflets, which she handed to Dicte.

‘It's very important to us that potential family donors know what is involved. Donating a kidney is a great personal gift and we want to be absolutely sure that you're doing this of your own free will.'

The eyes scrutinised hers, and Dicte struggled with her doubts, but still she said, ‘Of course I'm doing it of my own free will.'

Hørup scanned the leaflets before returning her gaze to Dicte. Dicte felt as if she was being X-rayed.

‘We also need to be sure that no money is involved. Or any other favours, if I may put it like that.'

‘There isn't.'

Hørup explained the procedure. They would start by taking blood samples to determine her blood group and tissue type.

‘We need to be sure you're in good health and these tests will take four days. It's up to you whether you want to come in as an outpatient or be admitted and stay at the patient hotel.'

‘Outpatient,' Dicte said. ‘I live locally.'

Once again Hørup scrutinised her, and there was a pause before she added, ‘In that case, I think a DNA test is required to determine the family relationship. Would that be all right?'

The thought hadn't occurred to Dicte, not to its full extent. Could there be any doubt? For some reason she didn't dare to even acknowledge the possibility and she didn't really know why.

‘That's fine,' she said, feeling her mouth go dry.

‘And what about the biological father?'

‘What about him?'

Again Hørup touched the leaflets on her desk.

‘From a medical point of view, we need to find the best possible donor. It could be the father rather than the mother.'

Dicte gulped, but it didn't make the pressure on her throat go away. She hadn't expected this.

‘The father is alive, but he's not a possibility,' she managed to say.

‘And you're sure about that?'

She wasn't sure about anything. Except that she had to get out of there and breathe some fresh air.

‘Fairly sure,' she said.

Hørup examined her again and Dicte had the distinct feeling that her thoughts and emotions were being studied under a microscope.

‘You can always back out, you know. We're happy to provide a medical reason for why a donor is unsuitable, to avoid causing problems within the family.'

It was a lifeline and it was so tempting that she almost reached out for it. But she had to take the next step – she knew herself well enough for that.

‘I'm sure that won't be necessary.'

Dicte left Inger Hørup's office with an agreement that she would return the following week to start the tests. She wasn't going to go through with it, she told herself, but she already knew her decision wouldn't be quite so simple. The truth was that she had no idea how she could back out and leave her son to his fate. If she kept the kidney, she might not be able to live with herself. The truth was also that she had to keep playing his game and it had a winner and a loser. She didn't intend to lose – but neither did she want to win.

She agonised over it and missed Bo being there to remind her of the importance of being true to oneself. But he wasn't, and Anne and Ida Marie had moved to the periphery of her life.

She pushed open the door, stepped outside into the fresh air and reached the conclusion that, when push came to shove, she had only herself.

Her legs carried her back to the car and this time they were no longer shaking.

When Dicte returned to the office in Frederiksgade there was an e-mail from Marie Gejl Andersen containing the name of the doctor who had treated her father and the firm of undertakers the family had used.

She rang both numbers and left messages. In her mind she was trying to link the discovery of the glass eyes in the ashes to the glass eye found in the mouth of Mette Mortensen. Was there really a connection between the two? Or it was standard practice for hospitals to remove the eyes of the deceased, and were there more instances where relatives had found strange lumps in the ashes of their loved ones?

Dicte rummaged around in her notes of the conversation with the doctor's widow from Lublin, Poland, and found an e-mail address for Bo's contact in Kosovo. It took a long time to decide on the wording of a suitably neutral e-mail asking for the telephone number or e-mail address of relatives or close friends of the young Albanian journalist, Janet Rugova, who had been found dead at Gradski Stadium in Pristina.

She reread the e-mail before pressing
send
, feeling more than ever that the murders in Poland and Kosovo were connected to the death of Mette Mortensen.

T
he website of Life and Death offered advice on how to have a dignified death, and you could order a form entitled ‘My Last Will'.

Wagner moved the cursor around the webpage while the questions piled up in his brain. Again he thought about Ida Marie and the not entirely unrealistic possibility that – given the difference in their ages – she would be widowed one day. Their finances were already sorted out. But what would happen to him? Would he be buried or cremated, or would he donate his organs and body to others?

He wanted to stay in charge of his own body, in death as well as life, but if he let science have access to even a part of it they would probably make a move the second he drew his last breath. Was that unethical or merely a sign of the times? Had it become a civic duty to let science use your empty husk either for teaching purposes or research, or as spare parts for the sick?

Pushing himself away from the computer with a strong feeling of revulsion, Wagner couldn't really identify whether the cause of it was the thought of his own death or more general confusion about what death in the modern world involved now that everything could be recycled or reused.

He visited the websites Funerals in Denmark and Elysium Funeral Planning. Death appeared to be ‘in'. As if it was something especially the young were into, along with the latest boy band and Scandinavian crime fiction.

He was pondering whether or not an interest in your own death was the ultimate proof of a self-centred society when there was a knock on his door and Paul Gormsen entered with a plastic file in his hand.

‘Am I disturbing you?'

Wagner nodded in the direction of the screen.

‘Not at all. I was just planning my funeral. Is that something you've thought about?'

‘Your funeral?'

‘Not mine. Yours.'

Gormsen's eyebrows shot up under his fringe, which was as floppy as always. They had known each other for more than fifteen years and been friends outside of work for almost as long. They had respectively performed and attended more autopsies than either cared to remember, but they had never had a personal discussion about the inevitable.

‘When the time comes the pathologists will finally get their wish and split open my head and cut out my heart,' Gormsen said, cheerfully referring to the constant rivalry between forensic examiners and pathologists at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. ‘I'm donating my body to science. Seems only reasonable, given that the science of medicine keeps me and my loved ones alive and pays my wages.'

Wagner nodded.

‘That seems fair. Perhaps in that spirit I should donate my body to future serial killers to give them something to practise on.'

‘Possibly,' Gormsen said, sounding unconvinced, and he sat down on the chair opposite him. ‘What has prompted all this talk of mortality? I've never known you to worry about life after death.'

Wagner closed the webpage.

‘I don't believe in life after death. But I am concerned about dying.'

He hadn't told another living soul – apart from his doctor – about his attack, as he called it, but now he gave Gormsen the edited highlights. To Wagner's enormous surprise, they evoked a smile.

‘Honestly, it sounds more like heartburn to me. Take it from someone who has suffered with it for twenty-five years.'

Gormsen's delicate stomach was well known within their circles. Wagner even remembered a time when Ida Marie had invited Gormsen over for Thai food and had ended up making sandwiches for him when he felt unwell. Wagner had secretly envied his good friend's meal of liver pâté and cheese.

‘Listen to the experts. I'm a kind of doctor and, although I've little experience of curing my patients, my diagnostic ability is not to be sneezed at.'

Gormsen patted himself on the chest to indicate where the pain was. Wagner recognised the area across his chest starting from his oesophagus.

‘Your attack sounds exactly like what happens to me if I drink too much coffee or put cinnamon sugar on my porridge.'

‘So I'm not about to drop dead?' Wagner said.

Gormsen held up the file.

‘I certainly hope not and, anyway, we can't have that because we have to be out and about catching criminals.'

‘We?'

‘The pill you found in the flat in Jægergårdsgade. The report from the Institute of Forensic Chemistry was sent to us at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. I thought I'd better come and see you myself with the result.'

‘Flunitrazepam?'

Gormsen nodded.

‘The pill is made by a pharmaceutical company called Actavis and its name is Flunipam, two milligrams. If someone puts a couple of these in your drink, you'll be away with the fairies in no time.'

‘Can you tell me how many pills she was given?'

Gormsen shook his head.

‘I can't be precise. But the concentration in her blood was close to poisoning, so she would have gone out like a light, we're quite sure of that.'

‘And it's the same as Rohypnol, the date-rape drug?'

‘The effect is the same. Do you remember that Rohypnol was also called Roche or the Forget-Me-Pill?'

‘The Forget-Me-Pill,' Wagner said, getting up. ‘There's no way we'll forget this. It has to be enough for us to charge our man in Jægergårdsgade.'

‘You think he did it?'

Wagner shook his head and handed the file back to Gormsen.

‘Don't know. But let me put it like this: if he's completely innocent then my name's Betty.'

Gormsen smiled.

‘I saw a film about a Betty once. I hope you find him.'

‘We know where he lives,' Wagner said, aware that it sounded like one of the countless threats made when certain groups of people got annoyed with social workers, carers, bus drivers, doctors or anyone else who saw things differently from them: we know where you live. He had never experienced threats to his personal life, but he knew officers who had fallen ill with stress for that reason.

Nonetheless, there were instances when it was appropriate to visit people in their home, and this was one of them. Wagner called his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Kristian Hartvigsen, and agreed that they would arrest Bay and apply for him to be remanded in custody within twenty-four hours. He wondered briefly whether to alert the public prosecutors so they could be waiting in the wings then decided against it. They had only circumstantial evidence and before summoning the cavalry he wanted to be more certain of the extent of Bay's involvement in the murder of Mette Mortensen. Next he rang Jan Hansen.

‘The two of us will go over to his flat together with a couple of the lads in uniform,' Wagner said. ‘Unless Bay is at work. Would you check that, please?'

Hansen called the hospital. Bay was due to work the night shift but hadn't turned up for the last two days. He hadn't called in sick, either.

They drove to Jægergårdsgade in a glum mood. Wagner knew they were too late when he saw the dog waiting patiently outside the entrance to the flats. It howled when they opened the door and ran up the stairs with its tongue hanging out of its mouth.

‘Something's wrong,' Hansen muttered on the way up. ‘Bay would never leave the mutt in the street. You can say what you like about him but he loves that dog.'

Wagner – who couldn't understand how anyone could love a fighting dog – said nothing.

The front door was open; anyone could have gone right in. The two uniformed officers entered first and quickly reappeared.

‘Christ, what a place. No one at home.'

Wagner and Hansen entered. There was nothing to see – no signs of a struggle or disturbance. Nor any of the recent upheaval they had caused. Everything had been left as the crime-scene investigators had found it. It was something they prided themselves on: tidying up their mess quickly so that no one could complain later.

‘Too late,' Hansen said, and Wagner couldn't have put it better himself.

‘We need to organise a search for Arne Bay,' Wagner announced.

‘What about the dog?' said Hansen.

Wagner stood for a moment watching the muscular, mustard-coloured dog running around and whining as it looked for its master. He didn't like fighting dogs, but he had to admire this one's loyalty.

‘Call animal rescue. They'll have to look after it.'

‘Won't they just put it down?'

Wagner shook his head.

‘Not without the owner's permission. They'll take care of it until Arne Bay turns up.'

If he turned up.