Life and Limb (34 page)

J
anos Kempinski sewed up the patient once he had made sure that the new kidney was working.

Afterwards he popped his head into Inger Hørup's office.

‘How was your meeting with Boutrup's mother?'

‘Her blood pressure's too high,' she said, and she appeared to mean it.

‘She didn't back out?'

The nurse shook her head.

‘She seemed disappointed. She's worried about what will happen to him now.'

‘What about the father? Any way of tracing him?

She shook her head again.

‘I've asked Boutrup. But he's not interested in pursuing that lead. He says he's hoping for a cadaveric kidney now.'

‘Good luck to him. A family donor would be preferable.'

‘What can you do in the face of such obstinacy? Do you think he wants to die?'

Kempinksi pondered this. Death might be a way out for some people, but Boutrup didn't strike him as one of them.

‘No. Perhaps it's a kind of pride. Let me know if anything changes.'

He went to his office and reached the phone just in time. Lena was trying to sound brave, but something was very wrong.

‘It hurts so much. Please can you come?'

He knew she hated asking; she was the independent type. But right now she was all alone and he was the one who had pushed her into the operation. He would have to see her.

‘I'll try, I promise.'

He had to run around the whole department to organise it, and finally he managed to swap his shift using the excuse that his mother had unexpectedly fallen seriously ill.

Then he drove to Lena's house knowing full well that he was leaving his old life behind. He knew he would probably never return.

‘It hurts so much.'

She was lying on the sofa when he arrived. He looked at the tiny figure under the blanket and could barely see her. Again he was overwhelmed by the urge to take her in his arms and run away to somewhere safe, but no such place existed, as he well knew.

‘Here. Let me have a look at you.'

Kempinski carefully removed the scarf covering her newly operated eyes. They were red and swollen, and puss was seeping from them. He felt her forehead, which was burning hot.

‘Have you taken your temperature?'

She nodded. A tiny, cautious nod. By her grimace he could tell that any movement hurt her.

‘Thirty-nine point five,' she said.

He took her hand, leaned forward and kissed her. He didn't say so, but they both knew. Her new corneas had become infected.

‘We had better get it checked out.'

‘Vejle?'

She was never going back to Vejle – he had sworn that.

‘We're going to Casualty. They'll admit you to ophthalmology straight away. Do you want me to pack some things for you?'

She gripped his arm.

‘Janos, it was illegal, wasn't it. Those corneas. They weren't approved. Won't there be trouble at the hospital?'

He sighed. Everything would come out in the open, but perhaps it was better this way.

‘Don't you worry about that. The main thing is that you get better.'

He sat a little awkwardly, holding her hand, stroking her delicate skin; the blue veins stood out so clearly. She seemed so fragile. He thought about recent events and tried to find regret and shame; he knew, though, that he would have done the same again. He would do anything for her.

‘I'm sorry, my darling. I didn't mean to put you through all of this. I just wanted you to get better.'

She put on a smile.

‘I'll survive. But what about you? Won't you face repercussions because you went outside the system? And where are those corneas from?'

He didn't even dare contemplate the answer to that; he could only deal with one day at a time. Of course, it would be best if Vejleborg could stop the infection, but the thought of seeing him again made his flesh crawl. Would he rather sacrifice his career? The answer was ‘yes', as it had been when he had left the hospital to see her. He had no idea where this would take him – or her, for that matter. There was no other way, though, and he only hoped that she would survive. That was all he cared about.

He stood.

‘I'll pack you some toiletries,' he said and started hunting for a bag. He remembered Boutrup's nickname for him.
Dr Death.

He wondered if Boutrup had had a premonition. Would his nickname prove to be too close for comfort? He hoped not.

‘M
y daughter's dead, my wife has left me. What more do you want?'

Mette Mortensen's stepfather, Ulrik Storck, was clearly on the defensive. The little house in Sjællandsgade seemed empty and there was no one there to bake rolls now. Nor was there a girl in pink who dreamed of solving mysteries and becoming an accountant and riding off into the sunset with her boss. There were, Wagner thought, no more rivals.

‘You had a conversation with your daughter – your
step
daughter,' Ivar K said. ‘Saturday night. What did you talk about? What information did Mette give you and why didn't you consider it relevant to us and to our investigation?'

Storck eyed them with the distrust Wagner had sensed right from the beginning.

‘I've told you several times that it was nothing. Don't you people understand? It had nothing to do with your case.'

‘Perhaps you should let us be the judge of that,' Wagner said.

The lawyer cleared his throat. Wagner and Ivar K were sitting on the sofa. Storck was perching on the edge of an armchair.

Ivar K had stretched out his long legs next to Wagner on the sofa, which appeared to irritate Storck considerably. He hadn't offered them any refreshments.

‘Mette visited me at my office one day. In the doorway she met one of my clients who had had a stone thrown at him when the Nazis turned over a café in Mejlgade and broke some windows. When she called me on Saturday night she thought she had made a big discovery.'

‘Why?' Wagner pressed. ‘What kind of discovery?'

Storck looked away.

‘She had met this guy at a club who boasted of being behind the attack on the café. He said it was a set-up. The two groups had staged it to attract media attention. Mette didn't believe it, but later that night they went on to some pub and my client arrived and it turned out that the two men did indeed know each other well. She called to tell me that, but I told her to forget all about it.'

‘Why?' Ivar K echoed his boss.

Storck squirmed. For a while he looked into the distance.

‘Let's be frank, shall we? We all need publicity, and my firm is about to merge with one of the city's leading firm of solicitors. It's a high-profile merger. There will be masses of press coverage, also of Lind, Balle & Storck, and I couldn't afford to risk losing that.'

He looked at them with eyes so defensive they bordered on the offensive. ‘So it was important that the merger didn't collapse.'

Wagner understood him far too well. Something inside him turned.

‘We're talking about your own stepdaughter,' he began. ‘You could have helped our investigation and we might have been able to solve the case much sooner.'

Storck eyed him with scepticism.

‘I doubt it. As far as I've understood the skinhead with the Doc Martens wasn't the killer. And now he's dead. You can't come here telling me it would have made any difference to you, given the mess you're making of this case. You'd be better off looking for the twisted psycho who did this.'

‘And what if it turns out that the twisted psycho is one of the two men Mette met that night? How would you feel about that?'

Ivar K struggled to conceal his contempt for Storck.

‘How would you feel if Mette's killer turned out to be your client?' he continued, sitting up straight on the sofa now. ‘Because Mette knew him from somewhere else, didn't she? Didn't she tell you that? Didn't she tell you her suspicions about the two companies whose accounts she was auditing?'

Storck shook his head to indicate that he regarded Ivar K as an idiot. Wagner felt his colleague tense up and gently placed a hand on his arm. A punch-up between a hot-headed detective and one of the town's best-known defence lawyers would be unhelpful at this stage.

‘She thought she'd discovered some sort of illegal trade going on because she'd seen my client visiting one of the firms where she was working, and she thought she'd overheard talk of some dark deeds. But Mette had a lively imagination. I told her to focus on her work and forget about it.'

‘Forget about it? Ivar K asked with vitriol in his voice. ‘Did you ever take Mette seriously? Was nothing she did ever good enough?'

Storck shrugged his shoulders. There wasn't a hint of doubt or regret detectable in him.

‘Of course it was. But to suggest that my client might have killed Mette – the world isn't like that. Those kinds of coincidences only happen in the movies. We all know that the killer has to be a nutjob.'

He raked a hand through his hair. Wagner sensed that a lengthy lecture was imminent. Ivar K sat like a highly unpredictable coiled spring.

‘It's not your fault, but that's how society is today,' the lawyer continued, warming to his subject. ‘There is no sense of community. No sense of pulling together. The mentally ill are left to fend for themselves.'

Storck leaned forward.

‘The person who did this to Mette is the product of society's indifference towards marginalised groups. Don't you understand? Don't you understand that you, too, are merely a tool used to divide society into the good and the bad, to make sure that we don't form a united front to those in power?'

Wagner stood up. They had got what they came for and they didn't need rousing political speeches. He sighed. The conversation with Storck had served only to confirm his core belief that politics and ideology were well left alone. His religion was facts.
Facts.
Anything that could be weighed and measured and, more importantly, proven.

He felt nothing but relief as they left.

‘No sense of pulling together, my arse,' Ivar K said as he turned around and raised a finger towards the house.

Wagner pretended that they weren't together.

‘I've got it!'

Kristian Hvidt stormed into the meeting like a whirlwind on a sandy beach. In his hands he was waving two pieces of paper that Wagner recognised. They were the print-outs from Mette Mortensen's desk drawer.

‘I've cracked the mystery! Look here!'

He placed the two pages in front of Wagner. Numbers and letters merged in front of Wagner's eyes while his thoughts were reluctant to release his meeting with Ulrik Storck. He had never been any good at maths.

‘Look. I've circled the significant amounts.'

Wagner gave him a semi-offended look. He had got the message.

‘So that everyone can keep up, even the dummies,' Jan Hansen said in a friendly voice, articulating Hvidt's thoughts.

Hvidt ignored him.

‘I'm sure these are shadow accounts printed out from separate computers, one at Marius Jørgensen & Sons. And one at StemBank. We've analysed them separately. But we haven't compared the numbers. And some of the numbers are exactly the same. It can't be a coincidence. Take a look at this.'

He pointed.

‘Here Marius Jørgensen shows a receipt of 7124.75 kroner and here …' He pointed to the corresponding figure in StemBank's unofficial accounts. ‘Here StemBank has the same amount shown as expenditure, right down to the decimal point.'

Wagner looked. Several amounts were circled. Most of them around 5,000 to 10,000 kroner each time.

‘This is my theory,' Hvidt said. ‘Mette prepares the official accounts for both businesses and has sat with their respective computers in front of her because that's the standard practice and it's much easier. But with her head for figures she found the alternative accounts on the computers and understood how they're connected. In addition, she may have seen The Thin Man at StemBank while working there and she may have overheard him speaking a little too loudly about the trade in human tissue.'

Wagner stared at the print-outs. The numbers told their own story. ‘At least it proves that they do business together, and that in itself is suspicious,' he said.

‘What kind of service does a stem-cell bank buy from an undertaker?'

Ivar K was quick off the mark.

‘Human tissue. Which Marius Jørgensen supplied, aided by our tall thin man. And Arne Bay and Co, of course.'

Wagner stood up.

‘Okay, that has to be enough to pull in Claes Bülow and get a warrant to search StemBank's new freezer facility. Can't wait to see what we find there.'

Ivar K sent Jan Hansen a smile that was a little too friendly.

‘Aren't you glad you and the missus never got that far? Who knows? Your umbilical cord might have ended up as a heart valve in a Polish pig farmer.'

Wagner's mobile phone rang. It was the duty officer informing him that Dicte Svendsen was downstairs.

‘I haven't got time. She'll have to call me later,' he replied.

He heard agitated voices in the handset and suddenly Svendsen's voice could be heard loud and clear.

‘Let me up. It's important!'

He looked at the others and sighed.

‘I'll meet you at the lift.'

He had time to think that she must have been running. Her hair was a mess and she was panting. Only later did he realise that it was pure excitement, like a hunting dog getting the scent of game.

‘I've got him. I've got the name.'

Sitting in the briefing room, she repeated herself.

‘Who?' Ivar K asked.

‘Your tall thin man. I know his name,' she repeated.

Everyone held their breath. Only Wagner knew what was coming next.

‘
Avisen
's crime section gets the story, okay? If you set up a raid, we're allowed to bring a photographer and a reporter. What do you say?'

Everyone's jaws dropped. Wagner was tempted to tell her that they could arrest her there and then and charge her with perverting the course of justice. But it would take too long and it would ultimately be counterproductive.

He sighed.

‘Out with it.'

‘Do we have a deal?'

The woman looked like bloody Joan of Arc as she stood there, armed to the teeth with arguments about freedom of speech, the press as the fourth estate and I'll-see-you-in-court. He knew the tirade and had to suppress a smile. She was the only one who noticed and she looked away quickly and graciously before her triumph became too obvious.

‘Deal,' he said. ‘You're giving us no choice. I hope you have something good up your sleeve and not yesterday's news as usual.'

She ignored the insult, pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘His name is Kim Deleuran. He works at the Kommunehospital chapel. He's the stepbrother of Arne Bay. He's also politically active on the extreme left. He studied medicine for two years and has some knowledge of anatomy.'

She carried on talking. The pieces fell into place. All the connections were there: the chapel, the undertaker, StemBank, and Arne Bay and his political allies to transport the goods out of the country.

‘But we're still missing one connection,' she said as she looked up at him. ‘Storage. Have you got anywhere with that?'

He owed her, and he knew it. Wagner took a deep breath. It was possible the others would think him weak for giving in to her, but the decision was his to make and he made it.

‘Have you ever heard of a company called StemBank?' he asked.

She nodded slowly while he told her about Claes Bülow and Mette Mortensen's shadow accounts.

After she left he thought about Ulrik Storck and his statement that ‘the world wasn't like that'. No, it wasn't. It was much worse.