Next of Kin (14 page)

‘She re-married and has a couple of children with the new man,' Hansen reported as they drove. ‘He works in Hasselager at the Jacobs' pitta bread factory. Connie Husum's on income support. What do you reckon about Svendsen?'

The latter was said in such a low key that Wagner could hardly hear it over the sound of the engine.

Connie Husum and her new husband lived in the village of Gedding, close to Kasted, where Dicte lived. He was not in the slightest bit surprised when Hansen chose the route past Dicte Svendsen's yellow house, which must once have been built as a tied cottage for the neighbouring farm. Ida Marie had mentioned that years ago it had been a genuine fortress for bikers. The owners had barricaded themselves in behind barbed wire and a high parapet complete with gun slits. ‘Typical,' Ida Marie had said. ‘She can't just live in a normal house. Everything has to have a past.'

Like Dicte herself, Wagner thought, staring across the brown ploughed fields and the occasional stubble field in Kasted Mose. He breathed in and then let the air out, steaming up the window. When he opened it he received a light covering of drizzle which lay on his skin like a stray squirt of perfume from one of Ida Marie's expensive bottles.

‘I don't believe all this stuff about Al Qaeda,' he decided, closing the window. ‘I think PET are seeing ghosts or are reading too much into this.' He sighed. ‘Well, that's what they get paid for.'

‘For reading too much into things?'

‘For being over-careful,' Wagner corrected. ‘It doesn't seem logical. Al Qaeda would talk about Shariah laws, not the reintroduction of the death penalty. For my money they would talk about something more ideological or religious, not about anything as concrete as sentencing or the Polish president.'

‘But they do talk about justice,' Hansen pointed out. ‘They dress in Muslim robes and execute people and speak about Allah.'

‘But Al Qaeda never mention God,' Wagner said. ‘It doesn't fit the rhetoric, does it?' He brought the conversation to a close. ‘We'll have to see what comes of the case in England. The moment they find a body after the beheading, we'll have to get in touch with the police over there and find out who's dealing with the case. As things stand now, all they have is a film, it seems. We should see it, of course, but PET will get it for us.'

They drove on in silence. Wagner was thinking about crime and punishment, and how everything in the globalised world slotted together. What happened in one country promptly spread to the next. What would the reactions be when news of the two beheadings and the death penalty manifesto became public in Denmark? Would Muslims take to the streets and protest about the finger of suspicion being pointed at them? Would Danes do the opposite and subject the Muslim section of the population to hatred? There wasn't one scrap of evidence, and nothing was certain, but perhaps the people's court would still prevail. Was this becoming an age of mob rule when moderate voices were drowned by the noise from the streets? It didn't take much; they knew that from their experience of demonstrations by extremist groups. A couple of inflammatory text messages doing the rounds, crowds of people meeting and things could turn ugly.

‘Think it's the red house down there,' Hansen said, nodding towards a hollow. There was a row of small houses that had grown into each other, with latticed windows that needed painting and Eternit roofs with decades of dirt that could have done with a good clean. They seemed cosy and dilapidated at the same time, and Wagner guessed that the housing had been erected for farm-workers and day-labourers at the beginning of the previous century. There was bound to be a large farm close by, which had employed a great many workers of the area in by-gone times.

Outside the small house, brightly coloured clothes hung from washing lines of differing heights. Wagner noticed various sizes of children's clothing. There was also a battered tricycle and a rusty scooter; a football had rolled under the lowest branches of a fir tree. A shed contained even more bikes, stacked against each other, and in the parking space in front of the house was a beige-coloured Lada, probably an eighties model. Tied to the garden gate was a large dog with long, black hair, which stared at them as they parked. The moment they stepped out it began to snarl, a deep, ringing bass that must have been heard all over the village.

‘Good dog,' Hansen coaxed from a safe distance.

The dog bared white teeth and growled, drooling saliva.

‘Effective anyway,' Wagner said, going forward to ring the bell. But there was no sound, so he concluded it was broken. He was about to knock when the door was flung open by a girl of about ten. He guessed her age by height and breadth, not by her face, which seemed adult, nor her body language, which was reminiscent of a tarty woman. Her midriff lay bare between a short skirt and a skimpy, pink, much too low-cut top. Small breasts poked up at him.

‘Who are you?'

‘Is your mother home?'

The girl stood squirming in the doorway, chewing some gum in time to the music from inside the house. She looked askance. ‘She's asleep.'

‘Is she ill?' Hansen, who had joined him, asked.

Perhaps it was Hansen's special way with women, both old and young, that decided the matter. The girl smiled sweetly and suddenly looked very child-like. ‘No, she's got a hangover.'

A husky voice came from the inside of the house. ‘Who is it, Charlie? Is anyone there?' The voice came closer. ‘Is that Willer? Is that you, Willer?'

All of a sudden she was there in the doorway. She was a beautiful woman, or had been once. A patterned silk kimono was wrapped tightly around her figure, outlining the voluptuous curves of her hips and breasts. Her face was broad, her mouth sensual and her hair thick, wavy and unkempt. A crystal shaped in the form of a teardrop hung heavily from a gold chain, pointing directly between her breasts.

She didn't seem surprised to find two male strangers on her doorstep.

‘What can I do for you?'

Wagner thought he could detect a barely audible coo to her voice which was both soft and deep. A faint hint of duvet and perfume wafted out into the fresh air and up his nostrils. Her skin was well cared for and only slightly solarium brown. Her eyebrows were severely plucked like an Italian lottery hostess's, and there were traces of a lip pencil around her mouth as though the line of her lips had been tattooed by nature.

Hansen's voice seemed to crack on the spot. ‘We're detectives, madam. It's about your ex-husband.'

‘Kjeld? Charlie's father?'

Her ignorance seemed totally genuine. Wagner guessed this was a house where newspapers and news intruded only on the occasion of misfortunes. It seemed there hadn't been any in the last few days.

‘Kjeld Arne Husum,' Wagner specified.

‘What's the piece of shit done now?' She didn't even blink as she said it; she stared at them quite openly.

Hansen gestured towards the inside of the house. ‘Might we come in?'

She sighed and didn't seem very keen, but in the end, with a little toss of the head, she opened the door wide. ‘I'm sorry, it's a bit messy in here,' she said, without sounding the slightest bit sorry. ‘We had a few friends round last night.'

On a Sunday evening, Wagner thought. When you have to get up for work the next day. Or perhaps it wasn't that kind of friend?

The bit about the mess was a massive understatement. There were empty beer bottles and glass tumblers all over the coffee table as well as saucers filled with cigarette butts, and a whole collection of lighters, it seemed. But the coffee table wasn't the only messy surface. The floor was littered with objects of all shapes and sizes, from sewing tables to milking stools, an old pram and a couple of paraffin lamps, obviously picked up second hand. Around them were some computers of older vintage, and a couple of printers. Wagner found himself looking for bread-slicers, but saw none.

‘I'm a bit of a collector,' Connie Husum said. ‘It's my great weakness. I can't walk past a flea market without schlepping half of it home with me.'

She searched her kimono and found a packet of cigarettes at the bottom of a pocket. She pulled one out and lit it with one of the lighters from the coffee table. As she bent down, she put it back with a lazy caress. Hansen's eyes rolled and Wagner involuntarily felt something stir somewhere; it had nothing to do with his brain.

They sat down on the worn velvet furniture. The girl they had seen before had gone to another room in the house. Connie wrapped her kimono tighter around her breasts, but for one reason or another it felt as though she had done just the opposite.

‘What were you saying? What about Kjeld?'

Hansen put on his lugubrious face. ‘So you haven't heard that he's dead?'

The colour drained from her face and the sharp contours seemed to dissolve and blur. But she pulled herself together quickly and the moment of uncertainty was replaced by a toughness. ‘That can only make me happy. One problem less in the world.'

She spat out strands of tobacco and took them with two fingers. Wagner noticed they were trembling. ‘What did he die of? Was it his heart? The little he had?' she added, imbuing the words with acerbic venom.

‘He was murdered,' Wagner said and observed her. ‘Executed, to be precise.'

Her reaction was convincing and quickly followed by a single gasp which seemed to suck all the oxygen from the room. ‘You're not telling me he was … the one who was beheaded …? That was Kjeld?'

One hand shot up again to pull the kimono tighter around her body while the other, the one with the cigarette, waved all over the place, spilling ash. Her lips quivered.

They explained what they had agreed to say about the finding of the body on Samsø. Wagner left it mostly to Hansen, who was more than happy to take over. He searched for something in the meantime, but couldn't put his finger on what. A feeling; an atmosphere, perhaps. He tried to make the room speak to him. The room had been furnished in a slapdash way, but it wasn't without taste. There was art on the walls: a couple of lithographs and a few paintings, oil and watercolours. He recognised the style of some of the artists. They were not at the most expensive end of the market, but affordable and still a bit different. There were quiet, muted colours and sensual, almost affectionate brushstrokes. Naked and semi-naked bodies were entangled on the canvasses. Music was still coming from somewhere in the house. A languorous saxophone wailed its song and he seemed to hear a stylus scratching on an old vinyl record.

They asked her to provide an alibi; it wasn't particularly credible, but it was served up with a touching naïvety and Wagner nearly believed it. In recent weeks she had been finding it difficult to sleep, she said. The doctor had been reluctant to give her any more sleeping tablets so the result was that she slept well into the day, when she did finally fall asleep. Willer, her husband, was sympathetic. He took care of things in the house in the morning and drove the children to school. She took the evening shift.

Wagner observed her; her elastic lips forming the words and releasing them into the room; her eyes with the glint of innocence that only a good actor can perform. He was almost tempted to take her hand and, soothingly, stroke it, to place a kiss or two, then to move his lips up her arm and remove her kimono as though peeling an attractive, fragrant, slightly over-ripe orange. She had talked about her evening shift. He could not help thinking she might also have had a couple of daytime chores while the children were at school, in the form of male visitors, not always detectives.

‘How would you describe your marriage to Kjeld Arne Husum?' Hansen asked.

‘I wouldn't,' she said with contempt. ‘That pile of shit was over before it began.'

‘You brought up your child together,' Wagner reminded her. ‘Charlie?'

She nodded, blew smoke up to the ceiling and politely waved it away with her cigarette hand, spilling ash again. ‘At least that was the plan. But we could both have done without Kjeld's rearing methods.'

‘Why?'

She closed her eyes, as though reflecting. ‘I should have known,' she mumbled, almost to herself. ‘I was just a naïve fool who thought he only had eyes for me and my body.'

‘Did he have affairs?'

The shutters came down in her face and her expression was friendly but blank. ‘It's so long ago.'

Wagner leaned forward as the saxophone wound its way up the hall, and instinctively his gaze fell on the place where the cold of the crystal met her skin. ‘It's important for us to find out whether anyone could have had a motive for killing him,' he persisted, tearing his eyes off the crystal and focusing them on her mouth instead. It was restless in its movement, insecure; she seemed to be mumbling to herself as her eyes sought the interior of the house, where the music was coming from and the child had gone. ‘We have very little to go on and the killer may decide to repeat the trick and kill again.'

Now she turned her eyes on him and he saw something inside her flare up so intensely that he could feel the heat.

‘If he kills Kjeld's sort, that's fine by me.'

‘What do you mean by Kjeld's sort,' Wagner asked gently.

She didn't reply.

‘Did he mistreat you?' Wagner asked, but she averted her face and he knew they wouldn't get any further this time.

‘Do you also collect old bread-slicers?' Hansen asked, out of the blue.

She shrugged, absolutely unmoved. ‘I used to. I did them up and would have sold a few of them, but I didn't have the heart.'

‘When did you last go to the house on Samsø?'

She blew out smoke. ‘The things you ask. I had completely forgotten it existed.' She scrunched up her eyes. ‘It must be over two years ago. What about the bread-slicers? They're still there, aren't they?'

Hansen slowly nodded. ‘Yes.'