Next of Kin (23 page)

‘Let's call it a day then.'

The teacher switched off the overhead projector and, with his back to the students, fumbled with the transparencies which had a habit of sticking. The class, books and files already packed in backpacks, had been sitting clock-watching and casting longing glances out of the window.

Before anyone could reach the door, it was torn open with force. From the back row, Rose saw everyone freeze. A young, dark-skinned man in a leather jacket and jeans stood in the doorway with everyone's eyes on him. Perhaps it was because people weren't used to such appearances in the conservative surroundings of the law department. Or perhaps it was the man's charisma that did it. He was tall, slim and resembled a Bollywood actor. But that wasn't why. There was a bottled-up quality about him, as though there were feelings and thoughts in him that couldn't find an outlet. He strode through the class. The girls turned round and stared at him, but he didn't notice them.

Rose's hands stopped in mid-air. Her backpack lay open on the table, waiting for the last books that did not come. She wanted to say his name, but couldn't. As he stood over her, nostrils quivering and chest heaving beneath his jacket, she could hardly draw breath. She tried to step back a pace, but he caught her arm in a millisecond.

‘How could you think I would just stay away?' His voice was hoarse as though worn from vented anger and maybe tears of frustration. It bored its way into her conscience.

‘Did you think I couldn't hear it in your voice?' Now he was whispering, almost gentle. He took her other wrist and pulled her closer, put her arm around his neck.

She struggled, intent on keeping her promise to herself. But he had read her thoughts and was one step ahead.

‘And you wanted to do this all on your own,' he said, summing up the last few days in one sentence: the feeling of loneliness and the alienation from the others as though she had been appointed to die; the fear that he would reject her. ‘Rose, Rose, Rose.'

Her name seemed to be repeated for an eternity, with nuances she had never heard before and a yearning for the impossible. She fell apart. She couldn't control the weeping that surged through her body, sending tears pouring down her cheeks into her mouth, down towards his neck and jacket.

‘The bastards. The lousy, bloody bastards. What did they do to you?' It all came out between clenched teeth, but his caresses were gentle; he stroked her hair and kissed her where her make-up didn't quite cover the scratches.

‘It's okay,' she stammered. ‘Okay. It'll be fine.'

‘It's damn well not okay.'

Beneath the gentleness she could hear a swell of something quite different.

‘Don't do anything, Aziz. That's what they want.'

He didn't answer; he let go of her and finished the job of packing her books into the backpack. He swung it over his shoulder and took her by the elbow. ‘Come on.'

She could feel the looks of the other students on their backs and hear the girls whispering as he led her out of the room. The teacher was still standing where he was, now with a bulging briefcase under his arm. Aziz paused and nodded politely to him.

‘Please excuse my intrusion.'

Then they were outside. The sun burned down on her face, and she knew he could see everything so clearly in that merciless light, but he didn't say any more. They found her bike, which she had collected from the repair man that morning, and began to walk home.

She wanted to walk on her own, but he resolutely kept his arm around her while holding her bike with his other hand.

‘You might as well tell me everything,' he said as they walked through Vennelyst Park, which in normal circumstances she would have avoided. She still had the intense smell of grass in her nostrils from when she lay under the weight of her pursuers, and she could remember how her fingers had dug into the wet earth. Her body remembered touches and transgressions of private places, and everything in her winced as though someone had scratched five sharp fingernails across a blackboard.

‘Wait.'

He must have heard her desperation because he stopped in the middle of the path and removed his arm from her shoulder. She was forced to turn away and walked across the grass to behind a bush as the smells and sounds crowded in on her, forcing her stomach to contract. She just managed to grab her hair with one hand before she bent over and threw up. Finally she moved away, sank down on to her knees and heard herself moaning, but she couldn't stop.

He crouched down beside her. ‘Here.'

He had taken a paper serviette from her bag. She accepted it gratefully and wiped her face, the bitter taste of vomit in her throat.

‘It was here,' she said, peering up. ‘Down by the lake.'

She told the story between sobs, hating herself because she couldn't stop. They sat in the park for a long time. Tiredness weighed down her limbs, and she hardly had the strength to stand. Arms and legs felt as if they weren't hers.

He shook his head. ‘We should have kept a distance. Then it wouldn't have happened.'

‘Stop it.' She was angry. He'd said exactly what she knew he'd say. ‘There must be a solution,' she said. ‘It's there somewhere. But we need to think carefully, Aziz. There's no point rushing around hitting out at all and sundry.'

‘All and sundry?'

She shrugged. ‘You can't go out on a rampage of revenge.'

‘You mean we should be nice and kind to them,' he said, and she could hear he was struggling to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. ‘Mustapha …' His voice cracked.

She stood up. The ground was becoming cold and her empty stomach was rumbling, though not with hunger. ‘We'll think carefully,' she said vaguely. ‘We definitely shouldn't react as they would expect. We should continue to see each other and we should make a plan.'

He half-smiled as he brushed the grass off his trousers. ‘You sound like the Olsen gang.'

She looked at him and had to smile a little too, at her exotic prince and his passion for archetypal Danish comedies, knowing that vendettas lay not too far beneath his consciousness. She straightened and cuddled up to him, trying to catch his eyes, which she both loved and feared.

‘It wasn't rape, Aziz,' she whispered, unasked. ‘The police got there in time. It wasn't rape.'

She saw his relief, failing to add that it might just as well have been.

Sliver by sliver, she chipped away at the hardness and the hatred in him until she was left with the core, which, for the most part, was a feeling of powerlessness. She would never have thought of using her gender for the purpose, a femininity that right now she preferred to keep well hidden. But it was all she had, and he reacted in the way she sensed that men did when faced with women's vulnerability. He softened; tenderness and concern took over. It was like working on a chunk of flint with a sharp chisel.

‘You'll have to go back to college,' she said after, to his surprise, she had opened herself to him. Their lovemaking had been careful, tentative. ‘We have to think about this and work out the best way forward.'

For a second his voice was hard again. ‘What's the point of college? When I can't make a difference anyway?'

‘But you can,' she insisted. ‘You know that very well. You're not going to Police Academy to nail your old friends, are you?'

He sighed. They were lying in bed, and now he sat up and began to get dressed with hurried movements. ‘Of course not.'

He gazed down at her as he buttoned his shirt. There was sadness in his eyes. ‘On the way here a woman on the train was frightened of me because I had a backpack. She asked to get by me so that she could sit somewhere else. In another carriage.'

‘Oh, Aziz.'

He was a proud person, and she knew he had been made to feel humiliated by some of his own people, and now by Danes, too.

‘Didn't anyone say anything? Didn't anyone react?'

He looked away. ‘I reacted,' he said.

‘How?'

He sat down on the bed and put his feet in his shoes. He shrugged. ‘I just found another seat. That was easy enough. She was frightened, wasn't she? I couldn't do anything about that, could I?'

She was surprised that those who took him for something he wasn't couldn't see. She gently put her arms around him. And because she couldn't find the words, she kissed his neck where black hair met dark skin and all that was him.

They said goodbye half an hour later. She hoped she had persuaded him to return to college, yet even though he had promised, there was still a little nagging doubt. Would he take a little detour to see Mustapha in Gellerup? How would a meeting between them end?

She didn't dare think about it; about the hatred between them and the seemingly unquenchable thirst for revenge. She had to do something, anything, anything at all. Perhaps with outside help.

He had barely left when she returned to the sitting room and kneeled in front of the bookcase until she found what she was looking for: the slip of paper with Nazleen's mobile phone number which she had once flung away in desperation.

It didn't make sense.

Dicte was trying to work in the noise of the office. Telephones were ringing, loud discussions were taking place while vast quantities of coffee beans were being ground in the coffee machine in the kitchen. The bag of pastries and bread rolls had been plundered long ago as though it were a relief consignment dropped from a plane to a starving African village. Gone were the peaceful days when the daily grind took its course and one day followed the next; days she could only long for. Now everything was about extremes. Kaiser was issuing orders and counter-orders with the speed and precision of an American cruise missile. Crime reporters were being given sports events to cover, economics reporters landed with immigration stories and the trainee was in charge of publishing the newspaper—at least that was how it felt.

Davidsen was polishing his halo and enthusiastically launching himself in the defence of freedom of speech with a series of articles and interviews with the same old talking heads that are always wheeled out whenever there's trouble brewing. Holger Søborg had revived the old idea of spreading the ghetto children across schools where the per centage of so-called bilinguals was less than twenty, which politicians to the right of centre were queuing to support, while those to the left, with their usual hypocrisy, blamed the government and society. Everyone had an agenda that lent a bias to whatever they were asked. Anything connected with immigrants and refugees was suddenly of great interest, and if you didn't know any better, you would think the country was eighty per cent Muslim, and a suppressed Christian minority was desperately trying to steer the nation away from the brink of disaster. The troubles continued in Rosenhøj and Kaiser served notice of front-page splashes to come. The news of decreased levels of criminality in Gellerup was demoted to a single column on page seven.

Bo, true to form, had vanished into thin air. But not before he had subjected Dicte to an interrogation. ‘Okay, what's the plan?'

A few minutes earlier he had sat on her desk with one foot placed on the radiator and a cup of coffee as black as night in his hand. ‘Have you decided?'

‘What do you mean?' she asked, to gain some time. She had just had Kaiser on the line and couldn't face any more input on what she should or shouldn't do with her life and her problems—which were to a great degree also the newspaper's problems.

‘Perhaps you should start with your mother,' Bo suggested. ‘Have you ever actually asked where your child ended up or who set up the contact and so on?'

She looked at him, and he must have seen her scepticism.

‘Just a suggestion,' he said. ‘Something to chew on.'

‘If Kaiser gives me some space, there is someone else I would like to speak to first,' she said. ‘An ex-resident of the commune.'

He snorted. ‘Commune? That old pre-historic shit. Do you really think you'll find the answer there?'

With that salvo he slipped off the desk, but not before he had sent her an air-kiss and tugged her hair in what she hoped was a gesture of affection. She watched him leave.

‘I've gone to the North Pole if anyone asks,' he said over his shoulder and grabbed the last pastry on his way out. ‘They say they've got integration problems.'

‘With what?' Holger asked with the receiver tucked under his chin as he scrolled down the screen with the mouse.

‘Blue mountain hares,' Bo said, and was gone.

Dicte put on headphones to shut out the noise. In an attempt to achieve some clarity she opened a file and began to write down cue words.

Point by point, she gave shape to what had happened in the last couple of weeks: the first was the film of the execution which was sent to her alone. She put a big question mark by that because it was still a mystery: why her of all people? There was the apparent Muslim connection with the executioner's clothing and perhaps also the murder weapon, about which there was still no information. She made a note that she would have to ask Wagner. A specialist must have scrutinised the sabre by now, from the front, the back and the side, and have some idea where it came from.

The manifesto was given its own point with a question mark next to God and Allah. ‘Shariah?' she wrote as an additional comment and took her time considering this one. The death sentence was part of the famous Shariah law, on which she was by no means an expert. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But there were also normal, average Danes who thought it was okay to take a life for a life, so in that sense the executioner could just as easily have been from any small village across Denmark.

She drummed her fingers on the mouse mat as she pondered.

The tattoo and the identity of Kjeld Arne Husum were what troubled her most. It was here, where the victim met his past, that she had a role to play. It couldn't be chance. Someone had picked her out because she had a connection with the victim. This someone also knew about her pregnancy when she was sixteen, but anyone could have read that in a number of interviews and portraits on the net. Her own son? She forced herself to concentrate on the facts. There was a chance, but one thing was definite: the commune with all its seventies dogma and whatever was going on at that time had nothing to do with integration or Muslims. When had immigrants started arriving? The end of the sixties or the beginning of the seventies? At any rate, it wasn't anything she could remember from that time. She hadn't met one single Turk in her childhood in Bording or adolescence in Ikast. She couldn't recall any women with scarves or men with beards. If only there had been, but everything had been so uniform, so mind-numbingly boring in flat central Jutland.

She reclined in her chair and stared at the screen as her mind went back in time. She remembered it as stagnant, but perhaps there had been something under the surface she hadn't spotted. Perhaps it was how you imagined Loch Ness: a freezing cold lake as deep as an abyss with a monster living in the dark waters beneath.

There had to be something, but what? Morten, Kaspar Friis, Kjeld Arne. What had brought them together? What was the information that had been doing the rounds and ended in blackmail? She considered Astrid Agerbæk's description of the commune. Chill and damp, she had said. Like floodwater running beneath the house. A flood, Dicte thought, or a deep lake with a matching monster.

She reached for the telephone directory, even more convinced that her remark to Bo was correct. There was one person left who could give an answer unless she visited them all again. Dion Henriksen was the man she needed to talk to.

It was five o'clock that afternoon as she drove through a squally shower and parked a few metres from the daycare centre where Dion Henriksen worked as a manager. It occurred to her that Dion must have been working as a classroom assistant back then.

It had been easy enough to find his name in the directory, and his wife had been happy to give her the information when Dicte introduced herself as an old school friend trying to get the class together for a reunion.

‘He usually catches the 5.30 bus home,' Henriette Henriksen said.

‘Where's the daycare centre?' Dicte wanted to know.

‘In Viby.' She gave her the address.

‘I might as well try and catch him there,' Dicte said. ‘I'm in Harald Jensens Plads, so I'm close by.'

‘I can ring him and let him know you're coming,' Henriette suggested.

Dicte put on her sweetest voice. ‘It‘d be fun to surprise him, so perhaps you wouldn't mind letting me just turn up. I'd like to see his face when he sees me. If he can remember me, that is.'

She sat at a distance watching all the children being picked up by busy parents on bikes, in cars and on foot. Little people swarmed out of the building, dressed in rainwear every colour of the rainbow. Through the open window she could hear their bright voices like a chattering flock of birds on a spring day. Parents greeted each other and helped children into seat belts in cars or up onto bicycle seats.

She only recognised Dion by his height and because he was the last to leave the building. She opened the car door, got out and stepped over towards him, ignoring the rain that pelted down and collected in streams at the side of the kerb.

‘Dion,' she called out. ‘Dion Henriksen?'

He turned round, and she was totally unprepared for his reaction. He sent her just one glance and then looked around him, bewildered. With a sudden jerk, his long legs began to move beneath him and, splashing himself in the rain, he tore down the street away from her as though he had seen a monster.