Next of Kin (27 page)

‘I knew he wanted to kill me. I could see it in his eyes.'

The rape victim had at last reached the point where she could find words for what had happened.

Ole Nyborg Madsen listened with full concentration. The girl continued.

‘He wasn't at all like the person in the café. He was suddenly quite different. From the moment we got into the flat he changed.'

Her body was slight and her whole nature shy. It surprised him that anyone had even noticed her, but then it had started on the net. There you could be whoever you liked and make people believe all sorts of things.

‘He started to attack me as soon as we were in the door,' she continued, her voice thick with emotion now. ‘I tried to push him off me, but that made things worse. He locked the door so that when I tried to escape, it was easy to stop me.'

With some embarrassment she added, ‘I'd also had quite a bit to drink.'

‘You couldn't know he would rape you,' Ole put in.

She shook her head. ‘Nope.'

‘What happened then?'

‘He dragged me into the bedroom and pushed me onto the bed. And then he did it.'

Ole Madsen scrutinised his patient. There wasn't a lot of her. She would have been an easy victim. She didn't exactly exude self-confidence, either, but then who did in situations such as these? But she was a typical victim. A textbook example of the kind of girl a rapist should choose. Not very strong, no will power and no self-esteem to speak of. Just a little girl needing love and a bit of fun.

‘Did you put up a fight?'

‘A bit.' Then she shook her head. ‘I was too scared. I knew he'd kill me if I didn't do as he said.'

‘How?'

She stared at him with large eyes, as though the crime had already been committed. ‘I think he wanted to strangle me.'

She told him the details and he asked questions to make sure everything came out into the open, like drawing out a septic tooth.

All the time his thoughts followed parallel tracks. There were many ways of killing and he had to choose one that was the most appropriate and the most satisfying. He had come to the conclusion that he had to see the eyes and he had to see some kind of understanding in them. Simply killing was pointless. There had to be a confrontation first, he was convinced of that. Nanna's murderer should experience fear. He should realise it was a punishment and that he wasn't going to get off lightly. Strangling, perhaps. That was one possibility and the physical proximity appealed to him. Feeling skin in his hands and the throb of the pulse getting fainter. Looking into his eyes and seeing life ebb away. Close contact.

‘… Fucking slut, he called me.'

Sobs shook her slender frame and bored their way into his brain, bursting his fantasies. He passed her the box of Kleenex, feeling mean-spirited. She had wrung out her soul and he hadn't caught the last part.

‘In some strange way, he was right,' she sniffled, and he knew he had arrived at the core. The attendant guilt. The feeling of being soiled, of being broken.

‘Why do you think that?' he asked.

She peered up at him with big eyes. ‘I wanted it. Somehow I wanted it, too.'

‘You didn't want to be raped, though, did you? You didn't want it to hurt.'

‘But sex. I wanted that.'

‘Is there anything wrong with that?'

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps I just got what I deserved.'

Foolish child. He almost lost patience on the spot, but still managed to get her to see the light before the session was over. Thick as a plank. She was right. Sometimes it did seem as though they deserved it; as though he was wasting his time trying to build something in people who didn't have the capacity for it. The rape wasn't her fault. But for Christ's sake, she could show a bit of anger, some vengeance, prove that she was a human of flesh and blood and not an anaemic rag doll who let others do as they wished with her.

There was a knock at the door and Maibritt came in. ‘Have you seen the paper?'

He shook his head. She put it under his nose. ‘It's terrible. Now they've kidnapped a paedophile who's just served his time.'

He read the article and stared at the photograph. It was a still from a film. Grainy, not very sharp and the colours were on the pale side. But the fear in the man's eyes stood out. Yes! That was exactly how it should be.

‘Poor man,' said Maibritt.

‘Do you think so?'

She looked at him in surprise. ‘That? No one deserves that,' she said. ‘Being held hostage and not knowing whether you'll live or die. That's insane. How can you ask?'

He smiled to ease the tension. ‘No, of course not. You're right,' he said, but couldn't help adding that the paedophile wasn't exactly innocent. The man had abused his own daughter. He hoped someone would cut his bollocks off.

‘He's paid his debt to society,' Maibritt pointed out again.

Ole carried on regardless. ‘Nine months. For destroying his daughter's life.'

She just gaped at him. Then she turned her back on him and left. From her reaction he could see she was concerned about him.

He was, too.

As always, trying to find a parking space near the police station was hopeless, so she drove down to the harbour where she could find one. She stepped out into the autumn wind and pulled up the hood of her coat, relishing the feeling of being shaken by gusts of wind and breathing in fresh air after the stale atmosphere of the pub and the brief visit back to her office.

Dicte looked at her watch. It was half past six and it had been a long day already, but the adrenaline had injected some energy into her exhaustion. Just a few minutes, she thought, and started heading in the opposite direction to the town, towards the huge cranes and tugs on the other side of the railway lines. It was all she needed to collect her thoughts, to process everything she had just learned and all that that lay ahead.

A pattern was revealing itself to her and yet it was still incomplete. If it was a picture of a man or a woman, there was an eye missing, or a nose, and the outline of the body was still blurred. But a picture was definitely taking shape. And part of it was like a snapshot of her past.

Dicte walked down to the quayside and followed it round. It was evening and most of the harbour was deserted; the surface of the water was a restless reflection, whipped up by the wind. Further out, the gulls were diving, scrapping for the galley waste thrown into the sea. Once again she thought of Anne, wondering how she was doing; whether she could sense her thoughts. Was she aware of Dicte's confusion, her doubts and her struggle to do the right thing? Could she hear her heart pounding hard at the thought of the responsibility that came with truth and her mind churning in her quest for the solution?

The word ‘family' had taken on a whole new meaning. She thought of the blank square on Bo's insurance papers. Having a family was no guarantee. Every so often blood ties could change from being the decorative bow on the protective package to being the exact opposite. Relationships, whether created through genes or love, were fragile creatures.

And what about her? Could she have done anything all those years ago? Could she have prevented a young life from being strangled by blood ties?

She left the car and crossed over towards Kystvejen, making her way to the red brick colossus which was the police station. It appeared to have closed down for the night as well and most windows looked dark and uninviting, the station's officers on their way home to wives, girlfriends and children, leaving behind a skeleton staff to hold the fort. But there would be light in one office. Wagner and his team would still be at work, she was absolutely sure of that, just as she was sure that the coming days would be some of the longest for all of them.

It was an exhausted, grudging Wagner who met her in reception.

‘I can't give you anything,' he said. ‘I know you're part of this, but the investigation is off limits to you.'

She could tell from his posture and his grey face that it had been an unproductive day. He seemed to sway slightly as he rubbed his eyes with one hand and supported himself on the reception desk with the other.

‘I'm not here to ask for anything,' she said. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact.'

She didn't say this with any triumph in her voice. Nevertheless she received a guarded smile from him and he held up a hand as if to stall her.

‘Don't tell me you've got something for me. The last time you said that, the shit really hit the fan.'

Dicte unzipped her bag and brandished the file she had managed to compile, old newspaper cuttings faxed over from the main Copenhagen office by an irritable archivist hogtied by her insistence that she was sent absolutely everything.

‘So what is it?' he asked in the lift.

‘The summer of 1977. Husum was living in a commune outside Ikast. His parents lived in Herning.'

‘And?'

They stepped out of the lift and walked down the corridor to the briefing room where the team was working.

All eyes looked up and, in them, she read scepticism and hope mixed with frustration and stubborn determination. Ivar K was talking on the phone, sprawled across the window sill with his feet on a chair. Hansen was engrossed in a conversation with Kristian Hvidt, Eriksen was scribbling on a notepad and Petersen was busy with what looked like a report from the Institute of Forensic Medicine. A couple of other officers she didn't know were examining some print-outs and making notes.

‘Where?' said Ivar K down the receiver, grabbing a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket and writing down a reminder on the back of his hand. ‘Okay. Do you remember when that was?'

Wagner motioned for her to pull out a chair. She was welcome to sit on the desk or the floor for all he cared; she could read that in his face.

‘The summer of '77,' he prompted. ‘What about it?'

Ivar K put down the phone. Slowly they all graduated towards her and Wagner as though drawn by a magnet. She had their full attention as she handed him the file.

‘There was a case on everyone's mind that summer,' she said. ‘A four-year-old girl went missing from her home in Ikast. A major search was carried out, but to no avail. The girl was found two weeks later. There was evidence of rape. The girl was disorientated and didn't say a word about what had happened to her, or indeed anything else. The perpetrator was never found.'

Wagner looked around the circle. ‘Did we know this?' he asked no one in particular.

‘We would probably have got there by tomorrow,' Ivar K said. ‘I've just spoken to Husum's brother, Poul. Kjeld Arne lived in a commune in Ikast for two and a half years from 1976 onwards, so I would have checked with the local police for cases of that nature during that period.'

Wagner nodded. ‘So we've saved ourselves twelve hours, which might turn out to be critical.'

He looked at Dicte. She knew this was his way of thanking her.

‘What else?'

Of course he knew there was more to come. He could read her, she was convinced of that.

‘The girl's name was Kirsten Husum. She's Kjeld Arne's sister.'

‘Bloody hell,' Hansen, in shock, exclaimed. ‘How did you find all that out?'

‘The one living in the US?' Wagner asked, deciding to ignore Hansen for the time being. ‘What do we know about her?'

He threw the question at no one in particular. Jan Hansen pulled out a file and leafed briskly through it.

‘Her name's not Kirsten,' he said after a pause. ‘Her name's Ina and she's a dentist in Houston.'

‘Any other sisters?' Wagner asked.

Hansen read on. ‘Only one more. The one who disappeared in the tsunami with her husband and child.' He looked up. ‘She appears to have been an afterthought. Born in 1973. And her name was Kirsten.'

Wagner's voice was as sharp as a razor when it came.‘What do we have on her? Was her body identified or was she simply reported missing? What do we know about her past? Who was she married to?'

Hansen peered into the file again.‘Nothing. All we know for certain is that the family disappeared during a holiday to Thailand in 2004 at the time of the tsunami.'

‘Who collated this information?'

Wagner's voice had practically become a whisper. Dicte had just enough time to think that she would hate to be the officer in question, when Eriksen put up his hand in shame.

‘The pizza is cold, Mum. I can re-heat it.'

A pale, thin Rose had saved the evening in Kasted and was rewarded with a careful hug. It was like embracing a talking toothpick, Dicte thought, although she didn't say that. Bo was sitting in front of the television looking like the cat that had got the cream.

‘Hi, sweetheart. Any news?'

Dicte crawled up to him on the sofa. She needed to inhale his scent and feel his heart beating. She rested her head on his shoulder, pulled up her knees and covered them with a blanket.

‘I'll eat it cold,' she called out to Rose. ‘And a litre of red wine while you're at it, please.'

Bo caressed her neck. Rose brought the wine and pizza. Everything was idyllic, but in another cold, damp place a man was being held hostage and fearing for his life.

‘I suppose they're assuming it's terrorism now,' Bo said.

She nodded and took the plate Rose handed to her. ‘Strøm thinks Christmas has come early.'

Bo glanced at her.

‘Let's just hope he doesn't piss his pants with excitement,' he said.

She took a bite from the microwaved pizza. The aroma of cheese and garlic wafted seductively up her nose. ‘You know what I mean. He's convinced that it's all linked to the four terrorism suspects in Glostrup and Mustapha Pinar, whose name for some reason appears in an email to one of them.'

‘Have they taken him in for questioning?'

She shook her head with her mouth full of food, sending crumbs everywhere. She quickly brushed them off her trousers and down onto the carpet. Bo was also sprayed, but he grabbed her hand and held it.

‘They know where he is,' she said. ‘They probably have him under surveillance, hoping he'll make a mistake. It's only a matter of time before they bring him in.'

Rose was clattering around in the kitchen. Bo squeezed Dicte's hand. His other hand wandered along the back of the sofa and she rested her head back to make contact.

‘So what's been happening here at home?' she asked.

‘Anne called.'

That gave her a start. She was both pleased and defensive. ‘What did she say?

‘Well, what did she say? This and that.' He pulled her closer; she could feel his breath against her cheek, almost on her lips. ‘What do you say when you're calling from Nuuk on a satellite phone? Hello? How are you? Do you want to buy some ice, man?'

‘Bo!'

‘Well, she wasn't calling to talk to me.'

As always, Rose's pizza was fantastic. Bo drove Rose home while Dicte stayed on the sofa watching a very interesting television program which instantly sent her to the land of nod.

Later, when Bo had returned home and they had polished off the rest of the wine, she brought up the subject of Anne again. ‘When did she call?'

‘Round about six-thirty. I had just come through the front door.'

‘Six-thirty?' At half past six on the dot she had been standing at the harbour's edge, thinking about Anne and wondering if Anne had been thinking of her. Yet again it struck her that Anne, in some way or other, knew everything. Perhaps not every detail, but she knew the gist.

‘Why don't you call her now?' Bo suggested.

‘No, not at this hour.'

Anne could wait. She wasn't risking a confrontation on the line to Nuuk. Anne would drag it all out of her; ask her if she'd had come clean with Wagner.

You had to prepare yourself for a conversation like that. She might change a few facts in her internal dialogues, but she couldn't lie to Anne.