Next of Kin (28 page)

Mustapha Pinar.

Rose ran the name through her mind again and again. There was only one Mustapha Pinar. Only one of any significance.

She went into the bathroom when she got home. It had become a ritual now and she couldn't stop herself. She locked the bathroom door, undressed and laid her clothes in a neat pile on the toilet seat. For a moment she stood observing her body in the mirror on the back of the door. There weren't any curves left if there had ever been any. Her breasts were high and not very big. Her collarbone was outlined beneath white skin, and her stomach non-existent. Small hips protruded, stretching the skin from bone to bone. Even her hair didn't seem as thick as before. It hung, limp and lacklustre, to her shoulders, drawing her face down with it. Her eyes were dark hollows and stared back at her from the mirror, without recognition.

She touched the cold surface of the mirror with her finger, tracing the outline of her neck, then her shoulders.

‘Who are you?' she whispered. She saw her lips move but felt nothing.

Mustapha Pinar.

She turned on the shower and the water splashed down. Stray jets squirted in all directions because someone had forgotten to de-scale the showerhead, but she got in anyway and closed the plastic curtain. For a second it stuck to her skin like an extra layer, and she lashed out at it as a scream stuck in her throat.

Easy, now.

She leaned back and let the water stream over her. She turned up the hot tap, but it made no difference. She was still cold, maybe because there wasn't much of her left.

All evening she'd been calm. She had enjoyed being in Kasted, making pizza and soaking up the homely atmosphere. It had all been fine, exactly what she'd needed, until the name had cropped up as she stood at the sink with a glass in one hand and a tea towel in the other. Her mother's and Bo's voices resonated with reassuring familiarity from inside the living room, despite their conversation about the kidnapping and whether, or how far, it was terrorism or not. It wasn't the topic so much as the intonation that interested her. The voices told her that everything was fine and there was love and affection in the house.

She had a family. In some strange way they belonged together, bound to each other by blood, but also by time and love. At first she hadn't been sure about Bo, but now he was part of everything, and she couldn't imagine Kasted without him and the way he interacted with her mother. So much better than her father, who frequently pressed the wrong buttons and had never been able to work Dicte out. Bo could. That was the good thing about him. When Bo was there and he was concentrating, he was the only person who could get through to her. And Anne, of course, in another way. But Anne was in foreign climes and now the need for Bo was all the greater.

And then she suddenly heard them talking about Mustapha Pinar.

She turned off the shower and reached out for the towel to dry herself. The name had shot the idyll to smithereens. It had penetrated her brain, and an idea was beginning to form, but alongside it a mountain of repercussions.

PET had discovered a link, her mother had said. Between the terrorist suspects in Glostrup and Mustapha. Their arch-enemy, the man who wanted to tear them apart—and who was responsible for the attack on her, she was sure of that.

It all came back. The smell of wet grass and mud in the park; their voices, their touching and the panic along the length of her body as she lay beneath their weight. Their knives flaying her clothes.

‘No.'

She wanted it all to go away. She rubbed hard, and the towel left red patches on her skin. She saw it in the mirror in the clouds of steam after the shower. It had to be eradicated; everything that had happened, right from the beginning. There was a way, and she had found it, but did she dare take it?

All of a sudden Rose felt different. Her expression had changed. Her eyes were no longer sad and careworn, and her body didn't seem as insubstantial as before.

It would mean dealing with the devil, she knew that. It would come between them, and their love may not be the same as before, because she would be changed. She was ready to take this a lot further, she knew. She had never asked herself how far, until now. As far as she had to?

She thought about Aziz and knew she couldn't live without him. She closed her eyes and imagined his hands on her body, his lips against hers; his voice, his words; his smell and the taste of salt on his skin. Without him she would be a wandering shadow without a place to settle. She couldn't let that happen.

Rose straightened up. Her eyes flashed in the mirror. The decision was made.

Dicte could tell by looking at him that he wanted to run. His eyes darted sideways, searching for an escape route, but then he seemed to be borne along by the tide of children and teenagers coming down the corridor towards her.

‘Hi Morten.'

He looked at her. The bell echoed in their ears.

‘Lunch break,' she said. ‘That gives us some extra time. Twenty minutes, isn't it?'

There was disdain in his eyes, but she could also see something else. Fear. She couldn't help feeling smug.

‘What do you want?'

‘I just want to talk,' she said. ‘Where can we go?'

He looked around irritably and came close to being knocked over by a gang of teenage boys chasing each other. ‘Why don't you look where the hell you're going?' he yelled after them, and their frightened eyes told her that he was a teacher they would hate to get on the wrong side of.

He nodded towards the entrance. ‘Not here. We can go outside if you insist.'

They went outside. A gust of wind swirled leaves around the school playground and the sounds and smells reminded her of a time so far back that the images were dissolving.

‘Kirsten Husum,' she said, watching him. ‘What do you know about her?'

Muscles twitched around his eyes and mouth, but only for a millisecond. His voice was hard and there was nothing about him she recognised. ‘Why would I know anything about her?'

‘You can stop pretending right now. I've spoken to Dion.'

He leaned his head back and looked up at the clouds scudding across the sky as light alternated with shade.

‘So what?'

‘So now I know what happened, more or less.'

He slumped down on a bench. He didn't say anything, so she perched on the edge watching him, struggling to understand how, once upon a time, he'd not only been her choice, but also her ticket to another life. He had used her, but she had used him, too, she knew that.

‘In that case, you don't need me,' he said. ‘You can manage on your own. Clever Dicte, you always were a star pupil. Clever and willing,' he added, but she wouldn't be provoked; the opposite, in fact.

‘I was sixteen years old. I had lived a very sheltered life and you knew it. You were my teacher, you were the adult.'

She spoke without accusation. The facts spoke for themselves. He blushed, and for the second time within a few days, Dicte felt power in her hands. Much as she was both attracted and repelled by the feeling, she was certainly happy to exploit it.

‘We have a child together, I suppose you know that.' She did not wait for him to react. ‘I had to cope on my own. I had no one to talk to. You were the responsible adult and you rejected me when I sought help and comfort from you. I gave birth to the child without a father present. It was a boy.'

Her voice grew hoarse from the effort this cost her. Against her will, she was moved by her own words and tears pressed against her eyelids. ‘He's out there somewhere. I gave him up for adoption and I have regretted it ever since. For a while I thought it was him.'

She'd wanted to use this argument to apply pressure, but now it was on the verge of overpowering her.

‘Him? What do you mean?'

‘Someone sent me a text message. I thought it was him,' she repeated. ‘I was meant to believe it was from him. The execution … The films …'

Morten stared into space. Perhaps he was moved, it was hard to tell, but she had one more round to fire and in order to distract him from the first, she chose to aim it right in his face.

‘You knew that Kjeld Arne had taken Kirsten back to the commune. You knew that he kept her imprisoned in the utility room in the cellar for two weeks while the police were looking for her and her parents were going out of their minds with grief and anxiety. You knew what went on down there and that he and Dion shared a sick obsession with children.'

She spat out the words and they showered down over him. ‘She was four years old. You knew her own brother raped her downstairs. Yet you acted as if nothing was going on. You invited me into your room and turned up the music—so perverted, having sex with me while a little girl was exposed to the worst kind of torture in the room directly below your bed.'

She leaned forwards, very close to him; so close that she could kiss him, or bite him. So close that she could see the pores of his skin and a couple of liver spots on one of his cheeks. So close she could stare into the eyes that had once bewitched her but which now seemed to be devoid of a soul. Kirsten Husum had never been her own flesh and blood; she had never even known her. But at this moment she wanted to kill.

‘What kind of a person are you really, Morten? How do you define decency? Or did you convince yourself that it had nothing to do with you?'

He said nothing for a long time, just sat there looking at his hands, which grappled with each other as if seeking comfort, or perhaps forgiveness.

‘She survived,' he said at length. ‘We persuaded him to let her go. If it hadn't been for us …'

From his tone of voice she could tell that he had convinced himself of his own virtue.

‘How very heroic,' she said.

She sat for a while watching him. Was there anything else to be gleaned from him? The bell went once again and the whole school came alive as children of all ages rushed like lemmings towards the classrooms.

Dicte stood up. She wondered how to say goodbye to a part of her own life, then realised that you never do.

‘The police will want to talk to you at some point,' she said and left.

Was it probable? Was it even possible? Had Kirsten Husum indeed perished in the tsunami with her husband and child, or had she survived somehow and transformed herself into a brutal avenger? And if so, why now? After so many years? Why had she never talked about the days she had spent in the cellar? Why had she lived half a lifetime without ever holding her brother accountable?

Flesh and blood, she thought, as she drove back to the office. Perhaps that was where the answer lay. Staying true to blood ties? You could distance yourself from them; you could cut them out of your life. But turning your back on them and then holding them to account was a huge step. She wondered if someone had given Kirsten Husum a nudge and made her take that step.

At the office Davidsen was in the middle of a telephone conversation with an angry reader, and Holger and Helle were sitting close together pretending to discuss that day's edition. Bo was out on a job, she was told. Something to do with sport.

In order to find a starting point she rummaged through her notes for the articles she had written about the tsunami victims. She also found the name of the psychologist who had been assigned when the survivors returned home after the disaster. She called and left a message on her answer phone. When her telephone rang shortly afterwards, she thought it was the psychologist returning the call.

‘Dicte Svendsen,' she responded.

‘How are you?'

All the way from Nuuk, Anne sounded worried, and even with the hiss of the satellite on the line emotions welled up in her, just when she didn't need them.

‘Great. How about you?'

‘Liar,' Anne declared, cutting to the chase. ‘How can you feel great with what's going on? We do get the news up here, you know.'

Of course they did. Of course the kidnapping of Anders Nikolajsen had reached Nuuk.

‘So what's this about?' Anne asked. ‘What's it got to do with you?'

Dicte told her about the meetings with Dion and Morten and her tsunami theory.

‘And what else?' Anne asked, like a dog with a bone.

‘What else what?'

‘Why you?'

Dicte blurted out something, knowing immediately that Anne wouldn't let herself be fobbed off. ‘Because I used to go to that house. Because I was Morten's girlfriend? How would I know?'

Anne said nothing, the silence filled with white noise. Then she said, ‘That doesn't make sense. There has to be something else. There has to be more to it.'

‘What on earth could that be?'

She heard herself speaking. It sounded too much like a laboured defence and was relieved when her mobile started ringing from the bottom of her bag. She thought it might be the psychologist trying to get hold of her and she paid very little attention to Anne's objections as she finished their conversation with a promise to call her later the following day.

She answered the call just before it went to her message bank. ‘Dicte Svendsen.'

It was a kind of groan, as if the caller were in pain. She waited and the words came, recognising Kaspar Gefion Friis's junkie drawl. It sounded as if he was struggling to gain control of his tongue.

‘She was here … at first … She lived in my cellar …'

‘Kaspar?'

‘I couldn't refuse her, could I? I owed her. We all owed her, didn't we? It's all so fucked up.'

Dicte wanted to pin him down and ask more questions, but he hung up. She found his number and called him back, but there was no reply.

At least Ida Marie had refrained from remarking that a man like Anders Nikolajsen didn't deserve to be found. Or that he should be left to face the music and that she hoped he would rot in his jail.

She might very well have thought this, but he doubted it. After all, she was a human being who knew the difference between right and wrong. She was also the woman he loved and surely his judgement couldn't be that flawed.

For a moment Wagner rested his forehead against the window in the briefing room and stared out over the city: a few seconds of peace while they sat like sailors in a trapped submarine as the oxygen ran out. That was how it felt when the clock was against you. The sensation of slow suffocation could only be kept at bay with results, and there had been far too few of those.

In order to cope you had to surface every now and then, to snatch some oxygen in the form of coffee or food, or like him: to indulge in a little time travel to a milder climate, to the fragrance of Ida Marie's skin and perfume, away from the claustrophobic atmosphere in the police station and six increasingly frustrated officers and their bickering.

‘What's been happening at Martin's nursery? Any news about your suspect?'

He had only been able to find the courage and the energy to ask because she had been lying close to him in bed that very morning. It had been weighing heavily on him for days.

There had been a pause before she replied: ‘To be honest, I think it was a false alarm. I think you were right. We were jumping to conclusions.'

She'd been aware the case was haunting him, but she was hardly offering him her admission as a gift. It definitely wasn't the right moment to accept it with an ‘I told you so'.

‘You can never be too careful with things like that,' he assured her. ‘I'm glad you had an opportunity to discuss it. But what was it that made you change your mind?'

She lay for a while staring at the ceiling. ‘There were too many things that didn't add up,' she said then. ‘We based most of our suspicions on what Anton said, but then his mother admitted that he had a lively imagination and he was prone to manipulating the truth in other areas as well.'

‘So he was just making it up?'

‘It looks like it.'

‘Apart from keeping your eyes open and being aware, that's all you can do,' he whispered into the base of her neck. They lay like that for a long time.

‘Wagner!'

The sound of his boss's voice shattered his daydream. He turned away from the window and stared at Hartvigsen, who looked like he was bearing news.

‘Anything new?' Wagner asked.

‘From London,' Hartvigsen said. ‘They've found the decapitated body and they've arrested a woman. A Pakistani woman.'

The team gathered round swiftly. The information was delivered in exact phrases and faster than Wagner had come to expect from Hartvigsen.

‘Her name is Yasmin Kahn. This is her story: despite violent protests she was forced to marry a cousin at the age of seventeen. They lived together for a year until she eloped with a British man—the secret childhood sweetheart she'd known since school apparently—and with whom she had two children.'

They sat around the table while Hartvigsen remained standing, as if giving a speech at a birthday party on the family farm.

‘Of course her family refused to accept her choice. The threat of an honour killing hung over their heads, and she and her boyfriend went into hiding.' He paused dramatically.

Wagner couldn't help but ask, ‘And what happened then?'

Hartvigsen jutted out his chin with self-assurance. Wagner didn't begrudge him his moment as he revealed his next nugget:

‘She lost her boyfriend and their two children in the tsunami in Thailand. They haven't been able to get a word out of her about any Danish woman, but her hatred of Islam is obvious, according to my contact at Scotland Yard.'

Then Hartvigsen looked at them and added, ‘The beheaded man is her cousin and husband.'

The new information hung in the air for a moment before falling and causing outbursts and mutterings all around the table.

‘They must have met in Thailand,' Ivar K said, articulating what everyone was thinking. ‘The two women must have formed a pact.'

‘Okay.' Wagner took charge and Hartvigsen left them to get on with their job.

‘Kirsten Husum. What do we know about her?'

Ivar K and Hansen competed to present the information to the team: ‘Her body has never been identified. Only the bodies of her husband and their child were found. Her husband's name was Yussuf Abbas—he was Palestinian and, much to his family's disappointment, wasn't very interested in any form of religion. He was a carpenter by trade and did very well for himself. The child was a little boy of eighteen months. Kirsten Husum used to work as a care assistant for Social Services in Aabyhøj. They also lived in Aabyhøj, in one of the housing association flats in Silkeborgvej.'

‘I presume that the flat was re-let long ago and that the family's possessions have been divided up between the heirs,' Wagner said.

‘It's certainly gone,' Hansen announced. ‘I've spoken to the housing association. There's a Turkish family living in the flat now.'

‘So where has she been living?' Eriksen asked. ‘If she really did survive the tsunami, how did she manage to re-enter Denmark in the first place without anyone finding out? Does she have a passport? Is she using her own name? Or is she using forged documents?'

‘I imagine she's been getting by just like any other illegal immigrant,' Ivar K said. ‘You can buy forged ID papers if you know the right people.'

Wagner tapped his pen against the table and shook his head. ‘We need more information about her. When did she last go to work? Who were her colleagues, her circle of friends? Was she isolated from her own family or did she still see them? Do her mother or brother know anything?'

He sent them off in all directions. ‘Where might she be living? At a girlfriend's house, a summer cottage, whatever? And where is she holding the hostage prisoner? That's our priority. What does she know? Where does she normally go?'

Some of the men started to phone around while others left to visit the family. Wagner picked up his jacket and took the lift up to Crime Scene Investigation where he was invited along to the IT department after a quick word with Haunstrup. An IT technician was examining the film of Anders Nikolajsen.

‘Have you found anything?' He knew that he shouldn't put pressure on him and look over his shoulder, but the temptation was too much. He quickly briefed the technician about the new information.

‘A care assistant,' said his colleague, whose name was Kim Thorsen. ‘My mum's a care assistant.'

Wagner wasn't entirely sure what the point of this remark was, but responded all the same. ‘Is that right?'

The man nodded at his computer screen. ‘We've isolated the sound. It's dripping water.'

‘Rain?'

Thorsen shook his head. ‘Not strong enough for rain. There are only occasional, but very persistent drips.'

‘A dripping tap?'

Another shake of the head. ‘Sounds more like a drainage sump.'

Wagner had no idea what a drainage sump was, so he waited for an explanation.

‘It's a kind of grate that ensures rainwater drains away,' Thorsen explained.

‘And where would you need that?'

Thorsen shrugged. ‘Anywhere rainwater might cause a big problem. Such as flooding.'

‘A cellar?' Wagner suggested.

Sceptical, Thorsen tilted his head. ‘There's also condensation on the walls and no natural light, so it wouldn't be your standard cellar.'

‘But it could be somewhere underground?' Wagner asked, thinking of the oft-reported caves in the mountains in Pakistan and grainy videos of Osama Bin Laden with a machine gun and an ammunition belt hung over his shoulders. But this wasn't terrorism. It wasn't Al Qaeda. Or was it? A new twist on terrorist tactics? Who knew what went on in those circles? PET certainly didn't, and neither did the CIA.

Thorsen nodded vaguely, but his mind seemed to be far away, possibly visiting a distant galaxy.

‘Somewhere underground,' he repeated.