Next of Kin (7 page)

‘Found anything?'

One of the crime scene investigators, Emil Sørensen, peered up from his work holding an armful of withered leaves.

‘An old midden. The leaves were on top, but there are signs of recent digging.' He threw the pile to one side and brought a filthy latex glove up to his chin where a tiny leaf had caught on his beard. He looked up. ‘It's already lost most of its leaves.'

Wagner tipped his head back. ‘It' was the maple tree that had been part of the reason they had been able to identify the locality. The strange thing about the tree was that some of the middle branches had been sawn off, presumably to improve the view of the uneven pasture land that sloped down to the sea from the site, where the neighbours' cows grazed like black and white toy animals on a LEGO farm. He stood for a brief moment taking in the view and found it difficult to return his gaze to the midden. In the distance he saw a bird of prey curve upwards and circle. A harrier hawk perhaps. He was guessing. There was scattered vegetation, tufts of grass and a few fence posts poking up here and there like oversized matchsticks. Even in the rain it was beautiful, and steam rose off the soil, which obviously still retained the remnants of the summer's heat.

A piece of music surfaced in his mind. It was a Bach prelude that he had played once. It wasn't difficult, not brilliant, but it was different and more engaging than the set pieces most people knew. For a moment the theme seemed to be carrying him over the meadow on an illusory run of notes held together by a non-existent pianist. Then he was dropped and came to earth with a bang as Emil Sørensen let out a stifled cry:

‘Shit!'

Wagner turned in time to see a naked upper torso. The officer pulled the gauze mask up over his mouth as the stench began to spread and destroy the idyll. They carefully brushed the earth and the leaves away, layer by layer, until two muscular arms with black, swollen hands lay revealed. The moment the headless neck appeared from the midden, Bach was long gone.

‘Gormsen here.'

Under any normal circumstances Wagner would have smiled at the forensic examiner's breathless response, which sounded as if he had been caught in the middle of some passionate bedroom action. Now he was more than happy to take his eyes off their discovery in the dung heap and focus on the house.

‘We have a victim,' he said down the mobile to his old friend, who, he knew with almost absolute certainty, was not in the bedroom but at work, probably in mid-autopsy.

‘A whole one?'

‘Minus the head so far,' Wagner said, surprised at how easy it was to say. ‘We'll keep searching, but you'd better come and have a look if you can tear yourself away.'

From where he was standing he could see the gable end of the building, which had probably served as living quarters and a cow shed at one time. Ten cows at most, he guessed. A bit of land for growing vegetables and fodder for the cattle. Under the eaves of the thatched roof, stones were set in a characteristic pattern to ensure that rainwater quickly drained away into the ground and the property did not flood in the storms.

‘I'm coming,' said Gormsen. ‘They'll give us a helicopter, I suppose. Where did you find him?

‘In an old midden,' Wagner replied, heading for the house. They hadn't been able to get a court order, so he had taken the decision to search the place, banking on the court granting him a retrospective warrant. He knew it wouldn't be a problem. ‘We scrabbled around for a bit before we found it. The vegetation matches the film exactly.'

Not that there would have been an owner at whom they could have brandished the search warrant. The property seemed to be occupied only in the summer and at weekends, but the neighbour had a key. On seeing the combined police force of Samsø plus part of the Aarhus force she had handed it over without demur.

‘Is it raining where you are, too?' Gormsen asked.

‘Bucketing down.'

‘Can you cover him?'

Wagner watched his people manoeuvring the white canvas over the soft earth.

‘We'll put a tarpaulin over him,' he promised and gave Gormsen the address of this hellhole before pressing the ‘off' button. He struggled through the rain, past the execution block, which was due to be examined now for any traces of blood. It was close by the site of a small bonfire and he tried to imagine children with bread-twisters around the fire one summer evening, but he couldn't.

‘Coffee?'

Ivar K passed him a mug. Wagner's fingers closed around the hot ceramic vessel and he thawed out temporarily. He breathed in the steam from the coffee and closed his eyes.

‘Where did you get it?'

Ivar K nodded towards the neighbour's whitewashed farm where neat rows of hollyhocks and summer flowers bowed their heads in the rain. Red and yellow hollyhocks swayed under the weight of the rain, threatening to buckle in the middle.

‘What's the story?'

‘The owner lives in Aarhus. One Kjeld Arne Husum. Apparently only uses it as a summer residence.'

‘When was he here last?'

Ivar K swallowed a mouthful of coffee and wiped the corners of his mouth with thumb and first finger. ‘He came Friday last week. Said he had ten days' holiday. The neighbours, they're the Brodersens; were in Copenhagen for a week—she's from there—so they didn't see him after the first few days.'

He sent Wagner an eloquent look. ‘They came home one day before Husum was supposed to leave, but he had already gone.'

Wagner's brain churned away, but his eyes were scanning the property and the cars parked all over the place. He saw Dicte Svendsen and her photographer friend standing by the tape. He sighed. They weren't the only ones insisting on joining them. He punched in his boss's code while signalling to Ivar K that he should take a walk around the house.

Brief conversation. Hartvigsen had a meeting with the Chief of Police, who would inform PET. Later they would all have a get-together, but right now police work was top of the agenda.

Wagner strolled around the house which, in estate agent-speak, could do with a bit of TLC. The main door was open. Inside, he could see a couple of crime officers in white overalls and shoe protectors working quietly away, looking for possible leads. For a second he was tempted to shelter from the weather. The kitchen looked inviting. A coffee machine stood waiting, and there was an old-fashioned bread-slicer, which took him back to his childhood and his mother's thick slices of rye. But restlessness and the coffee urged him onwards until he came face to face with the door of what seemed to be an outhouse or a utility room.

‘Anyone got a key?' He gestured to the new-looking padlock.

Ivar K shook his head. ‘We were just about to pick it when the midden suddenly seemed more interesting. You know how it is.'

He knew. You had that buzz. You followed your instincts and created a sense of expectation, just the same way that the press could make stock exchange prices tumble with a mere mention of what might happen.

‘Do you want to do the honours?'

Everyone knew that Ivar K was the man for the job. His lock-pick gun was famous, and his willingness to use it inversely proportionate to his respect for search warrants. Rumour had it that Ivar seemed to have come into possession of the gun about the same time as an identical one went missing from Forensics. The latter was one of the many souvenirs Forensics had acquired over the years and formed part of an extensive collection of crowbars, mauls, hammers and other indispensable tools of the burglary trade.

Ivar K reached with glee into his back-pocket and pulled out the device. He bent forward and examined the lock. In the meantime Wagner returned to his car to get the flashlight from the glove compartment.

Dicte Svendsen was there at once. She held the door open for him while he clattered around. Drenched hair stuck out from under her hood and raindrops glistened on her cheeks. He almost felt like reaching out and wiping them off, but her eyes were hard, like bullet-proof glass.

‘You've found him.'

It was more a statement than a question. He stood up with the torch in his hand. ‘You know very well I can't comment.'

She jogged after him as he headed back to the house. He could feel the stubbornness oozing from every pore in her body.

‘I'm not just any journalist,' she reminded him. ‘For Christ's sake, it was me who gave you the film. I'm an integral part of all this, whether I like it or not.'

She stomped after him, as far as the cordon, which he pushed down and swung a leg over. Pangs of conscience worked away at him, but he ignored them. He couldn't afford to bring her into this. Not with all the eyes from above focused on him.

‘You owe me,' she shouted after him.

That did it. The anger mounted and stuck in his craw. He spun on his heel and marched back toward her, glared into her eyes, which were always so hungry and wanted so much from him.

‘I thought you said it was a thank-you gift.'

To his horror, he saw her blink back tears. But her voice was husky, as if from too many cigarettes, although he knew she didn't smoke.

‘Why me? Why the hell does it have to be me?'

The rain whipped her words into his face, and he looked at her, standing there in her raincoat, which seemed to protect her against the outside world and isolate her at the same time. Perhaps that was the way she was, it occurred to him. Perhaps it wasn't just the job and her background and the terrible experiences she had been through. Perhaps it wasn't random events conspiring against her but the fact that she had so many internal contradictions, forever chafing against each other and threatening to destroy her.

Then he had a sudden insight. He could see why she had been chosen. Why they were standing there in the rain on muddy Samsø. It was so obvious. So clear that he wondered why he hadn't seen it before.

‘Because you can never let anything go,' he answered, and went back to the outhouse.

Ivar K gave a shout of satisfaction as the lock yielded.

‘Voilà!'

He shoved the door open. The hinges groaned. An unbearable stench wafted towards them as Wagner switched on the torch and shone the beam into the darkness. It was like a lumber room. Worn-out appliances with grimy tops and old furniture full of holes fought for floor space. There were planks scattered across the floor and leaning against the wall, boxes covered in spiderwebs stacked up on shelves with old paint pots and brushes in jars, and rusting tools and buckets that had seen better days.

The beam crossed a shelf and Wagner recognised four more old-style bread-slicers—the only machines in this space that were in a decent condition, gleaming and freshly painted in different colours. The work of a collector, perhaps. He imagined the house owner had time to scour flea markets for them; his late wife had been obsessed with collecting chandeliers.

The beam continued to search, and they saw it at the same time. The sound that came from Ivar K's larynx was one he had never heard before and was joined by another protracted wail Wagner recognised as his own.

A fifth bread-slicer stood in the corner on the clean white top of an old fridge. The bread machine had been painted pillar-box red, the blade raised as if ready to cut a slice of rye. But it wasn't a loaf of bread in the box under the blade. It was a man's head.

‘Bloody hell! You can smell it out here.'

Bo's camera was like a machine gun fitted with a silencer. His bad leg almost caused him to slip in the mud as he chased after Wagner and Ivar K on their way from the outhouse. Dicte caught Wagner's profile, but what she saw was enough to stop her blood circulating. His face had stiffened into a grey mask and his eyes were lifeless as the light caught them from an oblique angle. Her ears were still ringing with the shouts that had emanated from the open door just a few minutes ago. Inarticulate, almost inhuman, cries that no one could control.

A couple of forensics officers emerged from the farmhouse with their suitcases and white fibre boilersuits, like health workers from an Ebola-stricken jungle. Bo was still snapping away. The officers didn't grace the crowd of freezing onlookers gathered behind the cordon with a glance. Quiet and concentrated on the task in hand, they shut everything else out and dived into the stinking shed.

Dicte stared through the curtain of rain from her position on the other side of the barrier.

‘What have you found? The head?'

Like Bo, she began to follow the policemen moving alongside the house wall down to the back garden and the midden. They didn't answer. She thought she saw Wagner shake his head, but it didn't seem to be directed at her. It was more like an expression of impotence, as though he were trying to articulate man's inexhaustible capacity for evil and had to give up.

She tried to breathe through her mouth. The sickly-sweet stench was transported on a breeze to her nostrils. She thought of Wagner's last words to her as she followed him with her eyes, and once again he took out his mobile phone to ring someone, probably his boss or the forensic examiner Poul Gormsen. Could the killer have intended the crime to be uncovered layer by layer like a parcel being unwrapped? Could he consciously have chosen her as a kind of personal PR assistant who would unravel motive and method at the speed and in the manner he dictated?

When the Arabic TV station Al Jazeera broadcast those cruel executions you were left with a bitter taste in your mouth; reporters were also being used as instruments in the war of terror. Dicte was in no doubt that both she and her newspaper were being used and had let themselves be used in the pursuit of some goal or other. But where did it begin and where did it end? When did her own curiosity and her own deductions start to take over? Was she still being used when she was wondering how to slant the next day's story and satisfy Kaiser's insatiable hunger for news?

‘Do you think it was chance?' she asked Bo, who was examining his photos on the camera display. ‘With the ferry, I mean.'

They gave up on the police and started to walk back to the car. What she would have given for a cup of tea or coffee, but no neighbours offered anything to the press. The smell from the outhouse had spread out tentacles to reach inside her very core, it seemed. She felt defiled and longed for a hot bath.

‘Nope,' said Bo, shaking his head. ‘We were definitely meant to come to Samsø. Anyone would have worked that out sooner or later.'

He sent her a sweet smile. ‘Even your friend Wagner worked it out.'

She stopped in mid-stride and turned in a complete circle. A small crowd had gathered by the cordon, maybe twelve people. She could also feel eyes on her from windows, hidden behind plant pots and porcelain figures. Even the cows in the fields were staring, and she had this insidious, irrational sense that she was being watched.

‘Perhaps he knows we're here. Right now.'

‘Perhaps.'

Bo opened the car door for her, such unexpected chivalry. She slid into the seat, bringing at least a litre of rainwater with her, dripping off her coat, hood and boots. He flopped into the seat beside her and the windows began to steam up. He switched on the engine and the de-mister.

‘How long are we going to sit here? We can't see anything anyway.'

She switched on the radio. The Danish band Mew's distinctive atmospheric sounds filled the car.

‘It's tomorrow's story. I promised Kaiser.'

Bo sighed and slipped down further into the seat.

It was half past seven when they finally drove off the ferry and onto the quay in Hov. The ambulance carrying the dead body crawled along ahead of them in the queue and onto the slick road, its flashing lights strobing through the rain.

They had waited in the car for three hours before the forensic examiner had finally arrived. It turned out to be a fruitless exercise. Bo had taken a couple of pathetic photos of Gormsen with his doctor's bag under his arm and his typically unruly hair blown by the wind. No one had wanted to make a comment. Everyone's lips had been sealed.

They had only driven a hundred metres when Dicte's mobile phone rang.

‘Benedicte Svendsen?'

‘That's me.'

‘Kurt Strøm here, PET. Can we talk?'

‘Now?'

‘Do you know the café in Hov?'

She had been there with Rose on their Samsø weekend. They had eaten Bornholm kippers. ‘Yes.'

‘Well, let's have a cup of coffee together. We're here already.'

Too taken aback to refuse, she rang off and reported to Bo.

‘I assume they'll pay for it,' he said and indicated, turning down to the marina.

There was sand over the floor in the café and a quick glance at the menu board revealed that kippers were still the best offer they had. The few customers were dressed casually in jeans and sweaters and sat leaning across their tables with foaming glasses of draught beer. Country music blared in the background.

The two PET agents were in the corner, and in their suits they looked as out of place as two priests in a brothel. They all shook hands. One of them, Kurt Strøm, had a face that was too big for his skull, as though the man had been on an extreme diet. The other, who was small and round with close-cropped hair and floppy ears, was introduced as Carsten Strandgaard.

‘We thought it was time we had a little chat,' Kurt Strøm began. ‘It might be difficult for you to take in what has happened.'

‘Difficult to decide how far to go with regard to the press, of which, of course, you're a member,' Carsten Strandgaard added, getting up. ‘Coffee?'

‘Cappuccino, please.'

He raised his eyebrows to Bo.

‘Draught beer,' he said, then added, ‘Large one.'

There was an almost imperceptible hesitation as the PET man went to the bar and ordered.

Dicte, resting on her elbows, leaned over. ‘So you want us to stop, is that right? Have I understood correctly?'

She had obviously got to the crunch too early. Strøm's previously rehearsed script flitted across his face like a shadow.

‘We wanted to talk to you about the wisdom of running any further articles until we know what we were dealing with here.'

‘And you don't know? No one has claimed responsibility yet? No anonymous telephone calls? No coded emails or unsigned letters?'

Strøm shook his head and ignored her tone, which she knew was shrill. A whole day's work. Mud and murder on the island of Samsø, and the article would never be printed. Bloody waste of time.

‘We don't expect to be contacted. If there is to be any contact, that is. Which we expect there will be.'

‘And what if there isn't?' Bo asked. ‘What happens if there is no more than this one execution? Nothing else? Then I suppose it's just a callous, perverted killing.'

Strøm shifted his feet uneasily. The sand on the floor crunched. ‘Between you and me, it is very unlikely that anyone will claim responsibility. The film is a kind of replica of terrorists' methods. Of course, it's been sent away for examination. The Technological Institute and the Technical University of Denmark have highly skilled professionals who can find things hidden in the recesses of such films. It takes time, but they will find leads we can follow.'

‘So you think this really is terrorism?' Dicte asked. ‘Muslim extremists?'

‘We don't think anything,' Strøm said, as neutral as a career diplomat on a secret mission. ‘But the possibility exists. And as long as it does, it's a matter of national security and whatever serves it best.'

‘And so freedom of speech goes out of the window?' Bo chipped in.

Carsten Strandgaard came back with a beer and a cappuccino.

‘Have you spoken to Otto Kaiser? My editor?' Dicte took the sachet, ripped a hole in it and sent the sugar flying everywhere.

Strøm nodded. He didn't need to say any more. She could see from his expression that the conversation with Kaiser had been an ordeal.

‘Shit!' she grunted loud enough for them to hear, yet hoping they hadn't. She could have told herself that was going to happen. She should have known.

‘Perhaps the press can help uncover details of the case,' she suggested. ‘We have our methods. We have contacts. An article here, an interview there may be able to winkle more out. Like in the case against what's-his-name on Sjælland who's on remand … Wasn't it
Jyllands-Posten
that served him up on a silver platter for the police?'

Strøm and Strandgaard exchanged a fleeting glance. She picked the message up in a flash. Trouble with stubborn witness, it said.

‘What happens if Dicte's paper ignores your good advice and continues to publish articles about the case?' Bo asked and took a swig of his beer, leaving froth on his top lip. He wiped it off with the sleeve of his sweater.

‘We can't stop you writing your articles,' Strandgaard said cautiously. ‘We can only recommend that you reconsider. If this is …' He searched for the right formulation before continuing, ‘… the worst possible scenario, then publishing articles could do more harm than good. You might ask yourselves who is using you if, for example, you print the killer's demands or play his game in other ways.'

Dicte drank her cappuccino, which had already gone cold.

‘You say we might take it upon ourselves to publish demands if and when they appear. That presupposes we are told what the demands are. Is that something you're expecting to happen?'

Strøm looked at her. She noted his sympathy and concern. It was too much for her and she turned away.

‘In sending the film to you in person, our killer seems to have made a decision,' he said in almost a gentle voice. ‘It must have achieved the desired reaction: your editor elected to put out the story with the most eye-catching headline. When the manifesto comes, the killer or killers may change tactics, they have a free hand.'

‘But why should they?' Strandgaard interposed with devastating logic. ‘Why fix something that ain't broke?'

Dicte nodded and stared into space with unseeing eyes. The country music was loud and people's voices were getting louder.

‘So it'll be me next time, too,' she said, hoping she sounded as if she was stating a cold fact.

Everyone looked at her. No one said a word.