The Killing - 01 - The Killing (29 page)

It was her from the start. She saved him. In return . . .

A family. A home. A small removals firm built from nothing, their name on the side. It seemed so much. All he could hope to offer. All he had to give.

Still she didn’t answer. He walked into the bedroom. Pernille sat naked and hunched on the bed. On her upper left arm, still vivid and blue as the day she got it, sat a tattooed rose. He remembered when she went down the hippie parlour in Christiania. They’d been smoking. He’d been dealing, not that she knew. It was Pernille’s way of saying, ‘I’m yours now. Part of that life you have. Part of you.’

He hated that rose and never said so. What he wanted of her were the very things she took for granted. Her decency, her honesty, her integrity. Her infinite capacity for blind, inexplicable love.

‘Are you coming?’

The black dress lay on the bed with her underwear. A black bag. Black tights.

‘I can’t decide what to wear.’

Birk Larsen stared at the clothes on the duvet.

‘I know . . .’ she began.

Voice cracked, tears starting.

He heard himself shrieking inside.

‘It doesn’t matter, does it, Theis? Nothing does.’

Her hands went to her brushed chestnut hair.

‘I can’t do this. I can’t go.’

He thought, as best he could.

‘Maybe Lotte can help.’

She didn’t hear. Pernille’s eyes were fixed on the mirror: a naked woman in middle age, body getting flabby, breasts loose. Stomach stretched by children. Marked by motherhood. How it should be.

‘The flowers should be right . . .’ she murmured.

‘They will be. We’ll get through this.’

Birk Larsen bent down, picked up the black dress, held it out.

‘We’ll get through this,’ he said. ‘OK?’

Downstairs Vagn Skærbæk sat with the boys. Out of his red overalls. Black shirt, silver chain, black jeans.

‘Anton. It was just a vase. Don’t worry.’

Birk Larsen heard this as he walked through the round tables and chairs, looked at the white porcelain plates they’d rented, the glasses, the food under foil at the side.

‘I broke a bottle once,’ Skærbæk said. ‘I did lots of stupid things. We all do.’

‘We need to get in the car,’ Birk Larsen ordered. ‘We’re leaving.’

The boys moved quickly, heads down, not a word.

Skærbæk looked at him.

‘What about Pernille?’

‘Her sister’s going to take her.’

‘Isn’t Mum coming?’ Anton asked, climbing into the car.

‘Not with us.’

Skærbæk said, ‘Theis, I was thinking . . . The woman at the school. It’s best I don’t talk to her.’

‘Why not?’

Skærbæk shrugged.

‘You’ve got a lot on your plate. Maybe she doesn’t know a thing. Just gossip.’

‘That’s not what you said last night.’

‘I know but . . .’

Birk Larsen bristled, stared at Skærbæk, a smaller man. A weaker man. This was always their relationship. One cemented by violence, by fists in the early days.

Finger in Skærbæk’s face he said, ‘I want to know.’

The civil servant called Olav Christensen was in Hartmann’s office, looking at the campaign posters. About role models. Integration. The future.

Twenty-eight but he seemed younger. Fresh-faced. Biddable.

He was sweating.

‘We have a small problem,’ Hartmann said. ‘The files you gave us on the teachers.’

A baffled smile.

‘What about them?’

‘One was missing.’

A pause.

‘Missing?’

‘It doesn’t look good, does it, Olav? I mean we ask. You deliver.’ Hartmann stared at him. ‘That’s the way it works, doesn’t it?’

Christensen said nothing.

‘I’m going to be boss of you and everyone who owns you soon. How about an answer?’

‘Maybe it got lost when we moved the archives.’

‘Maybe?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘This is the Rådhus. We’ve got documents going back a century. All kept in locked cabinets.’

Hartmann waited.

‘They are,’ Christensen agreed.

‘There are no cabinets missing,’ Skovgaard chipped in. ‘Or reports of lost files. I asked your boss. He’s sure of it.’

‘Maybe there was an error made with the filing.’

The two of them waited.

‘We have these trainees. Kids. I’m sorry. Mistakes happen.’

Hartmann got up, went to the window, looked out.

‘Funny the one file they should lose is the one we wanted. The one that could embarrass us. The police needed that, Olav. They think I held it back. They think I’ve got something to hide.’

Christensen listened, nodded.

‘I’ll find out what happened and get back to you.’

‘No,’ Hartmann said. ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’

He came and stood very close to the man.

‘Here’s what happens,’ Hartmann said. ‘On Monday we order a formal inquiry. We get to the bottom of this. That’s for sure.’

‘An inquiry?’

Rabbit in the headlamps. Deer in the sights.

‘But if the file turns up,’ Hartmann added. ‘It won’t matter, will it?’

‘I don’t know anything about this.’

‘Well. Then we’re done.’

They watched him go.

‘I remember him now,’ Hartmann said. ‘He applied for the job of director last year. Cocky little bastard. I didn’t even put him on the short list. He’s getting his own back.’

‘You think he’s doing favours for Bremer?’

‘I don’t know. He’s got access to our network. Make everyone change their passwords. Let’s take care.’

Hartmann looked out into the main office.

‘Where the hell’s Morten? I know I bit his head off but—’

‘He called in sick. He’s not a well man, Troels. He shouldn’t be doing a job like this.’

‘He’s diabetic. It comes and goes. His moods are unpredictable sometimes. You learn to live with it.’

She came and sat on the edge of the sofa.

‘I’ve been here five months. How long’s Morten worked for you?’

He had to think.

‘Off and on? For ever.’

‘And how long have people regarded you as a serious contender to be Lord Mayor?’

Ambition. She was never short of it. Ambition was a good thing. Nothing happened without it.

Her hand fell on his cheek.

‘We’ll get by without Morten,’ Rie Skovgaard said. ‘Don’t worry.’

It was bright and cold outside. A sharp winter sun. Weekend shoppers. Families out for the day.

Olav Christensen walked into the square and called.

‘I want that file back,’ he said.

Things were changing in City Hall. No one knew which way they’d go.

Silence on the line.

‘Did you hear me?’

He was getting mad, which maybe wasn’t such a good idea. But he couldn’t help it. Hartmann was no fool. No naive good guy either. Christensen could see that in his eyes.

An inquiry . . .

Documents got tagged, counted in, counted out. It would take a day to discover that he’d retrieved the Kemal file along with all the others. Seen the trouble it might cause. Put it to one side just in case.

There was no way out. No excuse. No lie he could invent.

His head would be on the line in an instant. Career down the drain.

Still not a word.

‘I did a big favour for you, man!’ A kid walking past with a couple of red balloons stared at him for yelling. ‘Don’t screw me around. I want some help here. I told you before. I don’t go down on my own.’

That was stupid. It sounded like a warning. Olav Christensen knew exactly who he was dealing with. Someone who issued threats, didn’t take them.

‘Look . . . What I’m trying to say is . . .’

He listened. Nothing there. Not even the slow rhythmic sound of his breathing.

‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello?’

Brown brick spire against a pale blue sky. Bells in tumbling chimes. Cameras outside. Crowds in the street.

Lund thought of the case, of the investigations ahead.

Was he here too? The man who held Nanna hostage, raped her repeatedly, beat her, tormented the girl for hours on end? Forensics were getting somewhere. The soap on her skin was recent and unlike anything at home. There was blood beneath the mud in her nails, skin cut clumsily by scissors or clippers. How many explanations were there? Just one. He’d bathed her somewhere, washed clean her bruised, torn skin, clipped her fingernails as she fought him. Then set her running through the dark woods barefoot in her scanty slip. Until . . .

Hide and seek.

Meyer said that and Meyer was no fool.

This was a game. Not quite real. When he locked her alive in the boot of Troels Hartmann’s campaign car and sent her screaming into that distant canal, he watched. The way another might enjoy a movie. Or a road accident.

Or a funeral.

A savage, unreal game.

What did he look like?

Ordinary. Criminals weren’t a race apart, marked by scars or strange physical afflictions. Separate from their victims. They were one with them. A stranger on a bus. A man in a shop who says hello every morning.

Or a teacher who came to the same school day after day, impressed everyone with his honesty, remarkable only for his apparent decency in a world where few cared.

Lund looked around as she always did, lustrous eyes roaming. Looked and imagined.

Monstrous deeds had no need of monsters. They were the work of the everyday and the undistinguished. Cruel tears in the fabric of a society struggling to be whole. Wounds in the city’s communal body, bleeding and painful.

She observed the sea of faces around her as she walked, found a space in the darkness by a pillar, sat down.

A place from which she could watch unseen.

The organ struck up wheezing. An old hymn. Lines from a Christmas carol she could barely remember.

Lund did not sing.

Lisa Rasmussen, across the aisle, did not sing.

Birk Larsen’s right-hand man from the garage, Vagn Skærbæk, face streaming with tears, black hat clutched to his chest, did not sing.

The teacher known as Rama, seated in a pew with his pupils, did not sing.

At the front, seated by the white coffin, Pernille and Theis Birk Larsen did not sing, but sat with their boys looking lost, as if everything – the church, the people, the music, but most of all the shining white coffin that sat by their side – was unreal.

The priest. A thin man, with a craggy, miserable face. In black with a white ruff round his neck, he emerged from the gloom by the altar, glanced at the casket with its rose wreath, gazed slowly round the packed and silent rows ahead.

Said in a ringing, loud, theatrical voice, ‘Today we bid farewell to a young woman. She was taken from us far too young.’

Hidden in the shadows Lund looked at the parents. Pernille dabbing at her eyes. Her husband, a lion of a man, a grizzled old beast. Head down, face rigid, staring at the stone floor.

‘It’s most unfair,’ the priest said in a tone that reminded Lund of a letter to the bank. ‘Beyond comprehension.’

She shook her head. No. This was untrue. It had to be.

‘So we ask ourselves – what is the meaning?’

Kemal – Rama, she still thought of him this way – was three rows back in a black suit and white shirt. Dark hair clipped close.

‘We question our faith, our trust in one another.’

Lund took a deep breath, closed her eyes.

‘And we ask – how are we to move on?’

She stiffened at that dread, deceptive phrase. Loathed it with a vengeance. No one moved on. They swallowed their grief. They hoped to bury it. But it lived with them. Always would. A cross they had to bear. A constant, recurring nightmare.

‘Christianity is about peace. Reconciliation and forgiveness. But it’s not easy to forgive.’

Lund nodded. Thought: right there.

His voice took on a high, ethereal tone.

‘Yet when we forgive, the past no longer controls us. And we can live in freedom.’

Lund looked at the man, in his black robe, white ruff. Wondered: what would he say if he was there by the canal that bleak cold night? Watching Theis Birk Larsen scream and rage. Watching Nanna’s dead limbs tumble from the boot with the filthy rank water, seeing the black line of snaking eels writhe down her naked legs.

Would he forgive? Could he?

The organ struck up. She noted who sang and who did not. Then Sarah Lund walked outside.

They knew the teacher would be at the funeral. So Meyer went to the apartment to talk to his wife.