The Killing 3 (5 page)

She picked up a pen, hovered over the photo.

‘Another day, Mum. Are you there?’

‘Yes. Another day. That’s fine. Just let me know.’

Then he was gone and she traced in the missing letters. Spelled out the word.

She called Brix.

‘Hi, Lund. Did you get the champagne and the note from OPA? They want you to start next week. No need for an interview. Congratulations I guess.’

‘Do we still have people at the dock?’

‘You called them off. Remember?’

‘Well call them back. There’s a ship there.
Medea.
I want to see it.’

‘You said it was nothing.’

‘And send a team out to Stubben. I’m on my way.’

She enjoyed an excuse to drive fast, didn’t bother with the light on the roof. A boat team was waiting by the dock. So was Mathias Borch. He said Hartmann and his team
were half a kilometre away at the homeless camp.

‘Tell him to get out of there,’ Lund ordered.

‘I tried. How sure are you?’

She passed him the photo, the name ‘Medea’ outlined in ink.

‘When the dock office contacted the ship this morning it wasn’t the crew they talked to. I asked them to try again just now. No reply.’

Borch glared at her.

‘If I’d known this I could have stopped Hartmann!’

Lund shrugged, climbed into the inflatable with Juncker and the two-man boat team.

‘So stop him now,’ she said, and the dinghy lurched off into the harbour.

Troels Hartmann was handing out plates of stew to quiet, scruffy men seated at camp tables in makeshift tents. The place stank of cheap food and open drains. Newspaper
reporters mingled with camera crews, following him from serving to serving, asking questions he didn’t answer.

As soon as a camera came close he smiled. Karen Nebel watched and didn’t. She wanted him back in Slotsholmen for a press conference.

Then Morten Weber led in a couple of men bearing crates of beer. A cheer rang out. A couple of the hobos grabbed bottles, stood up and toasted Hartmann.

He grinned, walked out.

Was still smiling when he turned to Weber and said, ‘Handing out booze to alcoholics, Morten. Very clever.’

Weber laughed.

‘You astonish me, Troels. Such a stiff-backed puritan in many ways. And yet . . .’

He waited for an answer, didn’t get one.

‘PET want us out of here right now. They think there’s an immediate threat.’

‘We need to get back for the press conference anyway,’ Nebel added.

Hartmann shook his head.

‘All the hacks are here. Why put them to the trouble?’

He marched to the car, sat on the bonnet, beamed for the cameras, waved them on. Even the reporters were taken aback.

Men in heavy coats were gathering round. They had earpieces with curly leads winding down their necks and looked worried.

‘So,’ Hartmann said cheerily. ‘Let’s not waste time, shall we? You’ve got questions? Ask me now.’

‘Shit,’ Karen Nebel muttered, and listened as they kicked into gear.

Weber was talking to the noisiest of the PET officers, a man who’d introduced himself as Mathias Borch. She went over, listened. The conversation was getting heated.

‘I told you to get him out of here,’ Borch insisted. ‘Will you just do it?’

‘Troels is Prime Minister of Denmark,’ Weber said with a shrug. ‘Do you want to try?’

‘Just a couple of minutes more,’ Karen Nebel added, trying to calm things down.

‘We had a dead body round the corner this morning,’ Borch replied, grim-faced.

He took out his phone. Called out a name over and over.

Lund.

Sarah.

No answer. But Karen Nebel saw the look on Morten Weber’s face and it was one she’d never witnessed before. White, shocked. Afraid.

‘We’ll help everyone we can,’ Hartmann said loudly from the impromptu press conference. ‘But we can only do that if we all contribute. That means Zeeland too. They get no
special privileges. You hear that. No more favours.’

She didn’t like ships. There’d been one in the Birk Larsen case. A dead man strung up on a rope. One more wrong swerve in the dark.

The two men from the boat team were looking round the deck of the
Medea
. Juncker had followed her inside. It was like a vast, dead iron cathedral and stank just like the other boat. Of
age and oil. Freezing cold in the long metal corridors. No sign of a thing until they got closer to the bridge. Then Lund put out a hand and stopped him going any further, pointed ahead.

A long smear on the floor. Blood. The same on the wall. Someone badly injured had lunged along here.

Trying to escape, she thought. The old trick – seeing these things in her head – was coming back however much she fought it.

A man had been hurt in this place. Somehow he’d worked his way free. Jumped into the freezing water and tried to swim for his life.

Must have been terrified for that.

A cacophonous racket cut through the darkness. She almost leapt out of her skin. Asbjørn Juncker was fumbling with his phone, bad rock guitar passing as a ringtone. Lund snatched the
thing from him, turned it to silent like hers. Someone had been trying to reach her ever since they got on the
Medea
. She could feel the handset trembling in her jacket. That could wait.

Torch out, high in her right hand, they went down a set of stairs. Storage tanks. Blood smeared on the side. In the corner a dead man, naked except for a pair of grubby underpants, knife wounds
all over his torso. Wire binding his arms to chest, his ankles.

‘Lund,’ Juncker whispered, walking round, torch and gun in his hands, pointing all the time.

She looked. Another corpse. Same condition. Knife wounds. Wire. They’d been tortured.

‘You don’t need a weapon, Asbjørn.’

‘The docks office told us there were three.’

‘Yes. The other one we found in pieces this morning. Whoever did this is gone. Too smart to stick around.’

On the bridge the only light came from the screens still alive on the control desks. There was a laptop near the wheel. She looked at it. A document was open. It seemed to be about
Zeeland’s computer systems.

Lund checked for a signal, told Juncker to call Brix and bring in a full team. Then phoned Borch.

‘I don’t know what’s going on here,’ she said, and told him about the bodies and the breach in Zeeland’s security.

He listened, said nothing. Mathias Borch was a star at police academy. Smart and dedicated. But never a fast thinker.

‘Hartmann’s not there any more, is he?’

‘He’s throwing an impromptu press conference. Why don’t you answer your phone?’

‘I’ve been in the hold of this bloody ship. Whoever they were they’re from here.’

She started walking around in the dark, torch in hand, looking.

On the wall at the back there were photographs. Lots and lots plastered on the painted metal.

She stopped. Politicians and industrialists. A face next to a news clipping: Aldo Moro. Former Prime Minister of Italy kidnapped by the Red Brigades, held captive for fifty-five days then shot
and dumped in a car in the street. Next to him a news story about Thomas Niedermayer, a German industrialist seized by the Provisional IRA, pistol-whipped, murdered then buried beneath a junkyard
outside Belfast. That story was more recent and Lund couldn’t stop reading. Niedermayer’s widow had returned to Ireland ten years after his death and walked into the ocean to die. Then
both their daughters committed suicide. One constant stream of misery from a single brutal act . . .

‘I’m looking at pictures of kidnapped politicians here,’ Lund said and didn’t even know if Borch was still listening. ‘Dead ones. You’ve got to get Hartmann
out of there right now.’

The PET people barged into the crowd of hacks, almost picked Hartmann off the bonnet of the car then threw him into a security van alongside Weber and Karen Nebel.

Flashing lights. Sirens. The three of them sat together on a bench seat, two armed officers opposite as the vehicle lurched out of the docks back towards the city.

‘They can’t treat me like this,’ Hartmann complained. ‘I won’t allow it.’

‘The police found two dead men in a ship offshore,’ Weber said. ‘Another this morning. Some photos of kidnapped politicians. They can.’

He got a vicious, spiteful glare in return.

‘Lund’s handling the case,’ Weber added.

Silence between the two men.

‘Who’s Lund?’ Nebel asked.

‘There’s history,’ Hartmann said. Then to Weber. ‘Talk to the Politigården. Not Brix. Go over his head. I don’t want her near.’

‘Is someone going to tell me?’ Nebel asked.

‘She made a big mistake once before,’ Weber said. ‘Nearly cost us an election. It’s not happening again.’

His phone rang. The van bounced over rough ground, finally found some decent road.

Nebel turned on Hartmann.

‘You should never have made those promises, Troels. You can’t invent policy on the hoof. You don’t know what Zeeland’s response might be. You need to let me handle that
side of things. I wasn’t hired to watch you scoring own goals.’

He looked amused by that.

‘Is that what I’ve done?’

‘I can’t work in the dark. I know you and Morten go back years. I don’t. Keep me in the picture.’

Hartmann pretended to be puzzled.

‘What exactly do you want to know?’

‘Are you screwing Rosa Lebech?’

He rolled back on the seat, didn’t look at her.

Morten Weber came off the phone.

‘Zeeland have just put out a statement denying the article. It looks as if their CEO will be suspended. Robert Zeuthen is going on the record to say he personally, and Zeeland as a
corporation, support the government’s recovery plan all the way.’

Lights outside. They were entering the heart of the city. Slotsholmen. Soon they would be back in the warm offices of the Christiansborg Palace.

Hartmann laughed. Grinned. Weber wouldn’t look at her.

‘You both knew that was coming, didn’t you?’ she asked.

‘Morten’s got friends everywhere,’ Hartmann told her. ‘Maybe a little bird told him the paper were going to dump on Kornerup.’ He slapped Weber’s knee.
‘Not that I want to know.’

The van pulled into the courtyard in front of the palace. Two officers came and opened the doors. Hartmann didn’t move.

‘We need a press release, Karen. You phrase them so carefully. So beautifully. I wish I had that kind of skill myself.’

A hint of a smile at that.

‘But let me see it first, won’t you?’ he added. ‘Then pop a copy in Ussing’s pigeonhole with my warmest regards.’

She went ahead of them into the building. Weber stopped him on the steps, waited till the security men were out of earshot.

‘Is she right? Are you popping something in Rosa Lebech’s pigeonhole?’

Hartmann’s face fell.

‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said and started walking. Weber’s arm stopped him.

‘I zipped up your flies once before with all that Birk Larsen nonsense, Troels. We were damned lucky to get out of that in one piece. Don’t ask me to do it again.’

‘I’m a single man. A widower. I work every hour God gives for this country. I’ve a right to a private life. A right to be loved.’ Then, almost as an afterthought.
‘I had nothing to do with that girl.’

‘Oh,’ Weber said, with a nod. ‘It’s love, is it?’ He waited. No answer. ‘In the middle of an election campaign? Which we may well lose anyway. With all this
Zeeland crap, Lund hanging around . . . and you shagging the leader of the party we need to save our skin.’

Hartmann groaned.

‘Show some faith, Morten. I’m on top of this. Rosa’s bringing the Centre Party to the table. They’ll back me as Prime Minister. Zeeland’s fixed. And you’re
going to make sure Lund comes nowhere near.’

He put a hand to Weber’s back and propelled him towards the palace.

‘Aren’t you?’

Maja Zeuthen had never liked Drekar. Before Robert’s father died they lived in a former workman’s cottage in the grounds, had the joy of bringing two beautiful
children into the world in a small, tidy home meant for a lucky gardener.

There they’d loved one another deeply.

Then the weight of the company fell on his shoulders, and with it a growing sense of crisis. Not just Zeeland’s. The world’s. They moved into Drekar. Lived beneath the dragon. Got
lost in its sprawling floors and cavernous, empty rooms.

Being the Zeuthen who ran Zeeland was a burden too heavy for him to share. She’d offered. Lost the battle. With that defeat love waned. The arguments began. As she drifted away he spent
longer and longer in the black glass offices down at the harbour.

And when he was home they rowed. Two little faces watching from the door sometimes.

It was almost eight. The servants had put dinner on the table. She’d eaten with Emilie and Carl, trying to make small talk. Noticing the way they went quiet whenever she tried to introduce
Carsten into the conversation.

He was younger. Struggling a little with his medical career. As Robert said they weren’t his kids either and sometimes that showed in an uncharacteristic coldness and ill temper.

They cleared away the dishes themselves. Told Reinhardt to go home. He had a wife. Grown-up children. A house near the Zeeland offices by the waterside. But still he stayed around the mansion,
watching, worrying. Robert almost saw him as an uncle, a fixture in the house when he was a boy.

Emilie and Carl went upstairs. To play. To watch TV. Mess with their gadgets.

She sat alone on the gigantic sofa, staring at the huge painting on the wall: a grey, miserable canvas of the ocean in a deadly gale. When they were splitting up Emilie said she hated it. The
thing made her think of where grandpa had gone. Had Maja stayed it would have vanished before long.

Emilie came down, dressed in her blue raincoat, pink wellies and a small rucksack with childish pony designs on it.

‘Where are you going?’

She didn’t blink, looked straight at her mother.

‘To feed the hedgehog.’

‘The hedgehog? Now?’

‘Dad says it’s all right.’

‘Dad’s not here.’