Trophy (2 page)

Michael Sander ran a comb through his hair and straightened his tie. He was walking along a three-metre-high white wall that surrounded one of Denmark’s most exclusive addresses: the houses in Richelieus Allé in Hellerup were all in the sought-after category between ‘very large villas’ and ‘mansions’.

He stopped and studied a plate engraved with the name ‘Caspersen’ sunk into the wall by the gate, checked his side parting in the polished brass, pressed the bell and flashed the surveillance cameras what he hoped was a trustworthy smile.

‘Who is it?’

The question came from a loudspeaker built into the gatepost.

‘Michael Sander.’

‘One moment, please.’

The double gates swung open and the shingle crunched under the soles of his shoes as he walked up the drive.

Smiling dolphins spewed water on a naked, strangely
lifelike nymph in a fountain in front of the house while an open garage displayed a rich man’s toys: a sky-blue Maserati Quattroporte, a Mercedes Roadster and a dove-grey Rolls-Royce. The number plates were SONARTEK 1, 2 and 3.

An ordinary black Opel was parked in front of the main steps.

Michael began to realize the optical illusion. From the gates the white house had seemed merely indecently large, but he had been wrong: it was actually enormous.

He walked up the eight wide steps and had just raised his hand to lift the knocker when the door was opened.

A pair of grey eyes assessed him before the face granted him a reserved smile. The woman was tall and her build strong and angular. She had never been gracious or delightful. Her features were broad, but symmetrical, and Michael took her to be a few years younger than he was.

She offered him a well-practised handshake and introduced herself.

‘Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke.’

Then she led the way across the white and green marble tiles in the hall and Michael sized her up: a string of pearls, black cashmere sweater, a simple, dark grey skirt and an unusual choice of wine-coloured tights which reminded him of the skinny legs of an oystercatcher. She was too tall to wear anything other than flat shoes, and she was a thinker.

He always divided potential clients into thinkers and doers. There were subdivisions, of course, but he rarely
found it necessary to change his first impression. Michael knew that Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke was the heir to a colossal family fortune, as well as being a partner in one of the biggest and oldest law firms in Copenhagen. For that reason alone there could be no doubt that she was academically gifted, but that wasn’t the factor that determined whether she was a thinker or a doer: it was the way the hips connected to the upper body and the legs, the sway of the lower back, someone’s posture, the length of their stride.

From time to time his wife would ask him in which category he would place himself, and every time Michael would feel a tad hurt. He regarded himself as a fortunate combination: sensuous, yet rational – a thinker
and
a doer.

Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke continued to walk in front of him up the staircase. It was like walking through the Natural History Museum. The walls were covered with stuffed animal heads and every imaginable size and variety of antlers and horns from the deer and antelope family. Vacant eyes watched him from all sides.

At the first turn in the stairs, an African lion reached out his long claws towards him. Above the animal’s front paws, its enormous head came crashing through a mahogany panel, its black lips peeled back over yellow teeth and its mane fluffed out; the furious expression in the animal’s glass eyes momentarily stopped him in his tracks.

The woman glanced over her shoulder.

‘My father called him Louis. Terrifying, isn’t he?’

‘Definitely, Mrs Caspersen-Behncke.’

‘Elizabeth is fine, if I may call you Michael.’

‘Of course.’

He was mesmerized by the animal.

‘Imagine being a little girl with a vivid imagination trying to get down to the kitchen for a midnight snack.’

‘I’d still be having nightmares,’ he said.

They continued upstairs until Michael stopped again, just below a three-metre-high painting of the previous owner of the house, the recently deceased captain of industry, Flemming Caspersen. The portrait was executed with photographic accuracy. One side depicted bookcases with old, gilded volumes and Caspersen – in a contemplative pose – resting his hand on a round table. There were sealed parchments and yellowing manuscripts, maps and open folios, as if the billionaire had been interrupted in his study of the sources of the Nile or the meaning of everything.

A grey grizzly bear rose behind the billionaire and both the man’s and the animal’s shadows merged together on the wall. Caspersen’s virile, energetic face was grave; his white hair stood up in short bristles, his brown gaze was directed at the spectator and the elevated position of the painting and his tall figure ensured him a regal dignity. His tie had discreet grey stripes and his suit fitted him as if it had been developed in a wind tunnel. ‘My father enjoyed playing the Renaissance man,’ Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke said.
‘Though I doubt if he ever read a work of fiction. He used to say that his life was exciting enough as it was. He found fictional lives dull.’

Michael pointed to a rhinoceros head hanging six metres above the floor. The animal squinted tragically at the grey, flat stumps that were all that was left of its horns.

‘What happened to him?’

‘Someone broke into the house a couple of months ago. They put the gardener’s ladder up against the wall, cut off the horns with a hacksaw and scarpered. My mother was in hospital and the house was empty. According to the police, it was a professional job. We really ought to take him down. A rhino without its horns is really rather pointless.’

She drew his attention to a cupboard down by the front door. ‘They forced the front door with a crowbar and cooled the alarm system with liquid nitrogen.’

Michael leaned over the banister and studied the cream-coloured wall below the amputated trophy. He could actually see a couple of dark marks from the ladder.

‘I’ve read that natural history museums and private collections are experiencing an epidemic of horn thefts,’ he said. ‘It’s said to cure everything from impotence to cancer.’

‘Its horns were impressive,’ she said. ‘My father shot it in Namibia in ’73. It’s a white rhino. Or rather, it was.’

‘I thought they were an endangered species – protected by law?’

‘This animal was shot for research, which everyone knows is just another word for bribery. My father always got what he wanted.’

Michael stayed where he was. The prehistoric animal roused a strange kind of empathy in him.

‘The horns weighed eight kilos and they were worth their weight in cocaine,’ she said. ‘The street value is exactly the same, incidentally. $52,000 per kilo.’

Michael was impressed. $400,000 for half an hour’s work was a good rate. Superb, in fact.

‘And they took nothing else?’ he asked.

‘My mother’s jewellery is in a safe deposit box and the only cash we ever keep in the house is for paying the gardener and the cleaner.’

She led the way down a passage on the second floor. They passed a darkened bedroom and Michael caught a glimpse of an emaciated female face on a pillow, large birdlike eyes turning to the doorway. A nurse was in the process of attaching a bag of fluids to a drop stand.

‘Flemming? Flemming?’

The nurse closed the door.

The voice kept calling out.

‘My mother,’ Elizabeth Caspersen explained. ‘Alzheimer’s.’

Michael smiled sympathetically.

She opened the next door and Michael collided with the blinding sunlight bouncing off the surface of the Øresund.

‘A beautiful room, isn’t it?’ she said.

The windows measured at least six metres from floor to ceiling.

‘Amazing,’ he said, shading his eyes with his hand.

He recognized the interior of the library from Flemming Caspersen’s portrait. An intricate wrought-iron walkway ran along the bookshelves three metres above the floor and formed the gallery. High above his head the huge, stuffed bear sparred with its front paws.

‘A Kodiak bear, Alaska ’95,’ she said laconically.

‘I’m starting to understand why they’re threatened with extinction,’ he said.

‘You don’t hunt?’ she asked.

‘Not animals.’

‘My father would have argued that if it weren’t for the safari industry there would be no money for reserves and gamekeepers in places such as Africa, and poachers would have killed anything that moved long ago.’

‘He would probably have been right,’ Michael conceded.

She walked over to the windows, folded her arms across her chest and chewed a nail. This probably wasn’t normal behaviour for a Supreme Court barrister, he thought, and positioned himself by her side to offer a kind of silent support.

The tall white wall cordoned off the park from the neighbouring estates. He noticed thin alarm wires running along the top of the wall and several white surveillance cameras that would appear to cover every inch of the grounds. The
problem didn’t lie with the house’s security, as far as he could ascertain. The weak spot was the open sea.

Out in the park, a black Labrador was sitting next to a flagpole with its nose pointing at the spring sky, whining pitifully.

‘Nigger, my father’s dog,’ Elizabeth Caspersen mumbled. ‘It has sat there, howling, ever since he died.’

‘Nigger?’

Elizabeth Caspersen smiled forlornly.

‘He wasn’t a racist. He only cared about whether someone could do their job. I think he found it amusing to walk around a neighbourhood like this and call the dog. Out loud.’

Michael continued to examine the alarm wires and the cameras on the garden wall.

‘Did the cameras record the break-in?’

‘Yes. Two men arrived from the sea at two o’clock in the morning in a rubber dinghy. Hoodies, ski masks and gloves. They ran across the lawn and around the house, found the gardener’s ladder and broke down the door.’

‘And Nigger?’

She looked down at the grieving animal.

‘He was probably just grateful for the company. He’s a lonely dog, very friendly. Why don’t we sit?’

He put his shoulder bag on the floor and took a seat in an armchair. Elizabeth Caspersen sat down in the chair next to his, crossed her red legs, looked out of the window and began flexing and pointing her foot.

He leaned back.

She moved her foot faster.

He had seen this before, of course: the hesitation before exposing your life and secrets to a stranger. The client would either change their mind at the last minute and end the meeting before it had even started, or they would take the plunge.

This would appear to be something in between.

‘You’re not an easy man to find,’ she said. ‘What do you call yourself? A consultant?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t look like a private investigator,’ she said.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘What? Oh, I see. Coffee? Water?’

‘No thank you,’ he said.

‘Are you married?’

Her fingers got very busy with the string of pearls.

‘Very happily,’ he said.

‘So am I.’

Elizabeth Caspersen pressed her fingertips against her eyelids.

‘So you don’t follow cheating spouses, loiter behind people’s garages with a camera at night or rummage through their bins?’

‘Only at the end of the month,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry … I …’ She blushed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that this is all very difficult. You were recommended to me by
one of my father’s English lawyers who knew of a Dutchman who had used the services of a Danish security consultant. Everyone became awfully secretive and it took a long time before the Dutchman replied.’

‘He called me before he contacted you,’ Michael explained.

‘I didn’t think people like you even existed in Denmark?’

‘I believe there are a few of us,’ he said. ‘But it’s not like we have a trade union.’

‘Your name is Michael Vedby Sander?’

‘Yes,’ he lied.

‘And you know Pieter Henryk?’

‘Of course …’

*

He had tracked down two incompetent kidnappers – father and son – to an abandoned farm south of Nijmegen in the Netherlands for Pieter Henryk. They had decided to kidnap the very wealthy Dutchman’s youngest daughter, which was their first mistake.

Involving the police, risking media attention and a scandal, was unthinkable for Henryk, who was old-school and preferred a more discreet, permanent solution.

The kidnappers had raped the nineteen-year-old girl repeatedly while passing the time. They had shaved her head, beaten her up, stubbed out their cigarettes on her back, and she was more dead than alive when Michael and Henryk’s team reached her. Michael’s task had been to find the girl, while Pieter Henryk’s men dealt with the kidnappers.

Michael had sat in his car at the edge of the wood a few hundred metres from the farm and seen her carried across the farmyard in the arms of a Serbian mercenary. The huge man delivered her to a Mercedes, where her father and a doctor were waiting. She was naked, limp as a rag doll and looked like a flayed animal. The car left the farm with gravel spraying from the tyres.

He waited. Half an hour later, a truck pulled up in the farmyard and the mercenaries started hauling bricks, mortar and buckets into the house where the kidnappers were still assembled.

Michael left the scene. He knew what was coming and he knew Pieter Henryk’s crew. They were Balkan veterans and had seen everything. If they were feeling merciful, they would throw a gun with two bullets over the new wall – before laying the last brick. If they were in a bad mood, they would tie up the pair, brick up the wall and wait until the mortar had dried.

*

She clapped her hands with a bang that snapped him out of his memories.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I want you to work for me,’ she repeated.

‘And I may well want to,’ he said tentatively.

‘Henryk said I could trust you unconditionally.’