Trophy (37 page)

And again, when the next shot was fired.

Michael blinked and looked at Lene’s hands. They were still there, but the barrel was gone.

‘Henrik …?’ Victor Schmidt said into the air above Michael’s head. ‘Henrik …?’

Michael realized that the shot had come from afar. Everyone looked at Henrik Schmidt’s right hand. His thumb and index finger were missing and small arteries sprayed fine, red arcs into the air.

‘Dad …’

The carbine had landed a few metres away.

Then everyone turned their gaze inland, to the low ridges, the moraine blocks and the willow thicket. A flash lasting only a second appeared from that direction. Like the sun bouncing off the telescopic sight of a rifle, Michael thought.

Thomas Berg was in the process of turning around when his head was yanked backwards by an invisible hand. It swelled and burst like an overripe fruit. He fell forwards and the dust rose. The back of his head was a wet crater.

The crack of the invisible sniper’s rifle echoed across the terrain and Michael and Lene stared at each other.

Victor Schmidt had got his own rifle down from his shoulder and was oblivious to the two of them. He aimed it at the moraine and the rocks, but there was no movement there, nothing to shoot at.

‘Who are you?’ he screamed. ‘Who are you?!’

There was no reply and he spun around and raised the rifle.

‘You … ! You bastard!’ he screamed at Michael. ‘All the time, it’s you … You bastard …’

A second later Victor Schmidt lay across Thomas; the two men formed a cross on the white snow.

Michael got up and hobbled past Henrik Schmidt who was bent double with his damaged hand pressed against his stomach. The young man didn’t see him. His blue eyes kept staring at the two bodies on the ground.

Michael picked up Lene’s service pistol, walked behind Henrik and kicked him at the back of his legs so he fell to his knees. Then he pulled a bootlace out of one of Victor Schmidt’s boots and tied the son’s hands behind his back. The blood was warm and sticky under his fingers. He took the other bootlace from the financier’s boots and ran over to Lene, who had got to a sitting position. He stuck his finger into the holes in her trousers and ripped open the fabric. She bit her lower lip and looked at his hands, but didn’t make a sound. The bullet had gone through her quads, but the wounds were no longer bleeding very much. The bullet hadn’t hit the thighbone or any of the major arteries, he concluded. He tore the bottom off her trouser leg, folded it into a compress and tied it tightly over her injuries with the bootlace.

‘It’s going to hurt like hell, but it isn’t fatal,’ he said.

She had gone white and she nodded, but she was looking over his shoulder at Henrik Schmidt.

‘Are you able to stand?’

He helped her to her feet, and her face contorted violently when she put her weight on her right foot in a hesitant step.
She turned her face towards him and he slowly let go of her, ready to catch her again.

‘It’s okay,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Totally?’ he asked, and looked her right in the eye.

She nodded and touched his arm.

Michael turned away and looked across the plateau behind them.

‘You were right.’

‘About what?’

‘We weren’t alone,’ he said.

Michael pointed to a figure far away. Impossibly far away. The man had got up between some rocks and was strapping a rucksack to his shoulders. Unhurried and methodical. He straightened up and Michael knew that the sniper was watching them. Michael slowly raised his hand; a couple of seconds later the stranger returned his greeting. Then he disappeared between the rocks.

‘Do you know him?’ Lene asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ Michael said.

There was a faint smile around Lene’s lips, but it disappeared when her eyes fell on Henrik Schmidt.

‘Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’ Michael asked her again, very gravely. ‘You’ll have to live with it for the rest of your life, Lene.’

‘I know. And I’m absolutely sure,’ she said.

He handed her the pistol.

‘I’ll wait here. I won’t leave unless …’

‘I’d like you to stay,’ she said.

Henrik Schmidt lifted his head and looked from one to the other. When she limped closer, he started to cry.

Lene stopped a few metres in front of him and raised her pistol.

Henrik Schmidt stared up at her, but found nothing in her face he could use, so instead he looked at Michael.

‘You have to do something,’ he said, still smiling. ‘She’s going to kill me.’

‘What can I do, Henrik?’ Michael asked. ‘You’re incurable.’

He paused for a long time and looked at Lene who was struggling to stay upright.

‘You cut off her head, didn’t you, Henrik?’

The young man didn’t reply, but looked into Michael’s dark blue eyes.

‘Who?’

‘The woman, Henrik. Ingrid Sundsbö.’

The boy smiled at the memory. He nodded eagerly: ‘Flemming always said, “Destroy what they love and you castrate them. They won’t be back.” It was good advice, don’t you think?’

He looked up again with his smiling, pale blue eyes.

‘We found her quite quickly and Flemming gave me permission to kill her. He said it was my right.’

‘Goodbye, Henrik.’

Henrik Schmidt’s jaw muscles quivered. He tried to swallow, but failed. Again he glanced briefly at the superintendent’s face before staring down at the ground. He closed his blue eyes, Michael closed his and the shot cracked.

Michael had counted to three when the fatal second shot echoed across the rocks and the fjord and reverberated between the hollows. A few seagulls on the black water took off, only to settle a little further out.

As Michael collapsed from exhaustion outside their tent, drank some water or ate one of the optimistically named energy bars, which tasted like crunchy loft insulation, Lene was morose and silent. She either sat on a stone some distance from the tent with her face turned away or laid curled up inside it, staring at the canvas. It was understandable and Michael had no great urge to talk either. Chewing alone hurt enough.

He lay on his back on one of the camper mats which they had rolled out in the sun and stared at the blue sky while his pulse and blood pressure returned to almost normal levels and the sweat dried on his body. Before his muscles seized up completely, he got up with a groan and walked back to the cliff edge to fetch another body, which he threw over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carried up to a hiding place he had found behind the big moraine blocks.

Victor and Henrik Schmidt were heavy but manageable, while Thomas Berg nearly killed him. The man was a giant, heavy and long, and one of his feet scraped along the ground behind Michael’s boots.

He put Berg’s body down at the foot of the moraine blocks and paused to get his breath back. He was smeared with the dead men’s blood, urine and faeces which made it almost impossible for him to manoeuvre them. He grunted, grabbed hold of the gamekeeper’s jacket and started dragging the body by its shoulders up through a small ravine. Sweat was dripping from his face and he sobbed from fatigue before he was finally able to roll the body of Thomas Berg down into a shaded, damp chamber under a low rock face where he sincerely hoped all three of them would remain undisturbed until Judgement Day, together with their rucksacks and the rest of the weapons he had found in the willow thicket. He had smashed their mobiles and satellite telephones and searched their clothing and rucksacks without finding anything of interest – with the exception of Elizabeth Caspersen’s DVD, which was in a pocket in Henrik Schmidt’s rucksack, or at least one with his name on it.

Michael got up, stretched his aching back and started throwing small rocks and stones down the slope. It took him an hour to cover the bodies and seal the chamber.

Then he staggered back across the plateau. The last body was Keith Mallory’s and Michael had found a special place for his old friend, far, far away from his executioners.

When he got there, he dried the blood from his face and picked up Mallory in his arms as if lifting a sleeping child. The Englishman was light, much lighter than the others, and his face was strangely serene, strangely disciplined, even in
death. Keith had mastered every situation, he had never had doubts or been at a loss or behaved inelegantly. His eyes and mouth were closed and he smelled only of his aftershave; the most expensive, obviously, that money could buy.

Michael had no qualms about burying him up here. The Englishman had been married once, but hadn’t seen his ex-wife for thirty years. He had no children. Many people would undoubtedly miss him, but no family members.

An hour later Michael placed his hip-flask on Mallory’s small chest, arranged his open hands across it and stroked his old friend’s cheek with his fingertips one last time. Then he said a short prayer and covered the body with earth, rocks and, finally, turf. It was a good, high location; a small mound with grass and heather in between the rocks and with a view of the fjord. It was the best he could find.

*

‘Lene?’

‘What?’

‘Please would you toss me my rucksack?’

His rucksack was passed through the tent opening and Michael tore it open. He was naked and had washed himself, screaming, in the meltwater brook and rubbed himself with handfuls of snow, after which he had sprinted across the plateau to the tent. Right now his skin was red and glowing, but very soon it would turn cold and blue.

He took out some clean thermal underwear, a fleece jumper, some socks and a pair of jeans. He buttoned them
with shaking hands and picked up his relatively intact parka from the ground. He laced his boots, squatted down on his haunches outside the tent and started heating water.

When the water boiled, he poured it into their mugs and chucked in some tea bags.

‘Tea?’ he called out over his shoulder.

There was movement inside, but no reply.

He was just about to repeat his question when she crawled out of the tent and sat down not far from him. He handed her a mug. She took it from his hand and stared blankly into it.

‘How are you?’ he asked, and looked across the fjord. It was getting late and he would hate to have to spend the night here.

‘I don’t know. All right, I suppose. Christ … I don’t know.’

‘I would have done the same,’ he said quietly. ‘Exactly the same.’

‘Yes.’

She shifted. She didn’t move further away, but she didn’t move closer, either.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

Michael looked up at the sky.

‘I think Elizabeth Caspersen would be prepared to spend a helicopter on us,’ he said. ‘We have a satellite telephone.’

‘I’d prefer to walk back to the cars,’ she said.

‘You’ve been shot in the leg,’ Michael reminded her.

‘It doesn’t hurt very much.’

‘Tomorrow you’ll be begging me for a morphine drip, trust me.’

‘I still prefer to walk, Michael. Have you buried them?’

‘They’re gone,’ he said.

‘Completely?’

‘They’re completely gone.’

‘And your friend?’

‘In another place. Far away. Honey?’

‘Yes, please,’ she said.

Michael squirted a jet of acacia honey into her mug.

‘Who was he? The miracle that saved us? I know that you know, but you won’t tell me because I’m a cop. Was he Plan B?’

‘The sniper? Possibly, but he wasn’t
my
Plan B. I didn’t get a proper look at him. Hat. Sunglasses. A camouflage net over his hat. I walked over to the place where he must have been hiding.’

‘Did you find anything?’

He smiled. ‘Nothing. Not even a flattened blade of grass. Or a cartridge shell or a footprint in the snow further in between the rocks. Nothing. A ghost, Lene.’

She shook her head.

‘Who the hell can hit anything at that distance? It must be at least six hundred metres from the cliff edge to his location.’

‘It’s 816 metres,’ Michael said. ‘Thomas Berg had a rangefinder in his rucksack.’

‘Eight-hundred …?’

Michael nodded and lit a cigarette.

‘A very skilled shot.’

‘Do you think Henrik Schmidt will haunt me?’ she asked. ‘That’s what worries me most. That he’ll always be there.’

‘Christ … Lene. I don’t know. I think hell will keep all three of them under lock and key. You think you did the right thing, and I think you did the right thing. I’d have done exactly the same if they had hurt one of my children like they hurt Josefine. And I’d have been grateful for the chance. If you hadn’t, Henrik would simply have been sent to a secure hospital and you would have had to live with the knowledge that he was still out there. This is better.’

‘What do I tell them at home?’

‘Back at the station, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t you think people will notice that the founder of one of Denmark’s most successful companies and his son have vanished without a trace?’

He looked across the plateau at the snow-covered, mystical mountains on the other side of the fjord that continued as far as the eye could see.

‘You said it yourself, Lene. You could lose a whole army up here. What’s a few hikers and hunters?’

*

They agreed a plan and Michael entered the lawyer’s number on the satellite telephone. The call was answered immediately and the connection was first-class.

Elizabeth Caspersen was satisfied. Without saying anything incriminating on the open line, Michael accounted for the situation and she grew happier and more grateful as the conversation progressed. She would be delighted to charter a helicopter to pick them up and it would fly them anywhere they wanted. Michael told her they only wanted to be flown forty kilometres to a car park.

She rang back ten minutes later. Her voice was tense, but clear, and she had been just as efficient as she always was. One and a half hours, she promised them.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Michael,’ she said. ‘It’s all really rather wonderful.’

‘So have you got what you wanted?’ he asked and a small pause followed down the other end.

‘ I suppose, I guess I have. Did you find anything up there?’ she wanted to know.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Nothing?’

‘No.’

‘Well … All right, then. The helicopter is on its way.’

‘Thank you.’

*

‘I think we should drive home in the same car,’ said Lene who had half followed the conversation.

‘Then we’ll take the Audi,’ Michael said.

‘Okay.’ She looked at the satellite telephone in his hand. ‘Do you trust her?’

Michael lit a cigarette, one of the last four of that day’s ration, and stretched out on the camper mat with one arm behind his head.

‘If that helicopter really does show up, I don’t suppose I’ve anything to complain about,’ he said.

‘But do you trust her?’

He waved the cigarette and yawned.

‘Does it really matter? If you’re asking me if she’ll be discreet, I trust her one hundred per cent. If you’re asking me if I think she has had her own agenda all along and used me to get what she wanted without at any point giving me the full picture, then I’m quite sure that she isn’t just a penitent daughter trying to atone for her father’s sins out of sheer piety.’

‘But doesn’t it piss you off to be used like that?’

Michael looked at her and laughed out loud. She sat with her injured leg stretched out in front of her and the other pulled up to her chest. She rested her chin on her knee and carefully massaged the muscles around the wounds with her hands. He had found an excellent first-aid kit among Victor Schmidt’s belongings and cleaned and disinfected the bullet
wounds while she bit her lips until they bled. Then he had given her a handful of ibuprofen and paracetamol and some broad-spectrum antibiotics. She was rubbish at swallowing pills.

‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.

‘I’m being paid for this, Lene. It’s a job. If I only worked for Nobel Peace Prize winners or saints, I’d have a lot of time on my hands.’

‘That’s rubbish, Michael,’ she said with a small smile. ‘If that was true and you really were just some hired fixer, you wouldn’t have brought me along. You would have tied me up and left me in that scout hut. You wouldn’t have cared about my daughter, you wouldn’t be calling home all the time and you’d never have risked your life abseiling down that cliff because it didn’t matter whether or not you found anything down there. It made no difference to your assignment. The hunters would have shown up anyway. And you wouldn’t be mourning your –’

‘That’s enough!’

Michael raised the hand with the cigarette to warn her and she fell silent.

‘Do you think you could let me have a moment’s peace, woman,’ he said, and closed his eyes. ‘I’m not always as professional as I would like to be, okay? Not yet.’

‘And fortunately you never will be,’ she said.

‘Right, but do you think that we could shut up now? Both of us? Please?’

‘Yes. Did you find anything down on the shore? You said something about a head earlier?’

Michael sat up and stared wildly at her. Then he got up and started dismantling the tent without saying anything or dignifying her with a glance.

One hour later they heard the helicopter come in from Porsanger Fjord.