Trophy (8 page)

‘And if they hadn’t?’

Michael tried visualizing sixty-five billion kroner.

‘Sonartek would have been broken up in less than five minutes,’ Simon Hallberg said. ‘The military part would be sold to, let’s say, Raytheon, US-owned and a major supplier
to the defence industry. They would create a subsidiary with the DOD as the main shareholder. The meteorological part would be sold to Philips or Siemens and the optical division to Sony or Samsung. The investment company would earn billions in a few seconds, and the DOD could sleep soundly at night knowing that their aircraft and submarines would also work tomorrow. Happiness all around.’

‘Who on earth says no to sixty-five billion?’ Michael wanted to know.

‘Flemming Caspersen and Victor Schmidt. It’s their life’s work and they already have all the money they will ever need. I believe one of Victor’s sons, Henrik Schmidt, will carry the baton. He’s Sonartek’s sales director and most people think he does a very good job.’

‘But he has two sons, doesn’t he?’ Michael asked.

‘Yes, but I don’t think Jakob Schmidt has ever shown much interest in the business. I believe he’s a big game hunter somewhere? Or maybe he works for aid organizations in Africa? He’s most definitely out of the equation when it comes to Sonartek’s future, is what I’m saying.’

Michael looked at his watch. There were so many things he wanted to get done today. Such as finding out the name of the man murdered in Porsanger Fjord.

‘What about Flemming Caspersen’s heirs?’ he asked.

The journalist held up one finger.

‘There’s just the one. Elizabeth Caspersen-Behncke – note the sequence of the double-barrel. She’s on the board of
Sonartek, but has her own career as a barrister and she doesn’t appear to be very interested in the company. Then there’s Caspersen’s widow, who has Alzheimer’s, but legally she now controls Flemming Caspersen’s share of the business until someone can get a power of attorney approved. She’s no longer capable of making any decisions.’

‘And if her daughter is appointed her guardian?’

‘With her own shares and those of her parents, Elizabeth Caspersen would have a majority shareholding in Sonartek’s parent company and therefore all the power.’

Michael looked pensively at his hideous sandals. That was interesting.

‘How did the Americans react to the death of Flemming Caspersen?’

‘No idea. There has been no official reaction, as far as I know, but you can be absolutely certain that they’ll be against any change in Sonartek. They prefer knowing where they stand.’

Michael nodded. Did the US Defense Department or one of their countless intelligence services have anything to do with Elizabeth Caspersen’s DVD? New, complex possibilities and angles sprouted all over his brain.

He got up and held out his hand.

‘Thank you, Simon. You are, as always, well-informed.’

The journalist also rose to his feet. ‘Why are you so interested in Sonartek? Do you know something I don’t?’

Michael smiled. ‘I couldn’t possibly say, Simon.’

‘A manhunt?’ Keith Mallory sounded unconvinced. ‘Are you taking the piss, Mike? You are, aren’t you?’

‘No, I’m serious,’ Michael said. ‘Is that really so hard to believe? People ski down Mount Everest, have themselves smuggled across the Afghan border to play soldiers. Game hunters order a hybrid of a lion and a Bengal tiger to get a trophy for their mantelpiece that no one else has. And don’t forget there were people who paid the Serbs to be allowed to shoot women and children in Sniper Alley in Sarajevo in ’94. Just for the sport.’

A pause followed on the other end of the line; Michael hoped it indicated serious consideration.

‘And we’re not talking New Guinea or Matto Grosso? Blow pipes and clubs?’ asked the Brit.

‘No, we’re talking about a possibly psychopathic billionaire; we’re talking the Arctic and laser scopes … and Queen’s “We Will Rock You”. Professionals, Keith. Ex-soldiers.’

Michael knew that they both had the usual suspects in mind: consultants from the multinational security companies
that got the contracts in Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan when the regular army units were pulled out, and who then poured in to guard oil installations, foreign diplomats, aid organizations, parliament, the fledgling democracy, to train said new democracy’s security forces, police and army, and make sure that the ballot boxes were filled with ballot papers rather than plastic explosives.

‘The guys from Pax,’ Keith Mallory suggested.

‘Could be,’ Michael said.

Pax was the most notorious of all the security companies. It was banned in many countries, but sought after in others. Pax got the job done, but their methods were highly dubious and there were never any witnesses around once the dust had settled.

‘I need a little more to go on,’ Mallory said.

Michael followed a water bus with his eyes. ‘Norway,’ he said.

‘Norway?’

‘Finnmark, Keith.’

‘When?’

‘Sometime in March in the last two years.’

‘Can you be a little more specific?’

‘Not at the moment, but once I find out the precise time, you’ll be the first to know.’

‘How many?’

‘Six hunters and one client,’ Michael said. ‘Please would you take a look at it? The money is good. I mean, really good.’

‘Did they catch anything?’

‘A man around thirty. He jumped from the edge of a cliff or was shot when the bastards had finished singing.’

‘Danish?’

‘No idea.’

‘How sick. That’s tragic, Mike.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll look into it.’

*

Michael got up, opened the balcony door and leaned against the balustrade. He looked at his newly purchased mobile phone with the prepaid SIM card, swung his arm back, and threw it far into the harbour’s waters. He had three others waiting, still in their unopened boxes. From now on, he would use a new one every day.

Talking to Keith was the smartest move he could make right now. The Brit’s contacts were fresh and far-reaching. If he dug deep enough, something would turn up eventually. This was the way things worked in Mallory’s shadowland. No text messages, phone calls or e-mails. Someone would contact the ex-major by tapping his shoulder in the pub or while out walking his dog, and Michael would subsequently pay a substantial finder’s fee. Someone was bound to know something, or know someone who did. It was who you knew. Everything in this business was about who you knew.

He lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

Sixty-five billion.

That blasted film would hang over Elizabeth Caspersen’s head and determine everything: her own, her family’s, and Sonartek’s fate. It wasn’t just a plastic disc with zeros and ones. It was a remote control with somebody else’s finger on the button.

Thoughts buzzed around his head like angry bees and collided with the inside of his skull. He reached out for a newspaper and reread the headline on the front page, which had caught his eye earlier when he passed the 7-Eleven: ‘M
YSTERY
D
EATH OF
Y
OUNG
D
AD
’. There was a photograph of a smiling man wearing the Royal Life Guards’ full dress uniform. Forage cap with a tassel, uniform jacket, shirt and tie. Nice teeth.

‘Suicide or murder?’ the journalist speculated on page five. Kim Andersen, a thirty-one-year-old carpenter, who had previously been deployed as a combat soldier with the Royal Life Guards to Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan, had been found hanged by his new wife the morning after their wedding. The Rigspolitiet were involved, which meant his death was being treated as unexplained. The timing was extraordinary, Michael thought. The dead man had lived with his girlfriend for six or seven years before they were married and they had two young children. The journalist hinted at yet another maladjusted, burned-out veteran who couldn’t find his way home.

There was a photograph taken from a helicopter of a thatched cottage in a forest, of ambulances and crime-scene
vans, and the journalist had sniffed out that one of the Rigspolitiet’s most experienced investigators, Superintendent Lene Jensen, was currently staying at Hotel Strandmarken, a few kilometres from the potential crime scene.

Michael’s eyes widened when he saw the archive photo of the police superintendent on the steps leading up to Copenhagen’s District Court: black suit, high heels, sunlight bouncing off sparkling red hair gathered at the nape with a hair slide. Serious expression.

He smiled when he realized where he had seen her before: at a café on Kultorvet yesterday.

He pushed the newspaper aside on the bedspread, stuffed an extra pillow under his head and resumed his study of the ceiling.

Lene yawned behind her surgical mask as she looked at Kim Andersen’s dead body on the steel slab. She was so tired she was about to keel over. The smell of formaldehyde made her feel nauseous and the constant hum from the ventilation fans above was giving her a headache. She hadn’t been able to sleep when she got back to the hotel. She had put the desert photo on the bedside table and spent the rest of the night either tossing and turning in bed or switching on the bedside light and studying the picture again.

The forensic examiner on duty today was a young woman whom Lene knew from previous cases. She folded the heavy sheet down to Kim Andersen’s feet. Blue and reddish livors had formed where the skin touched the table. He had been freed of the handcuffs, the plastic bags around his hands, and the rope around his neck. The indentation from the rope below the ears had now turned black.

The forensic examiner looked at her.

‘I expect you’re here to find out what killed him?’

‘He broke his neck, I presume,’ she said.

The doctor’s eyes smiled above her mask. ‘Yep. Lunch?’

‘Why not.’

She followed the pathologist to a series of light boxes on the wall where X-rays of the dead man’s cervical vertebras were displayed. Lene had once asked the young woman why she had chosen this macabre specialism, populated by abused children, rape victims and drowned and charred bodies, rather than a more lucrative and sheltered career as a plastic surgeon or an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist, but couldn’t remember her reply.

The pathologist pointed. ‘Here’s the top cervical vertebra, Atlas: he carries the globe, that’s the skull, on his shoulders. It’s displaced in relation to the underside of the skull, and the vertebra below, Axis, has broken. Do you follow?’

Lene nodded.

‘So what killed him is the fracture on this section of the second cervical vertebra,’ the forensic examiner explained.

‘By falling from a garden chair?’

‘It’s enough. He weighs eighty-five kilos and fell from a height of roughly forty centimetres. There was enough force, acceleration and gravity to break his neck.’

Lene leaned against the sink for support.

‘What about his wrists?’

‘That’s
your
problem, Lene, and good luck with that one,’ the pathologist said, shaking her head.

‘Someone handcuffed him after he was dead,’ Lene declared.

The forensic examiner nodded, went over to the section table and lifted up one of Kim Andersen’s arms. Rigor mortis had come and gone.

‘There are no skin lesions or bleeding underneath the handcuffs, which there would have been if, say, someone handcuffed him while he was alive and then hoisted him up from the ground with the rope. If we imagine that he handcuffed himself because he was worried he might change his mind halfway, there would still have been some marks. His nervous system would have carried on working even after he was brain dead and he would instinctively have fought the handcuffs. Besides, we found polyester fibres that match the rope on the palms of his hands. He tied the knot himself, but didn’t try pulling himself up by using the rope. There are no burn blisters in his palms, as you can see.’

The forensic examiner pulled off her gloves, took off her sterile gown, scrunched everything up and threw the bundle in a bin.

‘I’ve heard of cases where a killer has tried to make a murder look like a suicide,’ she said pensively. ‘But I’ve never heard of anyone trying to make a suicide look like a murder.’

‘So this is unusual?’

‘It is. Why would someone want to do that?’

Lene smiled. She really liked the forensic examiner. When she smiled, she revealed a charming gap between her front teeth which she could easily have had fixed. Lene liked that she had simply let it be.

‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ she said. ‘Someone wants Kim Andersen’s suicide investigated as if it were a murder. So that’s what I’m going to do. What do the blood tests say?’

The pathologist opened the file.

‘A quite respectable level of alcohol following the excesses of the wedding, but not alarming or in any way life-threatening.’

‘Sleeping pills?’

The forensic examiner shook her head.

‘No benzodiazepines or barbiturates, but Sertraline, a bog-standard antidepressant in a therapeutic concentration. Happy pills. You don’t kill yourself when you’re taking happy pills.’

‘You just get even happier?’ Lene mumbled.

‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing. What about his tattoos?’

‘The Royal Life Guards.
Pro Rege et Grege
is the Guards’ overall motto: “For king and people”. Then we have the words
Dominus Providebit
, which means “The Lord will provide”. Very pious. I looked it up. It’s a secondary motto for the Royal Life Guards’ First Armoured Infantry Company. It says
ISAF
on the inside of his right forearm, which stands for the “International Security Assistance Force” – the NATO-led mission to Afghanistan.’

‘The Coalition?’

‘Yes. He was a veteran.’

‘He was, and not just from Afghanistan. He had also been to the Balkans and Iraq. What about lipstick?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘His wife claims that she gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation once she had cut him down. She wore heavy make-up left over from the wedding, including smeared lipstick and a mascara, which was far from waterproof. I couldn’t see lipstick anywhere on his nose or his mouth. And there should be, shouldn’t there?’

The doctor’s eyes widened slightly and she nodded slowly.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I mean … there isn’t any.’

The two of them looked at the dead man’s stern, introverted face. The eyes had sunk deep into their sockets.

‘You’re saying the wife is lying?’ the forensic examiner asked.

‘I think that the only thing she has told me that’s true is her name,’ Lene said.

She removed her surgical mask, even though it took the edge off the stench, and hid a fresh yawn behind her hand. Her mobile vibrated silently in her jacket pocket, but she ignored it. She knew who it would be. Chief Superintendent Charlotte Falster wanted her daily briefing so she could step in with her superior intelligence if she felt it necessary.

‘Any fingerprints on the handcuffs?’ she asked.

‘Your CSOs have got them.’

Lene pointed to an irregular, deep scar on the dead man’s right thigh.

‘What’s that?’

‘Yes, that’s also very interesting. I’d say it’s a bullet from a hunting rifle or an army carbine.’

With some effort the forensic examiner raised the leg from the steel table. ‘The bullet brushed the top of the thigh, which broke its trajectory, so it went into the leg. The bullet passed straight through the flesh without hitting the bone or any of the vital structures in the back, such as a nerve or major artery.’

The exit wound at the back of the thigh was considerably larger than the smallish, star-shaped scar at the front.

Lene frowned.

‘And that’s not shrapnel from an IED?’ she asked.

‘No. And it hasn’t been treated by a surgeon. I’m sure it was thoroughly cleaned, but it wasn’t stitched. It’s been allowed to heal right from the bottom, which would have taken a couple of months. I would estimate it to be a few years old.’

Lene nodded. She could see that the forensic examiner had taken tissue samples from the edge of the scar.

‘So he wasn’t treated at a hospital or a Casualty department?’

The doctor shook her head vehemently.

‘I’m absolutely sure that he wasn’t. If a surgeon had treated this injury, the first thing he would have done would have been to cut through the soft tissue and open the bullet trajectory in order to ensure there was no soil or textile fragments inside it.’

Lene nodded again. Now, what was it Louise Andersen had said? Something about all the wars her husband had fought in without ever getting so much as a scratch?

*

Lene stopped for a moment outside the low building and looked towards Fælledparken. Small figures from a nursery were making their way across the grass as a jogger in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie did stretches against a tree about a hundred metres away. She took deep breaths to get the stench out of her nose.

Her mobile vibrated again.

‘Where are you?’ her boss demanded to know.

‘Outside the Institute of Forensic Medicine.’

Lene started walking towards her car.

‘What have you found out?’

Lene could visualize Charlotte Falster sitting in her office at the Rigspolitiet’s new headquarters in a dreary industrial estate in Glostrup, behind a big desk with a silver triptych frame displaying pictures of the senior civil servant to whom she was married and their good-looking and successful son and daughter. There were Impressionist posters on the walls, a Vibeke Klint rug lay on the floor, and an unflappable grey-bob hairstyle graced the chief superintendent’s head.

She wasn’t, as Lene’s friends Pia and Marianne claimed, exclusively an irritating bureaucrat or a lousy boss. It was simultaneously more straightforward and more complicated than that: quite simply, the two of them didn’t get on, and
had both known it right from the start. Still, they tried to make the best of things, if only out of mutual professional respect.

‘Kim Andersen killed himself,’ Lene said. ‘There’s no doubt about it.’

She unlocked her car. The energetic jogger in the hoodie had left the tree and was slowly running along the path, away from her.

‘And the handcuffs? How do you explain them?’ her superior said.

‘Someone handcuffed him after his death.’

‘To make us investigate the case?’

‘That would be my view.’

‘Any idea who it might be?’

‘The wife. There are no footprints in the grass other than his and hers. The dew had fallen and the soil was wet and soft.’

There was silence at the other end of the line while her boss sifted through her thoughts. ‘Do you need help?’ she asked. ‘Jan is back at work after his football injury. You know that …’

She didn’t complete the sentence, for which Lene was grateful. Yes, of course, each team ought to be made up of at least three staff: one to collate the information from the crime scene, one to read all the reports, and one to question witnesses. At this point, Charlotte Falster would usually start lecturing her about teamwork, synergies, facilitators,
ownership, mutual evaluation and other meaningless business school terms, but mercifully she refrained from doing so.

‘It’s just a suicide,’ Lene said. ‘I’ll talk to the widow.’

She heard a rustling of papers down the other end. Today’s newspapers, no doubt. Charlotte Falster’s relationship with the media was ambiguous. On the one hand, she performed well in print media or on television with her cool, reserved, articulate and well-schooled manner. On the other hand, she hated the fact that journalists, whom she universally regarded as a tribe of grotesque, puffed-up, self-important, lazy fools, wasted her resources with their Freedom of Information Act requests, interviews, enquiries and corrections.

‘I’ll handle the press,’ Lene hastened to add. ‘I’ll call a press briefing tomorrow. You were right. They’re really interested in this story. They’re buzzing around Holbæk like flies.’

‘Thank you,’ Charlotte Falster said, sounding as if she actually meant it. ‘Why don’t I issue a bland press release, and find a room at Holbæk Police Station. Is two o’clock tomorrow afternoon good for you?’

‘Of course it is,’ Lene said. ‘And thank you.’

She got into the car and pressed the speed dial on her mobile for Arne, the CSO, and asked him to compare the fingerprints from the handcuffs to those of Louise Andersen.

Then she wondered why it hadn’t even crossed her mind to tell Charlotte Falster about her night-time visit to Kim Andersen’s cottage, about the photograph of the invincible,
young warriors in the desert, or about her feeling of being watched all the time. There was no easy answer. It was just the way it was. She didn’t want the chief superintendent looking over her shoulder.

*

The jogger in the hoodie walked over to a motorbike parked behind the Institute of Forensic Medicine, removed the chain from the helmet he had locked to the handlebars, retrieved a leather jacket and a pair of gloves from one of the panniers, and put the key in the ignition. He was in no hurry. He knew he could find Lene Jensen any time he wanted to: the previous night he had attached several hidden GPS senders to her old Citroën. The police superintendent was utterly predictable. As was her pretty, twenty-one-year-old daughter, Josefine.

*

The flat in Kong Georgs Vej was empty, and clean. Josefine had aired it after the popcorn, no underwear was drying on the shower rail in the bathroom, the floor had been vacuumed, and the kitchen gleamed and smelled fresh. Even the daughter’s room looked as if it had been visited by a Feng Shui consultant. Lene wandered around, slightly stunned, in her own home. It was as if her daughter had taken a quantum leap from being a messy and totally self-absorbed teenager to the headmistress of a domestic science college.

She would miss Josefine when she started travelling and when, in due course, she left home. She would even miss
their strange, black arguments, which flared up out of nothing and into which they both threw themselves with passion. Neither of them ever asked for mercy and they took no prisoners. They would rather die than admit that they might have been wrong until they reached the far corners of their irrational fog, happened to look at each other, hit the
fast rewind
button on the conversation as they heard themselves spout the most ridiculous rubbish – and collapsed in laughter.

She would miss all of it.

Lene slept for a couple of hours on the world’s best sofa in her living room and woke up deeply resenting her next task: a long, hard talk with the grieving young widow with the false tongue.

First, however, she had to go to Holbæk and talk to Kim Andersen’s doctor.