Life and Limb (10 page)

He picked up the telephone on his desk and keyed in PET's number.

‘H
ey, you.'

‘Hmm.'

Bo was peering at the computer in the photo room and choosing photos from the bike race he and Cecilie had watched. Dicte waited in the doorway, but he took his time.

‘Didn't you used to know a Polish journalist? Back when you covered the election there?'

Bo glanced up at her for a quarter of a second before looking back at the screen and concentrating on the job at hand. Perhaps he wasn't making a point. Perhaps he was genuinely preoccupied with picking out the very best photos to send to
Avisen
, but Dicte couldn't help feeling like she was being punished.

At length he finished and looked up at her.

‘Let me make sure I've got this right,' he said and her skin began to tingle ominously.

‘First you identify a dangerous man both the police and PET are interested in, and then you make an amateurish attempt to tail him. You're lucky you're still in one piece. And you don't tell anyone, least of all me.'

He took a deep breath. She wanted to say something in her defence, but she didn't have time.

‘Then, God help us all, you tail him a second time, risking life and limb, only to learn that he's meeting a couple of random mates in a pub.'

‘I don't think they were random mates,' she cut in. He ignored her.

‘And now you want me – whom you've already sidelined – to serve up my contacts on a plate and feed you with information.'

He looked at her in disbelief. The old Bo seemed very far away, replaced by someone making accusations and attempting to control her, which she had always loathed, whether he was right or not.

‘Why would I do that?' he said. ‘So that you can run off with the information and risk your life again in a misguided attempt to play the great detective?'

He got up and started pacing the floor. She hated it when he was angry.

‘What is it with you? Is it because you got the credit for solving a couple of cases that you suddenly think you're entitled to set up your own detective agency? Has success gone to your head?'

He stopped, very close to her.

‘Can't you see how stupid this is? Couldn't you leave it to Wagner and his people for once?'

She realised that she might as well give up now. It had been a mistake. He had been beside himself when she had told him about her meeting with Arne Bay, or whoever he was. Of course, she shouldn't have asked him – he was right. She was going it alone now.

‘I'm sorry. Forget it.'

She retreated. Maybe he had expected more of a rearguard action, but she didn't have the energy for it. Instead she returned to her perch in the editorial office, where everyone was busy with their own work.

‘So no luck with him then, the old cowboy?' asked Holger Søborg, who must have had bat-like hearing. ‘Dicte alone in the world?'

‘Against all the silly windmills?' giggled Helle, who hadn't grasped what was going on.

Dicte didn't reply; she sat down at her computer and went online for information about the murder in Lublin, near the Russian border. Wagner hadn't gone into details, and no matter how much she had tried to probe him about the Polish story, all she'd got out of him was that the modus operandi had been the same in Lublin. That was three years ago. And two years ago in Kosovo. Surely that constituted a pattern – but what lay behind it? Was this organised crime – a kind of Mafia revenge – or were there other reasons why the murders were so similar?

While she Googled various combinations of ‘Lublin', ‘stadium' and ‘murder', she wondered what she had witnessed in Jægergårdsgade. The dark-skinned woman and the man who was supposed to be a violent criminal and racist. It didn't make sense. Yes, he had pushed her around, forced her backwards and held her roughly. But then there was the moment when he had gazed at her before kissing her on the nose.

She scanned the search results, but there was no match. It must have been reported in Polish newspapers, but she would need to know the language to read those.

She carried on thinking while the memory of Jægergårdsgade played over and over in her mind. Could the simple truth be that even a psychopath had an Achilles heel? Would that rule out Arne Bay as the killer who had deboned Mette Mortensen, gouged out her eyes and done the same to the victims in Lublin and Pristina?

Dicte thought about Nazism and concentration camp guards who had taken Jewish mistresses. She had heard stories about women whose lives had been spared because someone had fallen in love with them. And yet those same guards had sent thousands of other Jews to the gas chambers without a moment's hesitation.

After half an hour she gave up. She needed more information to make any progress searching online. Perhaps she could contact some Poles living in Denmark – a Polish Association or the embassy. Someone had to know something.

She started writing her third feature article about right-wing extremists and chose to focus on an association called Network Against Racism from the opposite end of the political spectrum. The association had been set up eighteen months earlier when right-wing groups had started filming and photographing anyone at meetings of left-wing organisations such as Red Youth, the Red Green Alliance and the Communist Party of Denmark/Marxist-Leninist, the communists in Aarhus.

She learned that it had been an attempt to monitor and document members of various groups that had led to the clash in the café in Mejlgade where Network Against Racism had just finished a meeting. The case had ended up in court, with Mette Mortensen's father, Ulrik Storck, representing the left-wingers. This was one of the few pieces of information she had managed to extract from Wagner, but it wasn't exactly a state secret. Since his daughter's death Storck himself had given several interviews – though not to Dicte's paper. Was it a coincidence that Mette's father publicly supported the far left, the archenemy of the right?

Dicte stared into space for a while without really seeing anything. She had become an experienced journalist – successful, too, as Bo had pointed out – and, yes, she had to be careful not to regard herself as infallible. She was, however, old enough not to believe in coincidences any more.

She had just finished rereading the article and was about to press ‘send', when she heard Bo's footsteps and felt his hand on her neck, followed by a conciliatory kiss.

‘Okay.'

As always, he perched on the edge of her desk.

‘I've just been speaking to Krystof Skolimovsky, who works on the biggest newspaper in Warsaw, and he went through their archives for me. The murder occurred during a major football match, Lublin playing Gdynia. After the match a Gdynia supporter found the body of a local doctor near the car park. Exactly the same MO as the other murders. The killer was never found, but there was a suspicion that the killing was politically motivated.'

She leaned back in her swivel chair and the letters on the screen blurred in front of her eyes. Three women mutilated in the same manner. Three murders where there was a suspicion that right-wing extremist violence may have played a part – not directly in Mette Mortensen's case, though, but perhaps her death was linked with her father and his high-profile court appearances.

‘The doctor was Jewish,' Bo elaborated.

Dicte's head was spinning. The ambitious daughter of a lawyer, an Albanian journalist opposed to Serbian nationalism, and a Jewish doctor. Women who ought to know their place and needed to be taught a lesson. Was that the connection? Was there a misogynist out there or an organisation determined to humiliate and taunt resourceful women who thought they could make a difference?

‘What was her name? And what was she involved in?' Dicte asked.

Bo hesitated before he tilted his head and replied.

‘Politically, in an anti-racist network called Poland in the World.'

He looked at her.

‘The victim's name was Miro Jakobowski. And you can drop the idea that all the victims were women. This one was male.'

‘Y
ou have a busy day ahead of you. It's enough to stress anyone.'

She sat with her head bowed as she checked his diary. There was a gentle whirl of blonde hair where the hairline met her skin. From where he was standing he could almost reach out and touch it, so he clenched his fist and kept it in the pocket of his gown just to be on the safe side.

‘Majken Rasmussen's surgery is scheduled to start at one p.m. Her mother is being prepped now. She has been in C2 since yesterday,' Lena Bjerregaard said in the singsong dialect which he found so endearing. ‘She and her daughter are in the same ward.'

She looked up. Were those tears that he could detect? It looked as if a fine, soft film was covering the eyes that had mesmerised him from day one.

‘It's a fine thing, isn't it? Organ donation, I mean. Of course, you would do anything for your children, but even so.'

Janos Kempinski nodded.

‘Do you have children?' he blurted, before quickly adding, ‘Never had time for it myself. The job, you know.'

She blinked, possibly taken aback by this offering of personal information. He ought to stick to work-related topics; that was wisest.

‘I have a daughter,' she said. ‘She's eleven. I'm on my own with her.'

Now she, too, looked a little awkward, but he noticed she had exchanged his personal information with some of her own. Perhaps he hadn't made a blunder after all?

‘It must be difficult. Being a single parent,' he said.

She looked back at the diary. ‘Fortunately Silke is a big girl now.' Her voice became rushed. ‘It won't affect my work. And my mother can always look after her …'

What had he done? It was going horribly wrong.

‘Please don't think ... I didn't mean it like that ... What I meant was ...'

He stopped.

‘You've got a risk assessment to do in half an hour in Outpatients.' Her voice became businesslike, but before it changed she had glanced up at him and he knew that she pitied him and his inability to have a conversation beyond the purely professional. And it was through work that she guided him back with a steady hand.

‘With Peter Boutrup, you know …' she finished.

He nodded. The results had come back of the examination of the Special Patient's blood supply to his legs, and they didn't look good.

‘What did he actually …? I mean, he's in prison for something, isn't he?' She reddened instantly. ‘I'm sorry. That's none of my business.'

‘He shot a man.'

She gasped but said nothing.

He understood. What was there to say?

‘He's in prison for manslaughter,' Kempinski explained, even though he didn't know much more than that. ‘Which means he didn't intend to kill.'

She nodded.

‘Boutrup says the other man shot his dog. The victim, I mean.'

He stopped. He couldn't believe he was practically defending Boutrup.
Killing is always serious, whether or not it is intentional
, he thought. But Boutrup had a way of attracting sympathy – there was no doubt about that. Kempinski wasn't the only person to be affected. The nurses were talking about him, too.

Lena lowered her eyes to the pages of the diary again.

‘At ten-thirty you've got a meeting about the waiting list and whether a patient called Victor Meyer from Viborg should go back on it,' she said.

He sighed. Meyer was a boy of only twenty-two and the year before he had received a donor kidney, which he had already destroyed by mismanaging his medication and going clubbing with so-called friends. Now he was pleading to go back on the waiting list, insisting that he had mended his ways.

‘At twelve you have a lunch meeting with Alex Breinholdt from Scandia Transplant.'

‘Oh, yes. Breinholdt. Lunch. Right.'

He would like to get out of that one if he could. Alex could be very pedantic and the meeting – which could be done in half the time – always dragged on. However, Scandia Transplant was important to the hospital, even though these days more and more transplant operations involved kidneys from living donors. It was the old consultant from the blood bank – the professor of clinical immunology, Flemming Kissmeyer – who, back in the 1960s, had set up Scandia Transplant for organs from deceased donors to be distributed between the Scandinavian countries. The system worked fine and was fair. If the kidneys from a deceased donor proved to be a better match for a Norwegian patient than a patient on the Danish waiting list, one kidney would go to Norway while the other would stay in Denmark. As a result of this scheme, several Danish patients were now walking around with a Swedish or Norwegian kidney. When a kidney or other organ was to go abroad, the relevant surgeon would usually arrive to remove the organ themselves. In this way the removal of organs from a dead donor sometimes resembled a meeting of the Nordic Council.

‘You could join us,' he suggested. ‘It might be useful for you to find out about Scandia Transplant and the whole system, and Breinholdt is a good man. Everything is being organised here from Skejby Hospital.'

‘That's something to be proud of, I imagine,' Lena said with a smile.

‘Very much so,' Kempinski admitted. ‘By the way, how was your appointment with the eye specialist?'

He asked only because it was in her eyes he believed he could see things he had missed out on over the years. He struggled to define what it was. Perhaps it was the opportunity for great, reciprocated love? Perhaps only a sort of mutual understanding and sympathy? Was he in love with her? Could that really be true after such a short period of time – well, no time at all, really?

He must have been lost in self-contemplation, or contemplation of her. Now he saw that her expression had changed. Her eyes were welling up. Or was he imagining things?

‘It was fine,' she said, but he knew she was lying.