Life and Limb (11 page)

P
eter Boutrup looked better than the last time Janos Kempinski had seen him. He was taking his medicine and benefiting from dialysis.

‘Hello, Peter.'

The patient's handshake was firm. Kempinski nodded to the two uniformed guards from Horsens.

‘Hail, Dr Death.'

‘I do wish you would call me Dr Life,' Kempinski said. ‘After all, that's what we strive to achieve here. To give life.'

The patient smiled sardonically.

‘Don't forget that someone usually has to die in order for you to give the life you're after. Someone has to stop breathing.'

Kempinski pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Boutrup, ignoring the two uniformed guards sitting in the corner, each with coffee cup. He looked at the patient's notes that he'd brought with him.

‘Not necessarily,' he said. ‘There are fewer and fewer cadaveric donations these days in comparison with family donations.'

Boutrup leaned back in the chair and studied Kempinski as if they were meeting for the very first time. Kempinski felt Boutrup's eyes boring into him, aware of just how easily the other man had got his attention. It filled him with a sense of unease, but also a bizarre feeling of excitement, as if he were an actor in a thriller. Everything felt stage-managed: the guards who were watching the convicted killer; the patient himself who treated his life as a game of chess and who didn't seem to care whether he lived or died. And then there was him, the doctor, who was being drawn closer and closer to a dangerous flame.

‘Yeah, but neither of those are relevant here, are they? Aren't you bringing me bad news?'

He was, in part. But he tried to dress it up nicely.

‘We've examined the blood vessels in your legs. A new kidney will require a lot of blood, so it's important that your circulation is working properly. In your case we think that surgery would be possible.

Boutrup got the message immediately.

‘But there's an increased risk, is what you're really saying. It's probably all those fags.'

He shrugged. ‘There's not much else to do inside other than puff away and hope you keel over and win an all-expenses-paid trip to the hospital.'

‘It's true that your veins are more calcified than we had hoped,' Kempinski acknowledged. ‘Nevertheless, we still want to perform the transplant.'

He scrutinised Boutrup, ready to interpret the man's slightest twitch. Maybe it was his secrecy which was so fascinating. Such as his claim that he had no family whom he could ask for a new kidney.

‘As we discussed before, your best option by far is donation by a family member.'

‘Forget it, Dr Death.'

The Special Patient shook his head and gave him another of his not-entirely-friendly smiles. ‘It's out of the question.'

Kempinski made another attempt. ‘Most people don't think that older kidneys are suitable, but that's wrong. If the donor is otherwise in good health, then … I was thinking about your parents.'

When the Special Patient failed to react, he heard himself continue.

‘After all, blood is thicker than water.'

The laughter came rolling all the way from the patient's stomach. Boutrup was practically in tears.

‘You're a good one, you are, Dr Death. Ha, blood and water – yeah, right.'

He leaned forward and put his face so close that Kempinski could smell his breath.

‘Have you still not got it? Haven't you guessed it yet?'

Kempinski felt offended, despite himself.

‘I don't believe in guessing. I prefer facts.'

‘All right, here's a fact for you.'

Boutrup inhaled and paused for dramatic effect. Kempinski began to wonder if the Special Patient was enjoying the situation.

‘I'm adopted. I don't have a fucking family,' Boutrup said with a smile, as if he had just announced that today's special was bubble and squeak and onion soup.

‘A
re you thinking serial killer?'

The question wasn't entirely unexpected. Even so, she felt the need to wash it down with something stronger than the glass of white wine she was cradling in her hand.

‘It's an obvious thought,' she said at last. ‘But I had hoped that you could exorcise it.'

Dicte looked at her ex-husband over the rim of the glass. Torsten was still Rose's father and, fulfilling that role, he would ring her from time to time for a chat about their daughter. Given that Rose had moved to Copenhagen and was well past the age when her divorced parents had a pow-wow without her presence, however, it was reasonable to assume there was another reason why Torsten had called her out of the blue and suggested they had lunch.

‘I still believe these murders are motivated by something other than satisfying the needs of some lunatic,' she said.

He had read all her articles; he always did, and his job as a criminologist gave him a pretext for his curiosity. But Torsten had a personal interest as well. He hadn't come purely to help and inspire her, but also to further his own profiling technique: he was one of those talking heads who regularly appeared on television and in the newspapers. She knew it was a source of vexation that no one had called him up yet, and that there were aspects of the stadium murder which clearly hadn't been made public.

‘Who said anything about a lunatic?' he asked.

She put the glass back on the table.

‘Come on. If someone murders three people, gouges out their eyes and replaces the bones in their legs with PVC pipes, and it can't be traced back to the Mafia, they have to be off their rocker!'

She had quickly made the decision to tell him everything she knew. In this respect she could trust him completely. Torsten Svendsen, the great womaniser, had never been able to keep his eyes or, indeed, his hands off other women; however, when it came to his work, he could be trusted. She would never have admitted it to him but she had huge respect for his professional insight into the thoughts and behaviour of criminals.

Torsten shook his head. She couldn't help noticing that his black curls were starting to go grey and that he was looking a little peaky. Only to be expected when you were in your fifties and you had a baby with a young wife, she thought, feeling just a tad smug. She was entitled to that, given the numerous times he had cheated on her with some long-legged beauty.

‘Very few serial killers are clinically insane,' he said, which she already knew. ‘The vast majority are highly intelligent people who happen to have their own twisted logic and view the world differently to the rest of us.'

They were eating tapas in Café Castenskiold by the river. He had talked her into the wine, though it had required less persuasion than she had pretended. Fuel was sometimes needed to stimulate anything other than conventional thinking.

‘But two women and one man,' she said. ‘Where's the logic in that? Plus the geographical spread.'

She was furtively watching two lovers on the red sofa and feeling envious. Once she had been that girl, also with Torsten. Pure euphoria. It was a long time ago now – twenty-five years, by her calculation.

‘That doesn't fit the profile of the serial killer,' she went on. ‘Don't they always operate within a narrow radius? The place they were born or the part of town where they live?'

There was hope in her voice. She loathed the thought of a serial killer, possibly because she had already been in contact with a killer who was blind to everything but his own value system and his urge to kill.

Torsten helped himself to a slice of Parma ham and popped an olive into his mouth, which he munched until he removed the stone and placed it on the edge of his plate.

‘You're dealing with someone who takes trophies in the form of eyes and bones. In many ways, an organised killer. There appear to be similarities in terms of crime scene, MO and possibly also the killer's signature, though we don't know much about that yet.'

‘But why? And why pick those victims? Doesn't that make it more likely that the motive is political?'

She wanted it to be political. It would – despite everything – have its own perverse logic. If you could talk about logic when dealing with a killer who mutilated his victims.

Torsten saw right through her.

‘I think you're seeing what you want to see. Because it would make it easier to comprehend. We don't like the idea of murders triggered by a deep urge within the killer. It frightens us that someone needs to silence the lambs so badly that they're prepared to kill for it.'

‘Silence the lambs? What lambs?'

He sat back in his chair and watched her until she started to feel uncomfortable.

‘
The Silence of the Lambs
,' he said. ‘Jodie Foster plays the FBI agent Clarice Starling. Hannibal the Cannibal is played by that British actor – what was his name?'

‘Anthony Hopkins.'

‘That's right. She's supposed to interview him in the hope that she'll gain an insight into the psyche of a serial killer the FBI is trying to catch. Hannibal the Cannibal's a notorious serial killer and he knows how such people think. He also knows how to mess with her mind and find her pain – identify the reason she has dedicated herself to a job that involves murder and death.'

Dicte squirmed in her chair and felt her bottom sticking to the seat.

‘Clarice remembers her childhood, when her stepfather slaughtered lambs on the farm and she heard their death throes from her room. She ran down to the bloodbath and grabbed one of the lambs in the hope of saving it. And then she ran away.'

Damn, how well he knew her – too well, sometimes.

‘We all have lambs we want to silence. You could say that serial killers have chosen to do something about it.'

He drank his wine.

‘And we recoil from them precisely because we're like them. To a much lesser extent, of course, you and I wouldn't dream of killing people and poking out their eyes. But it's there somewhere, as Clarice also discovered, and it made her vulnerable to Hannibal: the urge to stop the lambs screaming.'

She stared at him without really wanting to, while his words reverberated and echoed in her mind. She could visualise the bloodbath. How often had she heard the screams inside her head? Not the lambs' but the humans'. Judgement Day, when the shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats, and where the unworthy will die in a bloodbath.

She pushed back her chair and stood up.

‘I just need to find the loo.'

It had happened so unexpectedly. She practically staggered downstairs to the toilets, where she spent several minutes splashing her face with water. She wondered if he knew how close he had got? Of course he did. Hadn't he always?

Silencing the lambs. Was that what she was doing with her life? Was it herself rather than a lamb she had saved from the bloodbath when she ran away? Was she still ruled by her childhood fear of Armageddon?

She stopped and looked up at her face in the mirror. The eyes didn't belong to her but to some other woman, an angst-ridden one whose past bubbled under the surface like tears. She dabbed her face with a paper towel.

A woman emerged from one of the other cubicles and started freshening her lipstick. She noticed Dicte in the mirror, and an initial expression of recognition then disgust spread across her face.

‘It must be strange to make your living writing about the misery of others,' the woman said to her in the mirror and snapped shut her make-up purse as she smacked her lips. ‘But I suppose they pay you well.'

Dicte didn't know where it came from. The pain disappeared as if it had been flushed down the sink with the water. She spun around to the woman, who seemed rather less cocky now that they were no longer separated by the mirror.

‘My stories only matter because people read them,' she said, scrutinising the woman from her shoes to her eyes, which had already started to wander. ‘And what you just said confirms that.'

She gave the woman time to rally her arguments but she stood rooted to the floor, her mouth half open, stunned at the comeback.

Dicte nodded. Her eyes were dry now that anger had replaced her distress at the wound Torsten had been prodding.

‘That's right – I don't just write. I can speak, too. Incredible, isn't it?'

She spun around and took her time leaving the bathroom.

‘Okay, let's say it's a serial killer,' Dicte said as she sat down again. ‘But then why two women and one man? And how do you explain the geographical distance?'

‘Time,' Torsten said. ‘The global world. We're not the only ones who develop our tentacles, so I would argue it's possible for a serial killer to work across national borders. I've just finished some research about this particular topic, as it happens.'

He chewed a nail for a moment and a curl tumbled down over his forehead. Once she would have found this endearing; now it left her cold. So this was the real reason he had come: he wanted her to launch his research into the public arena with maximum impact – as it was sure to have, if it was linked with the stadium murder.

He flashed her his most charming smile – an old trick.

‘I'm prepared to offer you an exclusive,' he said. ‘We've been working on it for three years, a PhD student and me. We've interviewed killers imprisoned in Denmark and in seven other EU countries. Our conclusions are pretty unique.'

‘Two women and one man,' she said again. ‘A bisexual serial killer?'

He shrugged.

‘There could be all sorts of explanations. The man could be a slip-up or a diversionary tactic. Or, yes, there could be a sexual element. How much info do you have about the other two killings?'

‘Not much.'

‘Perhaps you should to try to find some.'

She checked her watch. It was later than she had planned and she knew that Bo would be at home, fuming. He fumed every time she met Torsten, although he would never admit it.

She stood up.

‘I'll think about it. Thanks for lunch, and we'll be in touch.'

He half rose, pressing his hands on the table. They hadn't discussed who would be paying, but in light of his ulterior motive she decided he could pick up the tab. She pecked him quickly on the cheek and headed for the exit.

‘The lambs, Dicte,' he called out after her. ‘Remember the lambs.'

She turned around, looked at him and reminded herself that she had managed to save herself before. She was the runaway lamb and he shouldn't feel sorry for her – he should feel sorry for the lambs that had been left behind in the fold.

She smiled and gave him the finger.