Life and Limb (16 page)

T
he theme of Bach's ‘Fugue in G minor' begins as a tentative question. The reply comes more promptly, but before it finishes a second question is again posed, this time by the soprano part. Another reply follows, but before it ends a question is posed by the bass. And so questions and answers alternate like a ball thrown from one to the other of the four voices until everything fuses into a climax and it ends in release from a G major chord.

Wagner leaned back in the wing armchair that Ida Marie detested. If the world was as articulate as the fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, he probably wouldn't be sitting here, wide awake in the middle of the night, grappling with a case which was becoming a little too complicated for his liking.

He pressed the repeat button on the remote control and the fugue played again. For the eighth time, at least, and he couldn't explain why, except that there was a sense of searching in the music, a yearning for release that resonated within him.

The process was so natural: once the theme had been played by one part the other parts had no choice but to mirror it and repeat it with variations. The next move, the next melodic fragment, could be predicted with some accuracy, but it never became dull.

He reached for the plate on the coffee table and took a bite of his rye and salami, which he washed down with a can of beer. Crime patterns tended to be as logical as a Bach fugue, although in his current case the sequence of notes had been broken and discord replaced the harmony he always strove to achieve. So many elements were missing. It was as if a mad composer had sprinkled too many illogical rests on top of what was already a complex musical image.

Wagner didn't know why he had woken up – he had been in deep, dreamless sleep, lying next to Ida Marie. But at two o'clock precisely he had opened up his eyes and from then on there was no way back. Three hours' sleep and he had to sit and wait for the sun to rise over the terraced house in Viby, hoping it would cast some new light on the situation.

At such times Bach was his only friend and he couldn't help thinking of the four parts as actors in a crime: what one voice did, the others reflected in a different key. Victim and killer were inextricably linked, and if the police couldn't identify a suspect and extract information from him, they would have to look at the victim again and make her talk. Even if, like Mette Mortensen, the victim was already dead and had long since lost the power of speech.

Mette
had
talked, though, with her mutilated body and the glass eye hidden in her mouth, not to mention the route she had taken on Saturday night from café to club to pub. Nevertheless, much was still unknown. They were still lacking so many details about this victim. Although they would start to surface – especially if the investigation delved into the lives of anyone known to the victim, including Mette's family. Murder was like skimming a stone across water. It caused ripples that would touch many people. Sooner or later something would turn up.

Wagner looked at his watch. It was 4 a.m. He briefly wondered where Dicte Svendsen might be and, especially, where she was in relation to the case. But then his thoughts started to merge, like ripples in the water that turn into wavelets and disappear into nothing. He closed his eyes and fell asleep with Bach in his ear and the taste of salami in his mouth.

‘ … And they go with you into the delivery suite and collect the blood before the placenta is delivered. That gives the best result.'

Wagner pushed open the door just as Jan Hansen sank his teeth not into a placenta but into an iced cinnamon whirl from the bag of cakes someone must have brought from the bakery to the briefing meeting.

‘They offer a twenty-year guarantee that the baby's umbilical cord blood will remain frozen, even if the company goes bust. And they've been approved by the Danish Medicines Agency and the whole kit and caboodle.'

This was delivered with an element of defiance and a glance at Ivar K, who looked far from convinced, and said as much,

‘Are you quite sure that you've read the small print? The price, for example? How much does it cost?'

Wagner remembered that the night before Hansen had gone to an open meeting last night about stem cells and this so-called bank where he and his wife were considering storing blood from their unborn baby's umbilical cord.

Hansen muttered something unintelligible.

‘Hello!' Ivar K tried again, more forcefully. ‘
What
does it cost?'

He rubbed the fingers of his right hand against his thumb.

Wagner chose this moment to interrupt.

‘The glass eyes – any news? And who is chasing Kamm from the accountancy firm about Mette Mortensen's personal file? Hasn't he kept us waiting long enough?'

Wagner sounded more awake than he felt after a near-sleepless night. Hansen and Ivar K both shut up about stem cells and umbilical cords, Petersen fumbled through his papers and Eriksen swallowed a mouthful of a pastry with chocolate icing before clearing his throat.

‘It would appear to be something of an artform,' Eriksen said. ‘There are people who wear glass eyes and there are those who make them to order, to match the colour of the other eye.' ‘And?'

There was no need for Wagner to ask, but it sharpened Eriksen's cerebral activity to have someone snapping at his heels.

‘A hospital will sometimes fit a glass prosthesis if they are surgically removing a patient's eye. Or removing corneas. If the eye is taken from a dead body, the eye socket will be padded with gauze before the glass eye is inserted.'

‘Fascinating,' Ivar K said under his breath in a voice dripping with sarcasm.

Wagner shot him an unfriendly look. Eriksen checked his notes.

‘Undertakers also use glass eyes if the body is badly damaged or, in rare cases, when the body is embalmed. They're called ocularists, by the way.'

‘What are who called?' Hansen said.

‘Ocularists,' Eriksen repeated. ‘People who make prosthetic eyes. They can be made from either glass or acrylic, but glass is said to be better.'

Eriksen shuffled some papers and launched into a lecture on the merits of glass over acrylic. He also added that a glass eye was usually carefully shaped to fit the eye socket and was subsequently painted to look as lifelike as possible. And that the first glass eye was developed and produced in the town of Lauscha in Germany.

‘They use cryolite glass to achieve the right surface hardness. It means you can also take it out and clean it.'

‘And how could Mette Mortensen have come by a glass eye?'

Eriksen looked at his notes again.

‘We don't really know,' he said. ‘The Forensics people have examined the eye in question and discovered that it was made by an ocularist in Copenhagen who supplies hospitals and eye specialists around the country. However, the eye would appear to be a semi-finished product, and by that I mean that it hasn't been customised for a living individual, so in its current state it's not ready to be fitted into a living person's eye socket. It would require alteration to fit the muscular structure of a particular eye.'

‘And what precisely does that mean?' Ivar K demanded.

Eriksen sighed and put down his papers.

‘As I understand it, it means we're dealing with the type of eye you would put in a dead body, if one or both eyes have had to be removed for some reason – a tumour, for example.'

Wagner sighed. Eriksen could be very pedantic when it suited him.

‘So this eye was never fitted in anyone's eye socket?' Wagner enquired.

Eriksen nodded, but he still seemed uncertain.

‘This eye,' Wagner continued, ‘was made to prettify a corpse. Possibly so that no one would know the real eyes had been removed.'

Eriksen nodded again.

Wagner shook his head. Again he was unable to catch the fugue and its logic. The whole point was that Mette's eyes had been missing.

‘A hospital,' Ivar K said. ‘It must follow that the murder took place in a hospital, or in an eye surgeon's private practice.'

‘Or a pathologist's,' Hansen suggested.

‘Or an undertaker's,' Arne Petersen said.

Or at my old aunt's, Wagner mused, but didn't say, possibly because at that point there was a knock on the door and an officer popped his head around. He was holding a plastic bag in his hand.

‘Sorry. Taxi driver has just handed this in.'

The officer entered and put the bag in front of Wagner.

‘Unfortunately he had a passenger in the car, but he left his card and said to give him a ring.'

The officer gave Wagner the card. Wagner opened the bag and looked carefully into its depths. Then he took a handkerchief from his pocket, reached down and retrieved a small, hand-embroidered, yellow-and-red handbag.

‘Mette Mortensen's, I presume,' Ivar K said.

Wagner nodded. He was tempted to open it; instead he returned it to the plastic bag so that Forensics couldn't complain of tainted DNA and smudged fingerprints.

‘If we're lucky, her mobile phone will still be in the bag,' Hansen said, saying aloud what everyone was thinking.

‘A
nd I've done loads of courses. I came top in the last one.'

The girl on the chair opposite Kiki chomped at her chewing gum energetically and ruffled her blonde hair before pointing at the various exam certificates that lay in a pile in front of her. Not that they were anything to crow about: she had included absolutely everything from adult education courses to her leaving certificate. Kiki noticed that her nails were bitten to the bone; even so, the girl had chosen to draw attention to them with glittery gold nail polish.

Well, so what? She was only eighteen years old and she didn't know any better. She said she would love to work as a temp, but she was worse than useless.

The girl continued to chat away, extolling her own brilliance, a skill at which she did excel. She was also highly skilled in making demands about salary, perks and pension.

Kiki looked at the telephone. She had wanted to make the call all day; so far she had stopped herself. There was something she wanted to sort out in her mind first and feel right about in her body.

‘I'm a real people person,' the girl enthused.

Kiki shuddered at the thought that her own children might one day turn out as spoilt as this girl and exhibit the kind of arrogance that only those who have never doubted their own abilities can possess. There were children who had always been told that they were winners, because modern child psychology didn't permit you to harm or stifle the little darlings' development by allowing them to fail. As a result, she concluded, society was full of half-baked individuals with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and this was amplified by their understanding that there was a shortage of decent workers.

Kiki heaved a sigh as she glanced at the telephone again.

It was obviously the lesser evil, preferable to a childhood full of constantly being told that you were no good. It was just possible, though, that a little bit of adversity might generate a different kind of strength.

Although Kiki had already made up her mind, she rounded off the interview and sent the girl home with a promise to be in touch once she had considered her application. She would rather turn down a client than send over an army of brain-dead blondes from the Danish ‘everyone has something to offer' education system as ambassadors for her firm. When would the politicians get their act together and let in skilled workers from abroad? Yes, they would need time to learn the language, but she would rather hire a tenacious, hard-working and well-educated Pole or Pakistani any day.

She had built up the temp agency herself and worked fifteen-hour-plus days to do it. What had happened to the spirit of enterprise in Denmark? What about passion and the joy of creating something from scratch? What was the point of anything if all you had to do was hold out your hand and the state would take care of you?

Kiki took a deep breath. Interviewing the girl had brought her out in a sweat – or perhaps there was another reason.

She took her handbag, went to the toilet and locked the door. She looked at herself in the mirror. There were droplets of sweat on her upper lip and her eyes shone. Her body was throbbing. She recognised the clear signs of withdrawal and rummaged through her handbag for her phone to call him. There was no reply, so she left a message saying that she would stop by his flat, knowing full well that she risked being punished. She also texted him.

After she had been to the loo she splashed a little water on her face, careful not to ruin her make-up. She was tempting fate and she knew it. If only it had been the whip and the pain of ecstasy that she was craving. But it was something else that had crept up on her unexpectedly and she hadn't had a chance to crush it until it was too late.
Feelings.

She grimaced at herself in the mirror. She hated feelings that got in the way of common sense or a good fuck. Feelings couldn't be trusted. They were highly suspect and they had a habit of spinning out of control.

She freshened her lipstick and smacked her lips to even it out while staring straight at her anxious reflection. This could end badly. This could end very badly indeed, but nonetheless she wriggled helplessly in the net, unable to free herself.

‘Then let it,' she told the image in the mirror. Not that it looked any the less anxious for that.

The stairwell lay wreathed in dark shadows as she snuck into the block of flats in Jægergårdsgade.

She fumbled around for the switch but discovered that the light wasn't working. Then an arm was placed around her neck from behind and she wanted to scream, except the hand had already covered her mouth. She inhaled through her nose in spasms and felt as though she was drowning.

‘You're playing with fire.'

She tried to free herself.

‘I left you a message,' she mumbled into his hand.

‘You should stay away. I'm bad company. You know that, don't you?'

She wanted to nod. She couldn't. He was holding her head as if it was stuck to his arm. Fear washed over her, mixed with a tantalising feeling that anything could happen.

‘It wasn't you, was it? But you know something. You were there, at the stadium. You were there.'

She whispered the words through his fingers, into the stairwell that seemed so clammy and empty.

‘I was there,' he said. ‘Of course I was there.'

He threw her over his shoulder and carried her like a cowboy carries a lassoed calf – and she let him. He opened the door to the secret room and she submitted once again, while all thoughts about how dangerous he might be were transformed into lust.

She was so caught up in the red wave of pain that she knew she'd be unable to remember the sequence of events accurately later.

‘You're strange. I've never met a girl like you.'

He released her from the chains and leather straps that had her tied to the bedposts, then he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her. Her earlier lust morphed into something she didn't quite understand or want to acknowledge.

He reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her face. He could kill me now, she thought. In this soundproof room in the heart of the flat he could do to me what was done to that girl.

She looked at him.

‘Tell me about her.'

He shook his head.

‘You think I did it, don't you?'

‘You told me yourself that you were there.'

He said nothing for a long time; he just stared at her. There was so much about him that she didn't understand, and it struck her that she liked it when she didn't understand someone, just as she didn't understand herself. The moment when everything became transparent, the excitement evaporated.

‘I didn't kill her, I've already told you.'

‘Have you?'

He lay down next to her. Slowly his fingers traced the welts caused by the whip while he gently licked her nipples, which were still sore and bleeding from the clamps. His tongue was soft and enquiring. His hand was warm and she moved towards him, without making a conscious decision, while he pulled a blanket over her. And in this position they fell asleep.

When she woke up it took a little while before she realised where she was. She had to fight her way up from the bottom of a deep ocean. He was still holding her. She didn't want the tenderness she saw in his eyes and certainly not the tenderness she could feel inside herself. She had to get away from him. He was a danger to her, but not in the way she had imagined.

She wriggled out of his embrace.

‘I've got something for you,' he said. ‘It's a parcel and I want you to keep it in a safe place.'

‘I don't want your parcel.'

He sat up. His eyes took on a sudden hard expression.

‘I'm not asking you. I'm telling you.'

She hesitated. He got up and fetched a large padded envelope, which he put on the bed. She didn't want to touch it, although she could see that it was heavy.

‘What is it?'

He shook his head.

‘Do you have access to a safe? A proper one with a code and everything?'

She nodded.

‘Hide it there. You're only allowed to open it if, one day, you can't find me. Otherwise I don't want you to touch it.'

‘Is it something illegal? Drugs? Money?'

He grabbed her shoulders forcefully. For the first time she saw something she had only suspected until now: he was scared.

‘I'm in deep shit, to put it bluntly. That's the way it is, so there's no point worrying about it. But remember this: if I disappear – if you can't get hold of me either at work or at home or on my mobile or whatever – you must open the envelope.'

‘Why me? Why don't you send it to the police?'

He shook her so hard her teeth chattered.

‘I don't trust anyone. Least of all the cops.'

‘But you trust me?'

He looked at her and the chill crept via hot tongues from his body to hers, and she couldn't resist him even though she despised him. What kind of man was he? What had he done? What was she getting herself mixed up in?

She thought about her reflection in the mirror and the desire for him that could be so all consuming.

‘I trust you,' he said.