Life and Limb (24 page)

I
t really wasn't her problem. She shouldn't get involved. She ought to stay away completely.

Kiki Laursen was eating a pot of yoghurt at her desk and looking down at Strøget from her office on the third floor in Søndergade. Her eyes felt as if someone had thrown sand in them. Almost two days had passed and her arms and legs felt heavy from insomnia. Her headache was near constant and her supply of painkillers rapidly diminishing.

She reached for her coffee and drank it in the hope of clearing her brain. She had spent the hours since being stopped by the patrol officer in a strange state she was unable to define.

When she finally realised that there was nothing she could do and that the black van was out of range, she had driven home and found the house at peace with itself. The children were sleeping. Her husband was snoring gently in their bed. Her red dress, the black slip and her knickers still lay scattered across the floor. The red high-heeled shoes had been kicked halfway under the bed. She had watched
him
for a long time and felt a rare tenderness for him. There was innocence in his features as he lay asleep with his mouth half open. His complexion was pale and delicate, although dark stubble had started to show. His eyelashes were long and velvety. She had pulled the doona over him and sat down on the edge of the bed as the hunt for the black van and its abrupt departure whirled around inside her head. What on earth had she got herself into?

She was thinking the same thought now, many sleepless hours later. She could choose to ignore what had happened. She could choose to focus on her own life and her career, the company she had successfully built up from scratch. Except the nagging feeling inside her refused to go away, and a yearning she didn't want to feel and of which she was ashamed pulled at her and distorted her view of the world. She knew it, but there was nothing she could do to resist the forces working away at her, sucking her closer and closer into something common sense said would be the death of her. But how much was a life worth? Nothing in reality, perhaps. In the bigger picture, an individual life didn't really matter very much.

Against background noise from the other four staff in the office, in between answering telephone calls and pulling up profiles from her database to match temps with clients, she had tried to remember the registration plate of the van. There was an X and a P and then four digits starting with 3 – or was it 8? A filthy 8 could be mistaken for a 3. And the rest?

She threw the yoghurt into the bin, annoyed that she had been too stupid to remember the damn number. That was another thing she was ashamed of.

She looked around the open-plan office. There was no one to discuss this with here. They were okay, her staff – that wasn't it. But there was no one she could confide in. She thought about her friends. They couldn't help with this, either. It was too much to ask.

Kiki got up and went over to the window. The weather had changed and yet again had turned into a typical Danish summer: cloudy with a chance of showers. People were carrying umbrellas. Raincoats of all colours could be seen in the street. If there were any clues after the kidnapping – she had convinced herself that's what it was – they would have been washed away by now. Perhaps she should have called the police or told the officer who pulled her over. On the one hand that might have made everything easier, but then there was the envelope in her safe and the warning about involving the police. Why on earth should she obey that order? Why should she allow herself to be controlled by an erotic obsession? Had she no will of her own?

It had taken her several hours to reach the conclusion that now manifested itself to her in the middle of her coffee. The answer was no. On this point, her will had been paralysed. He had taken control of it right from the very first. She could fight against it as much as she wanted, but it would make no difference. She had no choice; the decision was beyond her control.

At five o'clock everyone went home and she was alone in the office. The desks stood abandoned like ships at sea and the sound of voices and typing on keyboards had been replaced by the distant hum of people in the street below.

She wondered where they might have taken him and what they had done to him. And why. It was all tied up with the stadium murder – she had no doubt about that – and he was guilty of something, she was sure of that too.

He was already guilty of so many things.

‘That's enough,' she muttered to herself as she got up to lock the door, and finally turned her attention to the wall safe behind the counter. It was hidden behind a large framed Rosina Wachtmeister poster, bought from the shop on the ground floor. She lifted the picture down from the wall and rested it on the floor. And cursed him roundly because he had brought the envelope into her life and sucked her into the eye of a storm from which there was no escape.

She entered the code and unlocked the door. The brown envelope lay where she had left it earlier. She was the only person with access to the safe. Her staff always had to ask for permission and they didn't know the code.

She took the envelope and weighed it in her hand as she had done the very first time.

Then she broke the seal and peered inside, holding her breath.

It contained three items. The first was an English book entitled
Combat Training Manual
. The second was a magazine of ammunition. The third was a handgun – a pistol, a Glock 17 DK.

Carefully, Kiki picked up the pistol with both hands. It was lighter than she had expected, but she barely knew which way round to hold it, so she quickly returned it to the envelope. Damn him. What the hell had he been thinking? That she would run around and play superhero, rescuing him from some hole he was in that was entirely of his own making?

Curses and obscenities sprang to mind, her hands grew clammy with sweat and her heart pounded. But there was something else. Something that pumped around her body and sent a tingling sensation all the way to her loins. Something that made her skin feel as if it was fitted with tiny sensors and that the length of her spine had turned into an erogenous zone.

She picked up the book and flicked through it. What was the point of it? There was no letter – nothing at all in writing from him. Only a book, a magazine and a pistol.

The book was published in 1993 by Blitz Editions. It was printed in Slovakia. The copyright belonged to a company called Aerospace Publishing Ltd, but she had no idea whether that was of any significance. There had to be a reason, though, why he had put this particular book into the envelope.

A quick glance at its pages told her it was a book about various combat scenarios and how to resolve them. If a tank came rolling towards you, how would you stop the enemy from advancing? That was one of the questions. If you were being shot at by a group of men armed with handheld weapons, how would you attack their positions? And if you were a sniper, how would you delay the enemy from advancing to friendly positions?

She flicked randomly through it, and there was more of the same. You were asked to imagine a scenario, you were told what tools were available and then you were asked how to solve the problem. Enemy fire from the air, ambush on the road, a terror alert, survival in extreme temperatures and how to attack a guerrilla camp. There were numerous answers and none of them meant a thing to her.

She put the book down and looked at the front cover: a man in combat uniform with a grenade and a pistol running towards her, his hand reaching out for her throat. What on earth was the point?

It wasn't until she flicked through the pages again that she noticed. It was so tiny that she wondered whether it was anything at all, and she had to get her reading glasses from the desk in order to see it clearly.

Next to some of the letters there was a small pencil mark. It wasn't much – a tiny dot here and there. A code? It was pure paranoia, that's what it was. Her first impulse was to throw the book away, but once again she was trapped by her churning brain and the irresistible attraction of danger.

She sat down, lit a cigarette and opened the book at the first page. As she turned it over, a piece of paper fell out. She bent down, picked it up and stared at a sheet entitled ‘Tunnel Plan'. It was a plan of the tunnel system under the old Kommunehospital and at the centre of the labyrinth someone had drawn a cross.

L
ater that afternoon the house felt empty without Bo when Dicte came home from the office. Only Svendsen welcomed her with more enthusiasm than was, strictly speaking, warranted and Dicte squatted down to let the dog greet her. Even though it was raining, she snapped the leash onto the collar and went for a walk through Kasted and down to the moor, where the nightingale was singing its last notes, as it was nearly midsummer.

The walk, which should have been enjoyable, however, turned into a suffocating experience that snuck up on her from all sides as trees and bushes began to assume menacing shapes. Clouds flattened the sky across the countryside, and the light and the sun hid behind the grey cotton wool. It felt as if nature herself was warning her against what lay ahead and trying to persuade her to drop all plans of getting any information from Peter Boutrup and thereby solving the stadium murder. He was dangerous to her, she heard the voices say.

‘He's your son,' the treetops rustled. ‘What makes you think you can play with fire?'

She chose to ignore the messages and strode off with the dog, but Svendsen sensed that something was wrong. She stopped and started sniffing the air. Then she turned around and no promise of treats, no threat of being banned from sleeping on Bo's side of the bed, could change her mind. Svendsen wanted to go home that instant.

Dicte reviewed the day's events on the way back as she was dragged along by what felt like a whole pack of huskies. She had left several messages regarding Marie Gejl Andersen's father at Aarhus Hospital, at the undertaker's and at the crematorium. And, of course, she had attended the appointment with the transplant nurse and subsequently agreed to spend four days having check-ups the following week. She had also told Kaiser who, though far from enthusiastic, had nevertheless allowed her to take time off. The only fly in the ointment was that Holger Søborg had been appointed editor of next week's crime section and a sinking feeling in Dicte's stomach told her that was definitely not part of her plan. On the other hand, she would get a brief respite from the constant pressure and she was happy with that, as long as there was no incipient rebellion among the ranks.

‘Not so fast, Svendsen.'

They had reached the junction in Kasted and continued up Topkærvej. Dicte thought she saw a man walking down the church path and a low growl came from the dog's throat, but Svendsen was so keen to get home that she didn't stop to investigate.

Dicte had sworn Kaiser to secrecy about the potential kidney donation and had consequently been forced to reveal her relationship with Boutrup. She had no idea how long Kaiser would keep her secret; she had to assume that every journalist in Denmark would know in five seconds. It would not be long before it ended up in someone's column or was whispered into the right ears. It was a question of days before Boutrup's biological father would hear the news and very likely choke on his toast, which she reckoned he deserved.

While the dog was dragging her over the last stretch home, she wondered if she should contact him. She even got so far as to almost convince herself that she had a moral obligation to do so. But still it felt wrong, so she dismissed the thought. They had met a couple of times the previous year, during the crisis that followed the decapitation video which she had been sent anonymously, and it had made her re-examine her past for answers. Part of her past was buried in the commune near Ikast where her teacher had got her pregnant one summer a very long time ago. But Morten Agerbæk hadn't known, or hadn't wanted to know, that one of his sixteen-year-old students had borne him a son and given up that son for adoption. He hadn't even known last year, when the past had come back with a vengeance. So why would he want to know now?

The rest of the evening Dicte went around in circles until she finally bit the bullet and called Anne, whose voice sounded very distant.

‘How are you?'

Three little words drowned under the weight of hidden meanings, but Anne appeared not to notice.

‘Okay, but stressed. My father has been poorly.'

There had never been much love lost between Anne and her adopted father.

‘Oh, what's wrong with him?' Dicte asked while hundreds of other words queued up to be uttered. Part of her wanted to tell Anne about Boutrup, about the feelings that had started to grow in her and about the appointment with the transplant nurse. Another part of her wanted to beg Anne to hold her tight so that she didn't lose her footing and drown in her own ambitions to solve a riddle she should perhaps leave alone.

‘Pneumonia,' Anne said.

‘Will he live?'

She didn't intend to sound sarcastic.

‘What do you think?' Anne snapped. ‘They'll probably just give him a shot of antibiotics and he'll be right as rain. I mean, seventy-five is no age at all.'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that.'

‘How did you mean it?'

The telephone was stuck to her sweaty palm.

‘I was just trying to be funny,' Dicte managed to say. ‘Bad timing.'

There was silence at the other end. She waited in vain for Anne to ask how she was, but when the question didn't materialise she realised she was grateful. How could she articulate what she felt right now? How could she tell Anne what had happened – about Boutrup and the other matter? How would she ever bring herself to ask about Torsten and the day Bo had seen him and Anne in the hospital car park?

Even though the silence lasted only a few seconds, it was enough for the sound to seem extra loud when it came. Although it wasn't so much the initial sound as all the shards of glass that rained into the living room and the dog's howls as it hid behind the sofa.

‘What was that? Dicte? What on earth's going on?'

Anne's voice came from far away. Dicte was standing in the middle of the room still holding the phone, but she lowered her arm. She automatically put the phone to her ear while looking at the object that had caused the racket: a clearly visible foreign body in the middle of the carpet. A piece of paper had been wrapped around it and held in place by an elastic band.

‘Someone just threw a brick through my window,' she said and hung up.