Life and Limb (29 page)

‘W
hat were you up to, you and Bay?'

Jan Møller stared at the wall, at the only point where there might possibly have been a window. But there wasn't.

Wagner studied the man while waiting for an answer that didn't come. Møller was bloated, as if he had overdosed on growth hormone, and his head looked too small for his body. He was dressed in black: black combat trousers, black Kappa sweatshirt and black boots. His clothes looked creased and scruffy after two days on the road between the summer house in Løkken and the custody cell in Aarhus, where the view was a bit different from North Sea waves.

Hansen repeated the question, but in a new guise this time.

‘Arne Bay was found with a knife in his back. It went straight through the tattoo of the Celtic cross with which I dare say you are familiar. For your own sake, I think you should tell us what happened. History has a habit of repeating itself.'

Møller's eyes darted from Hansen to Wagner and around the interview suite as if looking for a way out. There was a certain robust intelligence in his stare. This young man had grown up in what you would call a good home. His father, Erling, was the managing director of the city's biggest tinned-food factory. He had two siblings who were successful, who had gone on to further education. Jan was the middle child. He was the black sheep, but the family had made excuses for him and hired expensive lawyers to get him off one charge after another. Not any more, though. Erling had announced that from now on his son would have to answer for his actions, of which the murder of his girlfriend was obviously the most serious. Jan had practically confessed, although he was keen to assure them that it hadn't been his intention that she would die of her injuries after he beat her up and did a runner.

‘Okay,' the young man said at last, looking at Wagner, who hadn't spoken a word. ‘Perhaps we can do a deal. I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine.'

Wagner looked him straight in the eye.

‘This isn't a US cop drama. We don't do deals.'

‘Of course you do. Everyone does.'

The room was silent for a little while. Then Wagner said, ‘What if we told you that Bay dropped you in it before he died?'

Wagner reached down by his chair and pulled up a briefcase. Without further ado, he started piling up files on the table. After a while the stack resembled a high-rise building seriously at risk of collapse.

‘We've got so much on you we don't know where to start.'

Wagner placed his hand on the pile. Jan stared at it.

‘You're lying.'

‘Maybe. And maybe not. We've already searched Bay's flat. We're only missing a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle – we've got everything else.'

‘We can't promise you special treatment in court, as I'm sure you know,' Hansen interposed. ‘Although the judge always looks kindly on goodwill. If he thinks you've been cooperative he might be inclined to reward it, no matter what we, the police, think.'

Møller's face scrunched up. No one said anything for at least thirty seconds. Wagner pulled out one of the case files and began reading it. Hansen took out his mobile phone and started texting like a nimble-fingered teenager. Wagner was conscious of Møller's eyes constantly roaming the pile on the table. There was no need to tell him that the files mainly contained blank pieces of paper.

‘It was nothing,' he said at last, staring at the tabletop. ‘It was just a bit of pocket money.'

‘Daddy turned off the tap?' Hansen asked, earning himself a glare from Wagner.

Møller just nodded.

‘I had expenses. So did Arne. They had to be paid.'

‘Even though the enterprise was criminal?' Hansen said, righteousness incarnate.

Møller shrugged.

‘In this shitty country? What's the bloody difference?'

Wagner sighed and hoped Hansen wouldn't let himself be provoked. He didn't want them distracted by a pseudo-political discussion with a right-wing lunatic.

‘So how did you make the money?' he quickly cut in.

Møller rolled his shoulders as if pressed down by a great weight.

‘It was Arne's contact. We were just couriers. I know you're going to ask me what we were moving, but I don't know and I don't want to, either.'

‘Where from and where to?' Hansen asked.

‘It varied.'

‘Give me an example,' Wagner said.

Møller closed his hand around the mug of coffee which up until now had sat untouched in front of him.

‘A box might have needed taking across the border to Germany and handing over to a driver somewhere near Padborg or Flensburg.'

‘Where did you collect from?' Hansen tried again.

‘We picked up from various places. Usually in the country. At a petrol station or in a rest area.'

‘Who delivered it to you? Did he arrive by car? What did the car look like?' Wagner prodded.

Møller shook his head.

‘I never got a proper look at the guy. He stayed in the car behind darkened windows. Our job was to empty his car and put the boxes in my Toyota Estate. Arne always knew where the goods had to be taken.'

‘So Arne Bay knew the man behind the wheel?'

Møller nodded.

‘I'm fairly certain he did.'

‘Where did he know him from?' Wagner asked. Møller made no reply.

Wagner thought about Dicte Svendsen and her theory about a trade in humans, perhaps human corpses.

‘Could it be related to Bay's work? At the hospital?'

Møller stared blankly at them.

‘It could be related to my old grandmother and I wouldn't know.'

Wagner contemplated the credibility of Møller's statement and decided he could buy it. There was a certain traditional criminal logic to his argument: the less you knew the more innocent it felt, and the less you would squeal if you were caught.

‘How were you paid? In cash?'

Møller nodded to Hansen, who had asked the question. ‘I always got my money from Arne.'

‘And what did the packages look like? Were they cardboard boxes? Something else?'

Møller frowned. For a moment he stared into space.

‘Not cardboard boxes. More like the kind of boxes you use for transporting fresh meat.'

‘Cooler boxes,' Wagner said, thinking that Møller wasn't his father's son for nothing. He must have seen meat arriving in that type of packaging at his father's factory.

‘Something like that.'

There was a knock on the door. Eriksen popped his head around and inclined it towards Wagner, who got up. Hansen announced the time the interview was interrupted and stopped the tape recorder.

‘Two things,' Eriksen said after Wagner had closed the door to the interview suite behind him. ‘Two independent witnesses say they saw a black van with darkened windows going to Åbyhøj Park around midnight the day before Bay's body was found. Neither of them made a note of the number.'

‘And?' Wagner asked him, eager to resume interviewing Møller.

‘And there's a man in a wheelchair who won't speak to anyone but you. He says it's urgent and it's about the stadium murder.'

‘Where is he?'

Eriksen nodded down the corridor.

‘Down by the lift. By the seating area.'

Wagner asked Eriksen to take over from him in the interview suite and headed down the corridor, past a large amount of stolen designer furniture stored here because there was nowhere else for it to go during the trial. During the thirty seconds it took him to walk to the waiting room he wondered about the cooler boxes and their contents – if what Møller had said turned out to be true. Dicte Svendsen might be right: perhaps it did have something to do with people. The smuggled goods certainly had to be some sort of perishable item.

The man in the wheelchair had once been handsome, about that there was no doubt. For a brief second, before the man's business caught his interest, Wagner registered a face that reminded him of a Hollywood actor whose name he couldn't remember, but whose chin and broad jaw had made multitudes of women swoon.

The man's hair was blond, his eyes piercing blue, but his body clearly useless from the chest down, where immobile legs sat passively in the footrests of the wheelchair.

‘My name is Gregers Laursen,' the man said firmly. ‘I'm married to Kirstine Laursen, and I'm here to report my wife missing. She hasn't been home for two days.'

Wagner was about to refer the man to another officer when something from his interview with Bay came back. It was about the woman who had driven the family car off a cliff during a holiday and crippled her husband while she had walked away without a scratch.

He was just about to ask when the man spoke again.

‘The man who's just been found dead. She was his lover.'

‘Arne Bay's?'

The man nodded. There was a defiant expression in his eyes which said,
Don't ask any intrusive questions
.

Wagner nodded to the man in the wheelchair.

‘You'd better come with me.'

T
he undertaker's business was located in Vestergade and was one of a chain of three trading under the name Marius Jørgensen & Sons. The other two branches were in Aalborg and Herning, according to her research.

At first Dicte studied the window display from afar and couldn't help sympathising with the dilemma faced by the window-dresser. How do you sell death?

The decision had fallen in favour of a multitiered display of pale blue velvet, on top of which were placed a selection of urns, from cheap wooden models to more expensive ceramic ones, although no price tags were attached. There was also a cross, resting discreetly against an urn; a bouquet of plastic tulips, and a poster drawing attention to a children's book called
Where
Do We Go When We Die?
. On another poster, this one for the Association of Danish Undertakers, two tulips were nodding to each other, blue on a white background.

She adjusted the shoulder strap of her messenger bag. She wasn't looking forward to crossing the threshold, but she had now left so many messages with Marius Jørgensen & Sons, and got nowhere, that there was nothing else for her to do. So she walked down the three steps and opened the door that instantly triggered a small crisp bell.

A tingling sensation ran underneath her skin, and she shuddered as she looked around the apparently deserted room. It was illogical, she knew, but the place affected her: the walls appeared to close in on her, and a headache which had been lurking all day started to throb.

Despite every effort to keep the room light and welcoming, there was an undercurrent of all-consuming darkness just below the surface and she was sorely tempted to return to the drizzle outside when music suddenly started to play. Notes from an organ piece that was undoubtedly beautiful and a fine composition spilled out from underneath a door, which opened at almost the same time, allowing a man to enter. He was tall with a slight stoop, clad in a dark suit with a fixed mild expression on his face, as if everything strove upwards: raised eyebrows; upturned corners of his mouth; receding hairline – a bizarre combination with his high forehead. She guessed he was around forty years old.

‘In what way might I be of assistance?'

His rather antiquated vocabulary sounded like something you might learn on a crash course in the funeral business, but his warmth seemed genuine.

‘Dicte Svendsen. I'm a journalist. I've tried phoning many times but you never returned any of my calls.'

She held out her hand. He shook it and she felt his skin, crisp and parchment like, the skin of someone who has worked with too many chemicals.

‘I did pass on your message to my father, who always deals with the press, but he has probably been too busy.'

This wasn't said with a grave countenance; rather, with an expression that bordered on regret.

Dicte thought that whatever this firm was hiding, it seemed unlikely that this particular individual was involved, unless he was a remarkably good actor. She decided to match his friendliness, at least to begin with.

‘We're doing a series of articles on death in our paper. The series is called “Life and Limb”. Let me show you some examples …'

She pulled some newspapers out of her bag and gave them to him. He leafed through them with interest.

‘I was hoping you might be prepared to talk to me about what it's like to be an undertaker,' she improvised, flashing him her most endearing smile. ‘And a little free publicity wouldn't hurt your business, I suppose.'

He returned her smile.

‘No, it wouldn't, would it. Summer is a quiet time. Winter is our busy period. What would you like to know?'

Dicte thought about the brick through her window and the glass eyes in the urn. In her head she had joined all the dots and reached a preliminary conclusion that the undertaker who had handled the cremation must somehow be involved. Now she was no longer so sure. She hadn't expected to find any cooperation. She looked around the room. It didn't seem quite so intimidating now.

‘Perhaps you could give me a guided tour?' she suggested. ‘I think our readers would like to know what happens backstage. People are very interested in death at the moment.'

He nodded and opened the door to the back room.

‘As long as there aren't any other customers, it should be all right to look around. This is where we have the initial meetings with our clients.'

It was a kind of office. Light and friendly, yet there was something about it that caused her headache to return. Perhaps because the walls were bare and everything seemed so stark.

‘We keep the coffins in here,' he said, crossing the room and opening another door. ‘This is just a selection, of course. One of each design. We have a storage depot.'

‘I understand that you have three branches,' Dicte said as she entered the room. ‘I imagine you need a lot of coffins.'

‘Please take a look at this,' he said. ‘Something for every size of pocket.'

She listened patiently to a lengthy talk on the prices of coffins and other services offered, such as liaising with the burial authorities, the probate court, the hospital and the vicar.

‘However, we don't offer only church services. All faiths are welcome here,' he said.

‘I guess you are seeing more and more of them?'

He nodded.

‘And more people prefer an open coffin. It means we need to ensure that the deceased looks presentable. ‘

‘How do you do that?'

They were interrupted by the crisp bell. He shrugged his shoulders with regret.

‘My apologies. Duty calls. We had better go back.'

She followed him out. Two nervous-looking women were standing inside the door. Mother and daughter, Dicte guessed. The undertaker received them with warmth, and before you could say ‘sepulchral inscription' the discussion about the father's funeral was well under way and the two women had started to look calmer. Dicte spent a moment observing the effect of the man's obliging manner on his customers. Then she turned around and went back to the room with the coffins and the urns lined up on shelves, like soldiers standing to attention.

There was another door to the room. She pressed the handle but it was locked. It was a standard lock that could be picked with a piece of wire. She rummaged through her bag and found her car keys. The key ring had broken long ago and was now a thick wire spiral. She unravelled it and removed the keys, then wiggled it inside the lock. A click quickly followed and she opened the door.

The room was dark and she groped for a light switch on the wall.

She regarded the scene before her; it was like entering a pathologist's lab. In the middle of the room was a steel bench. From it a waste pipe led to the stone floor. Behind that was a sink with hoses stretching over to the bench so that it could be washed down. As far as she could make out the undertaker also had a pathologist's chemicals and tools stored on shelves or hanging from the wall. Everything was neat and clean and shiny, but the smell of death lingered in the room – it rose up her nostrils and made her feel nauseated. Was this normal? It might be. Perhaps every undertaker had a room like this?

She suppressed her nausea, ignored the rumbling of her headache and walked across to the bench. A steel trolley had been pushed under the sink. She wheeled it out. On top of it were various bottles of foul-smelling liquids and jars, along with rolls of gauze and cotton-wool balls. There was also a box covered by a white cloth. She removed the cloth.

They lay like Christmas baubles, each in their own slot, on pieces of tissue paper. She had to reach out and support herself on the bench as about fifty glass eyes stared up at her.

It took her a couple of seconds to compose herself. Then she picked up one of the eyes. It was a standard factory model. There were only two colours – blue or brown – and no shades in between. The eyes were clearly meant for corpses, for whom the requirement for specific details was less important.

She frowned when she heard the faint sound of the doorbell upstairs. This either meant new customers or the two women had gone, and she knew which was more likely. Dicte quickly slipped the eye into her pocket, covered the box with the cloth and made it back to the shop just in time. For a moment the undertaker's friendly face seemed to be replaced by an angry mask, but it was only for a fraction of a second and it might have been her imagination. He smiled.

‘Perhaps we could continue another day? I have an appointment with a client presently.'

‘Of course,' she said, smiling back and whipping out her notepad for her last question. ‘I don't think I caught your name?'

Later she almost regretted telling Bo about her visit to Marius Jørgensen & Sons.

‘You're keeping things from me.'

He had stormed off in the direction of the car after the press briefing about the missing Kirstine Laursen and the result of Arne Bay's autopsy. Now she peered up at his face and it was clear that his frustration had surfaced. He yanked open the car door a little too quickly and dumped his cameras on the back seat.

‘You should have told me you were going to visit that undertaker. Christ, Dicte, anything could have happened to you.'

He left her to open the door to the passenger side. It took a while because the handle was broken.

‘Could you give me a hand, please?'

For a moment he glared at her combatively across the roof of the car. Then he got in, opened the door from the driver's seat and she clambered in.

‘And you didn't tell me you'd visited Winkler again, either.'

‘It's not like he's dangerous,' she said to the windscreen.

‘How the hell would you know?'

Bo started the car and reversed out. They could have walked, she thought, but he always had to take so much bloody equipment.

‘And remind me again when you're meeting that nurse?'

She gulped.

‘I've already met her.'

He gripped the steering wheel hard. She could see that his knuckles had turned white.

‘You weren't here. You were in Poland, remember?'

His face darkened. He didn't say anything for a while.

‘And what was the result?' he said finally. ‘When are they taking your kidney?'

She ventured to place her hand carefully on his thigh. It seemed tense against the denim of his jeans.

‘They're not taking a kidney. But I'm going there for four days of tests starting tomorrow.'

He turned around in the seat.

‘Four days!'

‘As an outpatient,' she reassured him, still with her hand on his thigh but ready to beat a hasty retreat.

He shook his head.

‘You're unbelievable, you know that? You could have e-mailed. You could have called.'

She slumped deeper into the seat and withdrew her hand. She wanted to say he could have called too, but in fact he had done. She hadn't managed to call him back every time, and when she had finally got hold of him she had been unable to tell him the whole story.

‘I didn't want to worry you.'

He drove across Strøget at Reginakrydset, continued over Rådhuspladsen and nearly went through the red light.

‘Worry me! I get even more worried if you don't tell me what's going on. When are you going to understand that? Can't you see that you're undermining everything we have?'

Could she? She stared out of the window. Did she like playing with fire? Was she ultimately just a hopeless adrenaline junkie? She hoped not.

‘You could come with me to the hospital tomorrow,' she offered.

‘I've got work to do.'

‘Okay.'

‘What time?'

‘Ten o'clock.'

They drove along the river and turned up Østergade. Shortly afterwards he parked in the courtyard behind the office and they walked up together. On the way up the stairs his hand brushed her backside and she knew it wasn't an accident, that he was accepting her peace-offering, though he would have liked more.

‘I can probably get someone else to do the work for me,' he said.

She stopped in front of the door to the newspaper offices. He pushed it open.

‘If you tell me about the undertaker,' he said.

They entered, made some coffee and sat down in the kitchenette. Holger Søborg and Cecilie had turned up, but apart from that no one else was there. Dicte sat down with her mug of coffee, put her feet up on a chair, told Bo what she had seen and showed him the glass eye.

‘Something's very wrong,' she concluded at last.

He sat for a while, looking at her. Then his gaze landed on her once-white Adidas trainers. It hung there.

‘Bo?'

‘Mmm?'

He leaned forward.

‘Don't move.'

She twitched involuntarily.

‘Sit still, for Christ's sake.'

She froze. He picked something off the sole of her trainer and held it in the palm of his hand.

‘What is it?'

‘You tell me.'

She had seen them before: two small, silver heart-shaped sequins.

She also knew where she had picked them up.