Life and Limb (3 page)

I
t was supposed to hurt. It. She never thought of it as anything other than
It
. Just as she never thought of him as anything other than
Him
. She had never tried to analyse why. Because she knew that once she started to analyse, there would be no end to it.

Kirstine – known as Kiki – Laursen leaned back in her chair and listened to the music booming down to her from the stage. Her fishnet-stockinged legs and stilettos were dancing a jig under the table. The advertised blues evening at Fatter Eskil – not a club she frequented – was better than she had expected. The room was packed and the atmosphere good.

‘I'm going to the bar. Anything you want?'

Kiki shook her head at Nina's question. It wasn't alcohol she needed. Even though she wasn't working the following day, and Monica was minding her children. She was after something else, and Susanne's hen's night would serve as well as any other evening on the town.

She looked around her circle of girlfriends, each dressed worse than the next. The bride-to-be won hands down. For the occasion she had been made up like an overripe princess and forced into a costume worthy of a yodelling Heidi. Just a few hours ago she had been in the centre of Aarhus selling red roses to male passers-by for a kiss. She had also been subjected to the attentions of a male stripper who, like the pro he was, had pretended he found her immense body sexy. The stripper was the only item on the program Kiki had taken any interest in. He was a fit guy with muscular thighs and a six-pack, no doubt about that. Broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, just as she liked. Shame he was gay, though, which obviously she kept to herself. No reason to burst anyone else's bubble.

Mmm, they were a good bunch, her friends. They were there when you needed them, and that had to be the most important criterion – never mind their dubious dress sense and peculiar choice of partners. Susanne would soon be joining the club. On Saturday she would be marrying the world's most boring man – aka the ever-neat Ulrik with blue, perfectly ironed shirt and matching tie and his two perfect children with clean nails and water-combed hair from an earlier (imperfect, one must assume) marriage. It was actually frightening to have so little influence over your friends' choice of partners.

She tried to imagine Susanne and Ulrik having sex but had to give up. Perhaps they could find something to get up to under the doona with the lights off. The odds weren't good, though.

The number was over and the audience was clapping. She got up.

‘I'm just going to the loo. Will you keep my seat?'

The others nodded. But she could see in their eyes that they knew:
Kiki's on the prowl now. Something's going to happen.

On her way out she scanned the room. Smoking was still permitted here and a fog had formed in the club; it seemed too cramped for all the people. That was how she liked it. Cramped, so you touched – a breast against a man's shoulder, her arm against a hand holding a glass of beer. A little ‘sorry' and then the pretend-casual eye contact.

That was how you caught men. It was simple. She had never had any problems – nor any great successes, either. It had never made her happy, although that wasn't the aim. She didn't really have an aim, she thought, aside from assuaging her hunger.

‘Nice tights.'

Was there disdain in the voice? The man behind the words stood propping up the bar. She had seen him before, at the Bridgewater Hotel a good hour earlier. Was it coincidence that he was here now? He didn't look like the Fatter Eskil type, but then she probably didn't either. There was half a beer in front of him; he took the glass in his hand and nodded to her in greeting.

All of a sudden she knew it would be him, although if anyone had asked her why she would have found it difficult to answer. It wasn't his appearance. He was muscular in that square way but not very tall, and his face was nothing special. Nice enough with a slightly flat nose – maybe the result of an earlier encounter with a fist – and high cheekbones. His hair was mousey and very short. Perhaps it was his clothes that attracted her. She had seen the Pringle logo on his yellow jumper from a distance. Black jeans and heavy black boots completed the impression of a staged presentation. Not uninteresting, but nothing to write home about. Who could she have written to, anyway?

‘Thank you.'

She formed the word with an exaggerated pout of the lips and met his eyes. His eyes were brown in that cool way where the expression drowns in the darkness. She supposed it was always the eyes. That was where the danger lay, and his gleamed in a special way she liked.

Kiki went to the toilet, took off her underpants and stuffed them in her bag. She quickly freshened her lipstick without dawdling in front of the mirror; she only had time to see her face and read its expression. There was no law saying she had to stay with her friends every minute of the hen's night.

She knew he would still be there on her return. He was waiting. Beside him there was another beer, and he pointed to it and looked at her.

She adjusted her silk dress, which had ridden up. She could see he knew she wasn't wearing underwear, or else he was hoping.

‘What's your name, then?' he asked after she took the beer.

‘Kiki.'

He squeezed her hand and gave a little bow. Not for fun; he was just the type that did that kind of thing. She felt that, at any rate.

‘Johnny,' he said in reply.

She liked the name even though she had an inkling it was fake. It smacked of truck driver and engine oil, yet she could see by his hands that they probably didn't work on cars.

‘And what kind of guy are you, Johnny?'

He looked at her.

‘Do you really want to know? Or is this superficial small talk?'

‘It's purely superficial,
and
I want to know.'

She tasted the beer. It was freezing cold; refreshing. His playing heightened her interest. He came over as tough and quick. In him she recognised her own hunger.

‘Job-wise I'm a health worker up at the Kommunehospital, what they used to call a porter in the old days. Privately, I'm so much more.'

‘Such as what?'

‘Football fan. Casual. Dog owner. Flat owner. Sex games fan. Coffee brewer. Whip owner. Son. Brother. Nephew. Even though my family can go to hell.'

‘What do you mean by “casual”?' she asked, but there were several other words whirling around her head and sending hot fluids through her body.

He leaned towards her. He seemed to be able to compress the air between them. His face came close to hers, and his eyes smiled, clear and bright.

‘I'll tell you later.'

‘Later?'

‘At my place.'

He nodded towards her hand. She had taken off her wedding ring, but the mark was still there.

‘I assume your husband's not interested in my company.'

She thought,
Well, you never know
… It wouldn't be the first time, but she wanted to keep this guy for herself for as long as she could. She sipped her beer and discreetly wiped the froth off her top lip while sitting up on a bar stool and very slowly crossing her legs.

‘Where do you live?'

‘By the station. What about a dance?'

It was the finale of the gig and people were finally beginning to fill the little dance floor. She could see both Susanne and Nina out there. She slipped down from the stool. On her way to the dance floor she felt his hand on her hip, and her anticipation left her breathless.

They danced up close from the start. He with his hands on her buttocks; she with her hands on his. They were firm – she could feel that quite clearly. His whole body was one large block of granite or flint. He could crush her. He could squeeze the life out of her in one hug.

‘Crush me,' her brain sang. ‘Crush me into tiny bits.'

The flat was clean and masculine in an impersonal way. Only the dog said something about the man. It was an Amstaff or American Staffordshire terrier. A breed that could be used as a fighting dog, but which, she knew from friends, could also be a good family dog.

This one seemed friendly enough at first glance. But the dog was like its owner: there was something concealed in those brown eyes.

‘Champagne?'

He produced a bottle from the fridge before she had time to answer.

‘Why not?'

The bubbles would go to her head and make her giddy.

The cork was released with a muffled hiss of air. He had removed his jumper. Underneath he wore a long-sleeved, tightly fitting T-shirt. She relished the sight and imagined what it would be like to touch his muscles under the material.

He poured the champagne into flutes, and sat beside her on the sofa and toasted.

‘I would like to hurt you,' he said softly. ‘You like being hurt, don't you?'

The room blurred in front of her eyes. The bubbles prickled and dried her throat so that she had to drink more. He went on. ‘You like the taste of blood. You like the feeling when the whip cracks and lashes your buttocks. I can see that in you. You like to be handcuffed and have a large dick thrust into your mouth. Again and again and again.'

Her heart was galloping. She was hot and wet. What she really wanted was to retain a measure of control and tell him he could go to hell with his sick guesswork. What she really wanted was to outmanoeuvre him and get up and go on her way. But he had already trussed her up with his words and she could only whisper a faint, gasped, desperate plea.

‘Yes.'

A
visen's
office in Frederiksgade had for years been far too small for the six journalists plus a couple of stray award-winning photographers, one of whom was Bo.

Alternating peaks and troughs for the newspaper – which was a morning publication – ensured a regular turnover of staff. When times were good other journalists were taken on and new editorial offices created, like the crime section, of which Kaiser had just made Dicte the editor-in-chief. In bad times the chop was waiting for the most recently hired employees or those who were close to retirement. The former were sent redundancy notices. The latter might be lucky and receive a termination agreement which allowed them to travel the world first class.

‘Ah, the chief editor. Nice of you to join us.'

Holger Søborg watched her from his safe post behind the computer screen. Dicte swallowed her antipathy, as she had vowed long ago she would. In her opinion Holger's cerebral capacity was in inverse proportion to his broad, muscular shoulders and his almost equally broad grin. Now, however, he had ended up in her section, so she was obliged if not to love him, then at least to tolerate him. Which she did today by ignoring his greeting.

‘Can you remember the boots the hooligans wore in
A Clockwork Orange
? Do they have a name?'

She threw out the question so that Helle could also have a chance. She was an ex-trainee, now a permanent fixture at
Avisen
and responsible for the weekly supplement, ‘Crime Zone', as well as taking care of the day-to-day crime material. She was also hopelessly fascinated by Bo and obviously considered him to be Aarhus's answer to Johnny Depp.

Dicte switched on her computer and it awoke with a sound like a rocket on the launch pad. It felt as if she had only just switched it off. On Sunday evening, after the dinner at Varna Palace, she had dropped by the office to write the article about the stadium body. That was why she and Bo had slept half an hour longer this Monday morning. And because his hand had happened to brush against her left breast.

‘Doc Martens,' said Holger, whose brain cells did occasionally manage to produce something useful. ‘Originally an English phenomenon, I believe. Punks wore them a lot in the eighties. You hardly ever see them in Denmark any more.'

‘But if you did see them, where would that be?' Dicte asked, thinking she would Google Doc Martens herself once she had checked her e-mails and the post stacked up in her in-tray.

‘The BZ movement, the squatters,' Helle suggested. ‘The ones who had the demo for the youth centre. I think there were lots of them wearing those boots.'

‘Skinheads, football fans,' Holger added. ‘Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. The Gallagher brothers. Why? Has that got anything to do with the murder at the stadium?'

Dicte gave that a wide berth.

‘No, it's just because Rose was talking about buying a pair. But for me they have “violence” written all over them.'

‘Boots can't do that all on their own,' Helle opined.

She and Holger started to go off on a tangent discussing violent crime while Dicte opened her mail thinking about football and Doc Martens. A football hooligan? Was this football violence that had got out of control?

She recalled the girl's film of the eyeless body. The woman had been beaten up, no question. Had she been kicked by the man with the heavy boots? Was it random, mindless violence for the sake of it? Or had this woman been picked out and, if so, for what reason?

They would not get any further until the body had been identified – that much was certain. She hoped Wagner would impart some of the police findings when the time came. She hadn't fed him the mobile phone for nothing.

She half smiled at the computer screen. The rebel had come out in Bo when he had realised she was going to pass the phone on to Wagner.

‘Have you gone mad?' he'd said. ‘Pass on forensic evidence to the police? You just don't do that.'

He didn't understand her thinking. Not always. He didn't understand that she was fishing for something in return – something long term. In his world the police had been the brutal aggressors who had separated him and his sisters when their mother's boozing got out of hand. In his world the police were the ones who had punctured the normality they'd had at home, however fragile. The everyday life in which Bo, as the eldest child, had been the one to go shopping, make packed lunches and clear away the bottles, and where the surface had been a messy, neglected but functioning home. The police were the foe: that was in Bo's blood. It was as simple as that.

She was no great fan of authority either, but the feeling was a hundred times worse in the younger man with whom she had lived for five years, her rebel with a cause. For the most part it had been easy to live with, but now and then it had led to ideological clashes that had been like a punch in the solar plexus.

‘Coffee?'

Talk of the devil. There he stood in the doorway, tall and lean with his hair down the back of his neck, gathered in a ponytail today. Was he her own private revolution against conformity and expectations of polite, short-haired men with knife-edge creases and clean nails? The thought crossed her mind – not for the first time – that her parents would have opposed the relationship. But her father was dead and her mother was far too wedded to Jehovah. There was no one to rebel against.

‘I wouldn't say no,' came the response from Holger.

Bo swaggered further into the room, wearing his cowboy boots.

‘Great. That's nice of you, Holger. Don't forget: a whole packet of coffee to one litre of water and make sure the lid's closed on the machine or it boils over.'

Holger blushed but clearly saw no escape from going to make the coffee. Helle smirked and Bo sent her a gracious smile. He perched on the edge of Dicte's desk:

‘Has your friend Wagner phoned to say the case is done and dusted? Or is he waiting for you to solve it for him, as usual?'

Dicte shook her head.

‘You're jealous.'

‘Who, me?'

Actually, the thought had never occurred to her. Once the words were out, however, they seemed to have a sudden logic to them, in their own illogical way. This wasn't about sex and love but about having something in common and feeling like an outsider. She decided not to go down that route and was saved by a cautious knock at the office door.

‘Dicte Svendsen?'

Two people stood there: married, in their mid or late forties, she guessed. Both looked tired and drained, with vacant eyes and wearing clothes that seemed merely functional. The woman wore no make-up and had short, wispy, salt-and-pepper hair. His hair was like hers.

‘That's me.'

She rose to her feet. Bo, with a friendly inclination of the head, loped off down the corridor.

‘Can I help you?'

‘Are you the person who writes articles about life after death?'

The man had asked the question, but it could equally have been the woman. They stood side by side, as if holding each other up.

She nodded. The series of articles about what happens to our bodies after death had been, in fact, Kaiser's idea, and at first she had been against the crime section writing it. But it was summer, and you had to fill the columns with something during the holiday weeks, and she had been fascinated by the cache of amazing stories in the Aarhus area. The articles had resonated with many readers. Today was no exception.

‘Let's take the weight off your feet. Come with me.'

She led the couple into a large meeting room and sat them down around the big, round table overflowing with the day's newspapers. She closed the door to the constant hustle and bustle behind them.

‘It's about our son,' the woman said.

‘He died a month ago,' the man added. ‘He dropped dead while out running. He was twenty-two.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that.'

Words were inadequate to express the big things in life. She searched for a more satisfactory response for the couple but quickly gave up.

‘You write about what happens to us when we die. Where we go,' the woman said, floundering. ‘But we can't find out what caused our son's death. We've already buried him, but we still don't have any answers and no one can give us them.'

‘I assume they carried out a post-mortem and found nothing,' said Dicte.

‘They're raking around for something that perhaps cannot be found, and we can't get closure,' the woman said. ‘We need answers, and they tell us that there are long waiting times. Can that really be true?'

‘By “they” you mean the forensic examiners? Dr Gormsen at the Institute?'

Both nodded.

‘Dr Gormsen is a nice man,' the woman said, ‘but we feel we're being fobbed off. We thought … We can't be the only people to have experienced this.'

Her voice was close to cracking. The man took his wife's hand between his.

‘We just want closure,' he said. ‘We're willing to stand up and tell Søren's story. People should know how the system works, and that might also put some pressure on the process.'

Dicte looked from one to the other. As she had in the past, she pondered what to say, here in a situation where two vulnerable people declared themselves willing to go public with their agenda. She understood them. But she also understood the forensic examiners and the rules stipulating that all deaths had to be reported to the police for a coroner's inquest and that as far as possible the cause of death must be determined. This could take a long time if nothing was found at the autopsy.

‘And they haven't found anything that might suggest your son was ill? A bad heart, maybe?'

‘That was the first theory, but they claimed they couldn't find anything to support it,' the man said.

Dicte took down their full names, and the son's, and asked whether she could contact the medical examiners first and then form a view on the matter. The couple were Karina and Aage Frandsen, and they also provided an address and several telephone numbers. Dicte doubted if anything would move faster if she wrote an article about their case, but they were right in thinking that it would interest her readers. Most people didn't have a clue how death could affect the living on so many levels.

After the Frandsens had gone she sat for a moment imagining how they felt. It was one thing to lose a child but quite another to know that the body was being cut up and samples taken. Not to have the certainty of the cause of their child's death; not to have closure.

She returned to the computer and Googled ‘Doc Martens'. Bo came in with a cup of coffee for her in one hand and his mug in the other. Her mood had plummeted after the meeting with the Frandsens. Bo stroked the back of her neck and she leaned back against him.

‘I caught some of that. It can't be nice.'

She shook her head.

‘At least they were given the body back and they were able to bury him. It must be the additional examinations that are taking the time.'

Bo was right, though: it wasn't nice. In the same way that it wasn't nice for the close relatives of the stadium victim to have learned their news. Death was seldom welcome in any family. But losing a son had to be a lesser evil than knowing your child had been beaten and perhaps tortured.

She typed in ‘Doc Martens'. Webpages of where you could buy the familiar boots came up in a flash, accompanied by photos.

‘Those are the ones,' Bo said. ‘What a clever girl you are.'

There was the ‘Dr Martens Black Smooth, classic 8 eyelet boot'. Doc Martens, according to the internet, had a distinctive air-cushioned sole and had been invented by a German, Dr Klaus Märtens, in 1960. The classic boot also had trademark yellow stitching.

‘What size do you take?'

‘Forty-four,' said Bo.

Dicte typed that in. She turned round and inspected the black cowboy boot that he had put on the radiator. It needed a new heel, but she had never seen him wear anything else. She smiled at him.

‘In three days you will be the lucky owner of a pair of the most famous boots in history.'