Life and Limb (4 page)

T
he small autopsy room at the Institute of Forensic Medicine was as packed and hot as a crowded dance floor.

Wagner had to rub shoulders with Ivar K and regretted not having brought Jan Hansen instead. He might have taken up more room, but Ivar K was in constant motion because of a crick in the neck. Like a hyperactive Duracell bunny he kept turning his head from one side to the other and rolling his shoulders, making the blue smock give at the seams. Although the mask for his nose and mouth concealed some of his face, he compensated by casting his eyes heavenwards and sending powerful signals with his eyebrows.

‘Bloody hell.'

He said it softly and followed it with a low whistle, which was muffled by the gauze mask.

Wagner, the IFM officer, the police's own Forensics man and the two pathologists were silent. They looked at the body on the table with quiet reverence.

There was a different aura around the young woman now as she lay there fully clothed. Degrees of death. Wagner's brain told him there was no such thing, but he still thought he had never seen anything or anyone as dead as this small person.

Behind his mask Gormsen nodded to the officer from the National Department of Forensic Pathology, and without a word they got down to removing the woman's clothing, garment by garment. The clothes were then placed in paper bags that the officers could take back to the drying cupboard. Plastic bags were no use – they retained moisture and could destroy any traces of DNA.

First of all, the skimpy pink T-shirt with the silver glitter and ‘I Love U' was carefully removed, then the bra concealing a pair of minimal breasts that could have belonged to a twelve year old. Each item of clothing was labelled. In the NDFP it would all be examined afterwards for possible clues: hair, semen, saliva, blood or whatever else could point to the perpetrator's identity. Wagner hoped that something would shift the balance, because so far they didn't have an angle to work on in the investigation. They hadn't even identified the woman yet.

When it was time to remove the baggy jeans a collective gasp spread through the group. What once had been a pair of attractive legs no longer had any shape. Nausea rose in Wagner's throat as he saw the clumsily sewn trail running from the hips to the feet.

‘What on earth has he done to her?'

He asked without expecting an answer. Gormsen didn't say anything. He had obviously decided that this autopsy should go by the book, and Wagner was satisfied. This would, he hoped, culminate in a charge of murder, and no one would be able to utter a word of reproach in regard to procedure.

When the clothes and personal effects – a five-kroner coin in a back pocket and an opened packet of Kleenex – had been recorded, Gormsen turned his attention to the external examination. He spoke, as he always did, into his little hand-held tape recorder while poring over the body, starting with the head.

‘There are lesions, as if from blows, to the left temple and right cheekbone,' he intoned.

Gormsen took out a mini torch and shone it into the empty eye sockets.

‘The eyes have been excised after death. The incision occurred through the eyelids, which are likewise missing. A sharp instrument was used.'

He put down the torch.

‘There is no sign of strangulation. The skin around the neck is intact.'

Gormsen's gaze followed his latex-clad hands while he spoke. He placed one of the woman's hands in his. She had the hands of a doll.

‘The fingernails are cracked. There is bruising on the arms, possibly caused by her attacker. There are also cuts to the hands and arms, maybe injuries incurred as she defended herself. We'll swab the underside of the nails.'

As he said that he took a toothpick, ran it under the woman's nails and deposited it in a small plastic tube, which he sealed. The IFM officer affixed a label.

The hands moved further down the woman's body and Gormsen noticed a scar, probably from an appendix operation, a scar from a removed mole and lesions around the genital area which might indicate rape.

Wagner wondered, for the umpteenth time, at the way in which bodies could speak.

He heard Gormsen take a deep breath and saw his chest rise and fall beneath the white coat. His fingers carefully probed the woman's legs. The sewing was so amateur you could easily wedge a finger between the stitches.

A short while later Gormsen extracted something stained with blood from the thigh. He went over to the sink and washed it, then stood for a moment with a grey object in his hand before setting it aside for the IFM officer. Wagner wanted to say something but could only produce a gurgle.

Gormsen turned back to the table, cleared his throat and, staring into middle distance, spoke into the mike.

‘Someone has removed the victim's thigh and shin bones and replaced them with PVC piping and sewn up the tissue.'

The air quivered. The noise from the ventilators was the only sound to be heard.

Ivar K put words to what everyone was thinking.

‘The bastard. He's deboned her. Like sodding poultry.'

His voice cracked as he went on. ‘Madman. Someone should put a bullet through his head.'

‘Deboned?'

Eriksen's eyes were on stalks as his coffee-pouring arm automatically came to a halt and he held the jug in midair.

‘What's the purpose? Why?'

Wagner let Ivar K answer.

‘Why? Because he's a sicko.'

It was spat out, and there was hatred in every word. The hatred could be unhelpful if it wasn't controlled, yet it could be handy motivation to clear up a crime. Wagner watched Ivar K. The whole of his long body was contorted in indignation against what they had witnessed at the IFM. Experience told him that it would spur on the others in the team, who were now assembled around coffee and sandwiches in the canteen.

‘Still no news on who she is? Have you checked the missing persons register?'

Hansen shook his head.

‘No one who answers the description.'

‘Anything else?' asked Kristian Hvidt, the youngest team member.

‘The clothes were checked on the fourth floor,' Wagner said. ‘And then there was the glass eye. That may turn out to be the most important piece of evidence. We have to find out who makes them and where they are available. Hospitals again? The Institute of Pathology. Private clinics too, of course. There are loads of people with glass eyes.'

‘Could it be the perp's?'

‘Could she have popped it in her mouth to give us a clue to the identity of the man?' This suggestion was from Arne Petersen.

Wagner reached for the coffee jug. Petersen had, like most people, read
The Da Vinci Code
, in which the victim left clues for the investigators. But that didn't make it a bad idea. Wagner thought about the film on the mobile phone and the man in the shadows.

‘Possible. And then there are the boots.'

The film had been copied to a computer and now everyone had seen it. Both the daughter and the mother had already visited the police station. Wagner could have kicked himself for not checking with Hansen about how the witnesses had been questioned initially, and whether or not the young girl had also had a chance to give her account of events. Knowing Hansen, Wagner guessed he would have tried to spare the girl, but in this case it was a misplaced consideration which Dicte Svendsen and her photographer friend must have seen through.

‘A man in Doc Martens with a glass eye,' Ivar K said. ‘What next? A wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder?'

Everyone grinned, even Jan Hansen. He and Ivar K were always at each other's throats, and a couple of barbs had been made about the mobile phone oversight. But for once it seemed that a common cause had been sufficient to moderate the differences between Hansen, the stickler for rules, and Ivar K, the cheeky schoolboy.

‘The place has been gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Any luck?' Wagner asked.

No one knew. He decided to pay a call on Forensics after the meeting.

His mobile phone rang. He could see from the display that the duty officer was calling.

‘Wagner.'

‘Henriksen, duty officer here. I've got two people here looking for their daughter, twenty-two years old, a Mette Mortensen.'

Mette.
It sounded so commonplace and innocent. It sounded like the name of a schoolgirl who did her homework and went straight home. Like anyone's daughter.

It didn't sound like the name of a victim whose eyes had been gouged out and her bones removed.

Wagner swallowed something that had got stuck in his throat.

‘I'll be right down.'

‘F
or Christ's sake, Svendsen, have you just hit puberty or what? I thought rebellion was for fifteen year olds.'

‘Rebellion?'

Dicte pulled up short on the threshold to
Avisen
's office. She hadn't expected Otto Kaiser to come over from Copenhagen for the strategy meeting for another twenty-four hours. And there he was, sitting in her swivel chair.

He was leaning back, almost in a recumbent position, with his long legs stretched out in front of him and his hands folded behind his neck.

‘We give you a chance as boss and assume you're sending out the troops like cannon fodder. But no, Svendsen is on the front line. And then goes to a piddling press conference at the police station.'

He tore away a hand and swept it before him in an arc to incorporate her colleagues looking busy behind their screens.

‘While the troops play computer games and poker on the net.'

Dicte slung her bag onto the table, almost hitting him in the process.

‘No one's playing games. We're busy with the bloody supplement, unless you've forgotten. New initiative. Operation Get-More-Readers. We're up to our eyes in work.'

Attack was always the best defence with Kaiser, and strangely enough she was in great form after one and a half hours in a boiling-hot conference room with the great Danish press gathered and Wagner & Co playing poodles on the podium. She was in a foul mood. Not a comma more than the other journalists had she been given. For whatever reason Wagner had decided he didn't owe her a jot, and the irritation at only being told what was strictly necessary now stuck in her craw. She knew they were holding something back; they always did.

Dicte went to the kitchenette for a glass of cold water. But the water from the tap was only lukewarm. And it would still be even if left running for an hour.

‘You said yourself you could do with a more laid-back role,' Kaiser pointed out as she returned with the glass of water in one hand and a sorely needed biscuit in the other. ‘You said you needed peace and quiet.'

She spluttered in mid gulp. Had she really said that?

‘I didn't mean peace and quiet to sit behind a desk. I meant …'

‘Peace and quiet to rummage around and find bodies in car parks and pass evidence on to the police like the little goody-goody you are.'

Of course he already knew. You couldn't keep any secrets from Otto Kaiser – he always had his imperial scouts out. She was one of them herself. Now and then she was at a loss to understand this strange loyalty she felt towards him. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he had been patient with her when introducing her to journalism during her traineeship, which she'd initially hated.

Goody-goody.
Her blood hammered the expression through her temples. This wasn't the first time he had used it. Nor was it the first time it had infuriated her. She was aware that she was supposed to kick up a fuss, and she gladly took the bait hook, line and sinker.

‘It's a good story, and there is more to it than the police will admit,' she said.

He drew back his legs and leaned forward like a child waiting for the last lines of a fairytale.

‘What else?'

‘I don't know. There's just something about that body.'

‘Who is she?'

‘A trainee accountant, twenty-two years old. Mette Mortensen. She disappeared after going to a club on Saturday night. Last seen by a girlfriend when she was flirting with a young man at one in the morning at Waxies in Frederiksgade.'

‘Do we know who he is?'

Dicte shook her head.

‘The description makes him sound like a football yob. And check this out.'

She brought up the mobile phone film on her computer screen and sent Bo silent thanks for copying it before they'd gone to Varna on the previous day. She had to point out the shadow and the boots to Kaiser.

‘Doc Martens. Worn by young right-wing extremists. Interesting that they should be close to the crime scene.'

After Kaiser had recovered from seeing the dead woman, he myopically studied the screen, the boots and her.

‘Right-wing extremist football fans. You've got a few of them here in Aarhus, I've heard.'

Dicte nodded. Over the years Aarhus had developed into a breeding ground for that kind of thing, and recently the neo-Nazis had attacked a socialist café.

Kaiser stood up and started pacing the room. She knew what was coming. It was already the silly season, and finding good stories was like squeezing juice from an unripe lemon.

‘Shouldn't we see if we could map the various groups – find out who they are, how they recruit their members, what motivates them and how many there are? Sympathisers, activities, trademark signs … the whole kit and caboodle.'

‘That's quite an undertaking,' said Bo, who had appeared from the corridor. ‘And not without risk. Those gangs are very closed and government agents are watching them.'

Kaiser angled his head and looked like a demanding cat.

‘So it's right up your alley.'

He studied Bo, whose ponytail hung in straggles caused by the heat in the conference room. Today's outfit was the usual cowboy boots, jeans and a faded T-shirt, this one proclaiming ‘Sex is God'.

‘Shave your head, put on some combat pants and a top, paint a swastika on your upper arm and you're home and dry.'

Bo smiled his ‘dream on' smile. Dicte propped herself against the half wall next to the kitchenette, wondering which exotic admirer had given Bo the T-shirt at some point in the distant past.

‘By the way, how's it going with the search for your son, the firstborn?' Kaiser asked.

She knew this had to come. It had been one of her arguments for the transfer to the crime section, where she had been appointed editor-in-chief for a wage that would allow her to have new windows installed throughout her house. Now the air trembled between them.

‘I ran out of steam.'

‘Why?'

Nothing was sacrosanct to Otto Kaiser – that much she had learned – and to him ‘sensitivity' was a town in Farflungistan. She considered how she could get through to him in brief, concise terms that she had reached a kind of peace with herself on that point, and she was fine that the now-twenty-something son she had put up for adoption was walking around somewhere out there. Life was too short for regrets and brooding on the past – recent events had taught her that. It was also too short to be a goody-goody, which she should have recognised years ago. Not that she was a fully paid-up member, but she had made her share of decisions to please others: an editor here, a lover there; someone in the family here, a colleague there. Perhaps it was her age; perhaps she was passing through a second puberty. There was an unexpected freedom about being in her forties, and with it the feeling that she owed no one a thing.

‘Because,' she said.

Kaiser raised a quizzical brow but Dicte didn't elaborate. Bo studied his nails. His colleagues had their heads down over their keyboards.

‘Okay,' Kaiser said slowly after a long pause. ‘You have a week to dig up what you can, but no longer. We need to have the newspaper filled, Svendsen, and preferably not with fiction.'

The dog welcomed them with her usual whimpering and tail-wagging when, hours later, they arrived home; her house which she loved for all its flaws and defects and hated for more or less the same reasons. The radiators clunked, the electrical circuits were soon overloaded and most of the double-glazed windows had misted up and blurred the view over the fields, and down to Kasted village and the moor behind. It was her imperfect idyll; the place where she could relax and her thoughts were her own, disturbed only by Svendsen, the black mongrel Rose had once forced her to adopt from the rescue centre. Rose who herself had deserted her and moved to Copenhagen to study law, but most of all to be with her boyfriend Aziz.

Dicte kicked off her shoes. Teenage daughters and lost sons. Ex-husbands and chatty girlfriends. She missed having life in the house. The two of them hadn't had the energy for company or parties or noise or laughter for as long as she could remember. Only on occasional visits from Bo's children did it all come back, and then the walls seemed to absorb the atmosphere and become alive again. The rest of the time was spent at work and with the everyday grind; one day devoured the next, until all of a sudden a year had passed.

She mused on degrees of death. That quickly led her to think about the body at the stadium, and when she opened a bottle of red and sat down on the sofa she realised that you could be alive and dead at the same time. And that death in itself – for the living – carried its own absurd affirmation of life.
Perhaps that is where the fascination lies
, she thought, tasting the wine while Bo went to his computer, obviously preoccupied by something very important.

For as long she could remember, death had been at her heels. From her Jehovah's Witness childhood the threat of Armageddon always hung over her head like a gleaming sword. Without the right faith you would not get into the Kingdom of God on earth; you would die and blood would flow. Later death became a part of her work. One murder followed another when you worked on a crime column. How had she ended up there? What was the attraction? Death's own affirmation of life? Death which threw her own life into relief and allowed her to feel that she was alive? Violent death, like Mette Mortensen's, that sent shivers down her spine, but at the same time drew her towards its alluring flame?

Bo called her. She followed his voice up to the computer, where he was going through old photos of his travels.

‘I knew there was something,' he mumbled.

The photo on the screen showed a man seated and reading a newspaper.

‘Kosovo,' Bo explained. ‘Two years ago.'

He had been doing an on-the-spot report in the former Yugoslavia. The stories from Kosovo were about crime and a Danish police chief who had been posted there. The police chief was the man in the picture.

‘What about it?' Dicte asked.

‘The newspaper,' Bo said. ‘The headline on the front.'

It was in Albanian, but there were two words she could understand:
Stadion
and
Killer
were part of the headline for the main story that day.

‘There was so much crime that it just felt like a drop in the ocean when we heard about it.'

He looked at her.

‘A woman had been killed. She was found by the stadium.'

‘And?' Dicte asked, although she had already intuited what was coming.

‘Someone had cut out her eyes and propped her against a car.'

‘Kosovo and Denmark,' she said. ‘The same method with an interval of two years.'

‘It could be a coincidence,' he said, but she could hear the undertone loud and clear.

‘There could be several more we haven't heard about. Elsewhere.'

He nodded.

‘In theory. Who knows what's going on in the world outside Denmark? We don't live in isolation any more. Everything has become global.'

What had she been thinking about before? That violent death has its own in-built life-affirmation? Wasn't that what was said about serial murderers: that they had to kill again and again to feel alive?