Next of Kin (30 page)

‘I'm off, sweetheart. Don't wait up.'

Bo kissed her goodbye and was out of the door before she could say a word. What could she have said? Now and then his other life took him away, and this evening his ex-wife had rung asking for help. She was on the evening shift at the hospital and both children were ill. Could their dad come and be with them until she got back, at midnight?

Dicte had only just heard the car reverse and roar off up the road when the dog started to bark.

‘Svendsen. Shut up!'

But that didn't help and the dog's barking increased in volume when she saw a broad shape standing behind the glass pane. She went into the kitchen and looked at the man through the kitchen window. She had never seen him before and she knew she should be on her guard. But there was something helpless about him which made her open the window a fraction.

‘Yes?'

Her voice was like another instrument in Svendsen's chamber concert for dog and human, and she had to strain to catch the man's reply.

‘I'm sorry to disturb you. My name is Ole Nyborg Madsen. I'm a psychologist.'

‘How can I help?'

He flourished a hand in the air. He looked like a spent force, Dicte thought. There didn't seem to be a spark of life left in him. His face hung in saddened folds and pain was swimming around on the surface of his eyes.

‘I've read your articles,' he said. ‘I think I can help you. We might be able to help each other,' he added.

She made a decision and went to open the front door. Svendsen's concert rose to new heights. ‘You wouldn't be a canine psychologist, would you? She doesn't bite, but the volume can be a bit too much sometimes.'

‘I'm afraid not.' Ole Nyborg Madsen shook his head.

Dicte took the dog by the collar and held it as she let the man in. ‘What's this about?'

They stood in the hall a little awkwardly. She didn't know the man, but there was something about him that made her want to offer him a comfortable seat. He just seemed to need it.

‘My cleaning lady … Our cleaning lady … Kiki Jensen, her name is …'

He gestured helplessly with one hand in the air. Dicte noticed that it was trembling.

‘It's a long story. But I have some information I'd very much like to pass on regarding the man who has been kidnapped. Or, to be more precise, regarding her, Kiki.'

‘Come and sit down.' She led the way to the living room and cleared away the plates of spaghetti bolognese.

The man sat down. She followed his gaze. He was staring at their half-full wine glasses on the coasters. ‘Would you like a glass?'

At first he shook his head, then changed his mind and accepted with gratitude. ‘If it's not too much … This is a little tricky ...'

He groped for words and again seemed to be searching for them in the air, his hands fumbling. She gave him a glass and poured; one of his hands held the stem of the glass and found peace while the other lay in his lap.

‘Thank you very much indeed,' he said after a deep draught. ‘That helped. My goodness, it's better than medicine.'

Dicte agreed. It usually worked for her. ‘If you have some information, why don't you go to the police?' she asked.

The man grimaced, making his face look even more pained.

‘You'll understand why when you hear the story. But I must ask you not to mention my name. For the same reason.'

She returned his look. ‘Have you done something illegal?'

He nodded. ‘Anything serious?'

His eyes flitted down to his hands, which now lay limp on his knees. ‘I haven't killed anyone, if that's what you're thinking. I haven't assaulted anyone. I haven't taken anything which wasn't mine.'

Then he peered up. ‘Perhaps you might say I was offered a dance with the devil. I agreed to a waltz but turned down a tango.'

Dicte studied the man. His clothes were hanging off him as though they were several sizes too large. His hair was uncombed and he needed a shave. There was something raw and anguished about his gaze. He was clearly a man who had suffered, and was still suffering, although she didn't know why, of course. She felt their roles had been swapped and she was the psychologist.

Finally she nodded. ‘Okay. We've got a deal.'

‘I've had another chat with London,' Hartvigsen said. ‘The current theory is that there is a third person. Someone who recruited the other two.'

Wagner studied him. Like the rest of his team, Hartvigsen's eyes were red with exhaustion and bristles were visible on his round chin. His knotted tie hung low, and he had spilt something down his shirt which had resulted in two long smears across his chest. Soft-boiled egg, Wagner guessed.

‘So he or she may have recruited more than just the two we're aware of,' Wagner said. ‘Perhaps it is a form of terrorism after all.'

Hartvigsen pulled out a chair and sat down with a bump. Ivar K obligingly swung his long legs off the table where he had been sitting and talking on the phone. Eriksen opened a bottle of mineral water and drank while Petersen ran a hand behind the back of his neck and wiped away the sweat.

‘We'll have to leave all that to PET,' Hartvigsen said wearily. ‘We may have to come to terms with the fact that we may never find the third man.'

Ivar K hummed the theme from the film, and Hartvigsen looked right through him. Wagner checked his watch. It was half past seven and they had been working non-stop for almost forty-eight hours. There were five hours left and, as the deadline approached, time was forcing them into a tight corner. Boxes of half-eaten pizzas lay open on the table and crumpled serviettes were everywhere, thrown away like rejected ideas. The room stank of cheese and sweat, mixed with despair and fear of defeat.

‘So someone was going round in the wake of the tsunami in Thailand collecting souls,' Hansen said. ‘He or she was fishing in the waters after the storm. Ravaged human lives, people who had lost everything or almost everything. They might have been working at a hospital or similar and had an easy time gaining their confidence. It's possible. He or she might have had contacts in the underworld who got them false papers and so on.'

Wagner nodded. It sounded plausible enough to his ears, but Hartvigsen was right. Perhaps they would never find out, and in any case international policing wasn't their business.

‘Okay,' he heard his own lethargic voice say. ‘Third man or not, it's still our job to find the victim in the film. And Kirsten Husum, of course. How far have we got?'

Hansen flicked through his notes. ‘She was kidnapped in the summer of 1977, when she was four years old, and was found two weeks later in a terrible state with signs of repeated rape and abuse. I've been talking to colleagues in Herning. Alfred From was in charge of the case then. According to him, Kjeld Arne Husum was living in a commune called The Dark Tower. Hence the tattoo on his upper arm. Apparently that was a kind of rite.'

Wagner was reminded of Dicte Svendsen and now he knew that was where the link was. He knew she had grown up in the Herning–Ikast area, in flat central Jutland. In some way or other she must have known about the commune. Perhaps she had even known Husum. What else did she know? He couldn't bear to think about it, but he was forced to when Ivar K spoke.

‘What about Svendsen? She reacted to that tattoo. What did she know? What hasn't she told us?'

Was that an accusation in his voice? Wagner looked him in the eye and sensed the challenge to his authority and judgement. At that moment he roundly cursed Dicte and her secretiveness, and the fact that he had fallen foul of it yet again. He should have been harder with her. He could have squeezed it out of her, but he had felt he owed her because she had served up that damned film on a silver platter to him.

‘We'll have to bring her in,' he admitted. For his own and Ivar K's satisfaction, he added, ‘Even if it's on a charge.'

Then he nodded to Kristian Hvidt. ‘Will you take care of that?'

Hvidt jumped to it with enthusiasm.

Hansen continued going through his notepad and reached out for his mug of coffee. ‘Kjeld Arne was questioned at the time in '77, of course. His whole family, too, it goes without saying. There was a tiny bit of suspicion surrounding him according to our colleagues in Herning, even though there was a much stronger suspicion pointing at one of the commune-dwellers with a conviction for molesting children. But they both had watertight alibis for when the kidnapping took place, a Saturday afternoon between one and one-thirty. The mother had left her daughter in a play area, supervised by a neighbour, who was also questioned, of course.

He kept flicking through his notes, slurped some more coffee and then banged down the mug with an expression of disgust. ‘Two of the others in the commune swore all four of them had been playing cards at that time, so there was no case to pursue.'

‘Have we got their statements?' Wagner asked.

Hansen nodded and read out their names.

‘They must be contacted. Immediately. The alibi has to be false, and they may know something about Kirsten H we can use. Did you get hold of Dicte Svendsen?' Wagner was looking at Hvidt who had just returned.

‘She isn't answering. I left a message on her mobile.'

‘Either she's deliberately not answering or she can't hear it,' Wagner said.

‘Or she's prevented from answering,' suggested Ivar K gloomily.

Perhaps Svendsen was off on another of her own investigations, Wagner thought. She may be further along than they were. Again he wondered how much she knew. What was she up to?

There was a knock at the door. Red hair brightened the room as Haunstrup from Forensics entered. Wagner instinctively knew they had a breakthrough on their hands. He could see it in the way Haunstrup stood—normally with a light stoop, but now he was like a new recruit in front of a disciplinarian sergeant. A smile beamed from his Mick Jagger mouth.

‘I think we've got something. Come up and see for yourselves on the fourth floor.'

‘I've been talking to a Lars Kristiansen in the photolab,' said Kim Thorsen, who had frozen an image of Anders Nikolajsen on the computer screen.

Wagner would have preferred to look away; however, duty obliged him to scrutinise not only the panic in the man's face but also the surroundings, or lack of them. The unfinished wall, the pale light and the sensation of an enclosed room without oxygen.

Thorsen pointed to the area behind the kidnapped man. ‘Do you see the tiny grooves in the wall here?'

He pressed various keys and zoomed in on one section of the wall. Wagner peered, but couldn't understand where the man was heading.

‘At the Technological Institute they reckon the wall curves here. It's difficult to see because the film is a close-up.' Thorsen made a movement with his hand to suggest a gentle curve. ‘The man's sitting in a cement pipe. A large pipe with a diameter of about two metres,' he said with audible excitement in his voice.

‘A cement pipe and dripping water,' Wagner said with the feeling that Kim Thorsen had an ace up his sleeve and it would have to be coaxed out, even though they didn't have the time. ‘Where can it be?'

Thorsen zoomed out again. ‘My mother works as a care assistant.'

Irritation rose like a hot air balloon inside Wagner and threatened to launch him out of the room. Why were they going over that useless piece of information again? He was about to vent his anger when Thorsen went on:

‘I knew there was something about that place.' He turned to Wagner and looked up at him. ‘She's just been on a course. Every third year care assistants have to update their knowledge of first aid and fire drills, so at some point Kirsten Husum must have been on a course.'

‘So?' Wagner had to hold on tight to prevent his impatience from getting the better of him. He forced himself to wait.

‘It's an air-raid shelter,' Thorsen said. ‘I think we're dealing with an air-raid shelter. There are more than three hundred spread across the town, but if Kirsten Husum has been on a course, it must have been in the centre in Skejby, just behind Skejby Hospital. There's an air-raid shelter there.

He studied them over the top of his glasses. ‘My mother told me about it because they went down and she got claustrophobia and had to be helped out. She said it was a twenty-metre-long cement pipe. That also fits with the dripping water. There would be a drainage sump for an air-raid shelter, and you would hear the constant sound of dripping water during the spring and autumn.'

He motioned to the computer screen. ‘I've just been on the phone to the boss there. Our man is sitting on a wooden bench. The shelter is the only one in town which is fully furnished, with benches and so on. All the others are empty cement pipes. They're kept at constant temperatures of eight degrees and occasionally people break in to use them as a potato store, or else the homeless sleep in them.'

‘How do you get in?' Wagner asked. ‘Wouldn't it be bolted? Wouldn't there be people about the whole time?'

Thorsen shook his head. ‘When there are no courses for firemen or whatever, the area is deserted.'

‘Not even a guard?'

Thorsen rolled his shoulders. ‘There's nothing to steal, is there? It's just an exercise area with burnt-out houses and an old bus for the firemen to practise rescuing people from fires.'

‘The air-raid shelter?' Wagner asked, clearing his head to put together a special unit. ‘You think our victim is located in that air-raid shelter? At the Training Centre in Skejby?'

Thorsen shrugged and said with caution, ‘I consider it extremely likely. It's the only air-raid shelter in the town which isn't bolted. You can get into the others, but it's more work. You have to work the bolts loose and that increases the risk of being seen. She may have smuggled the victim in under cover of darkness.'

Wagner straightened up. He placed a hand on the man's shoulder while mentally apologising for his irritation about his colleague's chat about his mother. ‘Well done. Sounds like we should have a look.'

Thorsen tore a sheet of paper off his pad and passed it to him. ‘The centre manager's number. They'll know more about the details. How to get in, emergency exits, etcetera.'

Wagner took the number with a nod and was already on his way back down to the briefing room. His concern about Dicte and her mobile phone was pushed aside in the adrenaline rush of a tangible lead.

‘Okay,' he said on his way through the Crime Scene Investigation Department with Hartvigsen and Haustrup hard on his heels.

‘Let's get ready to roll.'