The patient shrugged grumpily. Dr. Dyring didn’t take notice of her brusqueness.
“But I’ve heard something about a lack of feeling in your hands and feet, and chest pain. Is that right?” he asked.
“I’m not used to lying down like this for so long,” Vibeke replied. “That’s probably why I’m feeling so awful.”
“If you weren’t feeling awful, you wouldn’t be lying here in the first place,” Dr. Dyring said with a warm smile. “And you need to rest quietly until we know how big the dissection is and whether there’s a risk that your aorta will rupture. We can’t have that, can we?”
“If I could just have my own room,” Vibeke said, eyeing the patient in the other bed pointedly. “I noticed that there’s a room available farther down the hall. I mean, why do we pay taxes our whole life if we can’t receive proper treatment when we get sick?”
Trine rolled her eyes. It wasn’t true that there were empty beds; quite the opposite. There weren’t enough beds in the ward, just like they were short on staff, amenities, and enough employees to cover when someone called in sick or went on vacation.
“Well, we’ll have you on your feet and home again soon,” the doctor continued unaffected. “Now, for starters, I’m going to ask Trine here to temporarily pause your blood thinner until we know whether you’re going to have an operation.” He turned to Trine. “We’ll have her back on the seventy-five milligrams of aspirin again right away if she gets a stent. Let’s start with twenty milligrams of morphine as needed for pain. Remember to record the precise quantities, so we can transition to fixed doses as soon as possible.”
Dr. Dyring patted Trine’s upper arm and left the room. Trine set to work routinely checking the patient’s case notes and IV bags, so there was no risk of an overdose. Not that it wasn’t tempting to turn up this specific patient’s metoprolol so she could really experience what it meant to feel awful.
Trine noted the doses on the medication chart and examined the IV with practiced motions. She hung the drip bag and checked the patient’s telemetry, pulse, and blood pressure. Efficient, professional, essential.
“Can I ask for something to drink, or do I have to get that myself, too?”
Trine stopped to look at the patient, who met her eyes with a defiant stare. She felt it again. Something falling apart inside her, triggering a feeling of insignificance, like some pissant who gets squashed under a rain boot.
* * *
THERE WAS A linden tree on either side of the stone staircase leading up to the front door of Elijah’s Church. Under their branches one could take shelter and sit and watch the people on Vesterbro Square, above the traffic and hidden from the world.
Marie Birch often sat here. She liked to watch the fearless bikers zipping across red lights, and schoolkids on field trips wearing yellow traffic safety vests and holding one another’s hands. On these steps she could sit in peace and decide how much she wanted to engage with the world.
Today, not so much.
She found a cracker in her pocket and wrapped the jacket more tightly around her. It was a little big on her and too thin for the season, the fabric worn on the elbows. But she wasn’t particular. In elementary school she had worn flip-flops so late into the year, well into winter, that the bigger kids had started calling her Flip-Flop. Her mother had tried to get her to wear boots, but Marie refused. In the end she got sent home with a note. Still, she pretty much never felt cold. Not even when she slept in King’s Garden on chilly summer nights, or when she went dumpster diving behind the big Salvation Army store on Vesterbrogade, and certainly not now on these stairs under the linden trees.
The cracker tasted dry and of some nondescript vegetable, but she didn’t care about the taste as long as what she ate was relatively healthy. When she was little she had loved fatty foods and sweets. Her mother had to hide their cookies in a cupboard behind the cleaning supplies so Marie wouldn’t eat them all up. Mom had pinched those chubby cheeks and mocked her appetite every time she slathered Nutella on yet another piece of toast.
They had been a normal family. Aside from not having a father, but Mom had always gone to great lengths to normalize that fact.
Sperm donor.
Marie had told the other kids in the preschool that her dad was some sort of robot that had an important job in a distant galaxy and that’s why he couldn’t be home. He had never really been missed, not until later when she realized that his absence had played a part after all. She and Mother had gone on vacations, spent Easter with Grandma and Grandpa; she had been a Cub Scout. Marie remembered those times with a warm fuzzy feeling in her chest.
When had it changed?
Marie thought of the Christmas when Mother had forgotten to buy groceries and they ate leftovers on Christmas Eve. Mother had alternated between trying to save the mood with jokes and laughter and scolding Marie for sitting around pouting. She couldn’t change it now, could she? Marie felt the lump in her throat that made it hard to swallow. She still got it now, even after all this time.
She spit out a mouthful of dry cracker over the railing and wiped her mouth on her jacket sleeve. One day they had returned home, from grocery shopping maybe or from school, and Mother had lain down on the floor just inside the front door without taking off her coat. Marie still remembered the sensation of her hoodie’s fabric against her neck, where sweat gathered as she watched her mom lying there. Had she been fired from yet another job, or was it something with a boyfriend? Marie didn’t know.
After that Christmas Marie had begun tearing the toilet paper meticulously along the perforated line, so the paper didn’t rip, and something bad happened to Mother. It’s sick, Mother had said. Stop it! But what was she supposed to do with the thoughts in her head and the tension in her body? When Mother lay under a blanket in the living room, paralyzed with grief, colorlessness spreading around her? When Mother couldn’t comfort her?
Marie was nine when Mother had her first psychological examination. The same year her mother was committed to the psychiatric emergency department for the first time and Marie started sleeping at her grandmother’s more often. Everyday life had slowly fallen apart, day by day. Her playmates stopped wanting to come over; they thought her mother was weird. With time she stopped spending time at home herself and found older friends to hang out with on the streets instead, staying out late most nights. When she did come home, she would spread the comforter over her mother on the sofa before she went to bed. Until the night her mother wasn’t lying on the sofa anymore.
At the age of eleven she packed all her things into one moving box and one suitcase, while the social services lady watched. Her guinea pig couldn’t come. There was no room for him at the residential institution.
An ambulance raced past on Vesterbrogade, and the wailing sirens vibrated in Marie’s diaphragm long after the sound was gone.
She had told her story so many times—to caseworkers and other grown-ups with wide eyes and damp palms—that she no longer knew how much of it was true. Not that she was lying, there was just so much she could no longer remember. The details were lost in the common repression that everybody seemed to agree was preferable. The fact of it was that she had become a nomad. She had met many adults who had tried to help from nine to five, but had never let them in.
Darkness was already settling over the square. When you live on the streets, you learn to value summer’s soft light and hate fall’s long, chilly nights. Tonight, though, she had a place to sleep, a bed and a roof. That wasn’t worrying her.
The woman in the fountain was.
* * *
WHEN FIVE O’CLOCK came around, Jeppe hit the wall. He had made it through the day in relatively good shape, but by late afternoon it became almost impossible not to fall asleep. The other way around, dear body, he thought, sleep at night instead. He wished for something stronger than coffee, but he was done with that kind of thing. Instead, he went to the bathroom and held his head under the cold tap water, letting it run over
his hair, until his ears went numb. He dried himself on the rough paper towels without looking at himself in the mirror and went down the hall to the meeting room. Falck was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and his notepad, looking like someone who wasn’t working.
Jeppe printed out a picture of Bettina Holte and stuck it on the whiteboard with a magnet. A metallic crunching sound filled the room, and the board fell down on Jeppe’s foot. He tried to pick it up and reattach it to the stand but realized that a nut was missing. As if the building wasn’t falling apart enough on its own. Since the majority of staffers in the Homicide Unit had moved into the department’s new building on Teglholmen, the old police headquarters had seriously started to crumble around those detectives who remained. The plaster fell off in chunks, and the linoleum floors bulged under damp patches blooming like daffodils in the spring. To work here was starting to feel like keeping the Titanic afloat with balloons and a stick of chewing gum. Besides, Anette was always the one who dealt with this kind of thing.
Falck sat comfortably with his coffee and watched Jeppe struggle with the whiteboard without making a move to get up. No two partners are the same, truly.
When the whiteboard was more or less balanced, Jeppe grabbed a marker and wrote the most important facts about the victim and the death next to the picture.
“The forensic techs didn’t find anything in the home. No blood, nothing that looked like a murder weapon. If the husband killed her, he did it somewhere else.” Jeppe pointed to Falck, who mumbled his assent vaguely. “He could easily have hog-tied his wife, put her in the trunk of his car, and driven her to another location. Maybe he has a garage or a slip at some yacht club?”
“Yeah, I suppose that is a possibility.” Falck took a sip of his coffee and discreetly wiped his mustache on his sleeve.
“Maybe that’s something you could look into?” Jeppe suggested.
He wrote GARAGE? on the whiteboard.
“We have a spouse without an alibi,” Jeppe stated. “According to Larsen the neighbors claim the couple fought a lot and that it has escalated over the last couple of years.”
“Who doesn’t fight after twenty-seven years of marriage?” Falck asked, scribbling in his notepad without looking up. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
Jeppe turned back to the board again and studied the picture of Bettina Holte. Competent and professional, her husband had called her.
“She worked in the maternity ward at Herlev Hospital. Can you make enemies working there?”
Falck cleared his throat and then said, “Did you know that when the sand tiger shark is pregnant, the embryos eat each other inside the womb until there are only two left?” He kept scribbling meticulously, as if he were writing his memoirs and had the rest of his life to complete them.
Jeppe left the meeting room without succumbing to his urge to slam the door.
In his own uncharacteristically clean office, the double desk was blessedly free of Anette’s potato chip bags and old coffee cups. For once a quiet place to work and get a grip on things. Jeppe plopped down on his chair and called Clausen at NKC.
“Kørner!” Clausen exclaimed. “I was just about to call you.”
“Have you identified the make of the cargo bike?”
“Not yet, but I might have an idea about our murder weapon.”
“Let’s hear it!” Jeppe sat up straighter.
“It’s not that I would go blabbing about our cases to my family…,” Clausen began tentatively, as if he was looking over his shoulder before explaining.
“Of course not.”
“Right. Well, anyway, today I happened to meet my eldest daughter for breakfast—she’s an orthopedic surgeon, as you may recall—and I may have run the peculiar cuts on the victim’s wrists by her, hypothetically speaking, of course.”
“Of course.” Jeppe leaned back in his chair.
“My daughter thought there was something familiar about the pattern, although she couldn’t quite place it, and suggested that we call her friend Monica Kirkskov who works at Medical Museion. She’s an expert in antique medical equipment.”
“Okay…?”
“I’ll send you her number, okay? We’ll talk later.”
Clausen hung up, and Jeppe sat there holding his phone, looking at its dark display. Back when he was still married to Therese, he, too, had sat at the dining table and bounced investigations off her even though it wasn’t allowed. Now she bounced life’s challenges off her new husband instead, and a young couple had moved into their former house and painted the facade yellow. Jeppe’s belongings were packed up in boxes waiting for him to move into a new apartment in Nyhavn in two weeks. Life moved on. Until it came to an end.
Jeppe’s thoughts were interrupted by the phone lighting up with the promised contact information from Clausen.
Monica Kirkskov.
No time to dwell on the past. Life moved on. Jeppe gave her a call.
* * *
THE MICROWAVE SIGNALED with an insisting beep that dinner was ready. Chicken tikka masala for one, delivered to the door by an online grocery delivery, heated up, and ready to be served on psychiatrist Peter Demant’s rustic handmade Bornholm ceramics. The meal was perhaps on the fatty side, but today of all days, he needed the kind of comfort food that can be eaten from a bowl while lounging on the sofa.
He poured himself a big glass of milk and carried his food to the coffee table and its view over Holmen’s black water. A high-end sound system played Chopin, and his professional books in the built-in shelves sent the sound back with a soothing ring of experience and wisdom. His bare toes sank down into the carpet’s deep pile, and the combination of the ice-cold milk and the seasoned chicken took care of the rest. Bite by bite he slowly relaxed and felt the calm suffusing his body.
Peter was exhausted. For the last three weeks, in addition to the many hours he devoted to his own practice and consulting positions, he had poured his energy into a lecture that he had been invited to give in Amsterdam the following week. The world’s leading psychiatric convention and he had been invited as keynote speaker. It was a one-time opportunity to further his own theories on new drug treatment options to address self-harming behaviors. He needed valid, documented research outcomes, and that kind of research cost money. The convention was a chance to be seen and heard by just the right people, an entry ticket into the big league of global research. On top of that his paper had been accepted for publication by the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry, yet another feather in his cap. But then he had worked damn hard on that presentation.
The truth was that he had worked damn hard his whole life.
To some people things came easily, good things falling into their laps, and new opportunities unfolding before them daily. For Peter it wasn’t so. At school he hadn’t been the brightest, the tallest, or the best-looking, nor had he excelled at sports or the performing arts. The girls had quickly grown taller than him and had never bothered to look down. Yet Peter had one quality that had successfully gotten him through school. He was a hard worker, impossible to knock out of the game. Adversity was like a fuel that made him try even harder. And now his hard work was starting to pay off.
He scraped his bowl with a teeth-grinding sound, and he regretted not having bought chocolate. Today he needed the consolation only sweets could provide. From his earliest childhood, Peter had divided the days into three categories depending on his mood, and he still hadn’t given up the habit, not even after eight years of studying medicine, his internship, his psychiatry residency, and earning a PhD.
Today had definitely been a three: full of gray skies and bad thoughts, which refused to obey when he ordered them to leave.
The online newspapers described in detail how she had been found naked and mutilated—that was the word they all used: mutilated—in the fountain at Old Market Square. There weren’t any pictures of her yet, but Peter didn’t need them to remember her broad cheeks, the loose skin on her underarms, he
r greedy, wet mouth. The thought turned his stomach. He didn’t have the slightest desire to recall those images.
He carried his dishes into the kitchen, where stainless-steel appliances and black glass windowpanes reflected his prematurely receding hairline and sweaty forehead. He had eaten early and could still fit in a couple of hours of work. Maybe a bath first?
In the walk-in closet his suitcase already lay open, waiting for him to finish packing for Amsterdam. He took off his clothes and tossed them into the laundry hampers—one for darks, one for lights—before stepping onto the heated stone tiles in the bathroom. The warm water ran down his body, soap forming a lather. Peter raised his face to the soft beads of water and forced himself to relax.
CHAPTER 4
There’s something about Copenhagen in the fall, an absence of light, a lack of air. Sometimes the city simply seems to ignore the changes in the weather, as if it is too painful to accept that summer is over. In between spells of low-pressure troughs and despondency, a nice day will sometimes turn up with clear skies and jewel-toned autumn leaves. But not today.
Jeppe looked out over the Citadel’s dark trees and pulled his collar closed at the neck so the rain wouldn’t get in. Door-to-door canvassing around Old Market Square had produced zero results and a defective camera on Teglgårdstræde ruined their chances of tracing where the killer had come from and disappeared to. On the plus side, the crime scene investigators were positive that his cargo bike had to be newer, possibly of the brand Winther, Bullitt, or Acrobat. It was hard to determine from the blurry, rainy recordings, but so far those were the three brands his colleagues were looking into the sales from the last three years running. The bike could easily be older than that, so Jeppe was not optimistic. On the other hand, it placed the likely scene of the crime within a radius of a few kilometers from where the body was found. No one rides a cargo bike very far, especially not when hauling a dead body.
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