Don't Wake Me

by Martin Krüger

  ‘That we don’t come to visit anywhere near often enough.’ Jasmin finished her mother’s sentence and cast a quick glance at Jørgen. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Well, boy,’ said Stale to Jørgen after a while. Jasmin noticed Jørgen purse his lips. ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Do we really need to talk about this right now, Dad?’

  ‘I think we should,’ answered Stale obstinately.

  So Jørgen told him the truth. ‘Business isn’t very good at the moment. To be honest, I’m not sure how long I can keep the company afloat.’

  Paul and Bonnie made a sudden dash towards the open gate and Jasmin leapt to her feet. ‘Excuse me. Paul!’ She hurried down the veranda steps and her mother followed her, catching up just as she reached her son. ‘Don’t go onto the road,’ she scolded him, before looking up at Marit. ‘Well? Yet another sermon?’ Jasmin tried to stay calm, but on the inside she felt tense.

  ‘You know you’re free to do whatever you like with your own money. But how often have you helped him out already? And how much of that came from your shares in your father’s company? From us?’

  Jasmin ran her hand through Paul’s hair. ‘All right, off you go,’ she told him, ‘but stay with Bonnie.’ She and Marit watched as Paul picked up a small, unripe apple from the grass beneath one of the trees and threw it for Bonnie to fetch. ‘Some of it came from there, you’re right,’ she answered her mother quietly, ‘but that’s my business.’

  ‘Your father isn’t happy that his youngest daughter is so careless with her money.’

  ‘Just say what you really mean. He still can’t stand Jørgen, that’s what it boils down to.’ Jasmin folded her arms. ‘And I’m tired of having this conversation.’

  ‘Don’t take that tone, Jasmin. It is what it is. You can’t change your nature. Nobody can. Jørgen simply isn’t very successful. One day perhaps you’ll understand our concerns.’

  ‘One day?’ She snorted. ‘That’ll never happen.’ Jasmin turned her back on her mother and ran after Paul and Bonnie. She could hear raised voices from the veranda; it sounded like they were arguing up there. Your concerns, she thought. You have no idea. Money isn’t everything.

  Paul. Bonnie. Jørgen. They were all that mattered. If anyone ever took Paul away from her, she thought as she felt the spring breeze brush over her skin, she’d move heaven and earth to get him back.

  And Jørgen would do exactly the same.

  Chapter 3

  Jasmin didn’t notice the tears trickling over her cheeks as they mingled with the rain that was now pouring down in torrents, washing away any footprints the kidnapper might have left behind. The sky had taken on an indigo colour and looked like an old wound. An omen of the coming autumn storm that reflected the mounting panic and tumult in her mind.

  After she’d found the window shattered and Paul missing from his room, Jasmin had knelt down beside her unconscious Labrador, who was lying on the floor at the foot of Paul’s bed.

  Bonnie was alive, but breathing slowly and unevenly. Jasmin’s trembling hands had found blood on her fur. The kidnapper must have struck her down in order to get her out of the way, as otherwise she would have given her life to defend Paul.

  ‘Bonnie,’ Jasmin had whispered. ‘Come on, don’t do this to me.’

  The dog blinked. Her tail flapped gently against the floor, but other than that she’d refused to move. Jasmin didn’t know what she should do next, couldn’t get her thoughts straight – Bonnie, Paul, the window, the footprints. She’d rushed out into the driving rain and run in circles, staring at the ground. Her panic felt like a veil that had fallen before her eyes, stopping her from seeing the kidnapper’s tracks on the lawn. The garden gate was ajar, and there were clumps of soil on the roof of the veranda and the white wooden posts that held it up. Footprints, which the rain was rapidly washing away.

  Somebody had climbed up there to get to Paul’s window, which opened on to the veranda.

  Eventually, a scream fought its way up her throat; she screamed her fear and desperation into the rain until her voice was hoarse and she could scream no more.

  Now completely soaked, she ran back into the house and scrabbled through her purse to find Detective Inspector Henriksen’s business card. For a moment she was afraid she’d lost it, but then she found it tucked behind her driving licence.

  Jasmin dialled his number with trembling fingers. She felt nauseous, hot and cold at the same time; she wanted to weep, to beat at the walls.

  You should have seen this coming. The words ran through her mind over and over again. The moment you first spotted the drifter, you should have taken Paul and gone back to the mainland. But no, you had to play the detective.

  ‘Henriksen.’ His voice emerged quietly from the speaker and Jasmin could hear noise in the background. It sounded like music and the clink of glasses.

  ‘This is Jasmin Hansen,’ she said. ‘My son has been abducted.’ She blurted the words out so quickly and hurriedly that she wasn’t sure if Henriksen had even understood her.

  ‘Hold on, did I hear that right? Your son has—’

  ‘Disappeared.’ Jasmin finished his sentence for him. ‘He’s been kidnapped.’

  ‘Kidnapped?’ Henriksen repeated. ‘Are you sure? He isn’t just outside playing with the dog?’

  ‘No, Bonnie was knocked out cold. Someone broke in through the window of Paul’s room – there’s glass everywhere.’

  ‘I see. Ms Hansen, are you sure you’re alone in the house?’

  Jasmin glanced down the hallway at the cellar door. The boards were still nailed firmly to the doorframe. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘We’re on our way. Stay at home if you think you’re safe there, but if not then please leave immediately the moment you realise you aren’t alone. OK?’

  Jasmin felt her phone almost slip out of her trembling hand. ‘OK. Please hurry.’

  ‘Give us fifteen minutes. We’ll be right there.’

  ‘Wait! Do you know a vet?’

  ‘A vet? For your dog? Of course. I’ll ask around.’

  After hanging up, Jasmin remained standing in the middle of the living room. She was unable to take so much as a step; fear had paralysed her whole body, from her head to her feet. Paul is gone. He’s gone. The thought took hold of her, circling endlessly through her mind. Only after a few minutes had passed did she manage to head back upstairs to check on Bonnie. The dog was standing upright and shuffled towards her, unsteady on her feet but obviously not seriously injured.

  Jasmin carried her carefully downstairs, laid her on the sofa and waited for the police to arrive.

  Henriksen was true to his word. They arrived fourteen minutes later: the detective inspector himself, Arne Boeckermann – whom she’d only seen from a distance before now – and three other colleagues Henriksen must have brought with him from the mainland. These were a woman with short red hair, who fixed Jasmin with a curiously scrutinising look, and two men who pulled on white overalls and started searching the house and the surrounding area.

  Meanwhile, Henriksen’s first move was to head into the kitchen. To Jasmin’s surprise, he set about making her a cup of tea. ‘Ms Hansen,’ he explained as he handed her a mug, ‘this is Margret Gundersen, the village doctor.’

  ‘What about the vet?’

  ‘Margret can help with that too – she’s trained in human and veterinary medicine.’

  Only now did Jasmin realise why the red-haired woman had been looking over at her so oddly – she’d been observing Bonnie, not Jasmin.

  ‘Now, why don’t you take a deep breath and tell me what happened while Dr Gundersen looks at your dog?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She followed Henriksen onto the veranda and told him everything as the inspector closed the French windows behind them, walked up to the wooden railing and looked out over the garden.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ he said quietly and confidently. ‘We’re on an island. There aren’t many places to hide, and our colleagues from
the marine police and the coastguard are checking every boat that leaves.’

  ‘But what if he’s hidden an inflatable dinghy in an out-of-the-way cove?’ Jasmin asked. Her heart thumped against her ribs as if it were about to leap out of her chest.

  ‘He wouldn’t make it to the mainland on something like that. Besides which, my colleagues will be patrolling the area. We’re taking this incident very seriously indeed.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean we’ll find Paul though.’ Jasmin lowered her head as her grief overwhelmed her. Tears flowed down her cheeks and she couldn’t even lift her hand to wipe them away.

  Henriksen gently touched her shoulder; his hand was warm and reassuring. One of the forensic technicians approached, leaned over to Henriksen and whispered something in his ear that she couldn’t hear. Jasmin could see one of the police officers shining a torch around the garden. The beam cast a silvery gleam on the drifting wafts of fog, making them glitter like billows of dry ice.

  ‘My colleagues have found fingerprints and hair samples, which we’ll send straight to the lab.’

  ‘We have to do something,’ Jasmin heard herself say quietly. ‘We have to look for him.’

  ‘And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.’ From the way he emphasised the word, she realised he wasn’t including her. ‘You should wait here.’

  ‘I can’t.’ She finally wiped the tears from her cheeks. ‘No, I want to come with you. I want to help, not just sit here and wait. That’s more than I could bear.’

  Henriksen studied her carefully. ‘Will you be able to handle it?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely.’

  He nodded. ‘Then you can come with me. But call your husband first. He needs to know what’s happened.’

  Jasmin pointed at the origami sculptures on the coffee table. Through the blur of her tears, the folded paper looked like it was melting onto the woodgrain, as if it was made of water.

  ‘Those sculptures,’ she said. ‘Paul didn’t make them. He does a lot of origami, but those were left by the kidnapper.’

  Somewhat awkwardly, Henriksen pulled a thin latex glove over his right hand and picked up the sculptures. ‘A deer and a triangle,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Why a deer?’

  Because you killed a deer that night. Only that isn’t what happened.

  Tell him. Come clean.

  ‘He was here again last night – the drifter everyone’s been talking about. I saw him down in the garden. Then I fell asleep on the sofa. I had a nightmare, and when I woke up, Paul was gone.’ Jasmin looked up at Henriksen. The lump in her throat had subsided but she still felt so helpless. It was a feeling she wanted to shake off as quickly as possible. You have to take action. You can’t let them hurt Paul.

  ‘Something on this island doesn’t add up.’ Jasmin looked out into the pouring rain. Silhouettes moved back and forth through the grey: faceless figures in coats who resembled the drifter. ‘They’re hiding something.’

  ‘Who? What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. A terrible event – a fire everyone knows about, but nobody ever discusses. There’s a historian I wanted to visit . . .’ She broke off as she realised how trivial her little investigation had suddenly become.

  Paul had disappeared and she had to find him and bring him back. Nothing else mattered now.

  But what if those two things are related? What if it’s all connected? Yrsen. Paul. The fire. The historian, the drifter, my accident, the body on the beach.

  ‘Ms Hansen?’

  ‘We should dig deeper,’ she said. ‘I don’t know exactly who is trying to hide the truth, but they might be behind the kidnapping.’

  ‘Do you have any evidence for that assumption?’ asked Henriksen with interest. ‘Have you seen anybody? Has anyone threatened you or your son?’

  ‘The drifter, but . . .’ She thought of the gesture the stranger had made to her, how he had pointed towards the west. ‘He never actually came near us.’

  ‘But you don’t know for certain.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll find evidence, assuming the rain hasn’t washed everything away.’ Henriksen didn’t sound particularly confident. ‘Every criminal leaves evidence behind. We always find something.’

  ‘But that won’t help Paul. Even if we find out who the kidnapper is, he could be hiding anywhere. How big is this island?’

  ‘Around twenty-five square miles. We’ll leave no stone unturned.’

  ‘We? You mean, you, Boeckermann and the handful of colleagues you’ve brought here? Is that all?’ Jasmin snorted. ‘It won’t be enough.’

  ‘I’ll do my best to get reinforcements, but it’ll be tricky.’

  ‘Tricky?’ asked Jasmin sharply. ‘My son is missing.’

  ‘There are several other cases on the mainland that are taking up our resources. Paul has only been gone for a few hours.’

  ‘So? Do you really think he’s just gone for a walk and will be back any minute? That he broke the window for fun?’

  ‘Of course not. Please try to stay calm, Ms Hansen.’

  ‘I will not!’ It felt good to get angry, much better than sitting around ineffectually. ‘And if you aren’t going to take the initiative—’

  ‘Ms Hansen—’ Henriksen raised his hand as if to hold her back, but Jasmin shoved it forcefully aside. She left Henriksen on the veranda and stormed into the house, almost stumbling over the vet, who was giving Bonnie an injection. The Labrador’s tail thumped against the sofa and she lifted her head when she saw Jasmin. She had a white bandage over her ears.

  ‘How is she?’ Jasmin asked softly. ‘Will she pull through, or . . . ?’ Jasmin didn’t want to say the word out loud; she felt as though that would give it power somehow – too much power.

  ‘She’ll be back on her feet soon enough. Maybe in the next few minutes, even. I’ve given her something to stabilise her. The bandage needs to stay on for at least three days, and you should bring her to see me again after that. My surgery is on the way into the village, you can’t miss it.’

  Jasmin nodded thoughtfully as she stroked Bonnie, running her fingers through her thick, chocolate-brown fur. She’d seen the veterinary practice from her car yesterday; it had a distinctive sign featuring a floppy-eared dog.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘If Bonnie were to die . . .’

  ‘Stay strong,’ Gundersen replied, squeezing Jasmin’s shoulder. ‘You’ll see your son again.’

  With that, the vet nodded to her and left the room. Jasmin remained sitting by Bonnie’s side, stroking her. She didn’t look up when Henriksen came back in; instead, she watched his sturdy boots move over the floorboards and disappear towards the hallway.

  A few minutes later, she heard a rattle at the cellar door.

  Jasmin leapt to her feet.

  Henriksen had already removed the topmost board.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m wondering who might have put up these boards,’ he replied, as if he’d been expecting her reaction. ‘It looks to me like it was done in a hurry. An emergency measure.’

  ‘I didn’t want any rats or anything to come up from downstairs. One of the windows down there doesn’t close properly. Bonnie would have got skittish if she’d smelled any animals creeping into the cellar or crawling up here through some little gap.’

  ‘So you found something down there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Jasmin evasively. ‘I’ve only been in the cellar once since we got back.’

  Henriksen looked at her with a strange expression. ‘Would you mind me taking a look for myself?’

  Jasmin shrugged. ‘Feel free. There’s nothing worth seeing down there. The boiler, the gas heating. And our old hunting gun.’

  ‘Were you planning to use it?’

  Only in my dream. ‘Maybe,’ she answered truthfully. ‘I don’t like guns. But out here, on my own with just a dog and a child, I found it reassuring. After the drifter reappeared, I wanted to go and fetch it, but
then I noticed Paul was gone and . . .’ Her voice broke; she couldn’t say anything more. Henriksen fetched a heavy screwdriver and prised the wooden boards out of the wall one by one until the door could be opened once again. The stairwell was dark; the odour of mould and decay that wafted up towards them was stronger now than before.

  A spider skittered away into the darkness as Henriksen pointed his torch at the wooden steps. The sound of falling rain seemed to be emanating from the very walls. There’s something inside them, Jasmin thought, although she knew how insane it was. Something is living in these walls, and at night, when everything falls quiet and the only thing you can hear is your own heart beating, it makes rustling, scuttling noises.

  Something is living here.

  Something very old.

  And it isn’t happy that you’ve disturbed it.

  Henriksen descended the first few steps before turning back to look up at her, as if he’d realised she wasn’t following him. ‘Are you coming with me, Ms Hansen?’ His voice sounded dull, as if the darkness was absorbing it and on the verge of swallowing it altogether.

  ‘I’d prefer to wait up here,’ she replied.

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  Afraid. The way he pronounced the word irritated her. Afraid? You aren’t afraid. Whatever’s going on here, there must be a rational explanation for it. This new voice reminded her of Jørgen. She realised she hadn’t called him yet to tell him about Paul’s disappearance.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, trying to sound as tough and nonchalant as she could. ‘Lead the way.’

  Together, they descended the staircase until Jasmin and the inspector found themselves looking at the boiler. The gas burner ignited with a quiet rumble before they could take a step towards it. Jasmin noticed Henriksen give a start.

  ‘It’s only the heating,’ she said quietly. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  Henriksen took a long look at the red rowboat before turning to the gun cabinet. The door squeaked softly. He reached for the shotgun and took it out. ‘You do know cabinets like this one should always be kept locked?’