The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  Only rarely have we as a family ever been awake and gathered together in the middle of the night. But whenever we have, we’ve always made tea and toast. Last time was when Laban’s mother died.

  We exchange glances. We’ve known each other ever since the children were born. But at this moment we are, at the same time, strangers to one another.

  Laban and the twins sleep, while I make a final round of the living room. The shadow made by the blinds on the walls has wandered. On the table are the two devices and my phone. I’ve got a voicemail.

  It’s from Magrethe Spliid. She doesn’t bother saying her name, and the number’s anonymous. It’s just her deep voice, and no pleasantries:

  ‘Susan Svendsen, I’ve got something for you. Adolphsens Allé, the last house on the left-hand side, facing the sea.’

  The message is from just after midnight. An hour ago. I find the car keys and put on a sweater and jacket.

  We’ve never owned a weapon. But from the toolbox in the utility room I take a small, flat crowbar. It’s only forty centimetres in length, yet it weighs approximately one kilo and rests snugly in the hand. For good measure I pick out a chisel, too, with a blade as sharp as a barber’s knife.

  Some objects are symbolic of the profession, and one selects them accordingly. Bohr had his blackboard and chalk. His droplet of liquid. Andrea Fink has her cardiogram, the physical registration of the heart. Laban has his piano.

  To me, the crowbar is the king of all tools.

  I drop it into my bag.

  15

  ADOLPHSENS ALLÉ LEADS off Strandvejen at Øregårdsparken. Property prices here are among the highest in the country: the villas are as big as blocks of flats, with gardens tiny as flowerpots, and the vast majority have been bought up by advertising bureaus, Internet firms and foreign embassies.

  I park on the next road down and walk along the front, hugging the garden walls.

  The last house on Adolphsens Allé is the smallest of them all, only three storeys. It’s also the only one you could imagine might be a normal house, for human habitation.

  All the windows are dark. I linger for a moment by the tall wooden fence of the property next door, trying to merge into the environment.

  In the open carport I can see her Mercedes. Waves lap gently at the shore. There’s no wind, but the proximity of the Øresund makes the air cold as frozen breath.

  And then my eyes pick out Magrethe Spliid. She is sitting on the second-floor veranda, looking out across the sound. The door behind her is open, the room dark.

  The garden towards the shore ends not in a wall but in a rather symbolic, knee-high fence. I step over it onto the property, at the rear of the house.

  The snow’s reflection of the moon enhances the lux level by about forty per cent. I sense colours. One of the grand rhododendrons beneath the veranda has a crimson flower on it. At the end of December.

  I reach out and find it not to be a flower at all but Magrethe Spliid’s inhaler. I put it back on top of the bush.

  The back door is locked, the lock reinforced by means of a steel plate. It’s by no means a hindrance to my little crowbar, but a door being jemmied in the middle of the night makes a racket. Instead, I remove the snap-in bead from a window, take out the glazing unit and put it down on the grass, squeeze through the opening, wriggle across a counter, and find my feet again in the kitchen.

  The place is so tidy you’d think she was going all-out for an elite smiley from the food-safety authorities. And maybe not just from them, but from the women’s guild, too, for the little corridor through which I pass is spotless and smells of the natural soap-suds used to saturate the light, lye-treated floorboards. Not a superfluous item is visible, nothing to distract the eye, not so much as a discarded magazine, a pair of earmuffs or even a car key.

  On the first floor is a hallway with rooms on both sides. All is quiet. The house has been renovated from top to toe, presumably only the outer shell of the original building remains. Not a stair creaks. Perhaps Defence Command pays a princely salary, or perhaps Magrethe Spliid won the lottery or inherited a large sum of money.

  I continue up to the second floor, where the staircase opens out onto a broad landing and a single door has been left open.

  The whole floor has been knocked into one, an oblong space at least 100 square metres in area, ceiling raised to expose the beams, skylighting installed to let in a maximum of daylight.

  The room is bare apart from her desk, some bookcases next to it, a pair of comfy armchairs and a sofa, all gathered together in the far corner, where the door opens onto the veranda. The light wooden flooring is as extensive and uninterrupted as that of a ballroom, with the exception of a small, dark, rather unmotivated mat in the corner that looks like it’s made of plastic. That and a discus, which for all her neatness she has left on the floor next to the mat.

  It could have been a very pleasing room. In a very pleasing house. One of the few houses I could actually see myself living in.

  Danish society comprises a massive mainstream. If you follow it, the current will carry you gently along. The only thing required of you is to complete your education by the time you’re thirty, get yourself a husband and some kids and a desirable detached before you’re forty, moderate your alcohol consumption, survive the mid-life crises, make sure you’re on your marks and set for when the kids leave home, then curve into the final straight and the dash for the line in that singular Danish discipline called Whoever’s got most when they die wins.

  And I know what I’m talking about. All my life I’ve toiled to keep myself afloat in the midst of that current, and I intend to keep at it.

  Magrethe Spliid has done things differently. As yet I don’t know exactly how, but one of her sacrifices has most certainly been a husband and children.

  Getting out of the stream isn’t free. Normally it’s something only the privileged and losers can do. I’m not sure yet which of these categories she belongs to. But while only a small minority of those on their own have the means to set up a proper home for themselves, this is something she has managed rather successfully. There is a rich atmosphere of life about the place, and a pervasive aura of quality and refinement.

  But at this moment, such atmosphere has been overlaid by something else, a smell I’m unable to identify, that reminds me of something for which I don’t much care.

  I walk through the room and step out onto the veranda.

  She’s sitting in a high-backed deckchair, her head tipped backwards and resting against its edge, her long, muscular arms hanging limply over the sides. Her eyes are open, the tip of her tongue protruding from between her lips, as though she were blowing a raspberry at the moon.

  I take off a glove and place the back of my finger against her neck. Her muscles are as stiff as wood, she is already extremely cold, and my guess is that death must have occurred only a very short time after her leaving the message on my phone. Since then she’s been sitting here in minus five degrees.

  A slight waft of excrement tickles my nostrils. In death, her sphincter has relaxed and her colon has released some measure of its contents.

  I put my glove back on. The police superior with whom Andrea Fink and I worked in the early years of our collaboration once told me the police can recover fingerprints from any surface whatsoever, even human skin.

  I go back inside and sit down on her swivel chair, out of the cold and yet able to see her and also to scan the room. Her desktop has been tidied. The only thing on it is another discus.

  Fear is the strangest of phenomena. It doesn’t just occur in the body and in the mind. It can pervade the physical environment too – rooms and walls, for instance – and can remain for long periods of time. Perhaps this room, this house, will be suffused with the terror of what has taken place here for months or even years to come. My entire system is crying out for me to run and return to freedom.

  The twins are the reason I stay. I’m forty-three years old, my best years are behind
me. Or at least the chance of having some. But the twins are still just overgrown children. I’ve made it my intention to do what I can so they can have a future.

  After a few minutes I get to my feet, step back out onto the veranda and pull the sleeves of Magrethe Spliid’s cardigan back from her wrists, first one then the other. There are haematomas on both, and not from her cashmere being too tight. These are swollen black cuffs of bruising.

  I go back in and sit down on the chair again for a few minutes. Then I get up and go over to the black mat in the corner.

  It’s not a mat. It’s blood.

  You can’t be a mother of two kids like Thit and Harald without having seen blood in abundance and learning at least the basics of first aid, minor surgery and nursing.

  And on that account you’ll know approximately how much blood to expect from even the smallest graze. But here in the corner of Magrethe Spliid’s room we’re dealing with something else altogether. This is a pool of blood, whose sickly sweet, butcher’s shop smell pervades the room. The reason it looks like plastic is that there’s too much for it to have coagulated or seeped through the floorboards.

  Here, up close, I can see the wall has been spattered too.

  A moment’s nausea ensues, I am unashamed to say. There must be some reason I never became a butcher or a surgeon.

  I pick up the discus from the floor. It’s got little bits of what looks like bathroom sponge stuck to it with glue. I take it over to the door and study it in the moonlight and see that it’s not glue but blood, not bathroom sponge but cerebral matter. In the midst of this coagulated mass are tiny tufts of human hair, attached to flakes of what must be someone’s scalp.

  My time in this house is up. I return the discus to the floor and go out the way I came in, inserting the glazing unit and snapping the bead back into place, hoping the police aren’t able to trace fingerprints through alpaca gloves and that my car hasn’t been seen.

  I walk back along the front and get in behind the wheel.

  I sit there for a while.

  Something’s missing.

  I listen to her message again. Her voice is calm.

  ‘Susan Svendsen, I’ve got something for you.’

  And then, suddenly, there are two things I know.

  I know why they brought us back to Denmark. It was the only way they could get to Magrethe Spliid. I sense her fearlessness, the way I sensed it at the Defence College. Her integrity. There were no weaknesses. No family they could threaten to take it out on. No job they could take away from her. Not much life left to cut short.

  She knew something someone else wanted to know too. And whoever it was knew they were never going to get it. So they used us.

  That’s the first thing I know.

  The second is that she’s left it all to me.

  I go back to the house.

  It’s an immense physical effort. I’ve got nothing left in me for the finer points of burglary. I go straight to the front door and find it unlocked. As I step inside, my feet stick to something on the floor of the hall. I bend down and let my hands investigate. Wild horses couldn’t get me to switch on the light: only in the darkness do I feel any semblance of protection. My fingers find a thin rubber mesh of the kind used to stop rugs from slipping underfoot.

  I go upstairs to the second floor again, my teeth chattering like they haven’t done since I braved the waters of the Jammerbugten with the children in early May – according to them the start of summer, for which reason the sea, in their view, couldn’t possibly be cold and they were impervious to any suggestion that we return to dry land.

  This time I don’t sit down but remain standing.

  I’m not practised in the art of body searches, nor is it the kind of experience I’m interested in adding to my CV. But I embark on one anyway.

  Beneath the warmth and softness of Magrethe Spliid’s cashmere cardigan, the frost has begun to turn her rectangular frame from wood to stone. I pass my hand gently over her body. It’s as though I’ve grown fond of her, especially this past half-hour. Does that make sense? Can one’s feelings for a person grow after they’re dead?

  She was alone most of her life. I sense it strongly now. What then of the desire for affection, that is so much a part of our being human? Skin hunger. I pass my hand over her, as though in a long-deserved caress.

  I find nothing. My impulse was wrong. Or else it’ll take too long to verify. Even such a simple room as this contains any number of hiding places, for instance among the books on the shelves.

  I cast a final glance at the desk. In physics there’s a guiding principle that says that when you’ve got to choose between different theories, all of which are exhaustive and consistent, you should go with the simplest one. It’s not just a rule of natural science, it’s common sense too. If she left something behind for me to find, she’ll have chosen the most obvious option available.

  On the desk is a dark, rectangular item measuring about two by six centimetres. I pick it up. It’s a small, solid ingot of lead. I pick up her discus from the desk and unscrew the cover.

  Identical ingots line the recess, all pressed into place in their individual rubber-lined slots.

  But one of them has been removed and left on the table. In its place is a piece of tightly folded paper.

  16

  FOR ME, THE only truly effective cure for the jitters is preparing food. It’s always been that way.

  So when I get home, instead of going to bed, I bake croissants. But only after a light breakfast of two 500-millilitre caffeine tablets, a café au lait with four shots of espresso, and a half-litre Coke with ice.

  Croissants are an unnatural phenomenon. Theoretically, combining raw puff pastry with bread dough can’t be done, they belong to different dimensions. Every time the pastry is folded, the number of separate layers of laminated dough is doubled, the thickness of each layer being reduced exponentially with the number of folds and rollings-out. Eventually, after an hour and a half, and four periods of refrigeration, we’re talking about a layer thickness of a tenth of a millimetre. Physically, it’s impossible at that level to keep the two things apart.

  Empirically, however, it works, and this morning the croissants are a success.

  It’s only half past four. But the aroma has woken Laban and the twins. They appear in the living room, drowsy with sleep and sniffing the air like animals.

  I squeeze them each a tall glass of orange juice and place croissants in front of them. They eat and drink in silence. Not because it’s a rule or manners, but because croissants, when they’re done well, are a manifestation of great physics, and as such impart to the table a sense of church festival.

  ‘You’ve not slept,’ says Laban.

  ‘There was a message from Magrethe Spliid on my phone. She wanted to give me something, so I went out and got it.’

  They glance towards the smoothed-out sheet of paper that I’ve placed on the counter.

  ‘Once we’ve eaten, I’m going to deliver it to Thorkild Hegn. If he keeps his side of the bargain we’ll be free. Everything will be sorted. Thit and Harald can go back to school. I can start working again.’

  They say nothing. All they do is stare at me.

  ‘Susan,’ says Laban, ‘we’re in this together.’

  ‘Thit and Harald,’ I say, ‘go to your rooms!’

  They stay put.

  ‘Mum,’ says Harald, ‘we’re too old now to be sent anywhere, especially to our rooms. We’ll soon be leaving home. They’re hardly even ours any more.’

  I sit down in front of them.

  ‘She was dead when I got there. Someone suffocated her, a short time after midnight presumably, after she left me her message. They used her inhaler. It’s got a silicone mouthpiece that shuts off the mouth and nose. All they had to do was press it tight to her face and block the intake. She was strong as a horse, so there must have been at least two of them, one to keep her down, the other to hold the inhaler. It was slow, done in stages. The mask
leaves a mark on the skin if it’s pressed hard, like a diver’s mask. There were several, all identical. They wanted something from her. Information, or some item or other, who knows? So they went straight for her weak spot, her lungs. But whoever they were, they underestimated her. My guess is there were three of them. She took one of them out with a discus. Harald and I watched her practising. Her Danish record still stands. The guy’s head was smashed to pieces. There were litres of blood on the floor. The other two dragged him away in a rug.’

  They stare into space.

  ‘She gave them something, otherwise they’d have taken the place apart. But she hid what she wanted to give me in the discus she used for training. She knew Harald and I had watched her take it apart. She knew I’d find it. It’s a list of members of the Future Commission. And Thorkild Hegn’s home address. For some reason she was absent from the final meetings. She didn’t have the minutes. We’ve done all we could do. I’m driving over to Thorkild Hegn’s place now. It’s over. We’re out of all this.’

  I get to my feet and gather up my coat, the sheet of paper and the car keys.

  ‘Susan,’ says Thit, ‘would you mind sitting down again, please?’

  17

  I’VE DONE EVERYTHING humanly possible for the kids to call me Susan. I never wanted to be Mum, it sounds too much like an institution to me. I wanted the twins to see me as an individual, for the person I am. At the first parents’ evening when they were in kindergarten, there were eighteen mothers and two fathers, one of whom was Laban. The other women introduced themselves as ‘Victor’s mum’, ‘Diddums’s mum’, ‘Little Dumpling’s mum’, and so on, and before long I was writhing with exasperation. Eventually, I got to my feet and said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to pull yourselves together. Being a mother is hard enough as it is. Kids are basically black holes, singularities that absorb all light and energy without giving anything back. If you’re going to give up what little individuality you’ve got left so you can be Blob’s mum instead, you’re betraying yourselves!’