He also knew that some soldiers, despite remaining alive, never quite made it home. They had been different from the start, or the war had destroyed them. Some sought refuge in the wilderness as hermits; others found employment as consultants with security companies. In his career he had met several professional operators who had forgotten most things about this world.
‘I haven’t heard about it before,’ he said at last.
‘Do you have any idea where it might have taken place?’ she asked.
‘It’s an Arctic landscape,’ he said. ‘But that covers a multitude of sins, as you well know. It could be anywhere from Patagonia to Alaska, but the recording could also be from any mountainous region outside the Arctic. He’s screaming at them, but I can’t make out the individual words or the language.’
‘Can you get to the bottom of it?’ she asked, sounding despondent. ‘All of it?’
‘Yes, I believe so,’ Michael said.
‘How?’
‘I’ll examine the film on a series of digital photo programs. I have a hunch that I might be able to identify the crime scene from the constellations you can see just before they switch off the camera.’
Again she dried her eyes with the handkerchief and looked up at the vaulted ceiling.
‘Perhaps I should just go to the police.’
‘Perhaps.’ Michael smiled to encourage her. ‘But give me a couple of weeks first. I can’t exclude the possibility that it might be necessary or relevant to involve the police. They have some resources that I don’t. But they’re also bound by certain civilized rules which I’m not.’
‘Are you uncivilized?’
‘I can be fairly uncivilized.’
‘Fine. You have two weeks. What are you going to do with the jeweller’s box?’
‘Send it to a private forensic laboratory in Berne. If there are traces of anyone’s DNA on the box they’ll find it, and if there are fingerprints, apart from yours, they’ll find them too.’
‘You can’t send them the DVD,’ she said, sounding alarmed.
‘Of course not. But I can check myself whether there are any fingerprints other than yours on the disc. I’m no forensic expert, but I do have some iodine powder and a roll of tape.’
Elizabeth Caspersen nodded sceptically.
‘I had no idea that they even existed,’ she then said slowly. ‘Private forensic laboratories, I mean … but then again, I didn’t know that people like you existed either.
‘Money buys you anything you like in Switzerland,’ Michael said. ‘Which reminds me. You ought to get someone to go through your father’s private accounts. It would be interesting to know if he had transactions with Liechtenstein, the Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands or some other tax haven.’
She inflated her cheeks and let the air escape in a thin stream. ‘Of course. How far back do you want them to go?’
‘I’ll let you know as quickly as possible. May I see his guns, please?’
‘Of course.’
She made to get up, but sat down again.
‘I just don’t understand!’ she burst out. She pointed at the DVD. ‘How can anyone do that?’
‘You’re normal, Elizabeth. So, naturally, you don’t understand. I don’t understand it either, but I have hunted people – scum who deserved it. Anyone who lives a secluded life, like you say your father did, who only surrounds themselves with like-minded people, easily develops a sense of superiority and invulnerability. They no longer move in the ordinary, agreed reality, and they don’t feel that its laws apply to them.’
‘You mean billionaires?’
He flung out his hands. ‘Or politicians who have never had a real job, Saudi princes or twenty-two-year-old football players who make in a week what an ordinary person earns in a year by kicking a ball around for a few hours, and only see the world from a team coach or an Aston Martin. We tell them they’re special and they end up believing it. They’re surrounded by an entourage that keeps reality at bay, and suppliers ready to fulfil their every wish.’
‘Such as a human safari?’
‘Or virgins, vintage Bugattis, or powdered rhino horn,’ he said.
*
There wasn’t just an ordinary gun cabinet, but an entire weapons arsenal, in the basement of the house. Michael saw more hunting trophies, comfortable leather armchairs, bookcases with hunting literature, and magnificent, locked glass-and-mahogany cabinets, custom-made for the room. An almost defiantly masculine haven.
Michael liked weapons. He admired their functionality, performance and precision, and he even found their development fascinating. Behind the cut-glass doors in Flemming Caspersen’s weapons room there were rifles and shotguns that would set you back an average Danish annual salary or two, and which made his mouth water. He asked for the keys and unlocked the first cabinet, having put on a pair of latex gloves before he touched anything. Michael lifted out the weapons, unlocked bolts, studied the inside of the barrels by holding them up to a light in the ceiling, and sniffed boxlock actions, magazines and bolts. In the last cabinet he took out a hunting rifle with a telescopic sight, went through the unloading sequence and, to his amazement, caught the unused cartridge as it was ejected from the magazine. He pulled the bolt all the way back and looked closely at the breech before carefully leaning the weapon against the wall.
He examined every cabinet, opened drawers, and studied cartridge belts, various types of sights, and boxes of ammunition.
Michael pointed to the rifle propped up against the wall: ‘That one. I want you to keep an eye on it. Leave it where it is and make sure no one touches it, okay?’
‘Of course, but why?’
‘It’s a fine weapon,’ he said. ‘It’s a Mauser M03. It’s an excellent, modern, yet ordinary hunting rifle, compared to the magnificent samples your father also owned. Note there’s no engraving on it, as there is on every other weapon here, and it doesn’t do anything the others can’t do just as well, or even better. It has a fine Zeiss telescope with night-vision sight. It’s probably the gun I would choose if I …’
‘Wanted to hunt down and kill a human being,’ she said.
He nodded gravely. ‘It wouldn’t draw attention to itself and it’s the only weapon here that hasn’t been cleaned and oiled, which is odd, or at least worth noting. There’s gunpowder residue in the breech and there are still cartridges in the magazine – a mortal sin. I’ve removed one of the cartridges, which I’ll send to Berne, along with the jeweller’s box. We might just get lucky, who knows. Incidentally, I’ll need something with your father’s fingerprints. And something with yours.’
‘A fountain pen, for example?’
‘That will do nicely.’
He pointed to a small table with a three-quarter-full bottle of whisky and a crystal glass with a brown, dried membrane on the bottom.
‘I presume it was your father who enjoyed a dram of whisky?’
‘I don’t think he ever invited anyone down here,’ she said. ‘This was where he came to think. Oddly enough, I haven’t been in here since his death. It was his room and I was brought up knowing that it was out of bounds.’
‘If I could have the glass,’ he said, ‘I think it might provide us with the fingerprint we need.’
Michael looked around for some tools and found a fine selection of the screwdrivers and pliers used to make rifle ammunition. He pinched the end of the rifle cartridge with a pair of pliers and eased out the projectile with another pair, tipped the gunpowder into a drawer and dropped the cartridge case into a small plastic bag.
She looked at the weapon with revulsion. ‘Is that what he used, do you think?’
‘Could be. I would also like to see the recordings from the break-in, if that’s possible?’
‘I’ll get them to you.’
He gave her the address of the hotel where he always stayed when he was in Copenhagen.
‘Preferably tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ she said mechanically.
She walked him out onto the main steps, attempted a smile, but ended up folding her arms tightly across her chest and staring down at the tiles.
She was only one thoughtless word away from a complete breakdown, Michael thought. She had been on her own with that bloody DVD for far too long and was obviously juggling all sorts of conflicting demands. She had no idea if she could trust him. If the public ever saw the DVD, she, her husband and their children would have to live in its shadow. The media would crucify them and she would never be allowed to forget that her father, the renowned financier, had turned out to be a psychopathic killer.
He admired her for contacting him, rather than simply destroying the DVD and then crossing her fingers that no copies existed. He knew he wouldn’t have been able to do the same.
Chapter 3
After the meeting Michael sat in his car for a long time under one of the avenue’s trees, which were already in bud. He had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. He felt strangely feverish. He stuck a CD in the player, listening to Joan Armatrading while he mulled things over, smoking three of the eight cigarettes that constituted his daily ration: an agreement his wife had entered on with herself, on his behalf. He looked at the shoulder bag containing the computer, aware of what Keith Mallory would have said if he knew that he had taken the job: ‘Don’t forget your Kevlar, Mike.’
But he didn’t own a bullet-proof vest and he wasn’t armed. Weapons had a habit of turning unpredictable situations into unpredictable tragedies.
He was convinced that the hunters were soldiers, or ex-soldiers. Professional soldiers created their own subculture with specific songs, phrases, haircuts, tattoos and slang, and he had heard that song in places other than Grozny. It was a hymn to victory used by elite soldiers from many countries.
Young soldiers who had been on high-risk missions never again experienced a sense of comradeship like that they had experienced at war. Going off to fight was easy, but coming home could be impossible, especially to a country divided in its views on the necessity of the war.
Michael had met young men and women who had become almost addicted to deployment, who pleaded to be sent out again. In the field they had been in charge of sophisticated expensive equipment, while on Civvy Street they might be reduced to sweeping floors in a warehouse. And they were a generation without authority figures. Their parents and teachers no longer had the ability or the guts to discipline them, so they grew up in a world without demands, boundaries or rules. The Armed Forces gave them skilled, stable role models, responsibility, a purpose and a sense of belonging. Some of them found their first family in the military.
Life was harder for this generation in so many ways: their perception had already been warped. Until they witnessed their first real-life fatality, they believed that everyone would get up again, without a scratch, the moment someone restarted the computer.
*
Michael found a parking space near Hellerup Station and took the S-train to Nørreport. He always stayed at the Admiral Hotel on the Copenhagen waterfront when his clients were paying. Its location was central, it was expensive and comfortable, and it offered a soothing view of the harbour.
He strolled down Frederiksborggade and looked at all the people who had come out to enjoy the spring sunshine on Kultorvet. It was warm, there was no wind, and Denmark was in the transitional phase from puffa jackets, boots and knitted caps, to shirts, T-shirts, jeans and summer shoes. He noticed three women about to sit down at a café table in the middle of the square. The second woman had chestnut hair, long legs in jeans, broad hips, a fine bust, even shoulders and a classic, hourglass waist. She had the pale, clear complexion of a redhead, and large freckles generously scattered across her face. The upper curves of her cleavage, down to a white lace bra, showed in the gap of her shirt when she bent down to pick up a mobile that was ringing in her handbag. She brushed back her hair, put the mobile to her ear and let her green gaze glide indifferently across Michael. Her face and eyes hardened.
Michael’s own mobile started ringing. When he answered it, he heard small, bubbling sounds which stopped him in his tracks.
‘Hello?’
The moist bubbles were interrupted by an abrupt sneeze.
‘This is Michael Sander …’
‘Did you hear that?’ his wife asked him.
‘Heard what?’
‘Julie said, Daddy, how are you?’
‘She’s eighteen months old, Sara. It sounded like someone stepped on the hamster.’
‘No, she really did say it, Michael.’
‘I’ll take your word for it.’
‘Are you smoking?’
‘Not at the moment,’ he said.
‘What did she want?’
Her voice darkened.
‘A job,’ he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘I said yes.’
‘Any travelling involved?’ she asked.
‘I think so.’
He put down his shoulder bag and looked at a shop window.
‘Will you be gone long?’ she continued.
Michael pulled off his tie and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
‘I think so. It’s complicated.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘Yes.’
He heard her put down the toddler, whose big brother, aged four, shouted something to the dog.
‘You take care of yourself,’ she said.
‘Of course.’
‘I love you,’ she said.
‘I love you, Sara.’
*
The lobby at the Admiral Hotel had Wi-Fi, and Michael found a quiet corner and sent a long e-mail to the forensic lab in Berne. Then he wrapped the plastic bag with the cartridge case from Flemming Caspersen’s hunting rifle in tinfoil, asked the porter for a large, padded envelope, and put the bags with the whisky glass, the cartridge case, the fountain pen and the jeweller’s box inside it. He asked the porter to FedEx everything to Switzerland as quickly as possible and put 500 kroner on the counter to stress the urgency. The porter smiled, promising to take care of everything immediately.
In his room Michael opened the door to the small Juliet balcony and looked across Copenhagen harbour, the harbour entrances, Christianshavn, and further out at the calm surface of the Øresund. He took a long shower, put on one of the hotel bathrobes and set out his laptop, pen and a notebook on the desk.
Michael dusted the DVD with iodine powder, carefully blew excess powder off the disc, and dotted circles and swirls from the fingerprints emerged. He lifted the prints from the disc with special tape and held it up against the light from the balcony door. The prints were small, uniform and oval; a woman’s prints, he presumed, and from a single individual, he felt certain of it.
He would send the tape sections to the lab in Berne and ask them to compare them to the prints from Elizabeth Caspersen’s fountain pen.
Afterwards he watched the film repeatedly, noting down various details he had missed the first time round. He isolated the only brief, distorted image of the client himself: seen from the right and diagonally from behind; half a broad-brimmed hunting hat with a feather in the hatband. Under the brim he could see part of an ear, a white, well-trimmed sideburn – exactly like on the magnate’s portrait in Hellerup – a greenish sleeve, a gloved hand and part of the butt of a rifle. Michael cut and pasted extracts from the film, added various degrees of brightness, resolution and contrast to them, but the result was at best ambiguous. The human ear is highly individual, but most of this man’s ear was hidden by his hat and jacket collar.
He tried to work out if there was a wristwatch between the jacket sleeve and the glove, but concluded that there wasn’t. The weapon itself was impossible to identify. He examined the flash from the muzzle almost a dozen times, from the front and from behind. There was no doubt that it was a hunting rifle. The flash was longer and more yellow than that from a finely calibrated army carbine.
Of the other hunters, he could see only twiste
d random shadows in the terrain when the beam from a torch headlamp or the camera light happened to find them. They appeared to have lined up in a semi-circle and there were six of them, besides the client, judging by the number of laser sights. The cameraman tripped, and the camera swept across the nearest bystander, but was quickly steadied again when he regained his footing. Michael replayed the short sequence. He had caught a glimpse of something red and white. He froze the recording: it was a leg, a camouflage-clad right leg with a bloody field bandage wound tightly around the thigh between the knee and the groin.
The cameraman must have been injured.
He played the ending over and over: the young, dark-haired victim. His mouth a screaming hole. How he turned and ran out into the void beyond the cliff edge clutching the contents of the black sack. The victim was a well-built, tall and athletic man in his late twenties, dressed in appropriate outdoor clothing. When the camera found him again, he looked like a rag doll someone had casually dropped on the shore of what could be a fjord, the mouth of a large river, or a section of an archipelago.
Michael again replayed the film, and zoomed in on the victim’s right foot. It was naked, white, and stained dark brown with what looked like dried blood. He didn’t think that the young man had appeared restricted in his movements, but then again he was likely to have been pumped so full of adrenaline that he could have run with a broken leg. On his left foot he wore a sturdy hiking boot with blue laces.
It wasn’t much, and yet Michael felt strangely optimistic: the constellations in the background on the recording were sharply defined in the last few frames, and he could see the whole figure of the young man.
He paused and started pacing up and down the room. Then he unpacked his travelling bag on the bed, and smiled when he saw Sara’s suggestion for bedtime reading. She and an old school friend owned and ran a small but densely stocked second-hand bookshop with strange opening hours, in the high street of the small market town on Fyn, where they lived, and where he himself had grown up. Like Keith Mallory she was hoping to drag Michael out of his bottomless literary ignorance, but her recommendations inevitably centred on suffering, wasted opportunities, delicate, female sensitivities and longings. This time it was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. On his last trip it had been a Jane Austen novel and on the trip before that a poetry anthology by Emily Dickinson. He tossed Madame Bovary back in his bag and took out a smuggled crime novel by Jo Nesbø, which he put on the bedside table.
Trophy Page 4
