‘You said that Victor would do anything?’ he prompted her.
‘He really would.’
‘If Victor’s a mould breaker, surely he can identify with Jakob?’
She pulled a face.
‘Victor doesn’t get why Jakob won’t come and work for Sonartek. He feels that Jakob has rejected him as a father and mentor, and he doesn’t understand why his son won’t do his duty, seeing that he has given him everything. That is to say, everything he didn’t have. Material things, ultimately unimportant things, but like I said, he doesn’t get it.’
‘And he’s jealous of Jakob?’
‘I think so. He envies Jakob his freedom, but doesn’t realize that he can never know what that feels like because he doesn’t feel secure within himself. Jakob feels secure. Victor has to learn to see himself in both his sons rather than regard them as strangers. Do you like my boys?’
‘Yes. Very different and very alike, I think. But is that all there is to it?’
‘All what?’
‘The tension between Victor and Jakob. They don’t resemble each other physically. I would have thought it went deeper. That it’s about more than just the choice between a comfortable life and one that isn’t. Or doing your duty.’
The bedside lamp drew golden squares on her brown irises.
‘Oh, Michael …’
‘What?’
She poured more whisky into her glass and ran a weary hand across her face.
‘Michael, I think you’re a dangerous man.’
She spoke his name in Swedish where the ch became a short k, and she stressed the second syllable. It sounded really rather charming.
She yawned and stretched out. Her negligee gaped and a hard, dark brown nipple peeped out. No matter which direction Michael looked, his gaze still landed on something. It was very distracting.
‘I don’t think so,’ he mumbled.
‘But you are. You see things. I understand why Elizabeth hired you.’
She looked into space.
‘Something is wrong, Michael. Something terrible is about to happen. I know it.’
Slowly she wiped away the tears from her cheek with the back of her hand and looked at her moist hand in wonder.
‘Tell me what you think is wrong,’ he said softly.
‘I don’t know. Everything. The hunters at Pederslund.’
‘The hunters?’
‘There used to be so many. Now they hardly ever come. They were soldiers – Jakob’s and Henrik’s friends. Later it was mostly Henrik’s, even though he was never in the army. The boys loved hunting. They started some kind of boys-only club. Women were banned from their lunches and parties. Only high-class hookers and strippers were allowed. Men need space. A woman needs to respect that, or a man feels suffocated and trapped. Most young women today don’t understand. They castrate their men by making them feel guilty. Don’t you agree, Michael?’
‘Absolutely,’ he nodded. ‘But Jakob, where does he go when he can’t find a disaster zone to work in?’
She sighed.
‘Jakob is Jakob. I don’t think he has ever needed anyone. He never cried when he was little. He preferred to play alone and yet he was the most popular boy at school because he never made any effort. Is there anything more attractive to the rest of us than someone who is self-sufficient and is at peace with themselves? We think they have a secret that they could share with us. We’re attracted to them because we hope some of it will rub off. He reminds me of Flemming. And of you.’
‘How do you mean?’
She didn’t reply.
He repeated the question and was rewarded with a low snore. Monika Schmidt was asleep.
Fuck …
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
He got up and bent over her. Watched her peaceful, quiet face. The years faded away: Monika Schmidt looked like a sleeping child. The irises twitched under the thin eyelids, the mouth was relaxed and the lips blood red. She smelled of woman and expensive perfume.
Shit!
Was he supposed to carry her back to the marital bed to her drunken, unconscious husband? Wherever he was. Or prop her up against the door, knock on it and then do a runner? Or should he just put her on the sofa in the drawing room downstairs?
He left her where she was.
*
Michael took a small digital camera, a leather case and a thin Maglite torch from the inside pocket of his jacket, opened the door and glanced at Monika Schmidt once more. He decided that she was fast asleep. He tiptoed down the corridor, opened the door to the main staircase and continued across the landing to the opposite corridor. The house was completely silent.
Outside Jakob Schmidt’s room he stopped and examined the door frame for hairs or folded pieces of paper that would fall to the floor when the door was opened. He couldn’t see any tell-tales so he pressed down the handle. The door was locked; Michael squatted down on his haunches, put the leather case on the carpet and opened it to reveal the slim, steel instruments it contained. It was an old lock and it took him less than a minute to pick it.
Though he was sure that Jakob had left Pederslund, he held his breath when he opened the door and slipped into the quiet room. He leaned against the door and got his bearings in the almost total darkness. Then he switched on his torch and looked around a young man’s room where time had stood still for many years. There was a narrow, old-fashioned iron bedstead covered with a patchwork quilt, a bookcase with such classics as Moby Dick, Kim, Treasure Island and Lord Jim, and various military educational books that he recognized from his own bookcase. A bamboo fishing rod was mounted on the wall above the headboard and below the rod he saw the photo of the Swedish summer afternoon with Henrik and Jakob Schmidt that Flemming Caspersen had had hanging in his library. Even the frame was the same.
There was a desk marked with years of knife carvings, burns from forbidden cigarettes and rings from forbidden beer bottles. A laptop sat on the desk. Michael opened the lid and was asked to type in a password. He closed the lid again and instead opened a wardrobe filled with outdoor equipment: climbing ropes, a harness, karabiners and hiking boots, waders, sailing jackets and old uniform items, camouflage jackets and camouflage trousers, but not the military kind. There wasn’t, for instance, anything he recognized from Elizabeth Caspersen’s DVD. A sabre and a modern bayonet in its sheath hung on the inside of the wardrobe door. He found the Royal Life Guards’ full dress uniform in a plastic bag, and on top of the wardrobe a tall, fabric-covered box, which probably contained Jakob Schmidt’s bearskin headgear.
If the man with the dark, animal eyes were to find him in here now, he would be lucky to get away with a visit to Casualty, he thought. He was more likely to end up in intensive care with feeding instructions on a Post-it note slapped on his forehead.
Gripping the torch between his teeth, he lit up the photographs on the wall and took out his camera. The curtains were closed, but even so the camera flashlight would be visible from the outside. Never mind, it couldn’t be helped. He photographed each picture several times and checked the resolution on the camera’s LED screen before he moved on.
Officer School, Class of 2001: Jakob Schmidt stood in the middle of the back row, wearing the uniform of a first lieutenant. His expression was neutral. Michael took a small step to the side and looked at a photograph of five half-naked warriors with long hair and beards standing in the desert. Their faces were partly shaded under their hats and the men’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. He concentrated on the man standing by himself on the far left. Tattooed, a lazy half-smile, muscular, broad shoulders and long legs. He was almost certain that it was Jakob Schmidt. Michael recognized the type: not a team player, but a useful loner. The scorpion raised its sting along the man’s neck.
Then he studied various hunting pictures from the estate. To his surprise, he recognized Henrik in several of them. Sonartek’s sales director hadn’t struck him as the outdoor type, but he seemed perfectly at home among the others at the disp
lay of the day’s bag. One of the boys. Jakob didn’t feature, and Michael wondered whether he had taken most of the pictures.
Michael frowned and went back to the picture from the unnamed desert. He compared it to one of the hunting pictures taken in front of Pederslund. There was something ceremonious about it. The gun dogs were lined up at the foot of the steps and Mrs Nielsen was holding a silver tray with shot glasses with morning bitters before the hunt. Victor and Henrik Schmidt were standing at the top of the steps and eight younger men were posed in two rows; one standing, the other kneeling.
Kim Andersen. The dead Royal Life Guard who committed suicide. He appeared in both the hunting and the desert photograph. There was no doubt. He was dressed for hunting – oilskin jacket, hunting trousers and wellies; he had a rifle over his shoulder and was smiling at the photographer without a care in the world, exactly like the other men on the steps of Pederslund – and he was standing in the middle of the row of sunburned combat soldiers in the desert; probably somewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq. Michael recognized the tattoos from the newspapers; especially from today’s photograph of him on the bonnet of an armoured personnel carrier outside Baghdad, with a small Danish flag fluttering from the aerial.
He straightened up. He tried to remember the newspapers’ verdict. Suicide or crime victim? The Rigspolitiet’s Homicide Division was involved.
Michael listened to the sleeping house and opened the door to Jakob’s bathroom, which was basic compared to the luxurious bathroom further down the corridor. A white medicine cupboard over the sink contained some paracetamol, a deodorant and an unopened tube of toothpaste. Michael ran a finger across the toothbrush. It was dry as a bone and there was a thin layer of dust at the bottom of the bathtub so it probably hadn’t been used for months.
He took one last look at the photographs in the torchlight. A boys-only club, Monika Schmidt had called it. But that wasn’t what Michael saw in the photographs; he saw a ruthless longing for Arcadia with its own laws, a golden age that had never been. Dreamers, warriors and killers.
Chapter 25
Monika Schmidt had turned onto her side, but she was still asleep. Michael tiptoed inside, returned the camera, torch and pick-locks to his jacket pockets and covered her with the bedspread. He smoked a cigarette by the window, had a mouthful of Talisker and wondered who had sent her.
Somebody, someone not very far away, might have worked out that Michael wasn’t there to assist in a paternity case. It was certainly one possible explanation.
He felt someone was looking at him and turned around. Monika Schmidt was lying with her hands folded under her cheek, watching him. She didn’t move a muscle.
‘It’s all right, go back to sleep,’ he said.
Her gaze swept across his naked torso.
‘You look like someone who has been through the wringer, Michael. Where did all those scars and that Homer Simpson tattoo come from?’
‘I’m clumsy. And I got drunk.’
She smiled. ‘Why did you move to England?’
‘A girl.’
‘Why did you come back to Denmark?’
‘Another girl.’
She closed her eyes, rolled onto her back, yawned and stretched out.
‘I probably shouldn’t stay here, Michael, even though it’s a lovely, lovely bed.’
‘I guess not,’ he said.
She moved her arms up and down like a child making snow angels and stared up at the ceiling.
‘Monika?’
‘Yes?’
‘Who is Jakob’s father?’
Her arms were still bent at the elbow and her small hands lay near her dark, smooth hair. Her eyes kept watching the ceiling while her pupils expanded until the black had almost banished the brown. She rose onto her elbows, got down from the bed and gathered the negligee around her, all in one smooth movement. She didn’t look at him.
‘A man, Michael. A real man. Not a two-faced snooper like you.’
Monika Schmidt crossed the floor, steady like a sleepwalker, and left.
*
Michael looked at the closed door. He sighed, hauled one of the chairs in front of it and wedged its back under the handle. If anyone, anyone at all, tried to enter his room tonight, he would wring their necks.
He lay down on top of the bedspread with his hands folded behind his neck. Then he reached over and switched off the bedside lamp. He could feel the heat from her body and he could smell her. He thought about the redheaded superintendent who was investigating Kim Andersen’s suicide … Lene … what? Jensen. He wondered if he should contact her. And say what? That the ex-Royal Life Guard hadn’t hurt his leg during an innocent hunting trip to Sweden in the spring of 2011, but was injured when he took part in a depraved manhunt in the north of Norway? Did he have any evidence? Not really. It was more of a hunch.
Would she understand? Michael visualized the superintendent’s hard green eyes. Imagined her lips forming the words: ‘Piss off … Next!’
Then he thought about Jakob Schmidt. The imperturbable brown eyes. The intelligence.
And finally, he thought of Sara and their children, smiled in the darkness and fell asleep.
Chapter 26
He watched her go through the border between light and shade and stop on the pavement. She glanced around and he let her wait. Her hand tucked some stray hairs behind one ear. She looked up and down Allégade, and directly at him on the other side of the street, but failed to spot him in the shadows. He whistled and she looked up. He waved her over and she ran across the road. Confidently.
Close up, her scent was cool and fresh, and he saw that nothing in her make-up or outfit had been left to chance. The same went for his own appearance and he was aware he was making quite an impression: the rough motorbiking nomad had been replaced with a smooth stockbroker: silk tie in a tight Windsor knot, single-breasted dark suit, shiny black shoes, a crisp white shirt and a dark blue cashmere coat. He was freshly shaven, his hair cut was smart and he smelt discreetly of L’Homme.
‘What happened to the biker boy?’ she asked.
‘It’s his night off.’
She frowned. ‘What a pity. I rather liked him.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘He can come back, if you like,’ he said.
She just folded her arms and nodded.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked.
‘A little.’
He pointed to the long, dark BMW parked a few metres away.
‘It has heated seats,’ he said.
She looked at the car, but didn’t stir.
‘Nice,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I’m glad you came. My name is Adam.’
‘Josefine.’
He fished out a packet of cigarettes from his coat pocket and offered it to her. She took one and he lit both their cigarettes. He coughed and blinked tears away from his eyes.
‘I’m new to this,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe that.’
She looked away and chewed a nail.
‘It’s true. I’ve been travelling for so long that I’ve forgotten what you’re meant to do.’
He flashed her a disarming smile.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
‘Everywhere. Nepal, New Zealand, North Africa … South America …’
Josefine’s face lit up.
‘You’ve been to South America?’
He grinned and launched into rapid Spanish.
‘What?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘What did you say? What?!’
‘That I’m freezing my balls off out here and just what do I have to do to make the beautiful lady get into my car so we can drive somewhere nice and warm and have a drink?’
‘Tell me something about South America and you’re on. I’m going there in a few months.’
‘Of course. Whatever you want to know.’
He opened the door to her, she got in, leaned back in the passenger seat and ran her fingertips across the leather
while he stayed outside and took a look around. There was no one nearby. He had stolen a set of number plates in a multi-storey car park at the airport, taking care to stay in the CCTV blind spots. He squashed the cigarette under his shoe, got in, smiled at her, and left his door ajar so that he could see her in the light inside the car. One hand rested casually in her lap, while the other tucked the rebellious lock of hair back behind her ear again. Her nose was straight, her profile young and clean, her upper lip slightly fuller than her lower lip, and her mouth looked permanently on the verge of a smile. Her skin was perfect, practically without pores, and her forehead high and well-shaped. She smelled of girl, perfume and suede jacket.
‘Where did you go?’ she asked.
‘Costa Rica, Honduras, San Salvador, Argentina,’ he muttered, and clenched his right hand inside the leather glove.
‘Did you dance the tango in Buenos Aires?’ she asked.
‘I don’t dance.’
‘An old Chilean man who lives here in Frederiksberg is teaching me Spanish,’ she said. ‘He’s a poet and at least one hundred and twenty years old. He knew Pablo Neruda.’
‘Impressive,’ he said.
He closed the door and looked past her out of the side window. There was no one in the car park. Then he punched her as hard as he could, close to her left ear. Her lower jaw snapped under his knuckles, her head collided with the side window and her eyes widened before they clouded over and closed. Her mouth was half open. Then she opened her eyes again and looked straight ahead.
‘But …’ she said, and he hit her again.
She grew limp, slid down the seat and her face lolled towards him. He pulled her upright and reclined the seat so that she was half sitting, half lying down.
He removed her scarf and jacket. She was smaller than he had expected, and she struggled to breathe through her broken jaw. He put her jacket on the back seat, rolled up her nearest shirtsleeve above the elbow, and opened the glove compartment. The rubber tube was ready and waiting, and he tied it around her upper arm. Then he took a syringe from his inside pocket, removed the plastic cap with his teeth and injected five millilitres of Ketalar into her bloodstream.
Trophy Page 19
