There was a knock on the door and Aisha ushered in a middle-aged man in a hospital coat. His hair stuck out on all sides and the eyes behind his spectacles were dull and red-rimmed.
‘I found you a consultant, Lene.’
The consultant held out his hand and introduced himself.
‘You know her story?’ Lene asked.
He nodded. ‘Of course. I was one of the surgeons who operated on her. She’ll be fine. Eventually.’
‘Can she be moved?’
‘Where to?’
‘Another hospital.’
‘Which one?’
She told him, and he left the side ward and returned with Josefine’s notes and a nurse. He sat down on the chair by the headboard and read her notes from beginning to end. Then he said, ‘One moment,’ and took the nurse outside where they held a whispered conference before he came back.
‘We’ll send an anaesthetic nurse with her, just be sure, and she’ll need blood thinners to prevent embolisms. Excellent place you suggested. I’ve been there myself. Their people are very good.’
‘And her nose and teeth?’
‘They can wait. In fact it’s better to wait until the swellings have gone down. But not so long that the nose grows back crooked, of course. That would be unfortunate. No more than a fortnight, in my opinion. Do you want to go ahead?’
Lene nodded. She wanted to hug him, but felt it was probably not a good idea.
*
When they were alone once more, she started stroking Josefine’s cheek and hair again until her eye opened.
‘Thirsty,’ her daughter murmured, and Lene held up a cup with a spout so that she could drink.
‘Thank you.’
‘Can you hear me, Jose?’
Her daughter nodded.
Lene moved her face very close to her.
‘You’ve always wanted to visit Greenland, haven’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Come on, Jose. Of course you have. Who doesn’t want to go to Greenland?’
‘Not me. Cold.’
‘Not where you’re going, darling.’
‘Mum?’
‘Yes.’
The eye closed. Her daughter grunted something without opening it again. ‘The man. That night at the café. He was waiting for me. And he had been there before.’
Lene’s eyes were stinging and she gently placed her finger on Josefine’s lips. ‘We’ll do it later, darling. You don’t have to …’
‘Yes! The drinks menu. He had oil in his fingers. Ask them if they still have that menu.’
‘I will, sweetheart. And now I want you to shut up!’
There was a hint of a smile at the corner of her daughter’s mouth, but she did as she was told.
Chapter 39
At 8.10 the next morning paramedics rolled a bed into a Copenhagen Fire Service ambulance, which stood waiting in the courtyard outside the Rigshospitalet’s trauma centre. A nurse in an orange parka, pushing a trolley stacked with monitors, medication and personal belongings, accompanied the bed. The ambulance proceeded to drive to Copenhagen Airport. It went through a guarded entrance in the steel mesh fence surrounding the runways and continued until it reached one of the Danish Air Force’s Challenger 604 aircrafts, fuelled and ready for take-off, on runway 22L. The patient was moved to a transport stretcher and lifted up into the aircraft.
Twenty minutes later the aircraft was given permission to begin its 4,000-kilometre journey to the Thule Airbase at the far north of Greenland; a base that counted a well-equipped hospital among its facilities. The only people on board were the nurse, the patient and the two pilots. No flight plan was ever filed.
*
A hand on her shoulder woke Lene up. She had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep a few minutes after Josefine had been collected. The knowledge that her daughter was safe and out of harm’s way had been like a switch being flicked off.
She lashed out after the hand without opening her eyes, but it returned like an irritating fly. She got the feeling that it had been there for some time. As had the voice.
‘Lene!’
‘What!’
‘Open your eyes.’
‘Why?’
She opened her leaden eyelids and looked without enthusiasm at Charlotte Falster’s face. The chief superintendent looked just as exhausted and her hair was messy.
‘I packed your clothes,’ she said.
Lene sat up and hid a yawn behind her hand.
‘Thank you.’
‘Someone had been to your flat and left the door open so I didn’t need to disturb your neighbour after all.’
Lene was instantly wide awake.
‘I’ve been burgled?’
The chief superintendent nodded. She positioned herself by the window and folded her arms folded across her chest. She yawned as well.
‘Christ, I’m glad I have a desk job,’ she said emphatically, and Lene couldn’t help smiling.
‘Well, it’s important to know your limitations,’ she declared.
‘But you shouldn’t be bound by them,’ Charlotte Falster said. ‘And that’s what I’m trying to do. Move out of my comfort zone.’
‘And you have done,’ Lene said. ‘I’m deeply grateful for everything you’ve done for Josefine. I won’t ever forget it, Charlotte. Never.’
The chief superintendent blushed.
‘They didn’t damage anything, Lene, but the whole place had been searched.’ Charlotte Falster hesitated. ‘There were hidden wireless cameras everywhere.’
‘So you were filmed?’
‘Yes.’
Lene shrugged and got up from the bed. ‘Not that it makes much difference, in my opinion.’
‘I agree,’ Charlotte Falster said. ‘Shall we?’
Lene nodded. ‘Five minutes.’
She took a very hot shower and quickly towel-dried her hair. She stuffed a fresh ball of cotton wool into the ear with the burst eardrum. It no longer hurt and the doctor had said that it would heal of its own accord in a week. If only the blasted howling would go away.
Charlotte Falster had brought her clean underwear and Lene put it on and brushed her teeth. No make-up. Members of the armed response unit never wore make-up. She stared straight ahead and nodded to the chief superintendent, who dragged the chair into the bathroom. Charlotte Falster wiped the mirror with a hand towel and draped it over Lene’s shoulders.
‘Are you ready?’
Lene made herself comfortable, looked into the mirror and nodded grimly.
Charlotte Falster combed Lene’s long, damp hair and assessed it critically. Then she grabbed a sizeable handful, held up a pair of scissors and looked at Lene in the mirror.
‘Are you quite, quite sure? Some people would give a kidney for a mane like this.’
‘Do it.’
Ten minutes later Lene had a practical, but not terribly well-executed short haircut. She bent her head over the sink while her boss rubbed in the dark hair dye with steady, unhurried movements. There was an intimacy, a warm companionship between them, which was completely surreal given their usual antagonism and reserve, Lene thought. It would end when it became necessary to restore distance and lines of authority between them, but right now they were just two women helping each other in a bathroom.
Once the colour had taken, Charlotte Falster supported Lene’s head while she rinsed out the surplus dye with the shower head. Then she took a step back while Lene dried her hair, combed it behind her ears and looked blankly into the mirror.
‘Christ on a bike,’ she said.
Charlotte Falster leaned her head to one side.
‘I think the colour suits you,’ she said.
They looked at each other.
‘When is she coming?’ Lene asked, and at that moment someone knocked on the door.
‘Now, it would appear.’
The chief superintendent opened the door to a woman dressed in the black uniform of the armed response unit. She had short, dark hair roughly
the same shade as Lene’s, green eyes and regular features; she was 1.75 metres tall and weighed 65 kilos – and her real job was as a senior civil servant in the Rigspolitiet. The woman put a black sports bag, a machine pistol and a belt with a pistol holster on the floor and quickly took off her uniform.
Lene found a long-haired chestnut wig at the top of the sports bag and handed it and a pair of sunglasses to the now undressed civil servant. None of the three women spoke while Lene put on the black uniform, clicked the belt in place and pulled the strap of the machine pistol across her shoulder. She picked up the sports bag and looked at Charlotte Falster, who handed her a set of car keys.
‘White Passat, registration BK 46 801 at Stairwell 3. Look after it. It’s my own car.’
‘I will. Do you have the address?’ Lene asked.
Falster gave it to her.
‘What’s that?’
‘A scout hut in Herfølge. He doesn’t have a mobile at the moment.’
‘A scout hut?’
‘I suppose that’s appropriate. He’s a boy scout. Or so he says. The last real boy scout. Good luck.’
They looked at each other and there was a suggestion of movement by both of them, an awkward hug, perhaps, but it stayed at the thought.
‘He always works alone,’ Charlotte Falster said with a tiny smile. ‘And you hate confiding in anyone. You’ll make a great team.’
Lene smiled back at her, put on the sunglasses and left the side ward.
She took the lift to the hospital basement, found the right door and opened it with the key card that Charlotte Falster had obtained for her. She carefully closed the steel door behind her and walked quickly through the several hundred metres of the tunnel that connected the hospital with the Faculty of Medicine on the other side of Tagensvej. A tunnel normally used only by porters taking dead bodies to the Institute of Anatomy. At the end she took a sharp left, opened another steel door to an underground car park and found the chief superintendent’s shiny, white VW Passat parked close by.
Chapter 40
He had spent the night on a rickety sleeping loft in the unheated and gloomy scout hut in a sleeping bag which would have suited him perfectly if he had been a seven-year-old dwarf, and on a camper mat as thin as paper. Even though he had gone to bed fully clothed, the cold had woken him up several times.
Before he had settled down for the night, he had found a torch headlamp in a cupboard and searched the hut for something to eat. The result had been depressing. Michael had ended up heating a tin of tomatoes over a Trangia burner, adding noodles and macaroni he had found rolling around in the bottom of a drawer.
It was the dawn chorus in the nearby forest and the sunbeams creeping in between the roofing panels that had woken him up the last time. He had tossed and turned before he gave up trying to fall asleep again, then climbed down the hen-coop ladder on stiff legs to the icy rooms below. He looked around with dismay at the troop’s limp flags, a couple of clumsily stretched-out animal hides in frames and discarded papier-mâché figures, before removing the boxer shorts from his head and the woolly socks from his hands. He rinsed out the tomato tin because he couldn’t find any mugs, and lit the Trangia burner. He poured water into a small kettle, put it on the burner and searched for the lemon tea bag he knew was there somewhere. He had hidden it last night so as not to give in to the temptation to drink it there and then.
He saw her come through the trees along the narrow path that led through the forest to the nearby main road with scattered houses and farms. She moved with relative ease, even though the path was deep and slippery, and the black sports bag seemed to be heavy, since her left shoulder hung much lower than her right. She had a carrier bag from a petrol station in one hand and her face was serious and introverted. The woman was wearing a dark green hoodie, a black anorak, jeans and trainers, and Michael had never seen her before. The water boiled and he poured it distractedly into the tin, adding the tea bag to the reddish liquid. The woman pushed the sunglasses up into her short, dark hair and looked straight at him through the filthy kitchen window.
Michael frowned. Then he burned himself on the kettle and suddenly recognized the woman outside. He swore and opened the door to her. The mid-morning sun fell across her head and shoulders and made her seem smaller and thinner.
She stopped on the doorstep and looked at him.
‘May I come in?’
‘Of course.’
She glanced around and measured him from head to foot.
‘You look different,’ she said, without returning his gaze.
‘Shall I take your bag?’ he asked.
‘No, thanks.’
‘You look a bit different yourself,’ he said lightly, then went back to the kitchen table. ‘Tea? Red tea? Tomato-lemon flavour?’
She put the carrier bag on the kitchen table and Michael sniffed the air.
‘I heard that you were spending the night in a scout hut,’ she said. ‘So I brought coffee and fresh bread. And some cigarettes. My boss says you smoke.’
‘God bless you,’ Michael said warmly.
He found the paper cups of coffee and eased off the lids. The aroma was heavenly. The superintendent opened the bags of bread and butter and cut the rolls with a rusty scout sheath knife. Her movements were unhurried and assured and she looked at her hands rather than at him.
Michael buttered half a bread roll, put two slices of cheese on top, swallowed the food and sipped the still very hot coffee. He closed his eyes.
‘Ah, that tastes good,’ he said.
She retreated to a corner with her coffee, blew on it, folded her arms and almost looked him in the eye. Michael threw a glance at the black sports bag.
‘I had to talk to you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for bursting into your room at the hospital.’
‘How did you know I was there? My mobile?’
He nodded, tore the cellophane off the cigarette packet with his teeth, picked out a cigarette with his lips and looked around for the kitchen matches. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and peered at her.
‘They took my daughter and tortured her,’ she said. ‘They made me watch on a computer. I was somewhere else. That’s how they work. They push your buttons. My love for my daughter.’
Michael nodded.
‘I know. Why don’t we go outside? I think it’s actually warmer.’
Outside the hut, directly in the sun, there was a bench made from branches tied together with rope. Someone had truly earned their proficiency badge, Michael thought. He leaned his head against the wooden wall, which was warming up and smelled of tar. Lene Jensen sat down and put on her sunglasses.
They sat in silence for a while before she asked, ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m a security consultant. A one-man band. With one client.’
‘Elizabeth Caspersen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why does she need you?’
He looked at her.
‘It’s difficult to …’
‘It’s all bloody difficult, Michael,’ she said. ‘And it’s just as hard for me. They told me you work alone, and so do I. It drives my boss up the wall, but as long as I get results, she’s prepared to put up with it. At least up till now. It’s no longer trendy, apparently.’
Michael watched her. She had crossed her arms and her legs and was crouching like a pregnant woman. Perhaps that was how she felt. They really had got to her.
‘So what’s it about?’ she asked.
‘A secret,’ he muttered.
‘Everyone has secrets.’
His laughter was mirthless. ‘There are secrets, and then there are big secrets. Trust me.’
She sighed. ‘So it’s a big secret. Great. What kind?’
He smiled. ‘One man’s big secret. A family’s secret. Or … that’s what I thought, to begin with. It turns out it’s a part of something much bigger. He’s dead now, by the way.’
‘So you’ve found something out?’
‘Yes. Do you know
Elizabeth Caspersen?’ he asked.
‘No, but she appears to know my boss.’
‘She’s a corporate lawyer and Flemming Caspersen’s daughter. You must have heard of him. A billionaire. He started a company that produces rangefinders, lasers and sonars for arms manufacturers all over the world. It’s a huge, widely diversified business and they make equipment for fighter jets, drones, satellites and nuclear submarines. Almost everyone depends on their technology. But he was also a big game hunter. His house is full of skulls, horns and antlers from dead animals. He’s the Pol Pot of the deer family.’
‘I think I’ve heard of him. But you say he’s dead now?’
Michael nodded.
‘He left behind a DVD that his daughter happened to find when she was clearing out his safe. A DVD showing the final minutes of a hunting trip in north Norway. It would appear that Flemming Caspersen had become … degenerate. He had lost interest in shooting dumb animals and preferred more challenging prey, i.e. young, fit people who could run far and fast, and were used to the terrain.’
‘Degenerate?’
‘Insane.’
‘Kasper Hansen and Ingrid Sundsbö?’
‘Yes.’
Michael was impressed. She had actually listened to him while she sat in that side ward.
‘I think I remember their names,’ the superintendent said. ‘Wasn’t that a couple of years ago?’
‘March 2011 in Finnmark. North of the Arctic Circle. They were never found.’
Michael closed his eyes. Being warmed up by the sun was wonderful. He could happily have sat here for the rest of his life. His headache was also starting to clear.
‘Everything fits,’ he said. ‘It’s almost too good to be true.’
‘When something sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is,’ she said.
Michael looked at her with gratitude. ‘Thank you. Did Kim Andersen really kill himself?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure, but then again, he didn’t have a choice. Someone had left a couple of live cartridges on his children’s pillows and played a CD with an old rock song … a song he and his mates sang when they went to war. The message was loud and clear. His trained reflexes kicked in.’
Trophy Page 27
