Lene held her torch while Michael jumped down and lifted out a rucksack made from dark green camouflage fabric.
‘Is there anything else?’ she asked.
‘This.’
A small, green money box wrapped in strong, clear plastic. She took it from him and tucked it under her arm. Apart from that, the cavity was empty. He bent down and shone his torch through the grille, but couldn’t see anything other than a darkness that seemed to continue under the house.
‘It’s a basement of some sort,’ he said. ‘Did you know that it was here?’
‘There’s a trapdoor in the kitchen floor and a ladder down to a crawlspace,’ she said. ‘We didn’t find anything down there. Just a few bits of junk, that’s all. Water pipes.’
‘But you didn’t notice the grille,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we carry this stuff inside the cottage and take a look at it?’
Chapter 43
Michael discovered a heavy-duty jacket with an arctic-grey, white-and-black camouflage pattern at the top of the rucksack. He spread it out on the kitchen floor and searched its many pockets without finding anything.
Meanwhile, Lene had unwrapped the small, green money box and was going through the kitchen drawers, looking for a suitable tool to pick the lock.
He looked inside the rucksack and pulled out a pair of hunting trousers that matched the jacket, and held them up to the light. Michael was able to push a finger through a jagged hole halfway down the thigh. The fabric around the hole was stiff and dark brown.
‘Talking about evidence, this should help,’ he said.
Lene looked at the trousers, his finger and the two holes in the fabric.
‘What else is there?’
‘A cap, gloves, ski mask, a torch headlamp, water bottle. In fact, everything your well-equipped human hunter would need in the Arctic.’
He opened a zip at the top of the rucksack and found three folded, plastic-laminated maps in the scale 1:50,000: Statens Kartverk series M711: Porsanger Fjord, Alta Fjord. He pinched them between two nails and put them on the PVC cloth on the kitchen table.
‘Finnmark,’ he said tellingly.
‘But you already knew that. Anything else?’ she asked impatiently.
He glowered at her.
‘I’m starting to understand why you work alone,’ he said.
‘Likewise. Anything else?’ she repeated.
Michael aimed the torch beam inside the rucksack and looked in all the pockets he could find.
‘Nothing, I think. Hold on … There’s another pocket.’
He had felt a small zip under his fingertips in the rucksack’s waterproof cover piece. He unzipped it and found a single A4 sheet.
Lene tried to force the lid of the money box with a kitchen knife. It slipped and she cut her finger.
‘What is it?’ she asked, and stuck her finger in her mouth.
‘The floor plans of Flemming Caspersen’s mansion. There was a break-in a couple of months ago. Someone sawed off the horns of a rhinoceros and ran off with them. They came from the sea at two o’clock at night in a rubber dinghy, cooled the alarm system with liquid nitrogen, and nothing else was taken. The house was empty.’
‘Horns?’
She furrowed her brow.
‘Rhino horns with a combined weight of eight kilos. They sell on the black market for around $50,000 per kilo. If you know the right people,’ he said.
‘Do you think Kim did it?’
‘Well, he’s got a map of the house showing the alarm system and the location of movement sensors and surveillance cameras.’
She wrapped a tea towel around her finger and glared with hatred at the unbreakable green money box.
‘Just to steal a couple of horns?’
Michael shrugged. ‘It’s not a bad hourly rate, in my opinion. I wouldn’t mind doing it myself, if I knew where to sell them.’
‘You’re no thief,’ she said earnestly.
‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘How are you getting on with that box?’
‘Not very well. I need a skeleton key or something. A crowbar or a screwdriver.’
‘Do you mind if I have a go?’
‘Be my guest.’
She pushed the box across the table; Michael got up and hurled it against the floor. The lid sprang up and its contents spilled out.
Lene didn’t even flinch.
‘Neat,’ she said. ‘I could have done that.’
‘Just taking a short cut,’ he said and squatted down on his haunches.
The loot was disappointing: a CD in a plastic cover and two colour photographs. Michael placed the items on the table and pointed at the first picture.
‘That’s Pederslund in the background. And there we have Kim Andersen with a hunting dog and … is that him?’
Lene had jumped at the sight of the other man in the photograph: tall, dark-blond hair, broad shoulders, white teeth, dark, possibly brown eyes, open-necked, chequed shirt, oilskin jacket, corduroy trousers and hunting boots. And the end of a tattoo that reached up under one ear: the articulated tail of a scorpion. Michael had never seen him before.
She nodded and gulped.
Michael turned over the photograph: Pederslund 2008. Max and T.
‘I guess Max is the dog,’ he said.
‘And the “T” stands for Thomas.’
‘Yes. When you know it, you can see that he’s the man at the far edge of the picture from Afghanistan,’ he said. ‘Withdrawn, isn’t he? Thomas Berg, I mean.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And it’s not Jakob Schmidt,’ Michael said.
The other photograph was blurred and taken from an angle. Part of a hand covered the lens. There was a black, slanted bar on one side of the photograph that must have been the column of a car roof. The picture had been taken late at night. There was a deserted, grey and rain-sodden car park in the foreground, and the camera focused on a woman in a red parka, who had just turned into the doorway to a yellow wooden building. She held a rucksack in one hand while holding open the door with the other. Her mouth was halfway through a smile and a word to a lean, dark-haired man behind her. She had smooth, black hair and regular features. Her expression was simultaneously loving and impatient. Her companion was wearing a black parka, had a rucksack on his back and was leaning a pair of cross-country skis against the wall next to the entrance.
Porsanger Vertshus, it said in the red neon writing mirrored in the wet tarmac.
He leaned back.
‘Is that them?’ she asked.
‘Kasper Hansen and Ingrid Sundsbö.’ He nodded. Everything fell into place at this moment, he thought with a strange melancholy.
He stuck the photographs in his inside pocket and took the CD out of the plastic pocket.
‘Shouldn’t you have checked for fingerprints before you did that?’ she asked.
Michael held the plastic disc at eye level and studied the surface in the light from the lamp above the kitchen table.
‘There won’t be any, and does it matter now?’
He pushed back the chair and looked at her. Into her green eyes that didn’t blink.
‘Does it really matter now, Lene?’ he asked her again with emphasis. ‘More evidence, I mean? They did it. The question is what are you going to do about it? Do you want to see them in court?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ she mumbled.
She pushed her chair back as well and stared at the floor.
‘It’s hard,’ she then said. ‘Have you ever seen anyone get killed when you could have prevented it?’
*
Michael felt his face get hot. He thought about the two kidnappers in the Netherlands, and the abandoned farm outside Nijmegen; and about Pieter Henryk’s usually kind and youthful face, which had been haggard and grey when Michael, after the rescue operation, had met him on the steps outside the Slotervaartziekenhuis in Amsterdam where his daughter was being treated. The Dutchman’s shirt was one size too big and the navy blue coat hung loosely from
his shoulders. Henryk had handed Michael an envelope with his fee. He had turned into an old man in a matter of only a few weeks. His eyes were dull, he moved slowly and unsteadily, and his voice was reduced to a crisp whisper.
‘Thank you, mijnheer. Thank you. Also from Julia, my daughter. Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Michael had looked up at the concrete front of the hospital. ‘How is she?’
The Dutchman dried his eyes with a handkerchief and looked down at the paving stones.
‘She was always delicate,’ he said. ‘Very shy. A dreamer … difficult and artistic. She was a flautist with the Koncertgebouw, Michael. She was a virgin, even though she is nineteen.’
‘But much loved,’ Michael said, hoping.
The billionaire inflated his lean cheeks. ‘Absolutely! When we had time, and it wasn’t too difficult to love her.’
‘Perhaps she’ll get over it,’ Michael said.
‘Yes, perhaps.’
The father didn’t look as if he believed it.
‘But I think she’ll go insane,’ Pieter Henryk said.
*
Michael grimaced.
‘What is it?’ Lene asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘And what I just asked you?’
‘I’ve done it. I have killed people. And I never regretted it,’ he said.
‘Never?’
‘They deserved it. They had lost all humanity. Beyond redemption.’
He brought his newly acquired laptop into the living room and inserted the CD.
The disc held numerous files in various formats. Michael clicked on a random file – ‘Sagarmatha 2006-23-10’ – and leaned forwards.
Chapter 44
They watched the ninety-second movie and fell silent.
‘Johanne Reimers,’ Lene said at last. ‘The woman who flew with black kites in the Himalayas.’
The young Dane had won the World Paragliding Championship before she started flying with the famous black kites in Sagarmatha, a national park in northern Nepal, not far from Mount Everest. However, in October 2006 she had vanished without a trace along with Ted Schneider, an American photographer from National Geographic. Several search and rescue teams had looked for them in vain.
‘No one ever found out what happened to them, did they?’ she asked.
‘Now we know why,’ Michael said.
Lene looked up Johanne Reimers on Wikipedia and also found half a dozen good photographs of her on Google. Johanne Reimers was smiling in all of them, but was always deep in concentration. She was not only of this world, but also of others. She must have been absolutely fearless, Lene thought, or rather too wise to be fearless. She had had the mental strength to cut through the fear that anyone suspended some kilometres up in the air underneath a thin nylon parachute must inevitably feel, or perhaps the thrill of flying with the kite’s perspective, agility and company was simply too magical to give up.
And it wasn’t a freak storm, a miscalculation, a technical malfunction, a gust of wind or an unexpected hole in the thermal systems that had killed the twenty-seven-year-old woman. It had happened one day in October 2006 on a narrow path carved into the raw granite of the rock face, high above a valley where a silver stream wound its way through the mountain ranges until, a thousand kilometres to the south, it merged with one of India’s mighty, holy rivers.
It had rained that afternoon, the rocks were glistening with moisture, the air was dense and grey with humidity, and a stream trickled down the middle of the path. They could hear quick, rasping breathing and see two dark figures stumbling along. Upwards, all the time upwards, following the sharp bends of the path. The man, who had to be the American photographer, called out to the woman in English. Johanne Reimers slipped and fell on her hands and knees; he stopped as well and rested his hands on his side. His face was pale and he was wheezing.
The person holding the camera also stopped. The picture heaved and sank with his laboured breathing.
The American watched the woman a few metres behind him who was trying to get up. Then he looked back at his pursuers on the path and undoubtedly calculated his chances of getting away – with or without her. He staggered back, put his arm around her and dragged her with him with superhuman effort. He continued to stagger upwards, but stopped halfway through his third step when a bullet tore through his chest. His anorak billowed slightly on impact, but his body didn’t move.
Johanne Reimers fell to the ground, raised herself up on her hands and looked at the American. He was rigid and stared straight ahead with puzzled eyes as if he had forgotten something or wanted to tell her something important. She got up on her knees and reached out her hands to him as he slowly fell through the air, across the path and tumbled down towards the river far, far below them.
Johanne Reimers stood up and faced her pursuers. Her arms fell down her sides. Her face was a pale oval and her hair hung in dark, wet strands.
The others copied her and became just as inert and still. Like an audience watching a chamber play. The cameraman didn’t move and the camera was steady.
Johanne Reimers furrowed her brow and her gaze became alert; she opened her mouth as if she wanted to ask a question, but then she closed it again. She shook her head while someone loaded a rifle. She walked over to the cliff edge and stared into the abyss.
‘I can’t,’ she called out very clearly to them.
In Danish.
The camera zoomed in until her mouth filled the picture.
‘I can’t,’ she called out again.
The picture zoomed away from her face with dizzying speed, a shot was fired and Johanne Reimers fell to the ground and stopped moving.
Lene buried her face in her hands. She had recognized the woman’s expression from Josefine’s one open eye on the computer screen. The emptiness, the lack of understanding. Her own daughter’s face slipped effortlessly in place under the hood of Johanne Reimers’s anorak when Lene closed her eyes.
‘Bastards,’ she muttered, and stared at Michael’s battered, but composed face. Somehow it was reassuring, almost comforting to look at him. He was close and he was real.
He stretched his hand across the table and grabbed hers for a moment.
‘What did her last words mean?’ Lene asked.
‘I think they gave her the choice between jumping into the void … or getting shot. But someone like her would never kill herself.’
‘And they knew it,’ she said.
‘Of course.’
‘They’re insane. Totally insane and sadistic.’
‘Not according to the psychologists,’ Michael said.
‘I doubt the psychologists have seen this movie,’ she said.
Michael nodded. She noticed that a nerve was throbbing below one eye. The skin around his eyes was dark and sunken, and he looked just as exhausted as she felt.
‘They certainly have an unusual urge to document their cruelty,’ he mumbled.
‘Is it that unusual? It reminds me of those pictures and films from ghettos and mass graves which the Nazis took. Perhaps they met up to view the recordings.’
‘The Nazis?’
‘The hunters, Michael.’
‘And Kim filmed the killings?’
‘What if he wasn’t supposed to keep or copy the recordings? What if he only did it as an insurance policy? So that he could expose the others if they threatened him. Perhaps the plan was for the client to have the recording and for the original to be destroyed.’
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The client’s trophy was the recording. That was what they paid for. To own something no one else had.’
Michael pulled the laptop across the table and his index finger hovered over the files.
‘Another one?’ he asked.
Oh, God, no, she thought desperately, but knew very well that she had to. That it was her agonizing duty.
Lene got up and looked over his shoulder at the screen.
‘Musa Qala,’ she said, and pointed to
a file. ‘Allan Lundkvist talked about that place. I believe it’s some kind of regional capital in Afghanistan. The Taliban and the Allies take it in turns to gain control of it.’
‘The picture of the five men was taken outside Musa Qala,’ he said.
*
After the dark, wet afternoon in the Himalayas, the desert was very bright. Two of the four soldiers were bare-chested despite the fierce sun, the third was wearing a khaki T-shirt and shorts, and the fourth had a loose uniform shirt hanging outside his baggy camouflage trousers. All of them had chequered, black or red partisan scarves – keffiyehs – tied around their necks or faces because the desert wind whipped up sand and dust from the empty, white road and the bleak, scorched fields.
Lene recognized all four of them: Robert Olsen, Kenneth Enderlein, Allan Lundkvist and Thomas Berg.
The camera moved in a restricted arc and the recording was speckled with green reflections.
Michael pointed to the shadow on the road in the foreground.
‘A Humvee,’ he said. ‘A light armoured vehicle with a heavy machine gun on its roof. The cameraman is filming from inside the vehicle. The reflections are from the bullet-proof windows.’
The four men were armed with automatic carbines, which they never put down. Two were deep in conversation in the foreground while the others squatted patiently in the shadow of the Humvee without talking.
In the distance blue wood smoke hung over a cluster of low, clay houses with flat roofs which were the beginning or maybe the end of the town called Musa Qala. A narrow green ribbon crept past the buildings and lost itself in the horizon. They could make out some scrawny scrub and bushes growing along the river.
‘What on earth do people live on in a place like that?’ Lene wondered.
The soil looked as if it couldn’t support thistles.
‘Opium and goats,’ Michael said.
Lene pointed to one of the two standing men.
‘Thomas Berg,’ she said.
‘Talking to Allan,’ he nodded.
‘They’re waiting for someone,’ Lene said.
The two men stopped talking and turned towards the desert. The other two got up and dusted themselves down. One of them tossed a pair of binoculars, which Allan Lundkvist caught in mid-air and held up to his eyes. The camera zoomed in on the tall, swaying column of dust balancing on the heat haze in the distance. At the bottom of the column something white was moving swiftly. The men got ready.
Trophy Page 30
