The Considerate Killer

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  Finally free, he bundled the tape together and threw it away, completely indifferent to the fact that it might be what the DA would call “an important link in the chain of evidence.” He got up, not without difficulty, but in spite of everything he could still move. He felt dizzy and disoriented and had absolutely no sense of where he was, and in what direction the Land Cruiser had disappeared with Nina.

  Think. What did he know? What facts did he possess?

  They had hauled him out of the camper, carried him at the most ten or fifteen meters, he thought, before they had dumped him in the bushes. Therefore, the Land Cruiser had at some point been ten to fifteen meters from him before it drove off. The ground was wet and greasy and covered by fallen leaves. The Land Cruiser was heavy. It had no doubt left visible tracks, but that was no help whatsoever when he couldn’t see. Was there a small chance that the ruts were so deep that he would be able to spot them by feel alone?

  He had lost one shoe, and that foot was more or less senseless with cold. Still he bent down and took the shoe off the other foot as well. Brambles clung to his pant legs with stubborn thorns, and he felt the rain sting in several scratches.

  Though the Land Cruiser was an off-road vehicle of sorts, it didn’t have Caterpillar tracks. It couldn’t force its way through shrubbery or across fallen tree trunks. There was no need to go in the direction where the undergrowth was thickest. He turned around and began walking with steps that he hoped were short enough not to miss the rut of a tire track. Then he realized he would have to consider the matter more carefully. He paused. If he met the tracks at right angles, all he would be presented with was a rut the width of the Land Cruiser’s tire. Say about thirty centimeters. If his strides were any longer, he could easily step across it without noticing. Thirty centimeters. A foot’s length. One foot in front of the other, literally. And if he walked more than fifteen meters without finding anything, then he would have to go back to his starting point. If he could find it . . . Fifteen meters. That was fifty foot-lengths, he calculated. Oh, damn it. It would take him all night. And while he fumbled around here, one foot in front of the other, they had Nina, and . . . and he didn’t know what they would do with her. Didn’t know why they had taken her.

  I wanted her to think of heaven. People think too little about that kind of thing while they are still alive.

  A deep sound of pain forced its way out of him, halfway between a roar and a snarl. Completely animal-like. Someone had taken his woman. Every caveman instinct he possessed yelled at him to hurry, telling him that he should run through the forest, find them, smash them, kill them . . .

  If he had known which direction to run in, he would probably have done so, or at least tried.

  “Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . .”

  He reached fifty without having encountered anything that resembled a tire track. Wet leaves clung to his feet, both so cold now that it felt as if they were burning. The best that could be said about the experiment was that he actually succeeded in turning around and finding his way back to his bramble. At least to a bramble patch, but he was fairly sure it was his.

  Okay. New direction. He turned at what he thought had to be a forty-five degree angle and began again.

  “One, two, three, four . . .”

  At twenty-seven, he hammered his shin into a fallen tree and fell sprawling on the sodden ground. Momentarily, the pain in his leg overpowered his other miseries, and he remained sitting for a few minutes to massage it. Not a break, thank God, but he could feel a swelling take form under his moving fingers. He fumbled along the forest floor until he found a thick branch he could use as a kind of blind man’s cane. He couldn’t afford to fall again.

  The rain had increased. It pounded the leaves and the forest floor and spattered his ankles with tiny mud blasts for every fallen drop. He was about as wet as a man could get, and the cold was slowly eating its way inward, to the organs that kept him active and alive. Realistically he probably had a couple of hours left, maybe less, before movement became impossible.

  When he saw the flickering glow from the flashlight, he thought for a brief moment that he was so weak that he was already beginning to hallucinate. But it was real enough. The light skipped and danced and lit up the falling rain, and now he could hear the crackling, cricket-like sound of music escaping from a set of earphones.

  It was the stocky Filipino. Goodbye, Danish police. He was headed more or less for the bramble patch, and in a little while he would discover that Søren was no longer there.

  Søren ran. Not away from the Filipino but toward him. There was no reason to try to move silently; with that bass line in his ears, the other man would have been unlikely to discover him even if he had been accompanied by a full-sized brass band.

  He swung the branch against the exposed nape of the Filipino’s neck in a single desperate release of all his restrained caveman impulses. The round head bounced back and then forward with such rag-doll suddenness that for a moment Søren thought he had broken the man’s neck. He fell heavily to the ground, and it was clear that the follow-up strike would not be necessary. Søren used it anyway.

  It would have been better if he could have rendered the man harmless without taking his head halfway off, he knew that. He hadn’t dared. Hadn’t trusted his body or his strength sufficiently.

  Luckily, the man was fairly robust. He was coming to even as Søren was tying his wrists together with the string from the otherwise pretty useless windbreaker.

  Søren grabbed him by the neck and deliberately forced his thumb into the pain center behind the ear.

  “Listen,” he hissed in English. “You have one chance to survive. Tell me where my wife is. Now.”

  The man’s eyes rolled in panic. His face was distorted by pain, and tears ran down the round cheeks.

  “That way,” he said desperately jerking his head in the direction he had come from. “Down by the lake. Please, sir. Please don’t kill me.”

  Søren pushed him to the ground again and pulled his limbs into a leg lock that the Danish police were no longer permitted to use. Right now he couldn’t care less.

  “I have no idea what time it is,” he said, with his mouth next to the man’s ear. “But you’re under arrest.”

  Then he grabbed the flashlight and ran.

  He found the Land Cruiser fairly quickly. The back door was wide open, and various inventory had been removed from the galley—the hose for the gas hob dangled, and the water tank had been dumped behind the car—but there was no sign of Nina and the other Filipino.

  He stood for a few seconds, staring at the hose that had been led from the exhaust pipe to the window of the camper. Bastards. Evil murdering bastards. His heart gave a cramped jerk inside his chest, and he hammered one hand against the window in frustration and fear. Where was she? Had they gassed her? Was a corpse all he would find now?

  Down by the lake, the little one had said. And the rubber dinghy from the Land Cruiser’s roof was gone.

  Søren let the flashlight’s beam sweep across the tree trunks. The lake. He couldn’t see it, but he could see a slope with a set of tracks left by someone who had climbed it. He slid down essentially feet first, and sure enough, there it was—the lake. A grey, rain-pocked surface that stretched as far as visibility allowed.

  No boat. No Nina. No Filipino.

  “Niiiiinaaaa!” he roared as loudly as he could. “Niiiiiiiiiinaaaaaaa . . .”

  There was no answer.

  “You have to wake up now, Nina-girl. There’s something I want to show you . . .”

  Her head was so heavy that she had to hold on to it with both hands in order to sit up.

  She couldn’t sit up.

  There was a flickering behind her thick, closed eyelids. She knew he was there, but she couldn’t see him. Could only hear his voice.

  He was lying in the bathtub, and the water
was red.

  No.

  She didn’t want to. Didn’t want to see that again.

  “Nina-girl. Come on.”

  She felt his hand on her ankle. He took hold of her foot. Why was he holding her foot? If you want someone to follow you, you take them by the hand. She pulled her leg away, and her foot slipped out of his grasp.

  He was lying in the bathtub, and the water was red. The blood was flowing from both wrists, and his eyes, still alive, clung to her face.

  “Nina . . .”

  No. Her entire body jerked. She didn’t want to, didn’t want to . . . The world rocked wildly from side to side, and she kicked out, waved her arms.

  Water. Cold water.

  The shock raced through her, but the cold was better, sharper than lukewarm, bloodred bathwater. More real. She opened her eyes. There was a light, a light in the water. She grabbed at it and got hold of something. Fabric. Clothes. Clothes on a person.

  The camper. The carbon monoxide. They had tried to gas her. He had tried to gas her. Vincent.

  She hooked her arm around his neck. Lashed her legs around his body. Clung to him while they sank. Bubbles from the parka hood rose up around them, glittering in the light from his head lamp.

  She felt no desire to breathe. It was as if her lungs were paralyzed. She could let herself sink, fall for all eternity.

  “Nina-girl. Wake up now.”

  She ignored him. You don’t have to obey dead fathers.

  The man, Vincent, twisted in her grip. He tried to bend, fumbling for something with flapping hands. In the light from the lamp she saw why they were sinking so fast. The rope around his ankle. Somewhat farther down, something heavy that was just a shadow. She pulled the headlight off him and let it shine directly on the rope.

  You could loosen it, she said to herself. Or let go of him so he could do it. We could both rise to the surface together.

  She didn’t. She just held on. Right until she felt his chest spasm helplessly. She imagined how the water was streaming into his open mouth. He still fought, writhed, kicked. But not for long.

  Not until he stopped did she let go.

  She hung completely still in the water. A single wriggle loosened the oversized hideous pink jogging pants from her hips. Then she slowly began to rise. She did nothing. Didn’t swim, didn’t fight, just rose quietly and infinitely slowly toward the surface with the head lamp gripped tight in one hand.

  “Nina-girl.”

  She saw him there in the water, with open still-alive eyes. He stretched his hand toward her, but she didn’t take it.

  Not now, Dad.

  Søren stood on the lakeshore with an empty twenty-liter plastic bottle in his arms—the camper’s water tank, which he had emptied. He had taken off his windbreaker, T-shirt and pants and considered for a few more seconds whether it was really just a form of suicide he was engaged in. Visibility was almost zero. He had tried to direct the beams of the Land Cruiser’s headlights out across the lake, but the difference in height between the top of the slope and the water’s surface was too great—the beams pointed into the darkness and rain someplace above his head without illuminating what he most needed to see. He didn’t know how big the lake was, and to set out without even knowing in which direction it made sense to swim . . . It amounted to a form of madness. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to live with the consequences of his mistakes if he didn’t find her. If there was still hope, if there was even the tiniest chance that she was still alive . . .

  He had tied a length of blue nylon rope around the bottle, more or less like you tie a ribbon around a package. The flashlight was lashed to the top of the bottle. He hoped it would hold. The other end of the rope he had tied around his waist, with a few meters’ slack between himself and the bottle. He began to wade into the lake water. He was so wet and cold already that it actually felt warmer than the air.

  As he was letting himself slide forward to start swimming, he thought he saw . . . something. He rose abruptly again, found the bottom with his feet and stretched to his full height.

  There.

  A tiny glint of light, a vulnerable spark that disappeared, came back, disappeared, came back, with each flat slow ripple of the lake.

  “Niiiinaaaa!”

  Still no answer. He might be swimming toward a murderer, he was well aware of that. It could be V. But if it was and if he was alone . . . Søren began to swim with long, solid strokes. The bottle bobbed along in his wake, and he could feel the little tug on the rope around his waist with every kick.

  Ten strokes. Then head up and treading water, to be sure he still was going in the direction of the light. Ten more strokes. Ten more.

  It wasn’t a boat; that much he could see. It was a person. A person floating in the water, unmoving and silent.

  Ten strokes. Ten strokes.

  It was her.

  She was floating on her back, face up. Dead people don’t do that, he tried to tell himself. But if she was alive, why wasn’t she swimming? Why was she just lying there?

  Five strokes, six strokes . . . and then he could finally touch her.

  “Nina.” He barely had enough voice to get her name out. Did she react? He pulled her close, grabbed hold of her face with one hand. She looked up at him, eyes alive.

  But her pupils were enormous, wide and unfocused. She didn’t try to answer him, and when his fumbling fingers found her pulse, it was so slow that he thought at first he had lost it again.

  “Nina . . . Nina, wake up. Help me a little.”

  Her lips moved, but there was no sound.

  He had to face the fact that she was incapable of holding on to the plastic bottle. He managed to get one of her arms across it, but he had to tie her on, and then he had to hook himself to the rope to make sure the bottle didn’t just tip under her weight.

  Now he was grateful for the Land Cruiser’s headlights. Their beams gave him a direction, a marker to swim toward. He forced his stiff and exhausted legs to scissor, but he didn’t have the strength for the faster, more exhausting crawl.

  He didn’t think much. Not even about how she had survived—only about getting them both safely to shore.

  There were lights around her. Lights and voices. A mask was pushed down over her face, and she tried to push it away.

  “It’s oxygen,” she heard Søren say. “You need it.”

  Oxygen. That made sense. She lay still and let them do it.

  The light stung her eyes, but it also reminded her that she was alive. Even the pounding, hammering headache that felt as if it was squeezing her brain out through her eye sockets, even that was better than nothing. Not to feel was to die. And she wanted to live.

  She closed her eyes, raised one hand slightly and fumbled blindly. He grabbed it. His hand was cold as ice, but that was another thing it was possible to live with.

  Better than nothing. Much better than nothing.

  Later she found out that he had dragged her all the way to shore, up the slope and back to the Land Cruiser. He had driven her directly to the hospital because he didn’t have a cell phone and it was faster than trying to get help any other way.

  They had given her pressurized oxygen. She remembered it floatingly, unclearly, as if it was something that had happened to someone else. Almost twenty-four hours had passed before she stopped hallucinating. None of the ghosts were her father’s, however. She wondered whether she had left him there in the cold, dark waters of the lake. She wasn’t sure.

  She floated in and out of sleep, dozing among flickering illusions on the border between dreams and wakefulness.

  During one of the lucid moments, she found Caroline Westmann standing by her bed.

  “I know you’re tired,” she said. “But I just need you to confirm the following: Was it Vincent Bernardo and Ubaldo Martinez who exposed you to carbon monoxide poisoning
?” Westmann placed two photographs on her covers. One was an oddly smiling portrait of Vincent, the other a more neutral identification photo of the other Filipino. Her pulse gave an involuntary skip and jump at the sight.

  “Is that Martinez?” she asked.

  “Yes. Was he one of them?” Caroline Westmann’s gaze hung on hers like a dog waiting for a treat.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Thank you!” The detective sergeant beamed with satisfaction. “That’s about all we need for now. Get better!”

  The next time she opened her eyes her mother was sitting there looking at her.

  “Are you awake?” asked Hanne Borg. “Really awake?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Can’t you tell?”

  “You opened your eyes earlier, but I couldn’t get you to answer.”

  Unresponsive. Not a very promising sign.

  “I’m okay now,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure. Carbon monoxide poisoning could do ugly long-term damage, even if you survived the acute phase. Heart problems. Brain damage, other organ damage. Some issues only surfaced over time.

  Oh, damn. She didn’t want to be a disability case.

  While she had been struggling to get the Land Cruiser’s window open, to get air, to get oxygen, she had thought only of surviving. She knew now that two things had kept her alive—the thin stream of fresh oxygen-rich air that had come in through the not-quite-closed window, and the fact that modern cars were equipped with a catalytic converter that cut down on the carbon monoxide in the exhaust. When the two Filipinos had opened the door and dragged her out, she had been partly pretending to be unconscious. It was the roll and tumble down the slope and the final loose-limbed fall that had turned off the last of the lights.

  It could so easily have been permanent.

  “Where is Søren?” she suddenly asked. He had been there at the beginning, but . . . that was a long time ago. Several awakenings ago. That she had seen him . . .

  “He’s been admitted too,” said her mother. “Relax . . . It’s pneumonia. He’s being treated. He’ll be fine.”

  “Mom, he . . .” She couldn’t figure out how to continue. Didn’t know what it actually was she needed to say. Something about holding on, something about there being someone . . . that there was someone now who made sure she didn’t go down. Literally. Someone who could hold her, hold on to her, someone who knew what it was like in the war zone and still wasn’t . . . wasn’t desperate.