by David Hewson
Non nobis solum nati sumus.
We are not born for ourselves alone.
Cicero, De Officiis (Book I, sec. 22)
Contents
Principal Characters
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Principal Characters
Copenhagen Police
Sarah Lund – Vicekriminalkommissær, Homicide
Jan Meyer – Vicekriminalkommissær, Homicide
Hans Buchard – Chief Inspector, Homicide
Lennart Brix – Deputy/Acting Chief, Homicide
Svendsen – Detective, Homicide
Jansen – Forensic Officer
Bülow – Investigations Officer
Birk Larsen family
Theis Birk Larsen – father
Pernille Birk Larsen – mother
Nanna Birk Larsen – Theis and Pernille’s daughter
Anton Birk Larsen – Theis and Pernille’s son
Emil Birk Larsen – Theis and Pernille’s son
Lotte Holst – Pernille’s younger sister
Rådhus (City Hall) politiciansand employees
Troels Hartmann – leader of the Liberal Group and Mayor of Education
Rie Skovgaard – Hartmann’s political adviser
Morten Weber – Hartmann’s campaign manager
Poul Bremer – Lord Mayor of Copenhagen
Kirsten Eller – Leader of the Centre Group
Jens Holck – Leader of the Moderate Group
Mai Juhl – Leader of the Environment Party Group
Knud Padde – chair of the Liberal Group
Henrik Bigum – committee member of the Liberal Group
Olav Christensen – a civil servant in the Education Department
Gert Stokke – a civil servant heading Holck’s Environment Department
Frederiksholm High School
Oliver Schandorff – a pupil, Nanna’s former boyfriend
Jeppe Hald – a pupil
Lisa Rasmussen – a pupil
Rektor Koch – the headmistress
Rahman Al Kemal – a teacher, popularly known as Rama
Henning Kofoed – a teacher
Others
Hanne Meyer – Jan Meyer’s wife
Carsten – Lund’s former husband
Bengt Rosling – a criminal psychologist, Lund’s current boyfriend
Mark – Lund’s son
Vagn Skærbæk – Birk Larsen family friend and long-term employee
Leon Frevert – taxi driver and part-time Birk Larsen employee
Amir El’ Namen – son of an Indian restaurant owner, Nanna’s childhood friend
John Lynge – a driver for Troels Hartmann
One
Friday, 31st October
Through the dark wood where the dead trees give no shelter Nanna Birk Larsen runs.
Nineteen, breathless, shivering in her skimpy torn slip, bare feet stumbling in the clinging mud.
Cruel roots snag her ankles, snarling branches tear her pale and flailing arms. She falls, she clambers, she struggles out of vile dank gullies, trying to still her chattering teeth, to think, to hope, to hide.
There is a bright monocular eye that follows, like a hunter after a wounded deer. It moves in a slow approaching zigzag, marching through the Pinseskoven wasteland, through the Pentecost Forest.
Bare silver trunks rise from barren soil like limbs of ancient corpses frozen in their final throes.
Another fall, the worst. The ground beneath her vanishes and with it her legs. Hands windmilling, crying out in pain and despair, the girl crashes into the filthy, ice-cold ditch, collides with rocks and logs, paddles through sharp and cutting gravel, feels her head and hands, her elbows, her knees, graze the hard invisible terrain that lurks below.
The chill water, the fear, his presence not so far away . . .
She staggers, gasping, out of the mire, clambers up the bank, splays her naked, torn and bleeding feet against the swampy ground to gain some purchase from the sludge between her toes.
At the ridge ahead she finds a tree. Some last few leaves of autumn brush against her face. The trunk is larger than its peers and as her arms fall round it she thinks of Theis her father, a giant of a man, silent, morose, a staunch and stoic bulwark against the world outside.
She grips the tree, clutches at it as once she clutched him. His strength with hers, hers with his. Nothing more was ever needed, ever would be.
From the limitless sky falls a low-pitched whine. The bright, all-seeing lights of a jet escaping the bounds of gravity, fleeing Kastrup, fleeing Denmark. Its fugitive presence dazzles and blinds. In the unforgiving brilliance Nanna Birk Larsen’s fingers stray to her face. Feel the wound running from her left eye to her cheek, vicious, open, bleeding.
She can smell him, feel him. On her. In her.
Through all the pain, amidst the fear, rises a hot and sudden flame of fury.
You’re Theis Birk Larsen’s daughter.
They all said that when she gave them reason.
You’re Nanna Birk Larsen, Theis’s child, Pernille’s too, and you shall escape the monster in the night, chasing through the Pentecost Forest on the fringes of the city where, a few long miles away, lies that warm safe place called home.
She stands and grips the trunk as once she gripped her father, arms round the splintering silver bark, shiny slip stained with dirt and blood, shivering, quiet, convincing herself salvation lies ahead, beyond the dark wood and the dead trees that give no shelter.
A white beam ranges over her again. It is not the flood of illumination falling from the belly of a plane that flies above this wasteland like a vast mechanical angel idly looking for a stray lost soul to save.
Run, Nanna, run, a voice cries.
Run, Nanna, run, she thinks.
There is one torchlight on her now, the single blazing eye. And it is here.
Two
Monday, 3rd November
‘Around the back,’ the cop said. ‘Some homeless guy found her.’
Seven thirty in the morning. Still dark with the rain coming down in straight and icy lines. Vicekriminalkommissær Sarah Lund stood in the lee of the dirty brick building near the docks, watching the uniform men lay out the Don’t Cross lines.
The last crime scene she’d ever see in Copenhagen. It had to be a murder. A woman too.
‘The building’s empty. We’re checking the block of flats opposite.’
‘How old is she?’ Lund asked.
The cop, a man she barely knew, shrugged his shoulders then wiped the rain from his face with his arm.
‘Why’d you ask?’
A nightmare she wanted to say. One that woke her at six thirty that morning, screaming bolt upright in an empty bed. When she got up Bengt, kind, thoughtful, calm Bengt, was padding round the place finishing the packing. Mark, her son, lay fast asleep in front of the TV in his room, didn’t even stir when, very quietly, she peeked in. That night the three of them would catch the flight to Stockholm. A new life in another country. Corners turned. Bridges burned.
Sarah Lund was thirty-eight, a serious woman, staring endlessly at the world around her, never once herself. She was starting her final day in the Copenhagen police. Women like her didn’t have nightmares, terrors in the dark, fleeting glimpses of a frightened young face that might, once upon a time, have been hers.
They were fantasies for others.
‘No need for an answer,’ the cop sa
id, scowling at her silence as he lifted up the tape and walked her to the sliding metal door. ‘I’ll tell you something. I’ve never seen one like this.’
He passed her a pair of blue forensic gloves, watched as she put them on, then put his shoulder to the rusting metal. It opened squealing like a tortured cat.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he said.
She didn’t wait, just walked ahead the way she always did, alone, staring, this way then that, bright eyes wide open, always looking.
For some reason he rolled the sliding door shut the moment she was inside, so rapidly the cat squealed an octave higher than before. Then fell silent with the metallic clatter of the heavy iron slamming out the grey day behind.
Ahead lay a central corridor and a chamber like a meat store hung with hooks at intervals along the rafters. A single set of bulbs in the ceiling.
The concrete floor was damp and shining. Something moved in the shadows at the end, swinging slowly like a gigantic pendulum.
There was the clatter of an unseen switch and then the place was as dark as the bedroom that morning when a savage unwanted dream shook her awake.
‘Lights!’ Lund called.
Her voice echoed round the black and empty belly of the building.
‘Lights, please.’
Not a sound. She was an experienced cop, remembered everything she was supposed to carry, except for the gun which always seemed an afterthought.
She had the torch though, safe in her right pocket, took it out and held it the way cops did: right hand upright, wrist cocked back, beam ahead, searching, peering into places others didn’t look.
The light and Lund went hunting. Blankets, discarded clothes, two crushed Coke cans, an empty packet of condoms.
Three steps and then she stopped. By the right wall, visible at the point it met the floor was a puddle of liquid, scarlet and sticky, two horizontal lines along the peeling plaster, the way blood smeared when a body was dragged along the floor.
Lund reached into her pocket, took out the packet of nicotine gum, popped a piece in her mouth.
It wasn’t just Copenhagen getting left behind. Tobacco was on the hit list too.
She bent down and placed a blue gloved finger in the sticky puddle, lifted it to her nose and sniffed.
Three more steps and she came upon a woodman’s axe, the handle clean and shiny as if it had been bought from a store the day before. She placed two fingers in the pool of red liquid that ran around the blade, tested it, sniffed and thought.
She’d never learn to like the taste of Nicotinell. Lund walked on.
The thing ahead was getting clearer. It swung from side to side. An industrial tarpaulin so smeared with red it looked like the shroud of a slaughtered beast.
What lay inside had a familiar, human shape.
Lund changed the position of the torch, held it close to her waist, beam upwards, checking the fabric, looking for something to grip.
The material came away in one swift movement and what lay beneath swung slowly in the beam. The frozen face the light caught was male, mouth open in a perpetual O. Black hair, pink flesh, a monstrous plastic penis erect and winking. And over its head a vivid blue Viking helmet with silver horns and gold braids running down.
Lund cocked her head and, for their sake, smiled.
Tied to the chest of the sex toy was a notice: Thanks boss, for seven great years. The boys.
Laughter from the shadows.
The boys.
A good prank. Though they might have got real blood.
The Politigården was a grey labyrinth on reclaimed land near the waterfront. Bleak and square on the outside, the interior of the police headquarters opened up to a round courtyard. Classical pillars stood in a shadowy arcade around the edge. Inside spiral staircases led to winding corridors lined with striated black marble running round the perfect circle like calcified veins. It had taken her three months to find her way around this dark and maze-like complex. Even now, sometimes, she had to think hard to work out where she was.
Homicide was on the second floor, north-east. She was in Buchard’s room, wearing the Viking helmet, listening to their jokes, opening their presents, smiling, keeping quiet beneath the cardboard horns and the golden braids.
Then she thanked them and went to her office, began to clear her belongings. No time for fuss. She smiled at the photo of Mark she kept in a frame on the desk. Three years before, back when he was nine, long before he came home with the ridiculous earring. Before – just – the divorce. Then along came Bengt to tempt her to Sweden and a life across the bleak, cold waters of the Øresund. Young Mark, unsmiling then as now. That would change in Sweden. Along with everything else.
Lund swept the rest of the desk, her three-month supply of Nicotinell, the pens, the pencil sharpener in the shape of a London bus, into a flimsy cardboard box then placed the photo of Mark on top.
The door opened and a man walked in.
She looked, she judged, the way she always did. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. His hair was short, his face severe. Big eyes, big ears. Clothes cheap and a little too young for a man who wasn’t far off her own age. He was carrying a box much like hers. She could see a map of Copenhagen, a kid’s basketball net for the wall, a toy police car and a pair of headphones.
‘I’m looking for Lund’s office,’ he said, staring at the Viking helmet perched on the new pair of skis they’d given her at breakfast.
‘That’s me.’
‘Jan Meyer. Is that uniform around here?’
‘I’m going to Sweden.’
Lund picked up her belongings and the two of them did a little dance around each other as she struggled to the door.
‘For the love of God . . . why?’ Meyer asked.
She put down the box, swept back her long brown wayward hair, tried to think if there was anything left that mattered.
He took out the basketball net, looked at the wall.
‘My sister did something like that,’ Meyer said.
‘Like what?’
‘Couldn’t keep her life in one piece here so she moved to Bornholm with a guy.’ Meyer stuck the net above the filing cabinets. ‘Nice guy. Didn’t work.’
Lund got sick of her hair, pulled an elastic band from her pocket and tied it in a ponytail.
‘Why not?’
‘Too remote. They went mad listening to cows fart all day long.’ He took out a pewter beer tankard and turned it in his hands. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Sigtuna.’
Meyer stood stock still and stared at her in silence.
‘It’s very remote too,’ Lund added.
He took a long draw on his cigarette and pulled a small child’s football out of the box. Then he put the toy police car on the desk and started running it up and down. When the wheels moved the blue light burst into life and a tiny siren wailed.
He was still playing with it when Buchard walked in, a piece of paper in his hand.
‘You’ve met,’ the chief said. It wasn’t a question.
The bespectacled uncle figure she’d sat next to at breakfast had vanished.
‘We had the pleasure—’ Lund began.
‘This just came in.’ Buchard handed her the report slip. ‘If you’re too busy clearing up . . .’
‘I’ve got time,’ Lund told him. ‘All day . . .’
‘Good,’ Buchard said. ‘Why not take Meyer with you?’
The man with the box stubbed out his cigarette and shrugged.
‘He’s unpacking,’ Lund said.
Meyer let go of the car, picked up the football and bounced it in his hand.
He grinned. Looked different, more human, more rounded that way.
‘Never too busy for work.’
‘A good start,’ Buchard said. There was an edge to his voice. ‘I’d like that, Meyer, and so would you.’
Window down, looking round from the passenger seat, Lund scanned the Kalvebod Fælled. Thirteen kilometres south
of the city, near the water. It was a bright clear morning after a couple of days of rain. Probably wouldn’t stay fine for long. Flat marshland, yellow grass and ditches, stretched to the horizon, with a bare dark wood to the right. Faint smell of sea, closer stink of dank decaying vegetation. Moisture in the air, not far from freezing. A hard cold winter stirring.
‘You can’t carry a gun? You can’t make arrests? What about parking tickets?’
An early morning dog walker had found some girl’s clothes on wasteland near a patch of silver birch woodland known as the Pinseskoven. The Pentecost Forest.
‘You’ve got to be Swedish to arrest people. It’s a . . .’ Lund wished she’d never answered his questions. ‘It’s how it works.’
Meyer shoved a handful of potato crisps into his mouth then balled the bag into the footwell. He drove like a teenager, too fast, with little thought for others.
‘What does your boy think?’
She got out, didn’t check to see him follow.
There was a plain-clothes detective by the find, a uniform man wandering through the hummocks of grass, kicking at the dying clumps. This was all they had: a flowery cotton top, the kind a teenager might wear. A card for a video rental store. Both inside plastic evidence bags. The top had bloodstains on it.
Lund turned three hundred and sixty degrees, her large and lustrous eyes looking for something the way they always did.
‘Who comes here?’ she asked the uniform man.
