by David Hewson
Anton and Emil’s young voices drifted through from their room. They were playing well together for once.
Birk Larsen looked at their coats on the table. Put them on the hooks.
‘Maybe we should eat together tonight. We can watch TV with them.’
He was staring at her, wanting her approval.
‘Good idea,’ Pernille said and it was almost a whisper.
Not long after they heard the sliding garage door. A bright voice that seemed to be a part of the place calling, ‘Hello? Hello?’
Birk Larsen walked down the stairs first. Pernille followed.
Red suit, silver chain. Cheeky grin.
‘Hi, Theis. Did you get my message?’
Birk Larsen stayed at the foot of the stairs, said nothing.
‘What about the boys? Are they ready?’
Pernille joined her husband. The two of them stood together.
‘They can’t go today,’ Birk Larsen said. ‘Anton’s got a cold.’
Skærbæk’s face turned suspicious.
‘What do you mean he’s got a cold? He was fine this morning.’
‘Yeah, well . . .’
Pernille was silent.
Skærbæk stood there.
‘You always got me to lie for you, Theis. You’re so bad at it yourself.’
‘Vagn,’ Birk Larsen groaned. ‘Not now.’
‘This is ridiculous. I love the boys. I was really looking forward to picking them up.’
He looked ready to cry. Or lose his temper.
‘Yes,’ Birk Larsen said.
‘Can’t you see what they’re trying to do? They’re trying to break us up. They can’t find the bastard who did it so they turn on us.’
‘Did you lie to us, Vagn?’
A long pause.
‘What did they say? Tell me.’
Together they stood there in silence.
‘Jesus . . .’
He turned to go.
‘Vagn,’ Birk Larsen said.
Skærbæk turned, pointed an accusing finger.
‘I always stood up for you, Theis. And you, Pernille. You know that.’
‘Vagn!’
The door went up.
‘Always!’ Vagn Skærbæk shrieked, then walked off into the rain.
The TV studio was in Islands Brygge, brand new, low blue lights everywhere. Bremer turned up just before they were due to go on air, apologizing, looking flustered.
They sat at the interview desk, Hartmann making notes, Bremer fidgeting nervously. The cameras were dead and silent. The circus had yet to begin.
‘I have to tell you, Troels,’ Bremer said in a low, spiteful voice, ‘I find your conduct appalling.’
Hartmann glanced at him then went back to writing.
‘Instead of jumping to conclusions you could have come to me and checked these ridiculous accusations.’
‘Shall we begin the debate with that?’
A make-up woman came over and started to put powder on Bremer’s sweating forehead. Someone called four minutes to go. The lights went down.
‘Or with you fleeing to the police to file stupid reports?’ Bremer retorted.
‘You lead, I’ll follow.’
Bremer laughed. Caught him with a sly look.
‘You can no longer accuse me of covering for a murderer. The police know Holck didn’t do it. I’ve told his wife.’
‘Have you spoken to Olav Christensen’s mother? Asked her opinion?’
‘You don’t know a thing. To think I once believed you worthy—’
‘Save your breath. Save it for the police.’
Bremer grasped at the glass of water in front of him, gulped some down.
‘There won’t be any charges. Unless they go for Gert Stokke.’ He brightened. ‘Oh, look. Here comes Rie Skovgaard. She’ll probably bring you the same news.’
Hartmann got up to speak to her.
‘I talked to the police,’ she whispered. ‘Bremer has witnesses who’ll say he never spoke about Holck at the meeting with Stokke.’
‘There were no witnesses. The minutes make that clear.’
‘There are now. It’s going to be Stokke’s word against the Lord Mayor’s. Troels?’
Hartmann walked back to the table. Sat down in the interviewer’s seat, close to Bremer.
‘Stokke’s going to be fired,’ Bremer said, eyeing the camera. ‘That’ll be the end of it. And the end of you.’
Hartmann leaned over, whispered, ‘Can you feel the world crumbling beneath you, old man?’ Looked into his hooded grey eyes. ‘You’re like a decrepit actor who doesn’t know it’s time to leave the stage. The only one who doesn’t see it. Tragic in a way.’
A pause.
‘And when it’s over, Poul, people will try to forget about you. What you were. What you stood for. You’ll just be one grubby little detail in the history of this city. No plaques. No streets named after you. No monuments. No flowers on your grave. Just a dirty sense of shame.’
Bremer stared at him, mouth gaping, shocked, speechless.
‘Do you think you can save yourself by conjuring up witnesses?’ Hartmann asked with a smile. ‘It’s pathetic.’
Someone called one minute. The lights went up.
‘Your house is built on lies and it’s starting to burn all round you. Before long you won’t see the world for flames. And then you’re just ash and cinders. You’re gone.’
He got up, went back to his own seat.
Bremer gazed at him with such bitterness and hatred.
‘And what about you? Are you any better?’
‘Yes,’ Hartmann said. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘So tell me how you think the surveillance tape disappeared. How could the party’s flat be connected to this poor child’s murder and no one notices, not one of you?’
Hartmann stared at the notepad, scribbled doodles on it.
‘Who stole that tape, Troels, and kept it secret even though it seems to exonerate you? How come Skovgaard suddenly gets a tip about Gert Stokke?’
No answer.
‘You’re no better than me,’ Bremer snarled. ‘You just don’t know it.’
The interviewer strode past them, took her seat, said, ‘We’re nearly on.’
More lights. The cameras closed in, lenses hunting.
Poul Bremer smiled.
So did Troels Hartmann.
Two scuba divers in the dank and muddy waters of the canal on the Kalvebod Fælled, dark shiny shapes in the floodlights. Lund and Meyer watched as a portable gurney was lowered down to them on ropes.
The men above pulled something to the surface. It looked like a chrysalis the size of a man. Blue plastic. Shiny and held with tape.
Four forensic officers got it to the bank. The duty pathologist waited in a white bunny suit, medical case by his side.
Gloves on, he took a scalpel, ran it down the plastic. Opened up a flap, got ready to wind it back.
‘All sensitive souls retire now,’ the man said and no one moved.
It stank of rotten flesh and rotten water.
Torches ran over it, caught yellow bone. Ribs and a skull.
Brix waited on the upper bank. Lund stayed as close as the pathologist allowed.
‘There,’ she said, spotting something. ‘What’s that? Try scraping it.’
‘It’s not the body.’
‘I can see it’s not the body.’
With the back of his scalpel he wiped the grime and mud from the tape that bound her.
A word emerged. Blocked blue letters. MERKUR, with a flying wing to the left.
Lund started walking to the car.
Driving through the dark night Meyer got a call from headquarters.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘I think they found what Vagn was talking about. Twenty-one years ago there was an incident in Christiania. Probably down to selling dope or something. Vagn got badly beaten up. Might have been killed.’
‘Theis stopped them,’ Lund said.
<
br /> ‘I sometimes wonder why you ask questions.’
It wasn’t far to Vesterbro. Skærbæk lived in a public housing project near the meat-packing district.
‘There had to be something tying them together.’
‘So why would Vagn kill his daughter?’
‘Let’s ask him,’ she said.
It was an ugly white block, three storeys with a supermarket in the basement. At the end of the road the hookers were out for the night. Jaded girls trying to look pretty, showing their legs to the cars streaming towards them over the Dybbølsbro bridge.
They were some of the cheapest flats around. Long lines of small units joined by an exterior walkway with an iron grille fence at the front. Skærbæk lived on the first floor. Svendsen was outside the door already. The apartment was empty. No one had been home all day. He’d left the Birk Larsens. He wasn’t at the nursing home.
Svendsen started for the stairs. Lund and Meyer paced the walkway.
‘Let’s add this up,’ she said. ‘Vagn gave his uncle the medication at ten. Nanna arrived at the flat in Store Kongensgade one hour later.’
‘The timing works for me.’
‘But how did Vagn know where she was?’
There was someone up ahead walking past the pale grey doors.
Tall figure, skinny. Baseball cap. He pulled the peak over his face as soon as he saw them.
‘Maybe he kept an eye on her,’ Meyer suggested. ‘He knew where to go.’
‘How? She just happened to go to the flat to get her passport. It’s not a routine.’
The man in the baseball cap had gone back to the lift. Pressed the button.
Lund and Meyer got there behind him. He turned away from them, took a phone out of his pocket, looked ready to make a call.
‘We questioned him twice!’ Meyer said. ‘We should have arrested him.’
Whoever he was calling hadn’t answered.
‘Let’s take the stairs, Lund. We could wait for ever.’
She followed back the way they came.
Then stopped, looked back.
The man in the baseball cap never made the call. But he couldn’t stop himself turning. And then she saw.
‘Hey,’ Lund cried. ‘Hey!’
He was starting to run, dashing down the narrow corridor towards a distant stairwell.
‘Meyer!’
Lund turned to follow, found herself in darkness, struggling to get her bearings.
Fast footsteps on metal. Iron railing, iron steps below. She’d got halfway down when she saw it.
White Mercedes. Taxi sign on the top.
Leon Frevert. The last man to see Nanna alive.
Meyer was running for it too, trying to leap on the bonnet.
He didn’t have a gun, she thought. Thanks to Brix.
‘Meyer!’
Didn’t matter anyway. The Mercedes wheeled out of the parking area, tyres squealing and smoking.
Lund got to their car first. Passenger seat. Blue light out of the glovebox, popped flashing onto the roof.
‘This time, Meyer, you drive.’
‘Who the hell was that?’ he asked, falling into the seat.
She didn’t answer. Just called headquarters.
‘I want a search for Leon Frevert. White Mercedes. Taxi sign. Registration HZ 98050. Approach with caution. Frevert’s a suspect in the Birk Larsen case.’
Meyer took the car out so quickly she had to catch her breath.
Maybe he turned right into Vesterbro. Or over the Dybbølsbro bridge, back to the city, or out to Amager, to the bridge to Malmö.
He slammed on the brakes, sending the flock of mini-skirted hookers scattering onto the pavement.
‘Which way?’ Meyer asked. ‘Which way, Lund?’
To the woods, she thought. To the dead trees of the Pentecost Forest. In the end it always goes there.
‘Lund! Which way?’
The wet shining roads led everywhere.
‘I don’t know.’
Leon Frevert had a brother. Svendsen brought the man to Frevert’s dismal studio apartment off Vesterbrogade.
He was called Martin. An accountant with his own company in Østerbro. Dark suit and tie. Younger than his brother, not so skinny or so grey. More money, Lund thought. More brains.
Meyer looked round the place.
‘Doesn’t your brother believe in furniture?’
Martin Frevert sat on the single chair. There was a sofa, a single bed. Nothing else.
‘Last time I was here the place was fully furnished. Three weeks ago,’ he added before either of them could ask.
Lund asked, ‘What’s missing?’
Frevert looked around the place.
‘The table. All his CDs. His stuff.’
‘So you didn’t know he’d given notice?’
‘He never told me. Leon always said he liked this place. His choice.’
They’d found a ticket to Ho Chi Minh City via Frankfurt. Due to leave the following Monday. Bought two days before.
Meyer said, ‘He didn’t tell you he was going to Vietnam?’
‘No. He went there on holiday a year or so ago.’
Martin Frevert scowled, looked guilty.
‘He used to go to Thailand too. It was the girls, I think—’
‘Oh come on,’ Meyer said. ‘He’d got tickets. Got money. He’d packed his bags. Sold everything. And he didn’t tell his baby brother?’
Frevert looked incensed.
‘He didn’t tell me! What do you want me to say? Why would I lie to you?’
‘What about girlfriends?’ Lund asked.
‘Not recently. He used to be married.’
‘Kids?’ said Meyer.
‘No. It didn’t end well.’
‘Friends then?’
Martin Frevert glanced at his watch.
‘Leon doesn’t have many friends. We’d have him round for dinner now and then. But really . . .’ He shrugged. ‘What was there to talk about? He drove a taxi. He humped cardboard boxes around the place.’
Lund ordered Svendsen to take Frevert to headquarters to make a formal statement. Then she walked to the plain wall at the end of the room.
It was covered with newspaper front pages from the very beginning of the Nanna case. Photos of Hartmann. Of Jens Holck and Kemal. But most of all pictures of Nanna, smiling.
‘The brother didn’t know,’ Meyer said. ‘This creep kept it all to himself.’
‘We had him.’ Lund stared at the front pages, the felt-tip pen marks around Nanna’s photo on every one. ‘We had him and we let him go.’
She walked out, went down the stairs to the car park. Blue lights flashing. Cars everywhere marked and unmarked. Forensics turning up.
Svendsen was smoking by the metal steps.
‘He dumped the cab near Birk Larsen’s place then picked up his own car,’ Svendsen said. ‘We’ve got an alert out for it. His phone’s off. We’ll get a trace the moment it comes back on.’
‘Why didn’t we know Frevert worked for Birk Larsen? You interviewed him.’
Svendsen looked at her, said, ‘What?’
‘You interviewed him. Why didn’t we know?’
‘He came in as a witness. Not a suspect. You never asked us to check him out.’
‘Lund . . .’ Meyer began.
‘Are you an intern or something, Svendsen?’ she barked. ‘Do I need to tell you your job?’
‘He was a witness!’ the burly cop yelled at her.
Meyer retreated.
She stabbed a finger towards Svendsen’s face.
‘If we’d known he worked for Birk Larsen we wouldn’t be standing here looking like idiots. We’d have Leon Frevert in a cell.’
‘Don’t blame me for your fuck-ups.’
‘You,’ she said, waving a finger in his bull face, ‘are a lazy man. And there’s nothing I hate more than laziness.’
She walked back towards her car. Meyer was making conciliatory noises behind her.
; ‘We’ve been working round the clock!’ Svendsen shouted. ‘I’m not having that bitch call me lazy. You hear that!’
She got behind the wheel.
‘They’re doing their best,’ Meyer said through the window. ‘Give them a break.’
‘Find Leon Frevert and I might even buy them a beer. Get his description out to the media. Bring in Vagn Skærbæk for questioning again.’
‘Lund . . .’
She started the car and edged out into the road.
‘Lund?’ Meyer said, running at the window. ‘What the hell do we want Vagn for again?’
‘Company,’ she answered and drove off.
Morten Weber was listening to the radio news, grim-faced, weary. A couple of reporters and photographers had ambushed Hartmann on the way into the Rådhus, following him up the stairs until Skovgaard turned on them.
Weber turned up the volume as Hartmann took off his coat.
‘Sources in police headquarters indicate the killer of Nanna Birk Larsen has still to be found. There is new speculation about the coming elections. The case continues to haunt Troels Hartmann since the Liberal Party flat is known to be connected to the crime. The basis for the police report filed by Hartmann against the Lord Mayor appears to be crumbling. New witnesses have stated that Bremer was not privy to the conversation . . .’
‘Turn it off,’ Hartmann ordered.
The office was strewn with papers. Committee minutes and constitutional documents.
‘Let’s go back to the police and get an update. Rie?’
She nodded, looking glum.
‘Send out a press release stating that we maintain our position on Bremer. Emphasize that I’ve been cleared of all suspicion.’
‘I hope the public believe that,’ Weber grumbled.
Skovgaard asked, ‘What did Bremer say to you, Troels?’
‘He accused me of covering up details in the case.’
‘What details?’
‘The surveillance tape. The party flat. He seems to think we got the information on Gert Stokke deceitfully somehow.’
Skovgaard said nothing.
Weber checked his phone.
‘I hate to make a bad day worse,’ he said, ‘but that slimy bastard Erik Salin’s waiting outside for you. He says he has to talk to you. It’s important.’
‘To him or me?’
‘I’d guess him. Ignore it . . .’
Hartmann went into the main office. Erik Salin was on the sofa, helping himself to a glass of wine. He’d started working on special projects for one of the dailies, or so he said.
