“Who hangs around at a crime scene,” Larsen objected, “with thousands of people who could discover you at any minute?”
“Do you have a better explanation?” Anette asked.
Larsen threw up his hands and snarled something inaudible. Anette rolled her eyes at him, and everyone else looked at the floor, except for the superintendent. She glared at Jeppe, as if to pin the blame on him for the team’s discouragement. Where, of course, it rightly belonged.
He quickly handed out assignments and called the meeting to an end. When he and the superintendent were alone, Jeppe could read from her worry lines that he was up for an adult-size scolding.
She stood in front of him with her hands on her hips, imposing despite her small stature and mild expression.
“Kørner,” she said. “What do you expect me to tell the police chief, the media?”
“That we’re investigating all leads and eagerly accepting witness statements.”
“We have no leads!” She pointed at him. “The only forensic evidence we’ve found pointed to a man who has now been murdered himself. Seriously: What do we have? Are there any suspects?”
Jeppe shrugged. The superintendent exhaled through her nose and walked to the door.
“I’ve asked Mosbæk to come in this afternoon at three to assist you with the investigation.”
“Mosbæk? Now?”
Jeppe’s mood sank even further at the prospect of spending the afternoon with the police psychologist. Not that he wasn’t good—Jeppe had consulted him privately and knew his professional expertise was top-notch—but right now talking about the killer’s psychology instead of looking for concrete clues seemed like a loss of valuable time.
The superintendent stopped in the doorway.
“Are you ready for this, Kørner? Because everyone would understand if this was too much on your plate… your illness, and all.”
He nodded resolutely and let the superintendent leave the room without commenting further. The compassion that followed a divorce-induced nervous breakdown was almost as bad as the breakdown itself.
Jeppe gathered his papers and reviewed his own plan for the day. The two other members of the writers’ group were to be questioned, first Erik Kingo, then Anna Harlov. Fortunately Anette had offered to notify Kristoffer’s next of kin. She was bringing one of the beat cops out to Kristoffer’s mother to share with her the bad news—and see if she could shed any light on his final days. Kristoffer had not, it seemed, been close to his mentally frail mother, but still she might have some important information. And at any rate she needed to be notified.
Jeppe decided to dispatch a couple of officers to visit Esther de Laurenti as well. He suspected her reaction to Kristoffer’s death would be even worse than the mother’s.
* * *
P. KNUDSENS GADE is one of the main arterial approaches into Copenhagen, which most people drive routinely in and out of the city but very few people ever really notice. Jeppe had jotted down the address of one of Esther de Laurenti’s writing associates, Erik Kingo, as HF Frem 4, P. Knudsens Gade during a brief phone conversation in which they had set their meeting. Now he wondered: HF usually referred to haveforening, a Danish allotment or community garden, often featuring a hodgepodge of summer cabins or tiny houses. Could there really be a community garden along the four-lane road that he had never noticed? And why would a successful author live along one of the main traffic arteries in the unglamorous South Harbor district?
As Jeppe neared Ellebjerg Elementary School, he slowed down and parked on Gustav Bangs Gade by a dense green shrub behind a chain-link fence. Sure enough: a community garden.
He walked along the chain-link fence until he came to a gate with a blue enamel sign where the letters HF Frem fought wind and weather for the right to maintain their white coloring. Inside the gate stood tiny wooden houses, beaming in happy colors, some with sunrooms and outbuildings haphazardly attached. The scent of freshly mowed grass competed with the buzzing of the bees to awaken childhood memories. He passed garden plots where people sat at picnic tables in shorts and bare feet, enjoying the midday sun with a cold beer. Retirees in the middle of a card game on one side, a family with young kids playing with the hose and an inflatable wading pool on the other. A father looked up when he heard footsteps and eyed Jeppe skeptically, squinting in the bright light.
The path ended between two little houses built on pilings over an oval pond. On the slopes all the way around the pond were wooden houses of all shapes and colors in a messy, idyllic, and very Danish version of a shantytown. Trees leaned, their dark green leaves dangling over the surface of the water, sun umbrellas beamed above wooden decks, and little dinghies lay moored among the water lilies. Jeppe had to remind himself that he was standing in the middle of southwest Copenhagen. He could hardly hear the traffic noise from the road only a stone’s throw away.
“You must be the doughnut eater.”
Jeppe turned and saw a tall man about sixty years old wiping his hands on a stained cotton rag. Judging from his worn white shirt, which was rolled up to reveal sinewy forearms, he had been painting something blue. Erik Kingo had broad shoulders, thick white hair, and a pronounced jaw—all of which clearly pleased him. He glanced at Jeppe without a smile and continued calmly to wipe his big hands.
“Yes, I paint, too,” he explained, as if to beat Jeppe to his inevitable questions. Then he turned and walked toward the house on the left side of the path without inviting Jeppe to join him.
Yet another alpha male, Jeppe thought wearily, and followed him.
“I suppose you’d like some coffee?”
Jeppe declined with a shake of the head and sat down on a storage bench without waiting for an invitation.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about the writers’ group that you, Esther de Laurenti, and…” He fumbled for his notepad.
“Anna Harlov is her name.” Erik Kingo beat him to the punch. “Quite a looker. Can’t write five sentences without losing three of them to banalities. But no women can, really, if you ask me. What would you like to know?”
Jeppe leaned forward to take a little weight off his haunches, which hurt the moment they encountered the hard, wooden bench. The storage bench was the only cabin-style feature of an otherwise minimalistic furnished home. No cushions, no knickknacks apart from two small bronze sculptures in a bookcase. A heavy desk took up most of the small space, signaling that work took priority over socializing.
“What can you tell me about your writers’ group?” Jeppe said, opening his notepad. “How long have you had it?”
Erik Kingo folded his arms over his chest and rested a contemplative finger on his chin. It looked both affected and masculine at the same time.
“Oh, God, let me see. I met Anna at a San Cataldo writers’ retreat about five or six years ago, and we’ve been in touch ever since. She’s married to a first-rate guy, John Harlov. Runs the Danish Arts Foundation. Anyway, our writers’ group just sort of came into being along the way as we showed drafts to each other and commented on each other’s ideas. Writing is a lonely process. It’s nice to get competent feedback from someone other than your editor.”
“I thought you said that Anna Harlov couldn’t write?”
“And God knows she can’t. But she has the qualities to become a good editor. Sharp eye. Esther joined just under a year ago. John was actually the one who suggested her. Mostly as a favor. I mean, she hasn’t published anything yet. She’s writing a hysteria-filled attempt at a murder mystery like so many other people. But her knowledge of literary history is impeccable.”
Erik Kingo finished wiping the paint off his hands and poured himself a cup of coffee from a Turkish coffeepot, the kind that produces a brew as thick as tar with sediment in it.
“We upload the texts we want feedback on to a shared folder in Google Docs, which Anna set up and maintains. She’s pretty adept with stuff like that. It’s only the three of us, there’s a password, and we’ve signed a writt
en contract that we won’t share information from it with anyone else. It would be a disaster if any of my material leaked out.”
Kingo tilted his head back and drained the last of the coffee from his espresso cup. Then he reached for the pot, carefully refilled his cup, and sat down on a chair across from Jeppe.
“Listen, I’m well aware that Esther’s gotten mixed up in some murder case or something, but what does that have to do with the rest of us?”
Jeppe paused before answering, taking in the man in front of him. Kingo radiated an almost old-fashioned kind of masculine authority that was rarely seen anymore. It was apparent that he was used to people indulging him.
“I can’t go into details, but there is a connection between the murder of Esther’s tenant and the manuscript she uploaded to the Google Docs page.”
“A connection?” Kingo repeated.
Jeppe maintained eye contact but didn’t say anything.
After a few seconds Kingo looked into his coffee cup and said, “Too bad about the girl, though. She was cute.”
“The girl?”
Kingo drank, then cleared his throat. “Esther’s tenant. Julie, right? I met her last time I went to one of Esther’s red wine orgies. She served the food along with that anorexic young singing teacher.”
Kristoffer. Jeppe stiffened. Kingo had met both victims.
“When was this?”
“A few months ago. It must have been the end of March, because I did a writer’s residency at the Hald manor until March fifteenth.”
“Did you talk to Julie? Or to Kristoffer… the singing teacher?”
“Not a word,” Kingo said, scraping blue paint off his thumbnail. “There were ten or twelve of us at the table, and the conversation was lively the whole evening, so there wasn’t time to chat with the help. I may have asked her for a cup of coffee at one point.”
Jeppe made a note to ask Esther de Laurenti about that party and then met Kingo’s self-assured gaze again.
“Back to the manuscript. When did you read it?”
“A few weeks ago. She used her own building as the setting for the story, that’s quite clear.”
“Were you aware that the girl in the book was modeled after Julie Stender?”
“No,” Kingo said with a shrug. “It could have been any young, small-town girl. Actually, that was one of the critiques I had of Esther’s text. That the victim was the most tired cliché in the world. Why not kill off an old man or a homeless person instead? Although I should point out, now, that the girl wasn’t murdered yet in the part of the manuscript I read.”
“So you haven’t read the pages Esther uploaded a week ago? The second part?” Jeppe studied the man sitting across from him, with the sunburned face and dark eyes, but saw only a vague indifference.
“I haven’t turned on a computer since I moved out here for the summer, three weeks ago. I own an apartment in Christianshavn, where I spend my winters. Out here it’s primitive; no internet, no unnecessary electronics. I have my cell phone, but I switch it on only once a day and then turn it off again right away unless there’s something urgent. I don’t even wear a watch.”
Kingo showed his bare arms to Jeppe. They were tanned with veins twisting just beneath the skin, drawing lines around the paint splotches. A signet ring gleamed on the pinky finger of his right hand.
“I’m here to work. Some days I paint, some days I write. And I write by hand. The only reason I know Julie was killed is that you called.” Kingo pulled his arms back and ran a hand through his white hair.
“Where were you on Tuesday evening?” Jeppe asked, and thought he saw Erik Kingo smile fleetingly.
“Tuesday evening, well, and late into the night, I was at my publisher’s summer party, where I received a prize, gave a speech, and then went on to a late-night pub with my publisher and several editors. I wonder if that could be used as an alibi?”
It probably could. Jeppe made a note.
Kingo turned and peered thoughtfully at the pond.
“That’s one of Copenhagen’s deepest ponds, did you know that?” he asked. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s up to thirteen meters deep and full of fish. There’re even turtles in it. An old lime mine, of course. We call it Church Pond, because it’s right by a church. Danish creativity at its best. See, if I ever killed someone, which I would never do in writing nor in real life, then I’d toss them into this pond here with something heavy around their feet and let the eels eat up the body.”
Erik Kingo laughed briefly and then waved his own morbid image away with a surprisingly elegant hand gesture. Jeppe watched his broad fingers and felt a shiver start at the top of his spine.
CHAPTER 19
It was quiet in the building at Klosterstræde 12. On the first floor the apartment stood empty because a catastrophe had struck and left it deserted. The second floor was abandoned because its resident was at the hospital trying to fight his way back to life. And on the third floor, things were quiet because Esther de Laurenti couldn’t get herself to make a sound. Sound is equivalent to life, except when the sound is a doorbell bearing bad news, then sound is equivalent to death. Her thoughts spun like a tornado; she should never have opened the door.
She sat on the armrest of the sofa, exactly where she had been sitting when the two police officers brought their news about Kristoffer. Getting up or moving to sit more comfortably seemed wrong. The world should stop.
I know there will be a next step, she thought, but I can’t take it. Even breathing felt traitorous. She noticed to her own surprise that she wasn’t crying. Even my tears have abandoned me, she thought, and instantly censured herself. This isn’t a book, this. It’s for real.
She forced herself to stand up, take a deep breath, and felt her blood moving. Had to take the dogs out, take out the trash. Look her manuscript over, think and try to figure out what had happened.
She had to try to understand that Kristoffer was gone.
In the bathroom, under the cool water, it hit her. Kristoffer wasn’t coming back; she would never see him again. Julie’s death had been awful, especially because she felt partly responsible, but losing Kristoffer was like losing her own child. Esther pressed the handheld showerhead to her chest and cried. Long, plaintive sobs echoed off the shiny tiles, until all strength left her and she let herself slump down on the wet floor.
She lay on the bathroom floor until she was shivering. Slowly got up, turned on the hot water, put the showerhead back in the holder on the wall, and let herself warm up. Dried off in a thick towel from the heated towel rack and applied lotion as usual. Life went on, even when it came to a halt. After she got dressed, she made coffee in the French press and sat down at her desk by the window.
Esther bitterly regretted having banished Kristoffer and squandering his final days by creating a division between them. It felt inexcusable not to have said goodbye. She wondered who would arrange the funeral, seriously doubted that Kristoffer’s mother was up to doing it. She had to offer her assistance.
While Esther’s thoughts surged back and forth between horror and practicalities, her hands sorted the papers on her desk into various piles. One with all the notes and drafts for her crime novel, which she would hand over to Jeppe Kørner at her first opportunity. One with bills, and one with citations for a book about Oscar Wilde that she had been contemplating writing for a few years. She placed the dog-eared Vagant literary magazines in a fourth pile and set the used coffee cups on the floor. Her opal ring, which had been missing for a long time, appeared under a copy of Galen’s That the Best Physician Is Also a Philosopher and she rejoiced wholeheartedly for a brief instant before she remembered and the world once again became unbearable.
When she visited Gregers in the hospital the day before, he had half-jokingly asked what she had done to bring these tribulations down on their building. He didn’t know how spot-on he was. Of all the crime novels in the world, why mine?
Esther made a pile of tax papers in the desk drawe
r, thereby unearthing a crumb-covered plate and a black tape dispenser. She put the plate down by the coffee cups and the tape dispenser on top of the tax pile. It was so heavy she had to use two hands. She continued sorting some fact sheets from the Pathology Department, with an uneasy feeling in her gut.
Something wasn’t right.
She looked at the desk. That tape dispenser, clumsy and functional—surely it wasn’t hers. Could she have borrowed it from someone and forgotten to return it? She never used tape.
If she had brought it home from the department, it would say University of Copenhagen on it somewhere. Esther turned the tape dispenser over in the light from the window but couldn’t find any label on it.
The bottom was covered with a light-gray, heavy-duty felt. But at one end the felt pad was no longer light gray. A dark brown stain extended out from one corner, turning into small splatters across the surface.
Esther’s hands gave way and the tape dispenser fell on the floor with a bang.
There was blood spatter in her blond eyelashes, filigree against her pale skin. She bore the mark on her cheek like an adornment.
He had bestowed eternal beauty on her. Her friend was given a last flight, landing in a circle of light.
Generous gifts. Can you see me now?
The nightmare factory’s comforter people formed me, shaped me by their absence. But now I do the shaping. Me, the knife wielder. Writing the story. My own story.
I’m not crazy, I’m one of you.
But there must be balance in things. Equilibrium between living and dead, opting in and opting out, chickens and eggs. There are limits to what one can tolerate. When the so-called caretakers ruin instead and the world watches without intervening, then a new set of rules emerges. A new justice.
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