Authors: Mikkel Birkegaard
Kit Hansen, the name of the fictional victim, is a beautiful 28-year-old redhead, slim and fit with large breasts. Her fear of water and of drowning stems from a tragedy in Sharm el Sheikh, where she and her boyfriend go diving by themselves only a few days after completing their training course. They get caught in a fishing net on the seabed. Kit manages to free herself and tries desperately to save her boyfriend, but he is helplessly entangled and she is forced to watch him drown. Bereaved, and laden with guilt, she has to return to Denmark and tell his family how he died, after which she suffers a breakdown. She loses her job with an advertising agency, withdraws from the world and becomes increasingly dependent on prescription drugs. Some time later her neighbour falls in love with her. He is the only person to look after the reclusive woman and slowly his love is noticed and reciprocated. With his help, she quits taking the pills. He also encourages her to see the psychologist, Venstrøm, who ultimately murders her. The story ends with the neighbour killing Venstrøm, but not before he has been subjected to a torture based on his fear of needles.
I flicked back in the book to the description of Kit Hansen and wondered to what extent she resembled the murdered woman – or, rather, vice versa. If it really was a copycat killing, did the real victim have red hair? Did she have a scar on her shin where the fishing net had cut right through to the bone when she struggled to free herself at the bottom of the sea in the Egyptian diving paradise?
How
far would the killer go to find a victim who matched the fictional character?
The alcohol was starting to take effect. My body felt heavier and it was getting harder to think clearly. I reread the chapter where Kit Hansen was murdered. Things seemed more and more unreal and I started to doubt if Verner had even called me. Perhaps it had all been just a daydream, a subconscious displacement activity to avoid doing any work.
I decided to go to Gilleleje to see for myself. I needed to find out if a murder really had been committed and, if so, try to establish how far the circumstances surrounding this murder matched mine – or if Verner was simply being paranoid.
THE TOYOTA HADN’T
been exercised for several months and it protested loudly when I turned the key in the ignition. Finally, it surrendered and I drove along the coast to Gilleleje. Most of the road was flanked by holiday cottages and spruces, but in a few places there was a clear view of the sea. The waves had white crests and in several places the beach was reduced to three to four metres of shingle by the salty foam. It was high tide.
There were few people out and about. November is well outside the tourist season and the cafés and pubs had put away their outdoor furniture, leaving me room to park the Corolla on the marina, close to the quay.
The book didn’t state precisely where in the marina the murder was committed so I stayed in the car, peering out through the windscreen. The strong wind formed sharp crests on the waves in the basin. Many of the boats had already been put into dry dock for the winter. Those that remained ground restlessly into one another, producing the unpleasant squeal of rubber against rubber, drowned
out
only by the noise of steel wires lashing aluminium masts.
Five cars were parked on the far side of the basin; one revealed itself to be a police car. I suddenly felt dizzy and grabbed the steering wheel, closed my eyes and inhaled sharply. I sat like this for a while, breathing as regularly as I could. Relax, I told myself. There could be hundreds of reasons for the police to be in the marina; it didn’t have to mean that Verner was right.
After a few minutes I summoned up the courage to open my eyes. Some people were standing around the cars, but more had gone out on to the breakwater and were looking out to sea. There was no police tape as far as I could see.
I left my car and strolled to the far side of the basin as calmly as I could. As I approached I could hear voices and the crackle of police radios. A couple of divers in wetsuits were sitting at the back of an open van drinking coffee in silence. A uniformed officer followed me with his eyes as I passed them. I didn’t look at him, but carried on walking towards the breakwater. Out there twenty or thirty people had gathered, adults as well as children, all peering out to sea. Some had brought binoculars and cameras. I joined a group and followed their gaze.
A hundred metres out were two boats, a large yellow and red rescue boat and a black rubber dinghy. Four buoys with red flags marked out a square of twenty metres by twenty metres.
‘They fished out a woman this morning,’ a voice chirped up. ‘She didn’t have any clothes on.’
A red-haired boy of about ten, wearing a yellow raincoat and blue wellies, was standing on a bench next to me.
Around
his neck he had a pair of binoculars almost as long as his upper arms.
‘She was completely white,’ he carried on. ‘And red.’
‘You saw that?’ I asked. My voice was trembling slightly.
He nodded eagerly.
‘I’ve been standing here all day.’ The boy planted his hands on his hips and turned his gaze towards the boats. ‘They came this morning. Loads of divers and police officers. At first, they told me to go away, but I kept slipping past them. They’ve given up trying to get rid of me now.’ He smiled and stuck out his chest.
‘And … the woman?’
‘She was completely white,’ he repeated. ‘There were chains around her and a stone.’
‘Did she have red hair?’
Wide-eyed, he turned to look at me. ‘How did you know that?’
I shrugged. ‘You just told me she was red as well.’
He nodded. ‘She had red hair. But she was also red here and here.’ He made a cutting movement with his hand across his chest and then his throat. ‘And on her arms and legs.’
I didn’t know what to say, or if I could even speak at all, so I turned to look at the boats. We stood like this for a couple of minutes until I cleared my throat and pointed to his binoculars.
‘That’s a very smart pair of binoculars you have there. Could I borrow them, please?’
The boy nodded and lifted the binoculars over his head. ‘But I want them back if anything happens.’
I put the binoculars to my eyes and zoomed in on the
boats
. In the rubber dinghy a man in a wetsuit was sitting down and holding a rope that trailed over the side and into the water. The dinghy was rocking precariously and every now and again he was forced to take one hand off the rope and grab hold of the gunwale for balance.
Obviously I knew there wouldn’t be an outline of the body on the surface on the water, but I think I had expected something. At any rate, I felt disappointed. There should have been some evidence that a violent act had happened there, but the water revealed nothing, and only the boats and the buoys suggested the area was special.
‘What’s happening?’ the boy asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said and gave him back his binoculars.
He lifted them to his eyes immediately to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
‘Do you think there’s another one?’ His voice sounded hopeful.
‘There won’t be,’ I said and turned around to walk back to my car.
‘Are you a policeman or something?’ the boy called out, but I ignored him and carried on walking.
As I passed the officers on the quay, they threw me a look filled with contempt.
‘Get a good eyeful, did you?’ one of them sneered as I passed them.
I sympathized. Rubbernecking is tasteless, but I hadn’t come out of curiosity. At least, not the kind of curiosity that drives some people. I wasn’t here to get a rush of adrenaline at the sight of blood, bones, intestines and brain matter. Though they were my props when I depicted
murder
and mutilation in my books, my inspiration didn’t come from real-life accidents. Simply closing my eyes sufficed. The images my own brain could conjure up were more than enough.
But, yes, I saw what I came to see in Gilleleje Marina.
WHILE I DROVE
back to the cottage, I tried to work out how many people had read
In the Red Zone
. My editor was the first person to read the script and I guessed that probably three or four other people at the publishing company, as well as a couple of bookclub editors, must have seen it. The book would be published in a few days; it had been printed, so the printers must have had access to it for a month or two. I had received thirty complimentary copies in the post and it was likely that several copies had been sent to reviewers and to bookshops as pre-orders. Of my thirty copies, I had sent one to Verner, given one to my neighbour, and sent one to my ex-wife and one to my parents.
In total I estimated that somewhere between one and two hundred people had had access to the printed text of
In the Red Zone
, but both my publishers and the printers had the electronic version and that tends to appear in the strangest of places. I once received a printout of my sixth book,
Nuclear Families
, where the names of the victims had been replaced with mine and my family’s. I
didn
’t take threats like that seriously. I had grown used to letters that attacked my work or me personally, but on that occasion someone on the inside had leaked the electronic version of the script. My publishers couldn’t explain it, but took the opportunity to enhance their security procedures. However, this was now some years ago and such precautions quickly become ineffective if they aren’t reviewed at regular intervals.
The bottom line was I had no way of knowing who or how many people had access to
In the Red Zone
, so I was none the wiser when I pulled into the drive of the Tower.
‘Hello, FF,’ my neighbour, Bent, called out as I got out of my car.
He was standing in his own drive wearing baggy army trousers, a far too tight black T-shirt and resting an axe on one shoulder. During the summer he had chopped down seven or eight trees on his own property and three on mine, and most of his garden was littered with timber in all lengths and widths. He had an artificial leg, but he was remarkably active and insisted on splitting all the wood into logs by hand.
‘Hello, neighbour,’ I replied and tried to produce a smile.
‘We’re running a bit late today,’ he said, grinning.
He was referring to our afternoon ritual of meeting up for a drink or two around three o’clock. Bent drank beer and I had a whisky, usually a single malt, Laphroaig or Oban. For me, it often marked the end of my working day. I rarely wrote for more than five or six hours and I had started to value human company after thinking about my book all day. My discussions with Bent were seldom very
sophisticated
and at times I got irritated by his prejudiced views about immigrants, women or politics, but he was always friendly and willing to lend a hand whenever I needed it.
‘I think I’ll have to make my excuses today, Bent.’ I pointed to my temples. ‘I’ve got a splitting headache.’
‘Oh, all right,’ he said, sounding disappointed. ‘I guess it must be hard work committing all those murders.’
‘What?’
‘Coming up with them, I mean.’
‘Oh, right, I see. No, I think it’s something else,’ I lied. ‘Might be flu.’
Bent nodded. ‘OK, I hope you feel better soon.’ He swung the axe from his shoulder and was about to carry on chopping, but stopped when I called out to him.
‘By the way, have you started the new book?’
Bent shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t finished your last one yet. I’m not a fast reader and when I’ve been outside most of the day, I fall asleep once my head hits the pillow.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not saying your books are boring, it’s just all that fresh air wears me out.’
‘That’s quite all right, Bent. I was just checking.’
‘See you later, FF.’
FF was the nickname he had given me shortly after we met. It was not only the initials of my name, but also of his favourite beer, Fine Festival, which for him was the perfect trade-off between price and strength.
Bent was only ever known as Bent. He came from a working-class family. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a housewife until Bent and his brother, Ole, were old enough to look after themselves, when she got a job as
a
cashier in the local supermarket. Even though Bent did well at school, he started an apprenticeship at fifteen and became a smith like his father. But the trade bored him, so he was delighted when his name came up for National Service and he was sent to the barracks in Næstved. He showed considerable promise and jumped at the chance to pursue a career in the army, a career that saw him posted to Iraq. He loved being stationed abroad and extended his posting several times – until he saw one of his mates ripped to pieces by an IED and was himself hit in the leg by shrapnel. The doctors couldn’t save his leg and after three years’ service abroad he was invalided out with miserly compensation.
Back home in Denmark, he realized he had no chance of getting a job and took early retirement at the age of twenty-six. He was in the habit of saying that his experiences in Iraq had aged him forty years, so technically he had reached retirement age.
He kept his army haircut and usually wore camouflage clothes and army boots, possibly out of habit, but more I suspect because it was important to him to remind himself and those around him of his past.
The mental calculations I had done on the way home were still buzzing around my head. I checked the stack of
In the Red Zone
that was on my desk. My publishers appeared to have short-changed me by one book on this occasion. At any rate, I’d given away four, but only twenty-five copies remained, including the one I had taken out on to the terrace earlier.
These days I’m rather wary of handing out copies of a
new
novel until it has been reviewed, so it was unlikely I’d given one away and forgotten about it. In the past I had given away books when drunk, sometimes with preposterous dedications to entice the recipient into bed, but it was several years since I had last done that.
I poured myself a whisky, which I knocked back before calling Verner. He wasn’t back from work yet, his wife said, so I asked her to get him to call me. For the first time since moving to the cottage, I was actually waiting for the telephone to ring.