Life and Limb (9 page)

M
ost shops were shut now, so it was possible to park in Jægergårdsgade, close to the entrance.

Dicte turned off the ignition. From where she was sitting she could clearly observe who was entering and leaving the property, the place that she had seen three men entering in Frederik Winkler's photograph. Bo was on a sports assignment for
Avisen
and she had delivered today's feature, the second in a series about the Danish right wing, focusing on Aarhus. Not that she had written anything other than a general story. It was too early and too dangerous to be more specific and mention names, places and dates.

She kept reminding herself that there was no proof of a connection between the murders and the right wing. True, it was likely that Serbian nationalists in Kosovo and old Nazi sympathisers in Poland – notorious for its many anti-Semites – had some form of shared agenda with the Danish Front, White Pride or whatever they called themselves in Denmark. She could tell from looking at Wagner that he was drawn to the same thought. It was only natural. They were looking for a connection and there had to be one somewhere. Three identical killings in Europe couldn't be a coincidence, but she didn't want to get fixated. There could be other explanations.

She kept looking at the front door while fragments from the morning's meeting with Wagner floated into her head. Most of all she remembered how serious he had been, and again she had wondered about his name and background. Ida Marie had told her a little. About his Danish mother who had fallen in love with a German soldier and subsequently been ostracised; how her head had been shaved and she had been publicly humiliated. About his father: an ordinary soldier in the German army who had never been interested in politics but considered himself lucky when his unit was posted to Denmark. His brother, Günter, had been on the Eastern Front and had frozen to death some kilometres outside Stalingrad wearing paper-thin boots and a threadbare uniform.

Ida Marie had left it at that. Dicte could easily add the rest because she knew that the German soldier had returned to Denmark after the war to marry the love of his life. It could not have been easy being the child of a German father and Danish mother in post-war Denmark, no matter how much the child was loved.

Now that child, now a man, was working on a case which brought him back to everything he would probably have preferred to forget. And, in addition, the recent discovery of deboned bodies with eyes gouged out in Aarhus, Lublin and Pristina, all close to local stadiums.

It couldn't be easy for him.

The front door opened while Dicte's thoughts lingered elsewhere. A woman appeared. Dicte could see her clearly through the windscreen. Her skin was a dark hue, which could have been the result of a Danish mother and an African father. Her lips were full, her lower one especially, giving her a slightly sullen, sexy expression. She was petite and wore green shoes with killer heels and a short, light-coloured trenchcoat tightly belted around her waist. She appeared to be staggering and for a moment she stopped and squinted, with a baffled expression, into the late afternoon sun. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was very beautiful.

Her lips trembled and appeared unable to settle. Her bright red lipstick was smudged. And, indeed, she took out a compact mirror from her handbag as she stood there in the middle of the footpath. With routine movements she wiped the worst of the excess lipstick off with two fingers, first from one corner of her mouth, then the other. The eyes were next. She used a tissue to tidy up the mascara.

The woman snapped the mirror shut and Dicte had a feeling she was looking right at her through the windscreen. She was probably in her forties but could have passed for someone much younger, had it not been for the high heels and her confidence, which was laced with vulnerability.

The timing was precise. A second later, after the compact mirror was back in the depths of her bag, the door opened a second time and a man came out. The woman looked at him with surprise. He was a little younger than her but her body language suggested that he was in charge. He wore a white long-sleeved T-shirt, tight jeans and sneakers. He was short – not much taller than her in her heels – but he was muscular, as if he worked out several hours every day. He scanned the street and Dicte felt his eyes sweeping her and her car, and she was glad she hadn't taken off her sunglasses.

The woman hesitated when he reached out an arm and put it around her waist. He jerked her towards him and kissed her deeply and whispered into her ear. She didn't smile. She said something brief in return, an almost pleading reply. Then he did something that seemed to be inconsistent with his personality. He held her at arm's length and gazed at her, then he leaned forward and gently kissed the tip of her nose.

He let go of her, turned around and strolled down Jægergårdsgade, towards the city centre.

Dicte stayed where she was and saw the woman get into a black Alfa Romeo and drive off in the opposite direction. Then she got out and rushed after the man who might or might not be Frederik Winkler's lost son.

Arne Bay, if that was him, walked down Bruunsgade towards the city centre. At the railway station he went into a newsagent's, with Dicte close behind him. He bought a packet of North State cigarettes and a plastic lighter. She bought some chewing gum. He walked on, down Ryesgade, where he took the cigarettes out of his pocket and stopped for a moment to shelter from the wind as he lit up. Then he continued along Ryesgade and into Strøget, the city's pedestrian area, without looking at the shops or any other people. At Clemens Bridge he took the steps down to the river. Dicte hesitated. All the shops were shut now. There were very few people about, except in the cafés some distance from where they were.

She quickly made up her mind. Her curiosity had got the better of her. She dashed down the steps – but now she couldn't see him. She went a little further. There was no one under the bridge. Its nooks and crannies lay in dark shadows and there was a stench of urine and vomit.

She jumped when she heard the voice.

‘Are you looking for me?'

He was standing under the bridge, completely hidden in the shadows. He held his cigarette so that the glow was near the palm of his cupped hand.

‘No,' she said, but she knew he could hear the lie. She could, too.

His mouth curled into a scornful smile.

‘You'll have to try harder if you want to tail someone.'

Her heart was pounding and her mouth went dry in an instant. He could beat the crap out of her here without anyone seeing.

‘Nervous?'

He stepped towards her. She could see his smile more clearly now. His eyes were cool and assessed her like some insignificant victim he could barely summon up the interest to attack.

‘Are you Arne Bay?'

Miraculously she managed to ask the question without her voice trembling.

‘What if I am?'

‘Someone says hello.'

This time he couldn't hear that she was lying, she was sure.

‘Who?'

‘Your father.'

She fixed her eyes on him and watched the change. It was like the kiss earlier outside his home. A new expression spread across his face; she couldn't quite define it. But it was something he wanted to suppress because his upper lip curled and revealed his teeth.

‘I don't have a father.'

‘Frederik Winkler,' she said.

‘Never heard of him.'

He moved closer to her.

‘Listen to me, bitch. You need to refine your technique. Even the special branch can do better than you. Come on, journo, do you think we're all morons? Do you think we can't read and write or keep up with all that biased crap you lot write in the newspapers?'

Of course. He had read her articles and seen her photo. There were times when she cursed her editor. A couple of years ago some bright spark had had the idea that a reporter's name should be accompanied by a photo. Every newspaper had quickly followed suit and now almost all of them had to list name, telephone number, age and bank details – or at least their office e-mail address.

‘Did you go out Saturday night? To Waxies? Did you leave with Mette Mortensen?'

He laughed out loud.

‘You've really got the bit between your teeth, haven't you? You've got guts, I'll give you that.'

‘Did you?'

‘What's it got to do with you where I was and who I was with?'

He still sounded as if he was enjoying himself. Dicte was perfectly aware that she was being led a dance, but all she could think of was to keep talking. Anything was better than being punched in the face.

‘Who was the woman you were with just now? Is she going to end up dead at the stadium, too? And anyway, what's a racist like you doing with a dark-skinned girl like her?'

She knew at once that she had crossed the line. He looked at her as if she were vermin, took a long stride towards her and pushed her up against the wall. The force of it nearly knocked the air out of her. His body was hard and threatened to crush her. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled hard.

‘Let me tell you something: who I am and who I go around with has got nothing to do with anyone but me. And certainly not a pug-ugly journalist cunt like you. Understand?'

She could die now. He could easily smash her head against the wall and throw her in the river, where she would be carried by the current to Aarhus Port. No one knew she was here.

‘Understand?'

She nodded. She had no choice. And then the sound of voices reached her ears and she heard footsteps coming down the same steps she had come from. He heard them, too, because he let go of her and took a step back.

‘Fuck you and all your kind,' he muttered, turned about and walked towards the cafés on the riverbank.

She leaned against the wall with her heart pounding and the humiliation smarting through her whole body.
How stupid can you get?

Seconds later there was life all around her. A flock of teenagers, laughing and fooling around, walked past her towards the cafés. She made a spur-of-the-moment decision and followed closely behind them, even though her legs were still shaking. She could see his white T-shirt further ahead, among other visitors to the river. This time she made sure to keep her distance and she stopped when he stopped in front of some tables, clearly finding the friends he was meeting. She couldn't get close enough but she thought she could see two young men in short, black jackets, one of whom might have been Martin Brøgger, the Nazi in Frederik Winkler's photos.

‘L
ayer cake! Whose birthday is it?'

Ivar K rolled his eyes in the direction of Jan Hansen, who looked like a lottery winner on a TV commercial.

‘He's got his missus up the duff,' Ivar K explained.

No one seemed to take offence at the coarse expression, least of all Hansen, who gazed at Ivar K with something bordering on affection.

‘It's going to be a boy this time,' Hansen said to Wagner, his eyes welling with tears of joy. ‘I can feel it.'

‘Congratulations.'

Wagner sat down wondering if Hansen would take paternity leave when the child arrived. It had become very fashionable these days, but God knows it was the last thing they needed, understaffed as they were following the Police Reform. ‘Fourth time lucky?'

He was referring to Hansen's daughter Camilla and the twins – both girls. Hansen deserved an ally in the hen house, no doubt about it, even though he adored his daughters. Still, four children was quite a handful.

Hansen nodded. The pregnancy was evidently planned. Hansen's wife did nothing on impulse. She was a nurse, tough as old boots, and she had Hansen exactly where she wanted him: under her thumb.

The team took their usual seats in the briefing room, and cake and coffee were passed around.

‘We've been talking about having the umbilical cord frozen,' Hansen said in an almost dreamy voice. ‘They say it's the future.'

Ivar K overfilled his coffee cup.

‘Total rubbish, if you ask me,' he said, slurping coffee from his saucer while his cup left rings on the table. ‘It's daylight robbery. It will be at least two hundred years before they can do anything useful with it.'

Eriksen mentioned that a local investor, Claes Bülow, had started a company offering the service.

‘There has to be something in it,' he said. ‘Don't you need permission from the Health Authority to start a business like that? Surely you can't just take people's money without offering them something in return?'

The others glared at Eriksen as if they couldn't believe what they had just heard.

‘Listen, where have you been for the last fifty years?' asked Arne Petersen, who was the same age as Eriksen.

‘Esbjerg,' interjected the team's youngest member, Kristian Hvidt. Wagner reflected that it should have been Kristian's wife who had fallen pregnant.

Eriksen's family came from Esbjerg, and they all worked for the police. A cousin here, a brother there. Eriksen almost had the whole country covered if he ever had the misfortune to get a speeding ticket. Though those days were probably long gone, Wagner thought without any nostalgia. Fortunately modern technology and logs that could never be completely deleted meant that those kinds of favours had become almost impossible.

Wagner watched them and let them carry on chatting. He had never attended a management course in his life – the very thought made him feel nauseated. He sailed his ship
his
way. One of his tactics was to make time for jokes, even when the going got tough.

‘Okay,' he announced finally, once the cake had been eaten, pushing back his chair and walking up to the flip chart. ‘Let's review the case so we don't run around like headless chickens.'

With a red marker pen he had written down the date and time that Mette Mortensen's body had been found:
Sunday 24/6, 16:45
. Then he wrote in brackets:
(match finished 17:
00)
.

‘There was no body at the crime scene before the match,' he said. ‘We've spoken to the owners of the cars parked close by and they saw nothing. Besides, it was teeming with people and cars, so it's reasonable to assume that the body was placed there some time between the start of the game and sixteen forty-five, a period of one hour and forty-five minutes. Did anyone in that time slot come forward?'

Hansen cleared his throat.

‘It's been difficult to track down anyone apart from the community-support officers who helped with the chaos in the car park. And, unfortunately, none of them noticed anything unusual.'

‘And they've all been interviewed?'

‘We think so. But there is one discrepancy. There appears to be a problem with the staff roster and no one seems to know if there were seven or eight staff working in that area.'

This was news to Wagner.

‘So why don't we just interview all of them?'

Hansen shook his head.

‘The person in question is …' He checked his papers. ‘A Jakob Refstrup … that same evening he caught a plane to Australia with his family and we've been unable to contact him.'

‘How long will he be gone for? He must have heard about the murder, surely?'

‘Not necessarily,' Hansen said. ‘Some of the officers went home once the match started. You know what it's like. They're very good at directing people at the start of big events, but you're on your own when it's all over. Same thing happened at the Madonna concert in Horsens.'

He was right: Wagner's own daughter had gone to the concert and complained about the lack of organisation as everyone tried to leave the car park at once.

‘Okay, but we need to talk to him as soon as he makes contact.'

Hansen nodded. Wagner continued.

‘Have we mapped out Mette Mortensen's movements on Saturday night yet? That's when she was last seen, wasn't it?'

Eriksen gave a nod of confirmation. He glanced at his notes and recited: ‘Around one a.m. at Waxies, a club in Frederiksgade. With a man described as small and fairly muscular, wearing heavy black lace-up boots, a yellow Pringle jumper and black trousers. Looked like a football hooligan, according to the witness.'

‘And what about Saturday during the day? What did she do then?'

Eriksen carried on with his recitation.

‘She had brunch with a friend at eleven o'clock somewhere near the river, a café called Viggo. Her friend, Beate Skipper – why don't people have ordinary names any more? – noticed nothing unusual. Then she was at home with her parents in the afternoon when they were visited by an uncle and an aunt, and a cousin the same age as the victim. They had travelled up from Silkeborg.'

‘Any particular reason?' Arne Petersen asked.

Eriksen searched for the answer but found none.

‘The relatives left after dinner, around eight o'clock, and Mette went to her room for a couple of hours. At ten p.m. she met up with two female friends at a café …'

Again the notes were checked. Eriksen was unfamiliar with the city's cafés and their unusual names. Wagner himself had long ago given up trying to understand the logic.

‘Called Tasteless. In Klostertorvet. And from there they went on to Frederiksgade at around midnight.'

‘What did she drink? And how much?' Ivar K asked.

‘Two beers at the café. Ceres Royal.'

Hansen sighed and helped himself to another slice of cake.

‘Big deal.'

‘And at the club?' Wagner asked.

Eriksen peered at his notes. He and Petersen had interviewed the victim's friends. The officers were excellent investigators, but Wagner knew from experience that it was easy to miss the odd detail.

‘Two Red Bulls, as far as I understand.'

Eriksen looked up.

‘I don't think the friends were so clear on the facts after they left the café. I imagine they each had their own plans.'

He made a gesture. Wagner understood. The girls had been on the lookout for men and had lost sight of each other.

‘That guy. Did he buy her a drink?'

‘We don't know anything about that.'

Wagner wrote on the flip chart.

‘Good. So we have a window from one a.m. Saturday night – or, to be more precise, Sunday morning – up until four forty-five p.m. Sunday afternoon. Fifteen hours and forty-five minutes where we can't account for Mette Mortensen's movements.'

He looked around the room. Jan Hansen's cake-laden fork stopped in midair. Ivar K put down his coffee cup. Everyone gave him their full attention.

‘That's a lot of hours. Right now our job must be to narrow down that window. Do we know of anyone who matches the description of the man in the black boots? I believe we've been in contact with PET, haven't we? About right-wing extremists?'

Kristian Hvidt nodded.

‘They're reluctant to share information,' Hvidt said, ‘but they've confirmed they're keeping a number of right-wing extremists in the city under surveillance.'

‘Names? Are they the ones we already know about, or do they know something we don't?'

Hvidt shrugged.

‘If we don't know anything it's probably because they don't think we need to know – now that they have extended powers and can involve themselves in our work and arrest people and God knows what.'

He spoke with a hint of irritation and Wagner understood it well. It was only recent that PET – short for Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, Denmark's equivalent of the Special Branch in the US – could play action heroes, but that was what the politicians wanted and the police would just have to get used to it.

Hvidt checked his notes and then looked up at Wagner.

‘The name Arne Bay, however, keeps cropping up alongside that of Martin Brøgger, and our friend Jan Møller, who appears to have vanished without a trace since his girlfriend was found dead.'

Wagner thought about Dicte Svendsen. She had believed that they knew nothing about the three right-wing extremists; the truth was that PET guarded its turf far more jealously than the press suspected.

‘We need to have a talk to PET about how we divvy up the work and get their agreement so we can bring in the men for an interview. They match the description, don't they?'

‘Arne Bay does, in particular,' Hvidt said. ‘But if PET are working on something they regard as much bigger than this, they won't welcome our interference.'

Wagner wrote down the names of the three men on the flip chart. You didn't mess with PET, even if you were a police officer. Usually everyone got on with their own job, but there were times when there were conflicts of interest. PET would perhaps prefer to leave Bay and Brøgger alone and put them under surveillance, to see what they were up to. Personally, Wagner would prefer to interview the men to determine their whereabouts at the time of Mette Mortensen's disappearance. He underlined their names with a thick line.

‘What could be bigger than our case? And don't forget Pristina and Lublin. I'll contact the guys in PET, tell them what we know and I'm sure they'll understand. It's about time we brought in Arne Bay.'

They ended the meeting one hour later, once all the known facts had been discussed and everyone had been allocated tasks. They decided to stage a reconstruction of Mette Mortensen's last movements on television and ask the media for more help. Wagner made a mental note to check with the police's IT department to see if they had found anything on her computer. They were still looking for her mobile phone. It must have been in her handbag, but no one knew where it was now. Both Mette's friends and the witness from the club could remember the small pink silk handbag which Mette was believed to have bought in the Chinese shop in Bruunsgade. They would need to get one like it for the reconstruction and distribute photos to the media, as well as photos of the sandals Mette Mortensen had been wearing. Her mother seemed to know where they had been bought.

Wagner was on the way to his office when his mobile rang. From the display he could see it was Paul Gormsen.

‘Yes?'

‘I've got something for you,' said the familiar voice that always made Wagner feel that he was in safe hands. This was also true when Gormsen was his partner in a rare bridge game.

‘Flunitrazepam. Does that mean anything to you?'

‘The date-rape drug?' Wagner said. ‘Rohypnol? I think that's what they call it in drug circles.'

For years Rohypnol, or Roche, had been a problem in singles bars, where men with nefarious intentions would buy young women drinks. Later the women would wake up, often bruised with signs of rape, unable to remember anything.

‘I think the name is still used,' Gormsen said. ‘But Rohypnol was deregistered as a pharmaceutical product in Denmark and has been for several years. Nowadays Flunitrazepam is registered as Flunipam with Actavis in one-and-two milligram doses, Flunitrazepam with Merck in one-milligram doses and Ronal with Sandoz in two milligram doses.'

‘Did you find Flunitrazepam in Mette Mortensen's blood? Or her urine?'

Wagner pushed open the door to his office and walked over to the window as Gormsen answered in the affirmative.

‘In her blood. We've just got the result from the Institute of Forensics.'

‘Does that affect the time of death?' Wagner said as he fixed the window with the hasp and looked down at the street. ‘I've heard that the substance is soon out of the bloodstream and visible only in urine?'

Gormsen hesitated.

‘Detection methods have improved in recent years. But they say that the half-life is up to twenty-five hours, so no, we can't really use it to determine the time of death.'

Gormsen was quiet for a moment. ‘Poor girl,' he then said. ‘She wouldn't have known what was going on.'

Wagner stuck his head out of the window and took a deep breath. Relatively fresh morning air filled his lungs. Gormsen meant well, but as far as Wagner was concerned Mette Mortensen's fate would have been far worse if she had known what was happening to her.

Wagner ended the call and sat for a while with his eyes closed as the noise from Sønder Allé and the bus station wafted into his office on the light breeze. Flunitrazepam. It must have been given to her at the club – or had Mette Mortensen gone home with the man in the boots and been given a drink at his place?

In any case, there was mounting evidence to suggest that they should take a closer look at the man with the heavy boots and the yellow jumper.