The Considerate Killer (23 page)

S
he had struggled.
You could see it from the way she was lying. She had kicked off one shoe and had tried to reach the button that controlled the windows with her foot. It had worked to some degree—she had actually managed to roll down one side window a fraction. The cost was also obvious; the cable strip had cut so deeply into her wrist that you couldn't see anything but blood.

Vincent had to turn away.

“Cut her free,” he said to Martinez. “And wrap something around that wrist.”

“Why?” asked Martinez

“Because we don't want her blood on us, idiot. What if we're stopped?”

The plan was that they would fly out of Frankfurt—Vadim had arranged for business-class tickets so they could just show up whenever it suited them and board the next flight. But they were still a long way from Frankfurt. And even further from San Marcelino.

He felt strangely empty inside. It had been done now. What he had promised Vadim. He hadn't believed he could do it. He had killed another human being. The rest . . . the rest was just tidying up.

“Take a picture,” he said to Martinez and handed him the little compact digital camera. He couldn't make himself do it, but he knew Vadim would expect it.

Martinez expressionlessly snapped a couple of pictures of the dead nurse. Then he suddenly turned the camera on Vincent.

“Say cheese,” he laughed.

Click
. Vincent held one hand up in front of his face in pure reflex, which only made the grin broader.

“What about the policeman?” he asked.

“Don't worry about him,” said Martinez with another glittering grin. “I took care of him.” He stuck the camera in his pocket and instead pulled out a roll of duct tape and waved it in the air.

Vincent stared at the tape. And at the naked hand holding it.

“What did you do?” he asked.

Martinez mimed pulling off a strip of tape.

“You blocked his nose?”

“Yup.”

“So he's dead?”

“Of course he's dead. Were you planning to let him live? He had seen your stupid mug, and he was a policeman.”

“Former.”

“That comes to the same fucking thing.”

“And then you just let him lie there—with his entire head covered in tape?”

“He's lying in a thicket right in the middle of the forest. It might take days before they find him.”

“Maybe. But when they do—they'll also find your fingerprints plastered all over that piece of tape. Unless you used gloves?”

He could see on Martinez's round face that that wasn't the case.

“Fuck . . .” said the moron.

“Go back,” said Vincent. “No, wait. Help me get her down to the boat first. And then go back and remove that tape.”

He had parked
the Land Cruiser as close to the lake shore as possible, but there was a slope that you had to navigate on foot. They had already carried the rubber dinghy down. It had been helpful to have something to do, instead of just standing outside the car, waiting for the carbon monoxide to take effect. It might be painless, as Diana had once said, but maybe that was only if it happened while you slept. The struggles of the nurse had made the entire van rock, and he felt like it was taking forever. He had decided to wait fifteen minutes after it grew quiet in there, but ended up turning off the engine after ten. He just wanted to have it over with.

He made Martinez take her arms while he grabbed hold of her feet. He didn't feel like touching the blood-spattered kitchen towel Martinez had wound around her wrist. The light from his headlamp flickered over bushes and tree trunks and Martinez's green raincoat. Then one foot slipped in the mud, and he lost his balance. He had to let go and cling to a tree in order not to fall over completely.

Martinez dropped his end too, pushed the body with his foot and let it roll the rest of the way.

“Martinez, damn it . . .”

Martinez looked up—a bit crookedly in order not to be blinded by the light from Vincent's head lamp.

“She's already dead,” he said. “What's the difference?”

Vincent was seized by an abrupt rage.

“Go,” he hissed. “Now. What kind of person are you? Do you have no respect at all for the dead?”

Martinez looked at him with an uncertain frown, as if he was really and truly trying to understand what Vincent meant.

“But they're dead,” he said at last, as if that was sufficient explanation.

Vincent clenched his fists so tightly that his nails cut into his palms.

“Go,” he hissed between clenched teeth.

“Okay, boss,” said Martinez, for once without laughing as if it was all a big joke. He began to climb up the slope. Halfway up Vincent saw him tuck a set of earbuds into his ears, and the tinny pop beat from a Kitty Girls song could be heard for a few moments until he reached the top and the rain and the trees swallowed the sound.

But with Martinez gone there was no longer anyone he could off-load the shame and guilt on. He suddenly thought of that damn fluffy little chicken they had placed by Victor's coffin, of its constant pathetic peeping, and of Vadim's face when he heard the explanation for its presence.

To wake the conscience of the murderer.

Did they do that kind of thing in Denmark? Probably not, when it wasn't even widespread among Manila's upper crust. And in any case . . . when he was done, there wouldn't be anybody to bury.

Damn. They should have done the same thing with the policeman. It was the only thing that made sense. Why hadn't he understood that at once?

Because he had pretended that the policeman wasn't going to be killed. Because he had turned his back and let things run their course. Left the decision to Martinez. So it wasn't on him, but it was anyway. He thought about how once he had not even been able to confess his nightly erections to Father Abuel. Such a distant and innocent time with problems so tiny and banal that he couldn't really understand why they had seemed significant.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have killed another human being
. . . No, Father Abuel was never going to hear about that either.

He slithered down the last few feet of the slope and bent over the body. It didn't look as if it had taken any damage from the rough treatment, but the kitchen towel had come loose, and the wrist was bleeding again.

He closed his eyes for a second.
Stop it
, he said to himself.
You can usually manage as long as you're dealing with dead people.

But dead people don't bleed. At least not as much as the nurse did.

He opened his eyes again. Placed two fingers against her neck and tried to control his own spasmodic shaking long enough to feel it properly.

It was there. The pulse. A faint flutter, from a heart that still beat.

“Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” The words came tumbling out of him without conscious volition. He had the sense that he was already in purgatory. That he had died without noticing, and was now being forced to live through his crime again and again.
How many times do I need to kill her before it's enough?
he asked silently. Should he drag her all the way up the slope and put her back in the car for a while?

No. It made no difference. She was going into the lake anyway, and whether her last heartbeats faded in the car or down there in the dark, cold water made no real difference—except for the fact that he could no longer consider her a corpse.

He took off his parka and swaddled her in it so he couldn't see her face and her bloody wrist. The rain fell heavily on his exposed shoulders, but it wasn't like the tropical rain at home, warm and yellowish—“as if the gods are pissing on us,” as his late great-grandmother Evangelina used to say with a cackling laugh. She had become slightly senile in her old age, which had loosened a few inhibitions.

This Danish rain was hard and cold and grey and smelled of forest. He took the parka bundle into his arms and carried it down to the water's edge where they had left the dinghy.

The largest of the camper's gas containers, an orange ten-kilo bottle, was already waiting, with a rope tied to the handle. He assumed it would be sufficient to drag her down to the bottom and hold her there. He had also considered using the even heavier water tank, but then he had realized that a plastic container full of water had pretty much the same buoyancy as the water that surrounds it. He placed her in the prow next to the gas bottle and began to drag the boat clear of the lakeshore. He had to splash a few steps into the lake himself. Holy Mother of God, it was cold, that water. He quickly leaned across the soft rubber gunnel and climbed on board.

The raindrops ricocheted off the surface of the lake—even more violently when a few strokes of the oars brought him out of what shelter the trees had provided. The thin pale beam from the head lamp strapped to his forehead did not light up the lake and the landscape, only the steady, grey rain, like steel hawsers chaining the sky to the earth. Vincent's T-shirt and fleece were soaked within minutes, and he looked over his shoulder. The woods and the lakeshore had already disappeared from view. Fuck. Would he be able to find his way back at all?

How far out did he dare to row? How far was enough? He had seen a sign the first day he camped here, courtesy of the local tourism office. The lake was Denmark's third deepest, it said. Thirty-one meters. That was what had given him the idea. Thirty-one meters should be sufficient . . . but how far did you need to go before it got that deep?

He hesitated. Pulled the black-and-yellow plastic oars out of the water and drifted with the current. Luckily it wasn't windy. The rain fell straight down in spattering cascades.

Here, he thought. That should do it. Here, while he still had some sense of where the shore was. He pulled the oars all the way in and carefully crept over to the parka bundle, very focused on distributing his weight so the boat wouldn't rock too much. He did
not
feel like capsizing now . . . he grabbed the rope and considered how to attach it. The feet? Or neck? In a glimpse he pictured how she would hang there in the lake water, like a big, macabre water plant attached to a rock. It was probably best to use her foot. The other somehow seemed to him to lack dignity, and then he'd have to see her face again.

He grabbed one naked ankle to tie the rope around it.

She moved. He was so unprepared that her bare feet slipped between his hands like a fish he hadn't managed to rap hard enough on the head. While he still sat there, paralyzed by shock, she rolled over abruptly and the boat began to tip. He grabbed at her with his free hand and got a hold of a handful of T-shirt. He wanted to pull her back in, toward the boat's center of gravity, but it was already too late. The gas bottle slid toward the railing; the boat's bottom rose up like a wall and threw them all overboard, Vincent, the nurse, and the gas bottle as well. He had time to suck in one single desperate gasp of air before the water closed over his head.

He tried to scissor kick, but something was in his way. In the flickering distorted beam of the head lamp he saw what was wrong—the rope had become tangled around one of his legs, and the weight from the gas bottle was pulling him down.

He tried to half-somersault in the water in order to loosen the rope. At that moment he felt a tug on his shoulder. A pair of pink legs hooked themselves determinedly around his waist, and an arm closed around his neck. He forced his head round and saw the face of the nurse so close to his own that he could barely focus on it. Only in a dim blur could he make out her expression—awake, alive, and insane—and yet a terror-fueled conviction took root in his soul.

She had come to pull him down to Hell.

W
hen Søren regained
consciousness, he was lying on his stomach on the forest floor with his arms stretched out in front of him. It took a little while before he registered how wonderful it was—
with his arms stretched out
. His hands were free.

It was raining. The shower-proof windbreaker stuck wetly to his back, and the raindrops ran down one cheek and from time to time oozed past the tape so that it bubbled when he breathed.

He rolled onto his side and scraped at the edge of the tape with weak fingers until he could get hold of a corner and pull. First the nose, then the eyes, then the mouth. He sat for a few seconds and breathed freely without sensing much more than that. To breathe in and breathe out, unhindered.

Then he remembered the rest.

Nina. They still had Nina.

He tore wildly and without coordination at the tape that tied his ankles together. When it didn't immediately produce a result, he had to force himself to stop and fumble for the end of the strip. He couldn't see very much, it was dark as all hell, but his fingertips finally found the slight edge they were searching for. He scratched and scraped and loosened another corner.

Finally free, he bundled the tape together and threw it away, completely indifferent to the fact that it might be what the DA would call “an important link in the chain of evidence.” He got up, not without difficulty, but in spite of everything he could still move. He felt dizzy and disoriented and had absolutely no sense of where he was, and in what direction the Land Cruiser had disappeared with Nina.

Think. What did he know? What facts did he possess?

They had hauled him out of the camper, carried him at the most ten or fifteen meters, he thought, before they had dumped him in the bushes. Therefore, the Land Cruiser had at some point been ten to fifteen meters from him before it drove off. The ground was wet and greasy and covered by fallen leaves. The Land Cruiser was heavy. It had no doubt left visible tracks, but that was no help whatsoever when he couldn't see. Was there a small chance that the ruts were so deep that he would be able to spot them by feel alone?

He had lost one shoe, and that foot was more or less senseless with cold. Still he bent down and took the shoe off the other foot as well. Brambles clung to his pant legs with stubborn thorns, and he felt the rain sting in several scratches.

Though the Land Cruiser was an off-road vehicle of sorts, it didn't have Caterpillar tracks. It couldn't force its way through shrubbery or across fallen tree trunks. There was no need to go in the direction where the undergrowth was thickest. He turned around and began walking with steps that he hoped were short enough not to miss the rut of a tire track. Then he realized he would have to consider the matter more carefully. He paused. If he met the tracks at right angles, all he would be presented with was a rut the width of the Land Cruiser's tire. Say about thirty centimeters. If his strides were any longer, he could easily step across it without noticing. Thirty centimeters. A foot's length. One foot in front of the other, literally. And if he walked more than fifteen meters without finding anything, then he would have to go back to his starting point. If he could find it . . . Fifteen meters. That was fifty foot-lengths, he calculated. Oh, damn it. It would take him all night. And while he fumbled around here, one foot in front of the other, they had Nina, and . . . and he didn't know what they would do with her. Didn't know
why
they had taken her.

I wanted her to think of heaven. People think too little about that kind of thing while they are still alive.

A deep sound of pain forced its way out of him, halfway between a roar and a snarl. Completely animal-like. Someone had taken
his
woman. Every caveman instinct he possessed yelled at him to hurry, telling him that he should run through the forest, find them, smash them, kill them . . .

If he had known which direction to run in, he would probably have done so, or at least tried.

“Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . .”

He reached fifty without having encountered anything that resembled a tire track. Wet leaves clung to his feet, both so cold now that it felt as if they were burning. The best that could be said about the experiment was that he actually succeeded in turning around and finding his way back to his bramble. At least to
a
bramble patch, but he was fairly sure it was his.

Okay. New direction. He turned at what he thought had to be a forty-five degree angle and began again.

“One, two, three, four . . .”

At twenty-seven, he hammered his shin into a fallen tree and fell sprawling on the sodden ground. Momentarily, the pain in his leg overpowered his other miseries, and he remained sitting for a few minutes to massage it. Not a break, thank God, but he could feel a swelling take form under his moving fingers. He fumbled along the forest floor until he found a thick branch he could use as a kind of blind man's cane. He couldn't afford to fall again.

The rain had increased. It pounded the leaves and the forest floor and spattered his ankles with tiny mud blasts for every fallen drop. He was about as wet as a man could get, and the cold was slowly eating its way inward, to the organs that kept him active and alive. Realistically he probably had a couple of hours left, maybe less, before movement became impossible.

When he saw the flickering glow from the flashlight, he thought for a brief moment that he was so weak that he was already beginning to hallucinate. But it was real enough. The light skipped and danced and lit up the falling rain, and now he could hear the crackling, cricket-like sound of music escaping from a set of earphones.

It was the stocky Filipino.
Goodbye, Danish police
. He was headed more or less for the bramble patch, and in a little while he would discover that Søren was no longer there.

Søren ran. Not away from the Filipino but toward him. There was no reason to try to move silently; with that bass line in his ears, the other man would have been unlikely to discover him even if he had been accompanied by a full-sized brass band.

He swung the branch against the exposed nape of the Filipino's neck in a single desperate release of all his restrained caveman impulses. The round head bounced back and then forward with such rag-doll suddenness that for a moment Søren thought he had broken the man's neck. He fell heavily to the ground, and it was clear that the follow-up strike would not be necessary. Søren used it anyway.

It would have been better if he could have rendered the man harmless without taking his head halfway off, he knew that. He hadn't dared. Hadn't trusted his body or his strength sufficiently.

Luckily, the man was fairly robust. He was coming to even as Søren was tying his wrists together with the string from the otherwise pretty useless windbreaker.

Søren grabbed him by the neck and deliberately forced his thumb into the pain center behind the ear.

“Listen,” he hissed in English. “You have one chance to survive. Tell me where my wife is. Now.”

The man's eyes rolled in panic. His face was distorted by pain, and tears ran down the round cheeks.

“That way,” he said desperately jerking his head in the direction he had come from. “Down by the lake. Please, sir. Please don't kill me.”

Søren pushed him to the ground again and pulled his limbs into a leg lock that the Danish police were no longer permitted to use. Right now he couldn't care less.

“I have no idea what time it is,” he said, with his mouth next to the man's ear. “But you're under arrest.”

Then he grabbed the flashlight and ran.

He found the
Land Cruiser fairly quickly. The back door was wide open, and various inventory had been removed from the galley—the hose for the gas hob dangled, and the water tank had been dumped behind the car—but there was no sign of Nina and the other Filipino.

He stood for a few seconds, staring at the hose that had been led from the exhaust pipe to the window of the camper. Bastards. Evil murdering bastards. His heart gave a cramped jerk inside his chest, and he hammered one hand against the window in frustration and fear. Where was she? Had they gassed her? Was a corpse all he would find now?

Down by the lake
, the little one had said. And the rubber dinghy from the Land Cruiser's roof was gone.

Søren let the flashlight's beam sweep across the tree trunks. The lake. He couldn't see it, but he could see a slope with a set of tracks left by someone who had climbed it. He slid down essentially feet first, and sure enough, there it was—the lake. A grey, rain-pocked surface that stretched as far as visibility allowed.

No boat. No Nina. No Filipino.

“Niiiiinaaaa!” he roared as loudly as he could. “Niiiiiiiiiinaaaaaaa . . .”

There was no answer.

“You have to
wake up now, Nina-girl. There's something I want to show you . . .”

Her head was so heavy that she had to hold on to it with both hands in order to sit up.

She couldn't sit up.

There was a flickering behind her thick, closed eyelids. She knew he was there, but she couldn't see him. Could only hear his voice.

He was lying in the bathtub, and the water was red.

No.

She didn't want to. Didn't want to see that again.

“Nina-girl. Come on.”

She felt his hand on her ankle. He took hold of her foot. Why was he holding her foot? If you want someone to follow you, you take them by the hand. She pulled her leg away, and her foot slipped out of his grasp.

He was lying in the bathtub, and the water was red. The blood was flowing from both wrists, and his eyes, still alive, clung to her face.

“Nina . . .”

No
. Her entire body jerked. She didn't want to, didn't want to . . . The world rocked wildly from side to side, and she kicked out, waved her arms.

Water. Cold water.

The shock raced through her, but the cold was better, sharper than lukewarm, bloodred bathwater. More real. She opened her eyes. There was a light, a light in the water. She grabbed at it and got hold of something. Fabric. Clothes. Clothes on a person.

The camper. The carbon monoxide. They had tried to gas her.
He
had tried to gas her. Vincent.

She hooked her arm around his neck. Lashed her legs around his body. Clung to him while they sank. Bubbles from the parka hood rose up around them, glittering in the light from his head lamp.

She felt no desire to breathe. It was as if her lungs were paralyzed. She could let herself sink, fall for all eternity.

“Nina-girl. Wake up now.”

She ignored him. You don't have to obey dead fathers.

The man, Vincent, twisted in her grip. He tried to bend, fumbling for something with flapping hands. In the light from the lamp she saw why they were sinking so fast. The rope around his ankle. Somewhat farther down, something heavy that was just a shadow. She pulled the headlight off him and let it shine directly on the rope.

You could loosen it
, she said to herself.
Or let go of him so he could do it. We could both rise to the surface together.

She didn't. She just held on. Right until she felt his chest spasm helplessly. She imagined how the water was streaming into his open mouth. He still fought, writhed, kicked. But not for long.

Not until he stopped did she let go.

She hung completely still in the water. A single wriggle loosened the oversized hideous pink jogging pants from her hips. Then she slowly began to rise. She did nothing. Didn't swim, didn't fight, just rose quietly and infinitely slowly toward the surface with the head lamp gripped tight in one hand.

“Nina-girl.”

She saw him there in the water, with open still-alive eyes. He stretched his hand toward her, but she didn't take it.

Not now, Dad.

Søren stood on
the lakeshore with an empty twenty-liter plastic bottle in his arms—the camper's water tank, which he had emptied. He had taken off his windbreaker, T-shirt and pants and considered for a few more seconds whether it was really just a form of suicide he was engaged in. Visibility was almost zero. He had tried to direct the beams of the Land Cruiser's headlights out across the lake, but the difference in height between the top of the slope and the water's surface was too great—the beams pointed into the darkness and rain someplace above his head without illuminating what he most needed to see. He didn't know how big the lake was, and to set out without even knowing in which direction it made sense to swim . . . It amounted to a form of madness. But he wasn't sure he wanted to live with the consequences of his mistakes if he didn't find her. If there was still hope, if there was even the tiniest chance that she was still alive . . .

He had tied a length of blue nylon rope around the bottle, more or less like you tie a ribbon around a package. The flashlight was lashed to the top of the bottle. He hoped it would hold. The other end of the rope he had tied around his waist, with a few meters' slack between himself and the bottle. He began to wade into the lake water. He was so wet and cold already that it actually felt warmer than the air.

As he was letting himself slide forward to start swimming, he thought he saw . . . something. He rose abruptly again, found the bottom with his feet and stretched to his full height.

There.

A tiny glint of light, a vulnerable spark that disappeared, came back, disappeared, came back, with each flat slow ripple of the lake.

“Niiiinaaaa!”

Still no answer. He might be swimming toward a murderer, he was well aware of that. It could be V. But if it was and if he was alone . . . Søren began to swim with long, solid strokes. The bottle bobbed along in his wake, and he could feel the little tug on the rope around his waist with every kick.

Ten strokes. Then head up and treading water, to be sure he still was going in the direction of the light. Ten more strokes. Ten more.