Authors: David Hewson
‘This is a memorial park for the Danish Resistance.’
The place it all began while she was chasing smuggled dope and immigrants in Gedser.
‘I know that.’
The firm, hard sound of her footsteps rang up from the footpath.
‘They were war heroes. Said Bilal saw himself as a patriot too. He would have worshipped them.’
He caught up, looked at her.
‘Sadly we can’t ask him now, can we?’
‘Bilal would never have left Anne Dragsholm in a place like this. A graveyard for martyrs? She was a
stikke
, wasn’t she? A turncoat. A traitor. Someone who wanted to drag
the army . . . Denmark down into the gutter.’
He waved his arms in front of him.
‘At the risk of repeating myself . . . we can’t ask him now.’
She kept walking.
‘Bilal erased those radio messages. Helped cover up what happened in Helmand. He didn’t kill her. Or the others.’
He stopped, hands in pockets, a jaded look on his face.
‘Then why did he take the Raben woman hostage?’
She shook her head.
‘God you’re slow sometimes. He wanted the army to come in and save him from being fitted up for something he never did. Fat chance . . .’
Lund turned and stared at the trees and the pale memorial stones.
‘They were murdered by someone who felt differently about this place.’
‘What’s all this got to do with Brix?’
They were approaching the old shooting range, with the three sacred stakes.
Walking, walking, never looking at him.
‘Brix is protecting the real killer.’
They looked like shrunken totem poles. Or relics from a lost Stonehenge. Part of a ritual, a ceremony most had forgotten, and those who remembered only dimly understood.
‘Stand there,’ she said, and got him to stop by the middle pole.
‘What is—?’
‘Dragsholm was terrified. She knew someone was going to come for her. Her house was full of alarms. She’d ordered sensors for her garden. She’d hired her own security
guards.’
It was too dark down here beneath the branches of the overhanging trees. She needed the moonlight.
‘Come,’ Lund ordered and they walked up the steep bank behind the stakes, the buffer that once took the stray bullets that never hit their intended target.
Stopped at the top, a little breathless, looking around.
Then Lund stared at his plain face caught in the moonlight.
‘But she never went to the police. She thought someone was going to kill her. And she never once called us.’
Strange shrugged.
‘Maybe she wasn’t sure.’
‘She was sure.’
‘Then—’
‘She found him. She knew who the officer was. He’d been given Møller’s identity deliberately by someone in Operational Command. They even forged a new dog
tag.’
Strange hugged himself in the cold, kept quiet.
‘Dragsholm knew he was working in the Politigården. She told Monberg. He did nothing. There’s no other explanation.’
‘Lund—’
‘Nothing else fits. And then suddenly we find all that incriminating evidence at Ryvangen. Even though we’d searched the same place only a few days before. Don’t you
see?’
He stared at the frosty grass and shook his head. Lund came up to him, touched the front of his jacket.
‘Someone planted that during the search.’
‘I was in charge of the search. I didn’t plant a thing.’
‘Then . . .’ She shrugged. ‘It’s got to be somebody on the team.’
His hand went to her arm. He peered into her eyes. She wondered about the expression there. It looked like sympathy. Pity even.
‘This is what happened last time, isn’t it? With Meyer. You won’t let go, even when it’s over.’
‘That wasn’t over. It still isn’t.’
‘Maybe not.’ His arms gripped her firmly. ‘But this is. Please let it die. For God’s sake . . .’
Lund pulled herself away.
‘Have you talked to Brix about this?’ he asked.
‘Not yet. Do you think I can trust him? He’s going to send me back to Gedser.’
‘We can stop that! Let’s have a talk with him. Both of us. You’re not going back to Gedser. But . . .’
His grizzled head lowered, his bright eyes bore into hers.
‘You can’t rock the boat for ever. We drop off Raben. We go back to the party. We have a few beers. Then tomorrow . . .’ She remembered the time they’d almost kissed. He
looked like this. Young and vulnerable. ‘Tomorrow you decide. About everything.’
‘Tomorrow,’ she murmured.
‘Can I have the keys? Can I drive?’
She looked back towards the graves and the memorial plaques with their endless lines of names.
‘I couldn’t find your grandfather on the wall.’
Strange blinked. Shuffled on his feet.
‘I couldn’t find his name in the memorial yard in the Politigården either,’ Lund added. ‘And that’s odd. Every police officer who died under the Nazis is
there. Even the ones who went abroad to the concentration camps.’
She looked up into his face.
‘Why is that?’
No words. And his eyes were different. The way they looked in Helmand. Another Ulrik Strange was with her at that moment.
‘I wasn’t asking out of curiosity,’ she added. ‘I know the answer. I just want to hear it from you.’
Buch couldn’t work out why he still had a ministerial car. But there it was waiting for him when he came out of Plough’s house, Karina sitting in the back, arms
tightly folded, face furious.
‘Maybe we should get a taxi,’ he said, sticking his head through the door.
‘Why?’
She wasn’t in a good mood. That was obvious.
Because this belongs to them, he thought. Like everything else. There could be a bug in the roof. Something that relayed everything he said straight back to the silver-haired man, the father of
the nation, seated in the old king’s office over the muddy riding ground where the horses went round and round. Just like him. Going nowhere.
‘Just get in, will you?’ she said.
He did and sat silent for ten minutes, thinking as they moved slowly through the night traffic. Then told her what Plough had said.
‘That can’t be true,’ she cried, next to him in the back. ‘You know Plough. He wouldn’t leak a damned thing. It’s not in his genes. Besides—’
‘He did it, Karina.’
‘I was with him every single day.’
‘He did it! He told me!’ The residential streets were long behind. This was the city now. Lights and noise and people. The grey island of Slotsholmen where Absalon once built his
fortress and created a city called Copenhagen was getting closer. ‘He was proud of it.’
‘For God’s sake why?’
There was a kind of logic there. Buch had to admit it.
‘Because all he wanted was revenge. In his own head Rossing was to blame. Never Grue Eriksen. Not the grand old man.’
She howled with fury.
‘He’s not that stupid, Thomas! He must know something that implicates the Prime Minister. Something—’
‘He doesn’t.’ Buch’s gloomy stare silenced her. ‘And even if he did he wouldn’t say. Plough’s part of the system. It brought him up. Made him what he
was. It’s hard enough to tear down one little part of it. To ask him to pull the rug from under everything . . .’
Buch put his hand on her arm, tried to make her see.
‘We haven’t been up against Rossing. Or Grue Eriksen. Certainly not Plough. We’ve been fighting . . .’
Slotsholmen. There it was beyond the windscreen. All the buildings, the ministries and the Folketinget, the little converted houses for the civil servants, the garden with its statue of
Kierkegaard.
‘We’ve been fighting that,’ Buch said, waving his hand at the grey shapes ahead. ‘Plough thinks he did the right thing. He was loyal. To the system to begin with. To his
son in the end.’ He glanced at her. ‘And what were we?’
She was a smart, ambitious, dangerous young woman, Buch thought. He hadn’t spoken easily with his wife Marie in days. A part of him, a part he hated, had looked at Karina, thought of
Monberg, and wondered . . .
‘Thomas,’ she said very slowly. ‘We know for a fact the Prime Minister was involved in a conspiracy that killed people. Killed them!’
‘True,’ he agreed as the long black car pulled into the Ministry entrance.
‘We can’t let him get away with that. How could you live with yourself?’ Her hand fell on his, soft and gentle and warm. ‘I know you well enough now . . .’
Buch took his fingers away, looked at the door he’d never walk through as a minister again.
He liked that job. He was good at it.
‘I don’t give a damn about my career,’ she whispered, watching him, every expression on his jowly, bearded face.
The car stopped. The driver was waiting for instructions.
‘I’m not giving up!’ he said, too quickly. ‘Believe it.’
‘Good.’ She patted his knee. ‘So what do we do?’
Buch got out. The night was cold but there was no rain and the twisting dragons he’d learned to live with looked as if they were dancing in the clearest moonlight he’d seen in
weeks.
He walked to the entrance, opened the door for her.
‘What’s Grue Eriksen up to now?’ he asked.
‘Talking to people about the reshuffle. He wants you there. To get your reward for keeping quiet.’
‘How soon can you put a press conference together?’
‘If I’ve got something good to dangle on the hook . . . thirty minutes.’
‘Do it, please,’ Buch said, then turned right to begin the long, interior march through the labyrinth of Slotsholmen, right and left, up and down until he found himself in the
Christianborg Palace. There he asked a couple of questions. Found the room.
The Prime Minister was on his own. Slightly hunched, shoulders rounded, not that Buch had noticed before. Face so familiar most of Denmark seemed to have grown up with it. Benign. Dependable.
Indulgent. A man to be relied upon.
Gert Grue Eriksen smiled when he walked in.
‘Hi, Thomas.’ He gestured at the seats round the table. ‘Take one, will you? We’ve fences to mend, haven’t we? I want this reshuffle fixed this evening.’ Hand
outstretched, Buch took it without thinking. ‘I’m glad we’ve got the chance to talk first like this. That trouble with PET . . .’
The Prime Minister frowned.
‘I’m afraid those officers became a little overenthusiastic. They seemed to blame you for König’s dismissal. Which is unfair and now they know it.’
For some reason Buch found himself staring at his hand after shaking Grue Eriksen’s. Sweaty, ugly, fat fingers marked by the scars of his early farming days. The hand of a labourer, not a
politician. Cautious, common men who didn’t shake with anybody, not without looking them up and down first. As he had once.
‘I owe you an explanation,’ Grue Eriksen said as Buch sat down.
‘Why can’t you let things go?’
Strange stood in front of her, back to how he’d looked in Helmand now. A soldier. A man of duty. Forcing all emotion from himself. Getting ready to serve. To fight. To rage.
‘I can let them go when they’re finished.’
‘Some things never finish, Sarah. It’s best to walk away.’
‘Your grandfather wasn’t a hero. He was a
stikke
. He worked for the Nazis. He was the one torturing them in the basement of the Politigården. Bringing them here so
they could be tied to these stakes and shot.’
Strange folded his arms and nodded.
‘And then one day,’ Lund went on, ‘a group of Resistance fighters called the Holger Danske caught up with him outside Central Station. Gunned him down in the street.’
He didn’t move, didn’t speak.
‘It’s all there in the Politigården records,’ she said. ‘Not the Frihedsmuseet. I checked. So I guess . . .’
Thinking. Imagining. This was what she was good at.
‘I guess one day a young police cadet comes in for work experience. He thinks his dead granddad was a hero. Because that’s what his father told him. So he decides to look up the
records for himself.’ She moved closer to try to see into his eyes. ‘And when he finds the truth he goes home and does what any kid would. He spills it.’
‘You’re not normal,’ Strange murmured.
‘This isn’t about me. It’s about you. Who you are.’
The eyes did flicker then, stared hard at her.
‘It doesn’t hurt any more. Sorry.’
‘Did your father lie to himself too? Did he pretend . . . ?’ she asked.
‘We all want heroes. We just don’t like to think of the cost.’
‘And then you run away to the army. God . . .’ She shook her head. ‘They must have loved you. All that inherited guilt. Talk about someone with a point to prove. An army man
from an army family and what a secret to live with. When you brought Dragsholm here did it make it even? One
stikke
for another? How did it feel when they said that wasn’t
enough?’
Nothing.
Lund went back down the slope. He slunk after her.
‘Come on, Strange. You said it yourself. You’re a foot soldier. Not a leader. Someone put you up to this. Someone gave you the code to the munitions store in Ryvangen. Fixed that
forged dog tag. Told you to kill those people and make it look so hellish we’d think some fake terrorist gang murdered them—’
‘Cut it out.’
‘You didn’t enjoy that part, did you?’ she went on. ‘Torturing Anne Dragsholm. Cutting Myg Poulsen and the priest to ribbons. Locking a man in a wheelchair inside his
own—’
‘Give it a fucking rest for once!’ he yelled at her, alive and jumpy.
Lund went quiet. Scared. At him in part. But more at her own growing fury.
Slowly, like a cat stalking its prey, he came over, walked round her once, returned to look in her face.
‘You’re not right in the head,’ he said.
She didn’t blink. Couldn’t have done if she wanted.
‘About this I am. Why did you go along with it?’
His hand came up, touched her cheek, ran across her dry lips, brushed the soft lines of her throat. Left her.
‘Why?’ Lund asked again.
‘Because sometimes things come back to bite you.’ He looked at the stakes, the little ramp above them. His voice had turned soft. He sounded younger. ‘I was at a court hearing
last summer. It was hot.’ A shrug. ‘I had a short-sleeve shirt. The Dragsholm woman came over wanting to talk about Helmand. Halfway through she saw the tattoo. All these questions. She
must have looked in my face and . . .’