Her voice echoed round the black and empty belly of the building.
‘Lights, please.’
Not a sound. She was an experienced cop, remembered everything she was supposed to carry, except for the gun which always seemed an afterthought.
She had the torch though, safe in her right pocket, took it out and held it the way cops did: right hand upright, wrist cocked back, beam ahead, searching, peering into places others didn’t look.
The light and Lund went hunting. Blankets, discarded clothes, two crushed Coke cans, an empty packet of condoms.
Three steps and then she stopped. By the right wall, visible at the point it met the floor was a puddle of liquid, scarlet and sticky, two horizontal lines along the peeling plaster, the way blood smeared when a body was dragged along the floor.
Lund reached into her pocket, took out the packet of nicotine gum, popped a piece in her mouth.
It wasn’t just Copenhagen getting left behind. Tobacco was on the hit list too.
She bent down and placed a blue gloved finger in the sticky puddle, lifted it to her nose and sniffed.
Three more steps and she came upon a woodman’s axe, the handle clean and shiny as if it had been bought from a store the day before. She placed two fingers in the pool of red liquid that ran around the blade, tested it, sniffed and thought.
She’d never learn to like the taste of Nicotinell. Lund walked on.
The thing ahead was getting clearer. It swung from side to side. An industrial tarpaulin so smeared with red it looked like the shroud of a slaughtered beast.
What lay inside had a familiar, human shape.
Lund changed the position of the torch, held it close to her waist, beam upwards, checking the fabric, looking for something to grip.
The material came away in one swift movement and what lay beneath swung slowly in the beam. The frozen face the light caught was male, mouth open in a perpetual O. Black hair, pink flesh, a monstrous plastic penis erect and winking. And over its head a vivid blue Viking helmet with silver horns and gold braids running down.
Lund cocked her head and, for their sake, smiled.
Tied to the chest of the sex toy was a notice:
Thanks boss, for seven great years. The boys.
Laughter from the shadows.
The boys.
A good prank. Though they might have got real blood.
The Politigården was a grey labyrinth on reclaimed land near the waterfront. Bleak and square on the outside, the interior of the police headquarters opened up to a round courtyard. Classical pillars stood in a shadowy arcade around the edge. Inside spiral staircases led to winding corridors lined with striated black marble running round the perfect circle like calcified veins. It had taken her three months to find her way around this dark and maze-like complex. Even now, sometimes, she had to think hard to work out where she was.
Homicide was on the second floor, north-east. She was in Buchard’s room, wearing the Viking helmet, listening to their jokes, opening their presents, smiling, keeping quiet beneath the cardboard horns and the golden braids.
Then she thanked them and went to her office, began to clear her belongings. No time for fuss. She smiled at the photo of Mark she kept in a frame on the desk. Three years before, back when he was nine, long before he came home with the ridiculous earring. Before – just – the divorce. Then along came Bengt to tempt her to Sweden and a life across the bleak, cold waters of the Øresund. Young Mark, unsmiling then as now. That would change in Sweden. Along with everything else.
Lund swept the rest of the desk, her three-month supply of Nicotinell, the pens, the pencil sharpener in the shape of a London bus, into a flimsy cardboard box then placed the photo of Mark on top.
The door opened and a man walked in.
She looked, she judged, the way she always did. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. His hair was short, his face severe. Big eyes, big ears. Clothes cheap and a little too young for a man who wasn’t far off her own age. He was carrying a box much like hers. She could see a map of Copenhagen, a kid’s basketball net for the wall, a toy police car and a pair of headphones.
‘I’m looking for Lund’s office,’ he said, staring at the Viking helmet perched on the new pair of skis they’d given her at breakfast.
‘That’s me.’
‘Jan Meyer. Is that uniform around here?’
‘I’m going to Sweden.’
Lund picked up her belongings and the two of them did a little dance around each other as she struggled to the door.
‘For the love of God . . . why?’ Meyer asked.
She put down the box, swept back her long brown wayward hair, tried to think if there was anything left that mattered.
He took out the basketball net, looked at the wall.
‘My sister did something like that,’ Meyer said.
‘Like what?’
‘Couldn’t keep her life in one piece here so she moved to Bornholm with a guy.’ Meyer stuck the net above the filing cabinets. ‘Nice guy. Didn’t work.’
Lund got sick of her hair, pulled an elastic band from her pocket and tied it in a ponytail.
‘Why not?’
‘Too remote. They went mad listening to cows fart all day long.’ He took out a pewter beer tankard and turned it in his hands. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Sigtuna.’
Meyer stood stock still and stared at her in silence.
‘It’s very remote too,’ Lund added.
He took a long draw on his cigarette and pulled a small child’s football out of the box. Then he put the toy police car on the desk and started running it up and down. When the wheels moved the blue light burst into life and a tiny siren wailed.
He was still playing with it when Buchard walked in, a piece of paper in his hand.
‘You’ve met,’ the chief said. It wasn’t a question.
The bespectacled uncle figure she’d sat next to at breakfast had vanished.
‘We had the pleasure—’ Lund began.
‘This just came in.’ Buchard handed her the report slip. ‘If you’re too busy clearing up . . .’
‘I’ve got time,’ Lund told him. ‘All day . . .’
‘Good,’ Buchard said. ‘Why not take Meyer with you?’
The man with the box stubbed out his cigarette and shrugged.
‘He’s unpacking,’ Lund said.
Meyer let go of the car, picked up the football and bounced it in his hand.
He grinned. Looked different, more human, more rounded that way.
‘Never too busy for work.’
‘A good start,’ Buchard said. There was an edge to his voice. ‘I’d like that, Meyer, and so would you.’
Window down, looking round from the passenger seat, Lund scanned the Kalvebod Fælled. Thirteen kilometres south of the city, near the water. It was a bright clear morning after a couple of days of rain. Probably wouldn’t stay fine for long. Flat marshland, yellow grass and ditches, stretched to the horizon, with a bare dark wood to the right. Faint smell of sea, closer stink of dank decaying vegetation. Moisture in the air, not far from freezing. A hard cold winter stirring.
‘You can’t carry a gun? You can’t make arrests? What about parking tickets?’
An early morning dog walker had found some girl’s clothes on wasteland near a patch of silver birch woodland known as the Pinseskoven. The Pentecost Forest.
‘You’ve got to be Swedish to arrest people. It’s a . . .’ Lund wished she’d never answered his questions. ‘It’s how it works.’
Meyer shoved a handful of potato crisps into his mouth then balled the bag into the footwell. He drove like a teenager, too fast, with little thought for others.
‘What does your boy think?’
She got out, didn’t check to see him follow.
There was a plain-clothes detective by the find, a uniform man wandering through the hummocks of grass, kicking at the dying clumps. This was all they had: a flowery cotton top, the kind a teenager might wear. A card for a video rental store. Both inside plastic evidence bags. The top had bloodstains on it.
Lund turned three hundred and sixty degrees, her large and lustrous eyes looking for something the way they always did.
‘Who comes here?’ she asked the uniform man.
‘During the day nursery school kids on nature trips. At night hookers from the city.’
‘Some place to turn a trick,’ Meyer said. ‘Where’s the romance these days? I ask you.’
Lund was still going round slowly on her heels.
‘When was this stuff left here?’
‘Yesterday. Not Friday. There was a school trip then. They’d have seen it.’
‘No calls? No hospital reports?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No idea who she is?’
He showed her the bag with the top.
‘Size eight,’ the detective said. ‘That’s all we know.’
It looked cheap, the flowers so garish and childlike they might be ironic. A teenager’s joke: childish and sexy too.
Lund got the second bag and examined the video rental card.
It had a name: Theis Birk Larsen.
‘We found that near the track,’ the cop added. ‘The top here. Maybe they had a fight and he threw her out of the car. And then . . .’
‘And then,’ Meyer said, ‘she found her shoes and coat and purse and pack of condoms and walked all the way home to watch TV.’
Lund found she couldn’t stop looking at the woods.
‘You want me to talk to this Birk Larsen guy?’ the uniform asked.
‘Do that,’ she said and glanced at her watch.
Eight hours and it was over. Copenhagen and the life that went before.
Meyer came round and she found herself swamped in smoke.
‘We can talk to him, Lund. Leaving a hooker out here. Beating her up. My kind of customer.’
‘Well it’s not our kind of work.’
The cigarette went into the nearest ditch.
‘I know. I just . . .’ A pack of gum came out of his pocket. This man seemed to live on crisps and sweets and cigarettes. ‘I just want to have a little talk with him.’
‘About what? There’s no case. The hooker never complained.’
Meyer leaned forward and spoke to her the way a teacher might address a child.
‘I’m good at talking.’
He had prominent, almost comical ears and a good day’s stubble. He’d do well undercover, she thought. And maybe had. She remembered the way Buchard spoke to him. Street thug. Cop. Meyer could play either.
‘I said . . .’
‘You should see me, Lund. Truly. Before you go. My gift to the Swedes.’
He took the card from her fingers. Read it.
‘Theis Birk Larsen.’
Sarah Lund turned one more circle and took in the yellow grass, the ditches and the woods.
‘I’ll drive,’ she said.
Pernille perched above his big chest laughing like a child.
Half-dressed on the kitchen floor in the middle of a working morning. That was Theis’s idea, like most things.
‘Get dressed,’ she ordered and rolled off him, rose to her feet. ‘Go to work, you beast.’
He grinned like the tearaway teenager she still remembered. Then climbed back into his bright-red bib overalls. Forty-four, ginger hair turning grey, mutton-chop sideburns reaching down to his broad chin, face ready to switch from hot to cold then back to its usual immobile in an instant.
Pernille was one year younger, a busy woman, still in shape after three children, enough to catch his eye as easily as she had twenty years before when they first met.
She watched him clamber into his heavy uniform then looked around the little apartment.
Nanna had been in her belly when they moved to Vesterbro. In her belly when they married. Here, in this bright, colourful room, pot plants in the window, photographs on the wall, full of the mess of family life, they raised her. From squawking baby to beautiful teen, joined, after too long an interval, by Emil and Anton, now seven and six.
Their quarters stood above the busy depot of the Birk Larsen transport company. The place downstairs was more ordered than the cramped rooms in which they lived, five of them, forever in each other’s way. A jumbled mess of mementoes, drawings, toys and clutter.
Pernille looked at the herbs on the window, the way the green light shone through them.
Full of life.
‘Nanna’s going to need an apartment soon,’ she said, straightening her long chestnut hair. ‘We can put down a deposit, can’t we?’
He grunted with laughter.
‘You choose your moments. She can choose hers. Let Nanna finish school first.’
‘Theis . . .’
She wound herself back into his burly arms, looked into his face. Some people were scared of Theis Birk Larsen. Not her.
‘Maybe it won’t be needed,’ he said.
His rough face creased in a crafty, teasing grin.
‘Why?’
‘Secret.’
‘Tell me!’ Pernille cried and punched his chest with her clenched fist.