Authors: Mikkel Birkegaard
Death Sentence
A murder committed on paper, safely within the confines of a novel, is one thing. To see that same crime in the real wold, is something else entirely …
Frank Føns is a very successful crime writer. His novels, famed for their visceral desciptions of violent death, have made him a household name. But now someone is copying his crimes. For Frank what once seemed a clever, intriguing plot twist has suddenly become a terrifying, blood-spattered reality.
Frank unwittingly swaps his role of writer for detective. He must find out who is using fiction to destroy his life, and why. What had once been a game is now a matter of life and death.
In fiction, the bad guy always gets caught, but in real life there is no such guarantee. Fear becomes real. The knife cut hurts like hell. Our narrator may not survive. And as Frank knows, no one is promising him a happy ending …
Death Sentence
MIKKEL BIRKEGAARD
Translated from the Danish by
Charlotte Barslund
Until recently I had only killed people on paper.
As it happened, I was good at it. Good enough to make a living from it and so experienced that I could refer to it as my job. Being able to write full-time in a country the size of Denmark is something of a privilege, but there are those who will argue that I’m not a ‘proper writer’ or what I write aren’t ‘proper books’.
I have had to put up with criticism, ridicule even, my whole career, and at times I have secretly agreed with my detractors. It’s not easy to admit, but when critics accuse me of laziness and cynicism, of resorting to shock tactics to make up for weaknesses in a plot, they are not altogether wrong.
But the story you’re about to read is something else entirely.
I know it will be unlike anything I have ever written. Normally I’m invisible, the anonymous narrator who reveals the story without drawing attention to himself. But this time I can’t hide. I have to reveal myself. And this introduction is primarily for my own benefit, a reminder
of
my project, a wagging finger, telling me what to do and on what terms. That’s what motivates me.
Because I must go on and I must do so alone.
I’m cut off from the world. There are no distractions. At night, the darkness and the silence are as dense as though I were in a bunker. No sounds or impressions can reach me.
But then again, I don’t need outside inspiration.
What follows here has already happened to me and merely needs communicating through my fingers and a keyboard to the computer. The events of the past week have forced me to train the spotlight on myself and document what’s happened while it’s still fresh in my mind and I have sufficient time left. There is no filter. No possible interpretation or perspective can show me or my role in the story in a better light. A shame, really, but no matter how tempted I might be to embellish the distressing and dreadful incidents I have taken part in recently, this time I can’t make it up.
In a way, it’s liberating.
I don’t need to lie.
The technique is different, too. I won’t have to resort to a range of literary devices to serve the plot or build the tension. I can write it as it is, without beating about the bush. The protagonist won’t need to look in the mirror to give the reader an idea of his appearance because the protagonist in this story is me, Frank Føns, a 46-year-old writer, of medium build and height, slim, with dark hair, a closely trimmed beard and a pair of steel-grey eyes which I have been told don’t blink very often.
There, that’s that out of the way.
Had it not been for the gravity of the situation, I would probably have relished my newfound creative freedom. I have some regrets I didn’t try this experiment earlier. Not that I haven’t launched into literary experimentation before, but I discovered early, too early perhaps, a formula that worked and I’ve stuck to it ever since.
But not now.
The rules of the game have changed.
I have been freed from my own and others’ expectations and conventions. I don’t need to worry about conforming to rules determining what a writer can or cannot do. Just as well, really, as I’m forced to start with one of the biggest clichés in the genre, the event that set everything in motion, a telephone call …
1
NO ONE
DARES
to ring me in the morning.
People who think they know me expect me to be hungover. Those who really know me know that I write in the morning and hate being disturbed. I was in ‘the Tower’, as my older daughter had once nicknamed our holiday cottage, and when the telephone rang, I wasn’t actually writing. True, I was at my desk, the computer was on and a mug of steaming hot coffee was next to the screen, but my thoughts were elsewhere. From my study on the first floor I had a view of the garden below. I was wondering if it was worth raking up the leaves today or whether I should wait until the autumn gales had shaken the last of them loose.
My gut reaction was to ignore the telephone. Calls at this time were never good news, or they would be unimportant, cold-callers or wrong numbers. I let the telephone ring five times before I grunted my name into the handset.
‘Your body has turned up,’ I heard down the other end.
It was Verner. He never introduces himself. Verner is
one
of the people who think they know me and yet hasn’t grasped that he can’t ring whenever he feels like it.
I was in no mood for games.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone has committed your murder.’
‘Which one?’ I asked, failing to suppress a yawn.
Verner worked for Copenhagen Police and he checked police procedures for me. He didn’t regard being a writer as a proper job, but he was still proud to contribute to the process. Sadly, pride had gone to his head and given him the impression he had the right to ring me at any time with ideas or suggestions.
‘The murder in the marina,’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ve found the body of a woman in Gilleleje Marina, mutilated and bound in chains.’
I closed my eyes and pressed two fingers against my temple. My mind was still drifting between thoughts of raking up leaves and guilt at not having produced that day’s quota of words. Verner’s news sank in only slowly.
‘Is this a joke?’ I asked, mostly to say something.
‘I’m telling you, this is your murder.’
‘What possible connection—’
‘The woman was alive and equipped with an oxygen tank when she went in,’ Verner interrupted me. ‘She has the same physique. Everything matches. Even the weight used to hold her down.’
‘A marble bust?’
‘Precisely.’
‘And you’re sure it happened in Gilleleje?’
‘Yes.’
My head started to ache. The murder Verner described
did
sound exactly like one of the killings in my new novel,
In the Red Zone
. It was the story of a psychopathic psychologist who subjected his patients to their greatest phobia, not in order to cure them, but to kill them in a way that realized their worst nightmare. Hence the murder in the marina involved a woman who had a fear of drowning. The psychologist dived down with her and studied the woman’s panic as she ran out of oxygen and suffocated. He got off on her terror in the cold dark water, her pupils widening and her screams muffled through her mouthpiece and the mass of water. I had murdered other characters via their fear of needles, tight spaces and spiders. Not one of my best efforts.
‘Frank?’ Verner’s tone was harsh.
‘Yes, I’m still here,’ I said.
‘What should we do?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s impossible. It must be a coincidence.’
‘She’s dead, Frank.
That’s
no coincidence.’
‘But the book has only just been printed,’ I protested. ‘It hasn’t even been published yet.’
Verner had to get back to work. He was on the beat in Copenhagen and dealt mostly with prostitution and petty crime. Murder wasn’t within his remit, so he had nothing more to tell me the first time he called. Thanks to an extensive network within the police force he was normally able to sniff out the information I needed for my books, be it arrest procedures, traffic regulations or ways to kill people. He assured me he would follow the investigation during the day and keep me posted.
It seems to me now that not telling anyone about the possible connection to my book was an unfortunate decision. However, Verner had supplied me with confidential information for years and was probably panicking at the thought of the consequences if he was found out. I was probably too shocked to think straight, though for a moment I fantasized about how the publicity could boost sales. I quickly dismissed that idea, though. It was just as likely the police would stop publication out of respect for relatives or concern for the investigation, and I needed the money. In the last ten to twelve years, I had written a book every eighteen months, and I relied on the income. Not that I lived a life of luxury. Since the divorce, the cottage had become my permanent home – contrary to the terms of the lease – and although it was in reasonable nick, it wasn’t exactly a palace.
‘The Tower’ was one of the older holiday cottages in Rågeleje, third row from the beach, on the north coast of Sjælland, with a spacious garden consisting mainly of lawn surrounded by tall birches and spruces. It was only ten kilometres from Gilleleje Marina, where I regularly bought fish from stalls on the quay.
It was local knowledge that made me pick the marina as the crime scene in
In the Red Zone
, but now it felt like a mistake. I couldn’t imagine ever shopping at the marina again. In fact, I couldn’t even begin to understand why anyone would commit a murder in the sleepy little fishing village.
So I decided to potter around the cottage doing odd jobs in an attempt to forget that a woman had been killed. It wasn’t easy. I work with death every day. Not
an
hour goes by without me thinking about new ways to kill people or inflict pain and injury. I turn ordinary household articles and utensils into murder weapons or instruments of torture all the time, but only in my imagination.
Now someone had tried it out for real.
I never got round to raking up the leaves or writing the 2,500 words that constituted my daily target. An hour later, having given up on keeping thoughts about the murder at bay, I comforted myself with a whisky, even though it was only just gone eleven. I sat on the terrace and watched the autumn sun battle large drifting clouds. Piles of fallen leaves were spread around the garden. The wind took hold of the tall trees and shook them, and sometimes a cloud of birch seeds would scatter across the terrace. Several of the tiny three-leaved flakes landed in my drink. They floated around on the surface like pieces of a puzzle, and I studied how they sank to the bottom of the glass as they absorbed the liquid.
I have never quite understood the English phrase ‘copycat murder’. I assume it has nothing to do with cats. In Danish you say that a murderer ‘aped’ another, which makes more sense to me. I can imagine that apes, like children, enjoy mimicking someone else’s movements. The more I thought about ‘copycat’, the more absurd it seemed.
I had drunk my whisky and so I went to fetch another one, along with one of the advance copies of
In the Red Zone
I’d received a couple of weeks ago. Back on the terrace, I flicked through the book and found the place where the murder occurred. It was roughly two-thirds in and
lasted
seven pages. The murder was the book’s emotional climax, the scene I tended to plan most carefully.