Fatal Crossing Page 11

  Bjarke shook his head. ‘They totally knew that Sonny and I did it. But after Lulu's account there was nothing they could do, so they had to leave. Kurt had his suspicions, of course, and he scowled at the pair of us for the next few weeks. Especially after he found a stolen moped in a ditch not far from Vestergården. And, of course, we never did go to London,’ he said with another melancholy smile.

  ‘What happened that night — what do you remember?’ Nora interjected.

  ‘The irony was,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘The irony was that after that night me and Sonny both swore to be her protectors. Have her back. There were some guys at the youth club who liked bullying little girls. Sonny and I had a word with them, and from then on they left Lulu alone. We even got Erik to give up his ridiculous porn magazines and all his other crap.’

  ‘Erik?’ Nora asked with raised eyebrows.

  ‘That's right. His dad fucked him up. Yes, in that way. And I guess he thought no one would find out as long as he read porn magazines and talked about tits all day. Kurt confiscated them, but somehow Erik always get new ones. He loved going up to the girls with the magazines and shoving them in their faces. Lisbeth would just laugh and take the piss out of him. Jeanette ignored him. But he really upset both Lulu and that little one ... Now what was her name?’

  ‘Anni?’ Nora ventured, holding her breath.

  Bjarke nodded. The name of the girl he had allegedly helped rape didn’t seem to make much of an impression.

  ‘Yes, that was her name, I think. Small and a bit fat. Ugly.’ He heaved a sigh, as if dismissing her as insignificant. ‘I think you can safely say that Sonny and I failed badly in our attempt to take care of Lulu that night on the ferry. Just one night, and she was gone forever.’

  ‘But what happened? Do you remember the last time you saw the girls?’

  ‘We’d been trying to buy booze in the duty-free shop. We didn’t get any, of course. We all looked like teenagers, and they asked for ID immediately. Then we wanted Lisbeth to give it a go because she looked much older when she wore make-up. But we couldn’t find her anywhere. So we sent Lulu off to look for her.’

  Bjarke paused for a long time.

  ‘She never came back,’ he then said.

  One night's chaos and regrets boiled down to a single sentence.

  ‘Did the rest of you stay together?’

  ‘Nah. I don’t really remember. I mean, at that point none of us suspected that anything bad had happened. I guess we thought that ... Well, I don’t know what we thought. That they had found some older guys who had booze, perhaps. It wasn’t a great feeling, and I personally didn’t want to look like a fool. So I let them get on with it.’

  Nora nodded. ‘Can you remember anything else?’

  ‘At one point I thought I caught a glimpse of Lisbeth at the disco, but I’m not sure. I only got as far as the doorway. They wouldn’t let me in. Then Oluf, Sonny and me bumped into this Norwegian guy who was over eighteen, and in return for a few strong beers, he bought us a bottle of vodka.’

  Bjarke pulled a face at the memory. ‘From then on, it gets a bit blurred, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘And what about Oluf? Oluf and Anni, do you remember anything about them?’ Nora asked more sharply than she had intended to.

  He looked at her with surprise. ‘No. Not really. Should I?’

  Nora made no reply. ‘Where's Sonny today and do you know what happened to Oluf?’

  ‘Sonny is doing time in Herstedvester. A totally amateurish bank robbery. Trying to pay off a gambling debt. I believe he’ll be out in six or seven years, if he lives that long, that is. From what I hear, he still hasn’t paid off his debt and the interest is starting to hurt.’

  ‘And what about Oluf?’ she asked again, trying to catch Bjarke's eye.

  But he was no longer paying attention to her. He was looking through the open window at two imposing foreign-looking men in black leather jackets who were passing by.

  He drained his coffee cup, got up abruptly and reverted seamlessly to the butch tone of voice.

  ‘Thanks for the coffee, lady. I need to go now. Call me with any news, will you?’ he said, and put down — in all seriousness — a business card with Dare Devils’ red trident logo and the title Chief Press Officer written in flaming letters above a mobile number.

  Then he left, making sure that the two in the leather jackets didn’t notice him.

  Nora leaned out of the window and saw the two men turn the corner by Assistens Cemetery. She briefly wondered whether she could possibly press Bjarke for more information by threatening to give him away to them.

  She was wavering in the doorway when her mobile rang.

  It was Andreas. She sat down at the table again and planted her feet firmly on the floor. Grounded herself.

  ‘Hey. I just wanted to hear how you were?’

  ‘Great,’ she said, pressing the handle of the teaspoon hard into the palm of her hand in the hope that physical pain would distract her from this ridiculous feeling of joy.

  ‘Oh, am I interrupting something? You sound tense?’

  ‘No, no. Everything is fine,’ she said and focused on the menu where she could read all about Java beans versus Ethiopian coffee, but the words burst like soap bubbles before they reached her brain.

  ‘Right, I don’t want to disturb you if you’re busy,’ he said, a tad miffed. ‘I’m just calling to find out if we’re still meeting the day after tomorrow?’

  Nora nodded before remembering that he couldn’t see her. ‘Yes. I’ll pick you up around eleven. Please text me your address,’ she said.

  They rang off, and Nora spontaneously slammed the palm of her hand against her forehead. It was just Andreas. An old friend. How did it get to this point where she could no longer carry on a normal telephone conversation?

  ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she said slowly, as one of the baristas passed her table.

  ‘I really hope that wasn’t your bank manager,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘I wish. It was a man who's off limits,’ she said.

  13

  The off-limits man was waiting with a bag slung over his shoulder outside his rented flat when she drove around the corner, having battled her way through London's Saturday morning traffic in a microscopic, bright green rented Ford.

  ‘You might have to keep that on your lap. Once I put my handbag in the boot, it was full,’ she joked, trying very hard not to notice that he was wearing a white shirt. With buttons.

  Andreas adjusted the passenger seat and stretched out his legs — to the extent that was possible. Nora pointed to the back where her, by now, somewhat dog-eared copy of Murders of the Century was lying on top of her notebook.

  ‘Page fifty-three,’ she said and as Andreas reached for it his arm brushed her shoulder. Rays seemed to emanate from him and she could almost sense an aura of heat around his body.

  For the next half an hour the only sound in the car was that of BBC Radio 4, while Nora navigated them out of London and joined the motorway. Andreas was immersed in the book. She glanced sideways to gauge his reaction, but his face was inscrutable.

  Finally he looked in the back to read the notes, thorough as always, before slamming it shut.

  ‘So, how about it? What do you think?’

  ‘It's one nasty story,’ he commented dryly.

  ‘Yes, of course it is,’ she said. ‘But do you think Bill Hix might have murdered Lulu and Lisbeth? Could that be why they were never seen again?’

  Andreas's brow furrowed. ‘It's hard to say. But, as far as I’m aware, he has never before or afterwards abducted two victims at the same time. It would require confidence, control and brute force. Did he have that?’

  Nora mulled it over. ‘Lulu and Lisbeth disappeared in 1985, and Hix was caught in 1992, seven years later. At that point he had, going by the contents of his cabinet of horrors, killed at least fifteen people. However, if you don’t want to alert the police that you’re a serial killer, you c
an’t kill every single month. So we have to presume that he spread the killings over a longer period. Perhaps he already had a murder or three on his conscience in 1985. Might that have been enough to convince him to escalate?’

  ‘It might,’ Andreas agreed.

  They sat for a while in silence, before he turned to her. ‘So what are we really doing in Brine?’

  ‘Going for a swim. And finding out where that suitcase came from. I have a hunch it's the key to everything.’

  If he was disappointed at her answer, he didn’t let on. Instead he started fiddling with the radio until he found a station playing evergreens.

  ‘Perfect. I love this one,’ he said when the opening notes of Frank Sinatra's version of ‘Come Fly With Me’ poured out of the speakers.

  ‘Let's float down to Peeeeruuu,’ he screeched enthusiastically and Nora clung to the steering wheel in order not to veer off the road from laughter.

  ‘Come on. Join in. You know you want to!’ he invited her and eventually she had to surrender.

  ‘In llama land, there's a one-man band and he’ll toot his flute for you ...’

  Then followed Shirley Bassey and her diamonds, Marilyn Monroe and her daddy complex, and Nora gave a superb performance with her take on the amorous ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da-daddy’.

  And before they knew it, they were in Brine. Nora's vocal chords felt raw and her stomach muscles ached from laughing.

  ‘The B&B address is on a piece of paper in my notebook. I printed it out from the web. There's also a map.’

  Andreas found it. ‘Yes. Dolphin Guesthouse. Two single rooms. It's on the left.’

  They drove up to a whitewashed building with a tiled roof and crooked walls framed by blue wisteria and large hydrangeas. In the reception a man in his twenties stuck out his hand and introduced himself as Wesley. He was tanned and looked like someone who spent the least possible time on dry land in the summer season. Nora guessed that the surfboard leaning up against the garage was his.

  ‘Welcome. Breakfast is from eight to nine thirty,’ he said, gesturing towards the conservatory.

  ‘We only have one single, so one of you gets a double. The only question is which one of you will it be?’ he said, looking from one to the other.

  Nora gave a light shrug, and said to Andreas in Danish. ‘It doesn’t matter. Go on, you have it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he replied.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying,’ Wesley said, again looking from one to the other.

  ‘I’ll take the single bedroom. Just give me the key,’ she said, reverting to English more abruptly than she had intended. And added: ‘Thank you.’

  Wesley raised his eyebrows without saying anything, as only a true Brit can, and handed her the key. The key ring was a small wooden ship with a big number three painted on the sail.

  Nora grabbed her case, ignored Andreas's protests and marched down the narrow passage to a small room with a single bed and a battered chest of drawers.

  The view across the car park bordered on panoramic and there was shaggy, moss-green carpet on the bathroom floor. The obligatory tea tray balanced on a wobbly bedside table with curved legs. Just as the Americans would defend their right to bear arms and drive their cars anywhere, including when visiting their next-door neighbours, the Brits would die for the right to a nice cuppa.

  Next to the tea cup was a cellophane-wrapped biscuit, which started to look seriously tempting when Nora remembered how long ago it was since she had wolfed down a slice of toast with marmalade and a cup of coffee and called it breakfast.

  Two minutes later there was a knock on her door, and Andreas edged his way in. His very presence made the room shrink. Nora sat down on the bed while he took the only armchair in the room, a plump, upholstered floral monstrosity that looked as if it had survived a couple of wars.

  ‘This is very ... green,’ Andreas said with a grin.

  She lashed out at him.

  ‘By way of consolation may I buy you lunch? I think that the green horror on the bathroom floor requires some form of compensation. We ought to cut out samples and send them to a lab. It represents a chance of discovering hitherto unknown lifeforms.’

  Nora couldn’t help smiling.

  When they stepped outside, the weather had changed as if finally the sun had had enough of its own capriciousness and had decided to hang around for the rest of the day.

  The light was golden as they walked down Seaview Street. To her enormous disappointment, the bric-a-brac shop was shut. She walked right up to the window and pressed her nose against the glass to peer inside before she noticed a small sign at the bottom pane in the door announcing that the shop was closed until further notice. She could tell from the curled-up edges that it had been there for a while.

  The shop looked dusty and abandoned. A hodgepodge of tat and treasures. A couple of extravagant crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling alongside brown, glazed ceramic lamps that had never been an aesthetic delight, not even against a background of 1970s Hessian wallpaper. On the floor was an old pram surrounded by stacks of books and toy cars.

  Nora quickly scanned the room for more suitcases, but saw none. She considered popping in to see the Russian woman in the Daisy Dairy Café, but changed her mind when she saw the queue of happy summer visitors waiting to taste their organic ice cream.

  Andreas dragged her down towards the beach where they found a pub with an open courtyard and a barbecue, which was still serving food though it was way past lunchtime.

  They ate grilled sardines with gooseberry compote washed down with cold cider. Andreas finished first and sat watching her pensively, while she struggled to get the last tiny bones out of the white fish.

  ‘Yes?’ she said eventually when she couldn’t take it any longer. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said enigmatically.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He hesitated, giving her enough time to close her eyes and wonder if he were about to say something terrible. Something unbearably awful.

  ‘I was just wondering ... Why did you really bring me here?’

  She drank her cider and slowly put down the glass. ‘I guess I thought it would be nice,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Because we’re friends. And because you’re a police officer and might contribute something that hadn’t crossed my mind.’

  Thus she slammed the dangerous, secret door shut with a bang.

  She started fiddling with the label on the cider bottle. The bottle was covered with condensation and she concentrated on ripping it off in strips with her thumbnail. When one strip came off, she would roll it between her fingers until it turned into a wet ball, before repeating the process.

  Andreas kept looking at her. ‘Nora Sand,’ he said softly.

  She opened her mouth to reply, but was overcome by a feeling of rage, which took her completely by surprise. Like a freak wave wrecking a sandcastle just as you thought the tide had gone out. Anger that he had turned up out of the blue after all these years and caused mayhem in her life.

  The waitress unknowingly deflected the anticipated reaction. ‘Looks like you could do with another round,’ she said with feigned jollity.

  The wave stopped abruptly, and when Andreas finally turned his attention to the waitress to ask for the bill, Nora could breathe again. She got up and strolled casually to the pub's lavatory.

  She turned on the cold tap and used an old trick she had read about in a novel from the Deep South. Back then, young women in crinoline petticoats and whalebone corsets would faint on a regular basis because the slightest emotion made them hyperventilate in their tight clothes. But ice-cold water on the wrist, right where the pulse is closest to the surface of the skin, forces the body to take it easy. Slow down. Be cool.

  Nora rested her forehead against the cold mirror, reached out her hands and proved that some advice is timeless and equally effective on overheated, Danish journalists.

  When she came back outside, Andreas
had paid and she had regained her poise.

  ‘So ice cream or a swim first?’ she said in her best Girl Scout voice.

  Andreas blinked again, but played along with the mood. ‘I’m afraid I have to draw your attention to current health and safety regulations: always wait thirty minutes after eating before you swim,’ he said gravely.

  Half an hour later, they were standing at the water's edge, eyeing each other up. It was a tradition that whoever jumped in second was a loser. Only one action was more contemptible: trying to get away with a false start.

  The sun made the surface of the water explode in thousands of stars, and the moment she hit the water, she felt good again. Everything went back to normal.

  Her skin tightened in the cold water and she surfaced for air. Andreas swam in front of her, and she dived under again and pinched his toes. Another one of their old games.

  They swam for a while along the shore, Andreas taking long, strong strokes. Nora struggled to keep up, and she promised herself that from now on there would be no more skipping the pool due to work pressure.

  Eventually they returned to the shore and when they reached shallow water, Nora stood on the seabed watching his body undulate in the sea. He looked like a big dolphin.

  They dried themselves, walked back up to the town and queued with the other tourists in front of the Daisy Dairy Café. A local girl was serving, and she had all the time in the world.

  It took Nora and Andreas half an hour to reach the counter, and while Andreas counted out the money, Nora asked about the Russian woman who had answered the phone earlier. The girl nodded towards the pub across the street. ‘Katya doesn’t like working when it's hot. There's a good chance she’ll be in the pub. She has long, red hair. You can’t miss her.’