Fatal Crossing Page 16

  Nora was reminded of the time she interviewed a famous female chef in London as part of a feature on high-achieving women. When they had finished the obligatory questions about how hard it was for a woman to break into a male-dominated world, and how big the sacrifices on the domestic front were, out of sheer curiosity Nora asked the chef about the best meal she had ever had.

  The woman's eyes had taken on a dreamy expression as she told her about a lunch she had eaten at the age of fourteen with her father on the roof terrace of a restaurant on Capri.

  ‘I don’t remember the starter or the main course,’ she said to Nora's surprise. ‘But when we got to the dessert, the waiter brought two peaches on a plate and a knife. It was as simple as that. They were just picked and warmed by the sun. I can still recall the sensation of my knife slicing through the skin to the golden, juicy, sweet flesh. It was heavenly. It was perfection.’

  Nora had never forgotten that, and she now selected a couple of peaches and placed them carefully in her basket, followed by a bunch of rocket and the best Parma ham from the deli. Sliced very thinly. At the cheese counter she tasted her way to the softest, creamiest buffalo mozzarella. Then she weighed a few handfuls of fat, salted Spanish Marcona almonds, popped a bottle of prosecco into the basket along with a loaf of ciabatta so freshly baked that she could feel the heat through the brown paper bag.

  That was dinner taken care of when the time came. All that was left on her list now was a serial killer and a bit of research.

  She turned on her computer the moment she stepped through the door and let it warm up while she put the food away. She rested the peaches on her windowsill where they could take in the last few hours of sunlight.

  Her flat was humid and she drank water straight from the bottle in the fridge before settling down to work.

  The last thing she wanted to do was read more about Bill Hix and his dreadful deeds, but it was crucial if she were to be properly prepared for her visit to Wolf Hall Prison in three days.

  Her window was ajar and she could hear the sound of London traffic in the background. Frustrated drivers beeping their horns at each other, Filipina maids picking up schoolchildren, teenage girls with mobiles pressed to their ear and builders catcalling beautiful women from the rolled-down windows of their white vans.

  There were days when the noise distracted and frustrated her, and she envied Globalt's Italy correspondent, who had rented accommodation in an old monastery on a Tuscany hilltop, from where in exalted calm and peace, he could write about brutal Mafia murders and intrigues in the Berlusconi government.

  But today when her laptop took her into a sick universe, Nora was grateful for the sound of normality coming through the window as a low but steady pulse. A link to a world where the sun was still shining and where girls who dreamed of becoming models slept safely in their beds and didn’t hang around King's Cross waiting to be picked up by a smug banker in a Mercedes looking for a cheap thrill. A world where young girls’ tongues didn’t end up pickled in a jar in a warehouse.

  After Nora had ploughed her way through the first five websites, she had a fairly good idea about Bill Hix and his dark deeds. There wasn’t much that hadn’t already been covered by Murders of the Century. Most of the sites were merely an extension of what she already knew, and many sites decidedly wallowed in the details of the individual murders.

  Nora tried staying objective. She made notes and prepared a timeline to get an overview, but she had a feeling of wading through a stinking cesspit. The blood-dripping graphics that glorified violence made her feel nauseous, as did the ecstatic and admiring comments that so-called fans of Bill Hix had left on allegedly factual sites.

  She wondered what drove Hix. Vanity? Arrogance, conceit, a God complex with the right to choose who would live and who would die? Or was he a scared little boy at the mercy of his desires? She quickly dismissed the last thought. He hadn’t been caught for years. That proved he was cold-blooded and calculating. Only a flat tyre, an unpredictable event, had brought him down in the end.

  He had run rings round James McCormey. Played on his concern for the victims’ relatives. Used it to torment everyone. He enjoyed the game. He loved being the centre of everyone's attention. She had to let him think that he had the upper hand. But not make it too obvious. It had to be a challenge or he would lose interest immediately.

  Finally she couldn’t take it any longer and turned on the news by way of a brain break. Anything, please.

  They were in the middle of a weather forecast so she channel-hopped and came across a documentary on biker gangs. Suddenly she had a light-bulb moment. She dug into her bag, pulled out the invitation from the Irish Embassy before she found the Dare Devils business card in a front pocket.

  ‘Helgaard,’ he said when he answered his mobile. She could hear background noise from a bar.

  ‘Nora Sand.’

  ‘Speak,’ he ordered her.

  ‘You never told me what happened to Olufi.’

  ‘Because I don’t know. We drifted apart. For a time I used to see him at Box Copenhagen Gym. He was good. Had the killer instinct you need to make it inside the ring. He was merciless. If you hesitated, Oluf would just punch you twice as hard. For him it wasn’t enough to floor his opponent, he had to hurt him too. A fight where his opponent ended up in casualty was a good fight, as far as Oluf was concerned. There was talk about him boxing abroad. But I don’t know if anything ever came of it.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might know?’ Nora asked.

  Bjarne Helgaard mulled it over. In the silence Nora could hear something that might be a super league match on the television.

  ‘He was with some woman. Betina or ... No, that wasn’t it. Benita, I think her name was. Her mum had a jewellery shop in Lyngby. Oluf was a real shit — he actually suggested that we do her shop over. He had tricked his girlfriend into revealing the security code.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Before you run along, I want an update on what's happening to my girls. Have you caught the bastard who did it?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Nora said.

  ‘But you’ll tell me when you know, won’t you? Sometimes justice can be swifter than you think,’ he said pompously.

  ‘Yes, and sometimes justice needs to think twice,’ she said and rang off.

  A search on www.krak.dk offered her two jewellers in Lyngby: Strand & Sons and True as Gold. Nora thought the latter sounded more likely and did indeed strike gold with a shop assistant who introduced herself on the phone as Natasha, and with no sense of discretion told her that Benita had just nipped out to the chemist, but would be back in ten minutes.

  Nora rang back twenty minutes later. This time it was Benita Svaneholm herself who answered the phone.

  Nora introduced herself and explained that she was trying to research a cold case as part of an investigative report, but deliberately used vague phrases on the assumption that few people would be cooperative on learning that their ex might be mixed up in a murder case.

  ‘Is this about his boxing?’ Benita Svaneholm asked, and Nora replied that it might be linked to his career as a boxer and asked casually about her relationship with Oluf.

  ‘Well, it was a long time ago,’ Benita said. ‘But I thought we would go the distance. We met at Bakken Amusement Park in the summer of 1990. He was tall and good-looking. Ripped. All the girls fancied him. We were together for six months, and I was starting to hope that we might get engaged,’ she said and emitted a small sigh at the memory.

  ‘But he had bigger fish to fry, poor Oluf. His boxing. He had been picked to join some amateur team going to Liverpool, I think it was, to fight some Brits. It was all really exciting, and Oluf was sure that if he did well over there, he would be able to go pro.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ Nora had time to interject before Benita started talking again.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he really was talent-spotted as he’d hoped. He never came back to Denmark. After three weeks
without a word from him, I called Box Copenhagen Gym. No one knew anything. I spoke to a secretary who thought that Oluf might have stayed in London, but he didn’t sound as if he knew Oluf personally, and I had a feeling he was only saying it to get rid of me because I’d been calling them every evening for a week,’ Benita said.

  ‘Did you try anyone else?’ Nora asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t have the surnames of the guys he used to box with, so I didn’t know who else to call. I had never met his family, so I couldn’t contact them either. Finally I had to accept that me and Oluf were over. That I’d been building castles in the air, or however the saying goes. I know that it's been too long now, but I’m still hoping that one day I’ll read about “professional boxer Oluf Mikkelsen” in the papers. But so far nothing,’ Benita said.

  ‘Do you remember the name of the boxing club secretary?’

  ‘Yes, I do, because it was funny. His name was Rudolf, and Oluf told me that the guy had a massive red nose after all the fighting, so they had nicknamed him Red-nosed Rudolf.’

  It took Nora less than thirty seconds to find the number for Box Copenhagen Gym on the internet.

  ‘Willy speaking,’ said a man with a Copenhagen accent.

  Nora told him that she was looking for Rudolf.

  ‘Rudolf? He retired years ago.’

  Nora's optimism began to evaporate.

  ‘But the old fool can’t stay away,’ the man said, holding the handset away from his mouth as he yelled across the room.

  ‘Rudoooolf. There's a lady who wants to talk to you.’

  Soon afterwards the handset crackled. ‘Rudolf speaking.’ The voice sounded crisp and old.

  Nora introduced herself again and explained that she was trying to find out if he knew what had happened to Oluf Mikkelsen.

  ‘Noooo. I don’t think so. I don’t remember him,’ Rudolf said very slowly. He sounded apologetic.

  Nora tried to prompt his memory. ‘He went on a trip with some other amateur boxers in 1991. To Liverpool or maybe London, and there's a possibility he didn’t travel back with them.’

  At this the voice became much more lucid. ‘Oh, yes, bloody hell! Now I remember him. We used to call him Oluf the Buffalo. Welterweight. Always fought in yellow. Three knockouts in five fights. Very, very promising. He’d started training a bit late, not much support on the home front, as far as I recall, but the lad had a left hook to make a grown man cry.’

  ‘Yes, that's him,’ Nora said to encourage him. ‘Do you know what happened to him in England?’

  Rudolf's voice grew faint again, as if someone had turned his volume down. ‘No. Not really. It was very odd. He was with us for the first part of the trip. We were in Liverpool and were due to go on to London. We’d had three really good nights. He won two of his fights straight out. The third one his opponent won on points, but it was daylight robbery. The judges voting for a local boy...’

  He paused as if to recall past triumphs, injustices and defeats.

  ‘Right then, on the fourth morning as we were getting on the coach, we couldn’t find Oluf anywhere. We checked his room and found his suitcase, but he was gone as were his wallet and his passport. At first we thought he’d gone on a bender. Truth be told, he was no angel. We thought he might be sleeping it off in a police cell or lying in the gutter after being mugged. I was really hacked off, and it caused a lot of problems for our schedule with the other clubs.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine,’ Nora said sympathetically.

  ‘Well, in the end we had to drive off without him. I left the address of our next stop at the hotel, but he never came back. I called the hotel a few days later and he hadn’t even bothered to pick up his luggage. I also tried the police, but they had never heard of him. At that point I’d had enough and thought that he had made his bed and could lie on it. When we came home, his girlfriend rang us day and night. I wondered if he had got her up the duff, to be honest with you, and that he might have decided it was more responsibility than he could cope with. If the trip to England had offered him an easy way out. Yes, I guess that's what I thought. We never saw him again. And he was a really good welterweight.’

  Nora thanked him and rang off.

  Another dead end. Or perhaps not. Oluf Mikkelsen had travelled to the UK. What had happened to him there? Was he still alive? And if he was, why had he never contacted anyone back home in Denmark? Had he simply cut all ties?

  Nora gave up looking for the answer and went to pour herself a glass of chilled prosecco to clear her mind. She carefully eased out the cork and avoided spilling a single drop while thinking how decadent it was to have a whole bottle of prosecco all to herself. She sat down and visualised how she would shortly take out the big blue ceramic plate from Istanbul, make a salad starting with the Parma ham at the bottom. How she would tear the mozzarella into fat strips and scatter them across the rocket, and how the warm ripe peaches would taste against the cool soft cheese. That is, if she could be bothered to get up again.

  The hiss of her entryphone interrupted her food fantasy.

  ‘It's me,’ Andreas said when she picked up the handset.

  ‘Andreas, I’m working,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘No, you’re not. I’m coming up.’

  She buzzed him in with a sigh. All right, so they would have to have the talk about PC Perfect and boundaries now, and how it might be time to say goodbye to a friendship that was clearly too volatile to be resurrected on anything other than Facebook.

  Andreas's words in Hanne's garden had let the genie out of the bottle, and no matter how much they had both pretended it had been put back in, it loomed large whenever they met. Like a fat little turban-clad figure from the Tales from the Arabian Nights, but sadly not one that would grant you three wishes.

  When he reached her second-floor flat, she had already built up a considerable amount of outrage and was ready to clear the air.

  ‘Andreas,’ she said firmly, before she had opened the door fully.

  He marched right past her. ‘My uncle called. When were you going to tell me that he had found Oluf Mikkelsen's fingerprints on the Polaroid?’ Andreas said angrily.

  Nora inhaled, but didn’t have time to answer him before he continued.

  ‘And here was I thinking we were a team. But it turns out we’re not. This was Nora Sand on a solo mission all along, so thanks for your help and bye-bye, Andreas.’

  Nora had never seen him so angry. The expression in his brown eyes was furious and the muscles in his neck were taut. He paced up and down the small room, looking like somebody who needed a lot more space.

  ‘But, please, listen -’

  ‘No, please listen to me!’ he thundered.

  Nora felt as if she had swallowed a puffer fish and her guts would be skewered from its spikes if she were to breathe.

  ‘It's always about you and your work. Anyone you meet can come along for the ride until you’re done with them, then you chew them up and spit them out, without —’

  That was enough. Nora could feel the puffer fish and she simply had to spit out the spikes.

  ‘That's just so unfair,’ she said and took a deep breath. ‘Firstly, you were at work -’

  ‘Yes, but my mobile was turned on —’

  ‘Secondly, let me tell you who's on a solo mission here. It was you, not me who decided back then not to stay in touch. Screw you, Andreas! You were my best friend and you decided with an overwhelming majority of one single vote, your own, to remove yourself completely from my life. And now you’ve come back and you expect me to trust you from day one?’ she retorted, horrified at the words that were spewing from her mouth.

  ‘So your pride was hurt or something. But let me tell you that I was hurt, too! One minute we had a friendship I really cared about, and the next — it was all over. Why? Why, Andreas? You just pissed off!’

  She could see that he was white from rage. He walked right up to her and stood with his face very close to hers. He was either about to slap h
er or kiss her, Nora thought. His face neared hers a fraction, and she began to feel the anger draining from her body like poison, and the blood rushing to her lips. Then he regained his composure. He turned on his heel, stormed out of the door and slammed it shut.

  She flopped on to the nearest chair, accidentally knocking her half-full glass of prosecco all over her skirt. Shit, shit, shit.

  She changed into a pair of shorts, sat on the windowsill and drank the rest of the prosecco straight from the bottle, while she watched the light across London change from golden daylight to light purple twilight and finally steel-grey night. Hours later she noticed the two plump peaches on the windowsill and ate them. They had lost their appeal.

  18

  The next morning she needed a cup of Nescafé to resurrect her. The milk, however, was off so she was forced to tip the first cup into the sink and start over. The coffee tasted strong and bitter without the milk. It matched her mood.

  She found Enzo's number on her mobile and he picked up immediately when she called. ‘I need an hour of your time. Are you free now?’ she said.

  They agreed to meet at the entrance to the park in Primrose Hill in half an hour.

  The small park, which had given its name to the area between Belsize Park and Chalk Farm, was one of Nora's favourite London parks. It bordered London Zoo on one side, the other was lined with Victorian houses inhabited by a typical London mix of rich Russians, actors and writers and anyone who had had the good fortune to move in before celebrities such as Jude Law, Gwen Stefani and Kate Moss made this small enclave of London into one of the city's most desirable neighbourhoods.

  Nora still cringed at the memory of the time she had been boxing with Enzo and they had both been so busy pretending not to notice the actor Alan Rickman watching them on a nearby path that Enzo had dropped his guard for a split second, and Nora had accidentally found an opening for her jab and given her trainer a black eye, which he wore as penance for two weeks.