Fatal Crossing Page 2

  Nora pretended to be affronted, pointed to the kettle and tossed her head.

  ‘Water. Coffee. Milk in the fridge. I’ll be in the bathroom.’

  She let the warm water cascade over her body while she wondered where to take Andreas. There was the organic Honey Bee Café around the corner, or they could go to the tapas bar by the tube station. She dismissed the idea. Too exotic for the North Jute he still was. She decided on the little Turkish place behind the supermarket.

  She dried her hair and quickly put on a nearly clean white T-shirt, a pair of black jeans and sandals. A line around her blue-green eyes and a dab of lip gloss later she was pretty much ready to have lunch in style.

  When she returned to the living room, Andreas was sitting pensively with a mug of coffee in one hand and the Polaroid of the two girls in the other.

  ‘Is this a story you’re working on?’

  Nora shook her head.

  ‘I bought an old suitcase yesterday and that picture was one of a bundle caught behind the lining,’ she explained, gesturing towards the suitcase still lying in the hall. ‘I don’t know what it is, but something about that photo bugs me. And I’m annoyed that I can’t place it. It feels as if I ought to know,’ she said.

  Andreas narrowed his eyes. ‘It looks like one of the girls is wearing a bracelet. Do you have a magnifying glass?’

  Nora rummaged around some drawers and found one under a pile of safety pins, coloured chalk and old chargers she had never got round to throwing out.

  She took the Polaroid from Andreas. He was right; on the wrist of one of the girls she could make out a bracelet with individual letters on single beads. It was out of focus, but Nora thought she could read an ‘L’ ... and possibly an ‘E’ or an ‘I’.

  Lene? Line? Lisette? Lea? None of those names brought her any closer to finding out what it was about the picture that intrigued her. Was there something familiar about the ferry where the picture had been taken?

  Andreas interrupted her train of thought. ‘I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had any breakfast yet, so how about it? Am I going to get something to eat today or what?’

  X

  Soon they were seated in Abdul's and Andreas had impressed Nora by ordering from the menu like a regular customer. Köfte, cacik and pide, and he even said Tesekkür to Abdul, who had put on his best smile in honour of the occasion.

  Nora raised her eyebrows.

  ‘What?’ Andreas said archly. ‘Or maybe you don’t think Aalborg Airport has international departures?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Only I remember you as more of a meat and two veg kind of guy. I had to nag you for hours to get you to try lasagne,’ she said with a rather sheepish smile.

  ‘People change,’ he said with a light shrug.

  Abdul fetched a jug of ice water and Nora's thoughts started circling the picture of the two girls once more.

  ‘Something about that photo keeps bothering me. It's as if I ought to know the girls,’ she began.

  Andreas nodded. ‘Same here.’

  ‘OK. Two girls. One of them has a name starting with L. Or maybe she had a boyfriend whose name began with an L. On a ferry? Lise on the ferry? Line? Lis ...?’

  And suddenly, just as Abdul placed a red plastic basket of warm Turkish bread on the table, the penny dropped.

  ‘Lisbeth!’ she said, slapping her forehead. ‘Christ Almighty, Andreas! It's Lisbeth. L for Lisbeth. Don’t you remember the case? The girls from the England ferry?’

  It was one of those cases that sometimes featured in documentaries. Last Easter when she went back to Denmark and had lunch with Trine in her holiday cottage, Nora had caught the end of a programme which declared — yet again — that what had happened to Lisbeth and the other girl, whose name Nora couldn’t remember, was still a mystery.

  Andreas nodded, tore off a chunk of bread and popped it into his mouth. ‘Yes. I remember that.’

  Nora racked her brains to recall the case. ‘Something about them going missing from that ferry. And how they were never seen again.’

  Andreas shrugged. ‘It's an old case. My guess is they ended up at the bottom of the sea. And they’ll never be found. Come to think of it, my Uncle Svend works with one of the guys who investigated the original case.’

  Their food arrived, and they fell silent while they filled their plates. When they had been eating for some time, Nora could no longer restrain herself.

  ‘Please would you call your uncle? I have to know right now.’

  Andreas leaned back and watched her through half-closed eyes.

  ‘You don’t think it can wait until we’ve finished our lunch?’

  ‘Please? I’ll get the coffee,’ she tempted him.

  Andreas let out a small sigh and found his mobile.

  Nora caught Abdul's eye and signalled ‘coffee’ while Andreas rang his uncle.

  The coffee arrived in a small copper jug with tiny glasses and two pieces of Turkish Delight neatly arranged on a white paper doily.

  Nora poured coffee for Andreas and herself, while he spoke to his uncle. She sipped the strong coffee and added a lump of sugar to take the edge off the extreme bitterness.

  Andreas rounded off the call. ‘All right then, give my love to Annika.’

  He took his time, drank some coffee, pulled a face and added sugar.

  Nora looked daggers at him. ‘Right. Out with it.’

  ‘You were spot on. My uncle works with Karl Stark, who was a young sergeant in Esbjerg back when the girls disappeared. He has never been able to let the case go.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘My uncle could only remember a few things: the two girls lived in a care home for troubled kids near Ringkøbing. Eight of the kids and three adults were on a three-day trip to London. But on the ferry Lisbeth and Lulu disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Or deep water, if you like. Never to be seen again. Lisbeth's black backpack was found on the sun deck, and that's the only clue.’

  ‘Ah, that was it. Her name was Lulu, the other one,’ Nora interjected.

  ‘A TV programme investigated the case last year, so I’m guessing that was the documentary you caught the end of,’ Andreas ventured.

  Nora thought for a moment.

  ‘Hmm. Does your uncle still live in Esbjerg?’

  ‘No, he met the love of his life, Annika, and they’ve moved to Dragør. He works for the Copenhagen Homicide Unit now, as does Karl Stark. Do you want me to ask my uncle for his number?’

  Nora nodded. ‘Yes, please.’

  Without being asked Abdul brought more coffee. And winked at Nora when she sent him a puzzled look.

  ‘It's a special day, Miss Nora. Lovely to see you without your mobile, and not here just to get a takeaway to eat at your desk,’ he grinned.

  Andreas shook his head and smiled. ‘Some things never change. Or maybe they do?’ he said.

  And so began the inevitable conversation. About who was doing what. What had happened to Ole, Klaus and Red Rita; who had married, who was at home with the kids or wedded to their career.

  ‘And how about you?’ Nora asked lightly when Andreas had accounted for divorces, civil service careers and one twin birth among their former classmates.

  She had checked his Facebook profile the moment he had contacted her, obviously, but information was sparse. He hadn’t listed his status as married or single. All she had been able to deduce from the groups he belonged to was that he continued to compete in tri-athlons, hadn’t lost his enthusiasm for Monty Python and was still a Chelsea supporter.

  ‘Yes, what about me?’ Andreas echoed.

  At that moment her mobile rang. It was the Crayfish.

  ‘Hey, you. Not a bad article. But I want you to rewrite some sections. I think it might be possible to identify him from the geographical information, so disguise it. And shorten the third paragraph. He's repeating himself. I’m just sending it back to you now. Your deadline is in thirty minutes. Bye.’

  He had rung off before s
he had time to reply.

  Nora fished out a twenty-pound note from her purse and placed it on the table.

  ‘Sorry. Work,’ she explained.

  Andreas's face was inscrutable.

  Nora tried to placate him. ‘How long are you in town?’

  She was rewarded with one of his crooked smiles. ‘Off you go. And let's keep in touch by email.’

  3

  Nora woke up to a short trumpet fanfare announcing that the budget airline was congratulating itself on arriving yet again on time at Copenhagen Airport.

  It was one of those red-eye flights, which meant she had to wake up before four a.m. to get to Stansted Airport, and she had gone straight back to sleep before the plane had even taxied down the runway.

  The book she had been planning on reading — an ambitious tome about oil conflicts in Africa — lay unopened on her lap, and she stuffed it back into her handbag before she got up and headed for the arrivals hall.

  There he was in all his glory, waving a Starbucks paper cup, as if she wouldn’t have spotted his dark green suit immediately. She knew no one else who wore a waistcoat. Especially not in June. Most of his beaming face was covered by a grey beard. Christian Sand was a prominent historian specialising in sixteenth-century Denmark and had named his daughter after the famous princess Leonora Christine.

  ‘Dad. There really was no need for you to pick me up.’

  Always a pleasure. Anyway, I had some time on my hands before going to that conference in Stockholm next week. I’m working on a new theory about Leonora Christine and her husband's flight from imprisonment in Hammershus Castle,’ he explained in an animated voice as he grabbed Nora's suitcase.

  They drove home to Bagsværd in the small, pea-green Fiat Punto that had ferried her father around for over a decade. The car had originally belonged to her mother, but after she left them, her father had kept it as a token of almost twenty years of largely happy marriage.

  The house had an unmistakable smell of dad. Dusty books, pipe smoke, leather, and rye bread cold-proving in a big clay bowl in the utility room. He made them coffee in a cafetière in the kitchen, while Nora dumped her suitcase in her old bedroom on the first floor. Her stripped-pine bed was where it always had been; even her old Tintin posters were still on the walls. It was always possible that something might one day prompt Christian Sand to take an interest in interior design and update the house, but Nora couldn’t currently imagine what it might be.

  She unpacked her party dress with the spots and put it on a hanger to give it time to straighten out before tomorrow evening.

  ‘The party starts at five. We’ll stop by Aunt Ellen's first to give her and Uncle Jens a lift to the hotel,’ her father explained. ‘David isn’t going. He's at the allotment. He can’t cope with all those people,’ he added with a small sigh.

  It came as no surprise to her. Her highly intelligent older brother had never been officially diagnosed as autistic, but going by what Nora had read, that was pretty much what he was.

  His job as an actuary with a leading insurance company made full use of his mathematics talent and also allowed him to work from home most of the time, and thus avoid contact with those baffling and frustrating human beings that peopled the world.

  On a good day he was a bit introverted and shy. On bad ones he was out of reach. You dealt with David on his own terms, or not at all.

  ‘Never mind, I’m sure it’ll be a great party, Dad. Got your speech ready?’

  Her father nodded.

  Nora had been looking forward to seeing her favourite aunt, who lived in Kalundborg, and had made sure to take time off to go to her seventieth birthday party.

  ‘All right then, if you must, but make sure you pop into the office, seeing as you’re in Copenhagen anyway,’ the Crayfish had ordered her.

  And she intended to do just that before having a late lunch with Louise at Danmarks Radio's Ørestad complex.

  She took the S-train from Bagsvӕrd Station, got off at Nørreport and walked the rest of the way to Globalt's editorial offices which occupied two floors in a building with an antiquarian bookshop on the ground floor.

  ‘Heeey, Miss Sand,’ Anette in reception called out brightly.

  In a long line of journalists, editors-in-chief, photographers, proofreaders and researchers worn out by working for a magazine as ambitious as Globalt, Anette was possibly the only constant presence at the office.

  She had been there since Globalt published its first issue, and had assumed the role of mother hen for journalists and editors. She organised their dental appointments, sent flowers to their wives when they worked late and listened to major and minor grievances without ever repeating them to anyone else.

  The Crayfish wasn’t the first editor to suggest adding her name to the colophon. Without her, he claimed, the magazine quite simply wouldn’t go out each week.

  Nora produced a box of Liquorice Allsorts bought at the airport from her bag and placed it on the counter.

  Anette wagged a finger at her. ‘Bad girl! You know very well they’re not good for me,’ she said with ill-disguised delight.

  The box quickly disappeared into the top drawer where it would remain until the next emergency that required a spoonful of sugar.

  ‘The Crayfish is in the meeting room, they’ve just finished their one o’clock meeting. He's in a good mood today,’ she added.

  The meeting room was hidden behind a kitchenette and could only be reached by navigating filing cabinets and piles of bound newspaper collections, whose raison d’être no one could remember.

  ‘Ah, our foreign correspondent, if I’m not mistaken,’ the Crayfish said with a smile and popped a piece of nicotine gum into his mouth.

  It was a standing joke at the office that the Crayfish might have quit smoking two years ago, but since then he munched his way through a packet of nicotine gum a day. In the run-up to a deadline, it wasn’t uncommon to see him chuck three pieces into his mouth at once.

  A collection of empty mugs had been left on the conference table. One was a pretentious Penguin mug with a Virginia Woolf quote that belonged to the cultural editor Viola Ponte. A mug the sports editor would nick every day, so Viola Ponte was forced to use a chipped Brøndby FC mug no one would own up to bringing into the building.

  The noticeboard behind the Crayfish was covered in A4 sheets, draft magazine pages at varying stages of completion. Some already featured text and photographs. Others were glaringly empty with only a few keywords scribbled in haste.

  ‘Right, so tell me: What's keeping you busy these days?’ the Crayfish said, leaning back in his chair and interlacing his fingers behind his neck.

  ‘Well, I have a few ideas. Pete and I have talked about spending some time in Africa gathering stories. For example, we could —’

  ‘Sure, but we’ve just run the Rwanda story. Don’t you have something more ... local?’ the Crayfish sounded impatient.

  ‘The Middle East?’ she ventured tentatively.

  ‘Hmm ...’ the Crayfish sounded unconvinced.

  Nora took a deep breath.

  ‘OK. I have something that might turn into a story. I don’t know if it has legs yet. Do you remember two girls going missing on the ferry to England?’

  The Crayfish shook his head as if trying to retrieve a snippet of information from a brain used to processing the finer points of American foreign policy from the New York Times and the intricacies of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

  ‘Er. Not really.’

  ‘Like I said, I don’t know if it has legs. But I’ve come across a picture that might be linked to the case. It was huge at the time. Two teenage girls went missing from the ferry from Esbjerg to Harwich in the 1980s.’

  ‘Hmm. Isn’t that a bit ... historical? It sounds more suited to a woman's weekly, in my opinion. Just before the crosswords,’ the Crayfish said.

  At that moment Anette entered with a stack of documents.

  ‘For signature. And preferably a bit quicker
than the last time,’ she admonished him and turned on her heel.

  ‘Anette, you’re a very ordinary sort of person,’ the Crayfish intoned pompously.

  Anette rolled her eyes.

  ‘Do you remember a story about two girls going missing from a ferry ... in — now when was it, Sand?’

  Before Nora had time to answer, Anette burst out: ‘You bet I do! I was a teenager when it happened and I would read anything about it I could get my hands on. It was years before I dared to go on a ferry again.’

  ‘Really? So you would like to read more?’

  ‘Yes!’ Anette declared firmly and marched back to reception where the telephone had started ringing.

  ‘I see.’

  The Crayfish stared out of the window for a while.

  Nora cleared her throat discreetly.

  ‘OK, Sand. Let's give it a go. It's a bit outside our remit. But why not. Two weeks. And you’re not relieved of your usual duties while you’re busy solving mysteries. Understand?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. However, I can’t promise you that -’ she began, before the Crayfish's mobile started beeping like a pacemaker in his shirt pocket. He took it out and frowned as he looked at the screen.

  ‘Hmm. A Russian number. I have to take this,’ he said with a wave, indicating her audience was over.

  She did a tour of the office. Most staff had already left for their summer break, but in the picture section she found Magnus absorbed in editing photographs from his most recent trip to Afghanistan.

  War photography didn’t usually appeal to her, but Magnus already had three international awards under his belt despite being only twenty-five years old, and he had surpassed himself yet again. He had caught in frozen moments the fear in their eyes, the dust, the despair, the boredom and the rush of victory.

  He turned around when he sensed her looking over his shoulder.

  ‘Hi, Nora,’ he said casually before turning his attention back to the screen.

  ‘Magnus, what's the situation with our photo archive — is it accessible to us journalists?’