Death Sentence, page 17
That same day Line took early maternity leave from her job to be at home. I didn’t think it was necessary, but she insisted, and we could afford it so there was little to discuss. It meant I could focus on my writing, but my partnership with Ironika changed. Now it was the girls who had secrets and me who didn’t understand their private exchanges.
Slowly we grew accustomed to the new rhythm. I worked more and more in isolation and Line and Ironika looked after each other while Line’s stomach grew. We never discussed the knife incident again, but I was aware of an increased vigilance in Line every time I played rough and tumble with Ironika. She tried not to let her daughter out of her sight, and her lack of trust exasperated me.
As I was also struggling with the pivotal chapters of Inner Demons, I might have been rather prickly in the weeks leading up to its completion. We had a couple of minor arguments, nothing serious, but enough to oppress the mood in the house. When it got too bad, I would shut myself away in my study.
The book was finished around the time Line gave birth to our second daughter, Mathilde. The birth went without a hitch. Line came home only two days later and in the meantime her father looked after Ironika. When we were all home again, it was as if the air had been cleared. We were a family once more. I had submitted Inner Demons for editing and could devote myself to my girls, and Line had nine months more leave, during which we could have a nice time together.
Everyone was happy and content, until the book was published.
Saturday
25
I MUST HAVE been overcome by tiredness in the end because the next morning I was woken up by the sound of the telephone ringing. I had kicked off my duvet during the night and I was cold.
‘It’s Finn,’ a voice said down the other end.
‘What time is it?’ I stammered.
‘Take it easy,’ Finn said. ‘You’ve got plenty of time to get to the book fair, I just wanted to make sure you were awake.’
I muttered something to that effect.
‘I didn’t have time to remind you yesterday,’ Finn continued. ‘So I thought I would just—’
‘That’s great, Finn. I’m on my way.’
I hung up before he had time to reply.
It was only Saturday.
I felt I had been in the city for months. The prospect of again sitting for hours signing books held no appeal at all. I dragged myself into the bathroom.
A deathly pale face with black rings round the eyes observed me from the mirror. A huge purple bruise spread across a couple of ribs under my left nipple and it hurt if I breathed too deeply. I shuddered and stepped under the shower, turning up the water as hot as I could stand it. Even so, I couldn’t get warm. It was as if the events of last night had planted a chill in my body that had taken root while I slept. I pushed aside the memory of Marie and concentrated on my morning ritual. The familiar routine of trimming my beard, combing my hair and applying deodorant helped keep my thoughts at bay.
Breakfast was reduced to a cup of coffee and a crusty roll, which I wolfed down while I flicked through the newspaper. Reading the news had become a nerve-wracking experience. Every moment I expected to see Verner’s eyes staring out at me from one of the pages, though I knew that once he was found, I would hear about it before the newspapers did.
‘Will you be checking out tomorrow?’ Ferdinan asked as I walked through the lobby.
Suddenly I was unsure. I desperately wanted to leave the city as quickly as possible, but I had a case to solve and I couldn’t do that from the cottage in Rågeleje.
‘I might be staying a couple more days,’ I replied.
Ferdinan’s face lit up. ‘Ah, a woman perhaps?’
I shook my head vigorously. ‘No, nothing like that. I want to visit some friends.’
‘If so, you can get your old room back,’ Ferdinan said and smiled.
My heart galloped. The thought of staying in that room made me feel sick. I was sure no one would ever sleep in there again.
‘No, that’s not necessary,’ I replied and tried to smile. ‘I’m slowly getting used to the luxury suite.’
‘OK,’ Ferdinan replied. ‘Just let me know.’
I thanked him and hurried outside to my taxi.
I told the driver to take me to Forum, but once we were in motion I had second thoughts. How could I sign books as if nothing had happened? Shouldn’t I go to the police instead? Shouldn’t I do what I had put off for far too long, try to fix it all? I cursed myself. If only I had contacted the police straightaway everything would be different. Even though I now had a concrete clue, room 87 at Hotel BunkInn, I couldn’t pass on this information to the police without getting Marie in trouble and I didn’t want that.
I grew increasingly frantic, but I was also aware that it really was up to me to solve the case. It was no longer about an ingenious angle for an autobiography or research for my next thriller, this was about survival.
It looked hopeless. All I had to go on were the words of a drug-addicted hooker, the name of the hotel and a room number. However, it was the first time since the body of Mona Weis was discovered that I felt I had caught up with the killer. No matter how devious he was, he couldn’t have predicted that I would find Marie. Unless he had actually been following me last night, he couldn’t know I was breathing down his neck.
A plan was starting to take shape. I didn’t delude myself that I could overpower the killer physically, that was too risky, but I might find evidence in the room at the BunkInn, something that pointed straight to the real killer, something I could take with me and place in the room where Verner lay murdered. In this way I wouldn’t be directly implicated. It was simplicity itself. However, it required that I gained access to room 87 soon. When the booking of room 102 expired, it would be too late.
When we had almost reached Forum, I told the taxi driver to take me to Copenhagen Central station instead. Finn and his autograph-hunters would have to wait.
Hotel BunkInn is near the station, but I had to buy a couple of things first. Marie had told me that the man who hired her, Verner’s killer, had a beard and wore a hat and sunglasses. I already had the beard, but was lacking the hat and sunglasses. A quick visit to a shop took care of that. Of course, I couldn’t know what kind of hat he had worn or what his glasses looked like, but in my experience people don’t pay much attention to such details. Not if they staff a busy hotel reception, and especially not in Vesterbro where a hotel receptionist’s best qualification is a short-term memory.
I put on my disguise and headed for the hotel. It was a strange feeling. I thought people were staring at me, that they saw through my disguise and I was attracting more attention to myself rather than less. This made me walk faster, which in turn only made it even worse.
The hotel was much smaller than I had expected. Only a small facade fronted the street, and the reception was the size of a parking space. The dark red carpet and brown wallpaper did nothing to make it seem bigger. A young man appeared behind a reception counter of imitation mahogany and black marble. He was pale, gangly and wore jeans, a checked shirt and glasses with a strong steel frame. A pair of half-open eyes behind them registered my presence without noticeable reaction.
‘Room 87,’ I said in as calm a tone of voice as I could manage.
The young man turned to the board with keycards and found number 87.
‘You’re that author, aren’t you?’ he said when he faced me.
I was too flabbergasted to reply.
‘Johnny told me he had checked you in when he was on duty last Tuesday. We share the job, you see. I’m a student, so—’
‘What else did he say?’
‘He said that you were a writer and that’s why you had asked not to be disturbed.’ He winked at me. ‘Don’t worry, we haven’t been in there.’
I nodded. ‘Keep it that way.’
‘But I could give you a couple of fresh towels. And some clean linen,’ the receptionist said, crouching behind the counter. ‘Since you won’t let us come in and change it.’ He sounded a little wounded. ‘Just leave the dirty linen outside, I’ll come and pick it up later.’
I accepted the stack of towels and bed linen he gave me and walked up the stairs. They squeaked and the red carpet was worn through in several places. Large patches of wallpaper had come loose and only seemed to be attached by the nails that held reproductions of classical motifs. In contrast to the Marieborg, I could easily imagine that a girl like Marie was a regular here.
Room 87 was on the second floor. It had a white panelled door with the number in brass letters. I glanced around to make sure there was no one in the corridor. I knocked softly. My heart seemed to have swollen and was beating against my ribcage, which hurt. I held my breath and bent forward to hear if there was any response on the other side, but I could hear nothing.
The lock buzzed willingly when I inserted the key-card. I entered and quickly closed the door behind me. It smelled of dusty carpet and stagnant air. The curtains were closed, which left most of the room in darkness.
I walked over to the window and opened the curtains.
Light flooded into the room and revealed a wicker chair with a matching round table, a standing lamp with a rice paper shade and a double bed with a thick, floral bedspread. Posters by Arnoldi and a few amateur drawings of the hotel hung on the walls. The bed didn’t appear to have been slept in, the bedspread hadn’t been disturbed and there was no sign that someone had even sat on it.
Apart from the table, it looked like the room was unoccupied. The wicker table had a glass top, and a newspaper, a map and a pair of sunglasses lay on it. I checked the bathroom. It was empty and the towels and soap were unused.
The wardrobe too was empty, only some flimsy metal coat hangers clanged into one another when I tore open the door.
I concluded there was nothing of interest anywhere and focused my attention on the table again. I approached it like an archaeologist about to start an excavation. Without touching anything I noted that the newspaper was from yesterday, the map was of Copenhagen and surrounding areas and was opened up on Frederiksberg and Valby. I looked for any marks that might reveal what was special about those places, but found none. Carefully, I lifted up the map from the table and put it on the bed. I did the same with the newspaper.
When I turned to the table again, I got a shock.
The newspaper had concealed a book.
It took me only a moment to find the photo between the pages.
The book was Media Whore and the photo was of Linda Hvilbjerg.
26
PERHAPS LINDA HVILBJERG was already dead, I couldn’t know, but I hoped that – for once – I was one step ahead of the killer. Not only had I found his hotel room, whatever he used it for, but I had also come a little closer to discovering his identity: the copy of Media Whore bore my signature and it was very likely to be the same copy I had signed the previous day.
The killer had to be the man from the book-signing queue.
Even though I had nothing but a signature and a pair of sunglasses to go on, I was convinced I was on the right track. There was nothing to indicate a specific person, so my scheme to plant evidence in room 102 had come to nothing, but I wasn’t disappointed.
Now, at least, I knew where he was staying and my first thought was to wait for him. I wanted to surprise him and catch him myself. For a moment I considered contacting the police so they would be here when he returned, but I couldn’t cope with explaining everything to them, including how I had found the room. I would obviously have to answer questions if I overpowered the killer, but then at least I could produce the perpetrator and my story would sound more convincing.
However, I couldn’t wait for him. There was too much at stake. The killer might already be on his way to Linda Hvilbjerg. If I didn’t exploit my advantage, I might not able to prevent her murder. She wasn’t exactly my favourite person, but she didn’t deserve to die, and certainly not as described in Media Whore.
Media Whore is about a serial killer who kills female TV presenters. The killer hates TV personalities for the adulation they get and the way they behave as if they’re superior to everyone else and above the suffering of ordinary people. It’s the killer’s self-appointed mission to make them understand they are real like the rest of us. He wants them to experience the pain of being ordinary, a real physical pain that will be enough to kill them. One of the victims is the host of the literature programme LIX, a carbon copy of Linda Hvilbjerg in every respect, except her hair colour, which I did change. She and the other victims are tortured to death in a way that is appropriate to the programmes they front. A TV chef is boiled, the presenter of a gardening programme is mutilated with tools before being buried in a vegetable plot, and the host of LIX is murdered in the cutting room after being raped with a book. As the story progresses, the killer’s pattern is detected and the TV personalities are put under surveillance. However, this only serves to enrage him. Now that TV hosts have become so precious that they need protection from the public, it becomes more pressing than ever for him to bring them back down to earth. In the last scene, the killer hijacks an entire TV studio and murders two studio hosts on live TV at peak viewing time. However, the hero, a quick-thinking production assistant, manages to ambush the killer, who is roasted alive in a tangle of cables.
Before leaving the room at the BunkInn, I carefully returned everything to the way it was. I surveyed the room from the doorway. It looked just as I had found it half an hour earlier. I left the bed linen and towels I had brought upstairs outside one of the other rooms, after which I crept away.
The receptionist sat with his back to me watching football on a small portable television. I tiptoed over to the counter, put down the keycard and disappeared out of the door without him noticing.
It had started to rain outside. Grey clouds tumbled across the rooftops and powerful gusts of wind forced pedestrians to stagger or lean into the wind using unfurled umbrellas as shields. I ignored the drops lashing my face and walked to Copenhagen Central station and through the vast hall with its shops, sandwich bars and people making it their mission to block my way.
I rang Finn from a payphone. I was fairly certain Finn would have Linda Hvilbjerg’s number. He didn’t answer. I imagined him talking to some bookseller, glancing at his mobile and ignoring the call because he didn’t recognize the number.
I slammed the phone down and headed for the main entrance. There I jumped into a taxi and told the driver to take me to Forum. I must be the only person in Denmark not to own a mobile, something everyone I know reminds me of at every opportunity. Even Bjarne had succumbed years ago and, though he hated to admit it, he could no longer manage without it. For some reason it has never appealed to me. I wanted to be unavailable. I didn’t care for interruptions and constantly having to account for where I was the moment I answered it, or share my conversations with random passers-by or fellow passengers. There had been very few times when I really needed a mobile, but one of them was now, as I sat in the taxi on my way to Forum.
I found the drive torturous. The city centre traffic was heavy and the car was stationary more often than moving. I couldn’t know if Linda Hvilbjerg would be at the book fair and I wondered what I’d say to her if she was, or what I’d say to Finn if I needed to get her number from him.
The crowding in the book fair hall was worse than the city traffic. Faces paraded endlessly by and I registered none of them, other than that they didn’t belong to Finn or Linda Hvilbjerg.
At ZeitSign’s stand, Finn was in conversation with three men in suits. He waved me over as soon as he spotted me and introduced me to them. They congratulated me on the good reviews. I didn’t catch their names or where they came from, but mustered a smile, a sweaty handshake and a ‘thank you’. With a nod of the head I signalled to Finn that I wanted to talk to him. He nodded back and gestured he would be with me in two minutes.
The stand was packed with visitors. Some glanced at me and I feared they might pounce at any moment. My only friend in this mayhem was Finn, so I was loath to move too far away, but nor could I cope with hanging around while people stared at me.
I edged my way to the cubicle where I was alone, thank God. The beer keg was empty, I realized, when foam spluttered into the empty beaker with an angry hiss. There was an extra keg under the table, but I couldn’t work out how to replace it and instead hurled my beaker into the bin with such force that it shot out again and vanished in a corner. Having paced up and down the tiny area for a couple of minutes, I sat down on a chair and buried my face in my hands. I tried to ignore the constant hum of voices, imagining what a boon a hearing aid that you could switch off must be. It helped if I closed my eyes and focused on the spots that danced behind the lids. My thoughts began to drift and eventually the noises around me disappeared from my consciousness.
I don’t know how long I had been sitting like this when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘Are you asleep?’ Finn said, laughing. ‘Well, I never. If you can sleep through this din without being knocked out by a hammer, you must have a special gift.’
‘No, I was just nodding off.’
Finn laughed again. ‘OK, let’s call it that.’ His smile disappeared. ‘You’re late, Frank. In fact, you can’t even call it late, you failed to show up altogether. You had a signing session this morning, remember?’
I nodded drowsily.
‘That’s why I called you,’ Finn continued. ‘You told me you were on your way. We had an agreement, dammit.’
