The Girl in the Photo E-Book

Heidi Amsinck

• Herausgeber: Muswell Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: A Jensen Thriller
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 428

Beschreibung

When ninety-year-old Irene Valborg is found brutally murdered in an affluent suburb of Copenhagen, her diamond necklace missing, it looks like a burglary gone wrong. When two more victims are attacked, the police lament a rise in violence against the elderly, but who is the young girl in the photo found by DI Henrik Jungersen on the scenes of crime? Impatient to claim her inheritance, Irene's daughter hires former Dagbladet reporter Jensen and her teenage apprentice Gustav to find the necklace. Henrik finds himself once more pitched in a quest for the truth against Jensen – the one woman in Copenhagen he is desperate to avoid.

Leseprobe

iii

THE GIRL IN THE PHOTO

Heidi Amsinck

v

To my sister Helene

Contents

Title PageDedication March123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748 April4950515253545556575859606162636465666768697071727374757677787980818283848586 AcknowledgementsBy the Same AuthorCopyright

1

March

2

3

1

Monday 11:23

Detective Inspector Henrik Jungersen waited under his umbrella as the uniformed officer who had been first on the scene pulled himself upright next to the flower bed.

‘Where?’ he said, when the man had finished spitting and wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

‘First-floor landing.’

Henrik glanced up wearily at the red villa fronted by an immaculate lawn and ornamental pines.

It was too big, too quiet.

More vehicles were arriving up the gravel drive, blue blinks intermittently illuminating the tall conifers that shielded the property from the road. He had told forensics to wait outside, so that he could have a moment alone with the corpse, and had already donned his white, hooded coverall, but he didn’t feel like going in.

Not yet.

He walked across to the Alsatian cowering by the squad car. It had belonged to the victim and, by all accounts, had been locked in the back garden for days. The partner of the officer 4who had just been reacquainted with his breakfast was trying to make the dog drink from a plastic bottle. No interest. Plenty of puddles it could have quenched its thirst from, Henrik guessed.

He stroked the dog behind the ears and on the silky golden patch on its forehead. It whimpered restlessly. Probably wondering what had happened to the hand that usually fed it. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘In the back garden,’ said the officer. ‘Crap everywhere. It was the barking made the woman next door call the police. Complaint wasn’t taken seriously at first, apparently.’

‘Next door where?’ said Henrik.

The officer pointed to the property to the right of the villa. Looking up, Henrik caught the movement of a curtain dropping back into place. Typical of leafy Klampenborg for a curtain twitcher to call the police about a dog making a racket. Where he came from, you would have popped over, had a word, tried to establish the facts before involving the authorities.

Anything before involving the authorities.

‘Did she say anything?’

‘Couldn’t shut her up,’ said the officer, twirling his index finger at his temple to suggest the mental state of the neighbour. ‘Nothing of use, though.’

Stupid woman, thought Henrik, feeling indignation rising in his throat. If she had only walked over and pressed the doorbell when she first suspected something was up, they might not be in this mess. He would pay her a visit afterwards, give her a piece of his mind.

The Alsatian would hopefully recover. Henrik would gladly have taken it himself until a new owner could be found, but he respected animals and their needs enough to know that his was no life for a dog.

Not lately.

Not since Jensen had exploded back into his life.

Where was she now? 5

It was a dangerous thought. He tried to dismiss it. Of all the women in Copenhagen, Jensen was the last one he needed to concern himself with.

He sighed, blowing steam into the cold, damp air. Bloody rain, pissing it down for weeks on end. Grey on grey. Much like his mood. Wasn’t spring supposed to start in March?

He closed his umbrella, tossed it in the front seat of his car and jogged up the steps to the villa, feeling the eyes of the officers on him.

A wodge of mail was stuck under the front door, circulars mostly. He put on his latex gloves and face mask and bent down to retrieve one of the few proper letters.

Mrs Irene Valborg

There wasn’t a postmark on the envelope. When had postmarks stopped being a thing? He opened the letter and found it dated over two weeks ago, a reminder from the dentist. Not a good sign, as if the stench coming from deep inside the house hadn’t already told him all he needed to know.

Once on a hot day during his early years as a police officer, he and a colleague had forced open the door to a flat in Valby after neighbours had complained about a stink in the stairwell. He had found the resident, a man in his eighties, seated on the sofa with his eyes wide open, his dinner tray on his lap and the TV blaring.

Dead for a month.

Crawling with flies.

Ever since, Henrik had been wary of them, these loners decomposing like fruit rotting in a bowl. It was the real reason he had asked for a moment on his own with the corpse under the pretext of reading the crime scene. Whatever he was about to find, he would rather there were no audience.

He had seen more than his fair share of death during his many 6years on the force. Why should he find these bodies in advanced stages of decay, these discarded human husks, so abhorrent and unnatural? It was inexplicable even to himself. A corpse was a corpse, after all.

He wanted to turn around and run back out, but he couldn’t.

Not now.

Not with everyone out there watching.

The front-door lock looked new and of decent quality. It hadn’t been forced, but that meant nothing. Burglars had methods of sweet-talking their way into the homes of the elderly. There was also a sophisticated-looking alarm system, though Henrik guessed this had been switched off when the killer had gained entry to the property, or Irene might still be alive.

He took a picture of the sticker with the name of the alarm firm, making a mental note to check when the system had been installed.

The house was neat and tidy, no signs of a disturbance. It was full of antiques, faded old stuff, as though time had stood still here for a century. There was a spiral-bound address book next to the telephone, tradespeople mostly, their names written in scratchy blue ink. Not much in the way of family and friends, as far as he could tell.

It didn’t look like anything was missing, but burglars were after cash, or valuables that could be handled and sold fast. Somewhere in the big, silent house there would be a handbag with an empty wallet, a jewellery box ripped open and plundered.

As he made for the stairs, a low humming noise told him he was nearing the remains of what had once been a talking, walking, breathing human being. His tread grew slow and reluctant on the steps. Before he reached the landing, he stopped and peered over the top, feeling his mouth widen in an involuntary grimace as he did so.

Irene was lying on her side, just inside a sliding security grille 7that separated the landing from the first-floor bedrooms. It was partially closed. Had the old woman realised what was happening and attempted to close the grille behind her, but been caught short by the burglar? She was a tiny little thing, like a bird, stick-thin limbs looking ready to snap.

Why kill her when she could have easily been shoved aside? The Persian rug on the landing had soaked up her blood, adopting it into its intricate pattern.

He forced himself to think like a police officer. While distressing to him, he knew that the flies and larvae, which had developed in abundance in the centrally heated house, would help them establish the time of death.

A bronze statue of an elephant, set on a marble plinth, was lying next to the body with bits of hair and skin stuck to it. It looked like the burglar had acted on impulse, grabbing the nearest heavy object he could find. Perhaps he had panicked. Perhaps Irene had been screaming and he had wanted to shut her up. Seeing as her neighbours worried more about barking dogs than the welfare of humans, he needn’t have bothered.

Slowly, Henrik leaned over the body, his palms tingling. Part of Irene’s skull was missing. Her dentures had come loose and were halfway out of her mouth, like comedy teeth.

In his youth, violence had been par for the course. The Friday night street fights with broken bottles, the perpetual low-level threat of the biker gangs. Someone in his street had been stabbed to death in a robbery. No need to romanticise the past, but to his mind the violence had become more callous and extreme in recent years.

Irene Valborg looked way into her eighties. Even if the perpetrator had wanted to kill her (which seemed unnecessary), why do it with such ferocious force?

Henrik was starting to feel queasy. He had the kind of concentrated headache that heralded vomiting. Saliva was running in his mouth, making him want to spit. 8

As he turned to go, he was distracted by a small movement around Irene Valborg’s face. Transfixed, he watched as a fly made its leisurely way from her mouth into her nose.

He didn’t look left or right as he bounded back down the stairs two steps at a time, through the gloomy hallway and out into the open, glad for once of the rain that meant no one lingered after his signal that they were free to enter the house and begin the investigation proper.

9

2

Monday 13:47

‘I’ll take it,’ said Jensen.

Having scaled the spiral staircase to the flat’s mezzanine deck, she had made straight for the rain-splattered dormer window. The advertised view of the Church of Our Saviour didn’t disappoint. Its brown and gold helter-skelter spire rose above the red-tile roofs of Christianshavn’s old apartment buildings like something out of a fairy tale. Far below, squashed in the uneven space between abutting red and yellow housing blocks was a tiny courtyard filled with bicycles and prams and a wooden picnic table surrounded by shrubs in terracotta pots.

‘You’re sure?’ said the agent, sounding surprised.

She was a heavily perfumed woman who, judging by her wheezing, ought not to spend her days climbing stairs.

‘I’m sure,’ said Jensen.

There was a chest of drawers and small futon in the crawling space under the eaves. Downstairs, a tiny sofa, a dining table and two chairs.

‘It may be small but it’s perfectly adequate for one person. Cosy, don’t you think?’ said the agent, as Jensen looked around. 10

Small was an understatement. The flat was arranged vertically, the clearance below the exposed oak rafters too low in most places for an adult to stand upright. But, in weeks of looking, it was the only place Jensen had seen that she could imagine herself living in. The rent was reasonable, and the view of her favourite Copenhagen church had clinched it.

The flat’s postage-stamp size with its awkward nooks and crannies explained why it had been on the market for longer than the few hours it usually took for Copenhagen rentals to be snapped up.

By the time she had aborted her flight to London in January, the container with her belongings had already travelled halfway back to England. Secretly, she was relieved. The possessions she had accumulated through fifteen years as a foreign correspondent would have reminded her of the life she used to have, before Margrethe had decided to close the London office. She couldn’t imagine them in the Copenhagen flat, the books she had bought on happy Saturday afternoons drifting through the West End, the assortment of novelty mugs.

The estate agent was looking at her with open curiosity, clearly wondering how someone in their thirties had wound up without much in the way of belongings, prepared to rent a flat without seeing it properly. ‘May I ask what you do?’ she said.

It was an excellent question, and one Jensen didn’t have an answer for. She was no longer an employee of Dagbladet, despite the editor-in-chief Margrethe Skov’s heavy hints that she was happy to let bygones be bygones.

‘If I come back, I want it to be as an investigative reporter. I pick the stories, you take me off the daily grind,’ Jensen had said, pushing her luck.

‘Very funny, Jensen, but, as you well know, that’s a luxury Dagbladet can no longer afford,’ Margrethe had responded with genuine regret in her voice. 11

They had agreed on a compromise: if Jensen found a good story, Margrethe would buy her articles on freelance terms.

Of course, others had made advances after Jensen’s piece on the Magstræde murder had hit Dagbladet’s front page, including the TV news of the Danish broadcasting corporation. ‘You’re exactly what we’re after,’ the editor had said.

Jensen had told her she needed time to think it over.

Margrethe would dismiss her as a traitor if she said yes, especially seeing as Jensen had spent the past two months in her spare room, while Margrethe had gone to work every day to keep Dagbladet afloat. Jensen had recovered relatively quickly from the physical injury she had sustained in Magstræde, but it had taken longer to sleep through the night, and she was still more jittery than she liked to admit whenever she left the safety of the Østerbro flat. Lately, though, she had been getting restless. Her stuff at Margrethe’s, what little there was, would fit into a taxi; she would be able to move in and unpack in under half an hour. Gustav could give her a hand.

‘I’m a journalist,’ she said to the estate agent, tracing a raindrop down the Velux windowpane with one finger.

Whatever else happened, that much was always true. She never just talked to other people, she interviewed them. Always hoping to discover something, looking for an angle, writing headlines in her head.

‘Who owns this place?’ she asked.

‘Kristoffer Bro,’ said the estate agent, adding when Jensen’s face remained blank: ‘He is an entrepreneur. IT. Very successful, very well known.’

‘Not by me,’ said Jensen. ‘But then I’ve been away for a few years.’

The estate agent nodded as if this made perfect sense. ‘His girlfriend is an actress – she is on TV a lot,’ she said, reeling off an unfamiliar name. ‘Stunning. Kristoffer lives with her in a big place out in Nordhavn now.’ 12

Of course he did. Who would live in a flat the size of a broom cupboard once they had made it? A place like this was for dreamers.

Losers.

‘So who do you work for?’ said the agent.

‘Myself, for the time being,’ said Jensen, clapping her hands free of dust from the windowsill, before the agent got a chance to ask the next question forming on her cerise-coloured lips.

‘When can I move in?’

‘Well, let’s see,’ said the agent, smiling while fishing an inhaler out of her handbag and taking a puff. Her lipstick left a dark pink mark around the mouthpiece. ‘There’s paperwork. I shall need two months’ rent up front. And of course, Kristoffer would have to agree,’ she said.

Jensen nodded, beginning her descent to the main living area, followed by the agent, whose heavy tread made the steps creak alarmingly.

Jensen walked over to the short wall of kitchen units at one end of the living room and looked out. A young man was playing the double bass in a flat across the courtyard with a look of intense concentration.

‘And I’ll have to see proof of income,’ said the agent.

‘Ah,’ said Jensen, turning around and leaning against the sink. ‘That might be a problem.’

‘I see,’ said the woman.

‘But I promise you, I am good for the rent.’

Jensen smiled but the agent was having none of it. The mirth on her face had vanished like the sun slipping behind clouds. ‘In that case, I shall have to ask you for six months’ rent up front,’ she said.

Jensen paused. In the silence, she could hear the patter of rain on the windowpane, the traffic on the street below, the creak of the old timbers. She could see herself in the flat, she liked it; it felt as right as any place was going to be and the liveliness of Christianshavn felt comforting. 13

Besides, she got the feeling from the agent’s set jaw that the woman wasn’t the negotiating type.

‘Not a problem,’ she said, finally. ‘But in that case, I want to move in tonight.’

The sun lit up the woman’s face again. ‘I’ll see what I can do. You are obviously in a rush,’ she laughed.

Jensen thought about it. Was she? ‘In a rush’ implied that you had some sort of plan, which she didn’t.

All the same, she felt impatience rising in her gut as she headed for the door. She had dithered long enough. ‘Once my mind is made up, I don’t like waiting.’

14

3

Monday 23:14

‘For Christ’s sake, who’d do something like that to an innocent little old lady?’

The booming voice of Mogens Hansen, known to all as ‘Monsen’, gave Henrik a violent start. He had been brooding over the crime scene photos from Irene Valborg’s villa in Klampenborg, staring at them for so long that his mind had wandered off to other matters. His team had gone home, on his orders. Mark Søndergreen and Lisbeth Quist, his trusted lieutenants, had stayed behind, but he had finally persuaded them to leave. Nobody was going to make any progress overnight.

‘Not all little old ladies are innocent,’ he said, recovering his composure enough to hide his surprise at seeing the famously work-shy Chief Superintendent in the office so close to midnight.

Monsen’s breath was sour with red wine and cigars which meant he had been to one of his dinners with Copenhagen movers and shakers. He jabbed a finger at Henrik, a slight slurring of his thunderous voice. ‘Are you saying she deserved to have her skull bashed in?’ 15

‘Of course not, but we shouldn’t assume that the old are all sweetness and light. If anything, it is patronising,’ said Henrik, feeling himself sliding towards one of the Chief Super’s lectures on how society was going to hell in a handcart.

Luckily, Monsen was distracted by his own epic yawn. ‘You speak in riddles, Jungersen. What are you doing here so late anyway?’

‘I could ask you the same.’

Monsen stared at him red-eyed. ‘In the doghouse with Mrs Jungersen again, are we?’ Monsen poked Henrik’s side with his elbow.

‘Just wanted time to think. Sometimes you have to wait till it’s quiet around here,’ said Henrik.

Monsen chuckled. ‘Don’t kid a kidder.’

Denial was futile. Monsen had known him for years and recognised a Jungersen domestic crisis when he saw one, Henrik’s reluctance to leave the office being a major clue. There had been many such crises over the years, though this was the first time his wife had not let him back in the house after a couple of days.

‘If I told you once, I told you a thousand times, it’s not worth letting work come between us and our spouses,’ said Monsen.

No danger of that in your case, thought Henrik.

It was true that, over the years, Henrik had used work as a means of avoiding a chilly atmosphere at home, usually self-inflicted. But how could he begin to tell Monsen that it was Jensen, a woman with dark blue eyes and an infuriating habit of sticking her nose in his business, that had brought his marriage to its knees?

Taking Henrik’s silence as confirmation that he had hit the bullseye, Monsen patted him on the shoulder. Henrik knew that the Chief Super would be mindful of the role he had played in the Magstræde case, firing a single shot with his Heckler & Koch as Jensen’s life hung in the balance.

Since he had stepped out in uniform for the first time more 16than two decades ago, Henrik had carried a gun. Twice a year, he had been tested for proficiency at an army shooting range, and many a time had he drawn his gun, but not until that night had he ever fired it on active duty.

There had been an aftermath, a tiresome bureaucratic process in which he had had to justify himself over and over. His immediate boss, Superintendent Jens Wiese, who headed up Special Investigations, had also insisted on him seeing a psychologist, something Henrik considered unnecessary.

(‘Ha! Enough material in you for a bloody textbook,’ he heard his wife say.)

Monsen and Henrik stood for a while side by side, looking at the pictures of Irene Valborg taken from various angles. Henrik knew that Wiese disliked these little tête-a-têtes of his with Monsen, envious of their easy rapport and feeling bypassed, but Monsen did as he damn well pleased and, for that, Henrik liked him immensely.

‘So, what are you thinking?’ said the big man, loosening his tie and undoing the top two buttons of his white shirt. He belched quietly under his breath, releasing a faint odour of garlic.

‘A couple of things,’ said Henrik, taking a step back. ‘One: why does an old lady all of a sudden buy an Alsatian and turn her villa into Klampenborg’s answer to Fort Knox?’

Monsen stared at him in astonishment. ‘Do you need to ask? Old people are living in fear of crime. I am only grateful that my own mother isn’t alive to see the state of society today, may God rest her soul.’

‘But why now, why not three years ago, or ten?’

‘The old dear probably read something in the papers that frightened her. Looks through the ads in the Sunday supplements and calls in an alarm firm with an over-enthusiastic salesperson. Next?’

‘Why use such force on her?’ 17

‘Fear of detection? Make sure she is well and truly dead so she can’t shoot her mouth off? Or just a general societal decline in decency and self-control? Take your pick.’

Henrik shook his head. ‘It wasn’t necessary to kill her.’

‘Necessary? When is it ever? Look at that chap who was killed a month ago on the allotment out at Amager.’

Henrik remembered the case. ‘Vagn Holdved.’

‘That’s the one. Almost got his head torn off, for Christ’s sake. And for what? A few quid in his wallet and some prescription meds?’

‘No leads yet?’

‘Nada.’

‘Why not?’

‘Ask Lotte. Her case.’

I don’t mind if I do, thought Henrik, recalling his colleague’s whip-straight blonde ponytail and runner’s physique.

(‘Now?’ he heard his wife say. ‘You’re seriously thinking of sex now?’)

His wife still wasn’t answering his calls. What more did he have to do to get her to listen, prostrate himself naked on the doorstep of their family home with ‘sorry’ tattooed on his forehead?

‘You look rough, Henrik, if you don’t mind me saying so. Buy your wife some flowers and go home,’ said Monsen, walking away with a heavy paw lifted in farewell.

Henrik suppressed a cynical laugh. How nice it must be to live inside Monsen’s head, in a world where a bouquet of roses was enough to stem a woman’s fury. Monsen had never met Henrik’s wife. Just as well. He didn’t fancy the Chief Super’s chances in head-to-head combat.

‘Just five more minutes, and then I am out of here,’ he lied.

When Monsen had left, and Henrik was certain he was alone, he went to his office and shut the door behind him, then pulled down the blinds and switched off the lights. 18

He was too tired to bother unrolling the sleeping bag that he kept in his locker. He knew he couldn’t go on like this, but he had to cut down on his hotel bills, and staying with his father, now that his stepmother’s Alzheimer’s had got worse, was unbearable.

He sat on the settee, undid the laces of his old Timberlands and thought of Jensen. He had no idea where she was these days. Bar a couple of lacklustre articles, which suggested she was still in Denmark, there had been nothing under her by-line for quite a while now, not since the Magstræde case that he had to admit Jensen had outsmarted him on.

He couldn’t text her. To stand a chance of getting back into his wife’s good books, he would need to be on his best behaviour from now on.

Zero tolerance.

One strike and you’re out.

Still, it would have been nice, if Jensen had thought to give him a sign of life. Most likely, she was still cross with him.

His wife and Jensen.

You would have to search for years to find women with longer memories or a more maddening predisposition for carrying a grudge. How had he managed to fall out with them both at once? This seemed a spectacular feat of recklessness, even for him.

He sighed deeply, lay down on the sofa and covered himself with his leather jacket, praying for the sleep that he knew would not come for hours, if at all.

19

4

Tuesday 11:47

Christina Vangede lit up the wet car park opposite Gentofte Church like a human neon sign with her platinum-blonde hair, pink coat and orange tan. Her make-up was dissolving in tears, which was odd as none of the other mourners now beating a hasty retreat to their cars seemed badly marked by the occasion. Jensen guessed they were mostly business acquaintances. Carsten Vangede had been respected, maybe even liked, but not loved, she decided. Except by his sister.

The coroner had decided that Carsten had hanged himself after going bankrupt, but Deep Throat, the anonymous source who had told Jensen how he and Carsten had both been defrauded by their accountants, had suggested otherwise. Carsten had bought a flight to Thailand hours before he died, and what kind of suicidal man did that? Jensen had decided to stay in Denmark to find out, but the story had turned out less than straightforward.

To her relief, Deep Throat had not been among the mourners at Carsten’s funeral. He would be appalled at the meagre 20outcome of her investigation, and she didn’t feel like disappointing him.

Plenty of time for that yet.

The problem was that no one was interested in suicides of bankrupt, alcoholic, unmarried Danish males in their fifties, let alone the police. ‘So he bought a plane ticket before he topped himself. Who gives a shit?’ one exasperated detective had told her before hanging up.

What would Henrik make of it? He was keeping his distance. She supposed he was feeling guilty that he hadn’t turned up to drive her to the airport as he had promised.

Too right.

She felt in her bag for the spectacle case that had belonged to Vangede’s fraudulent accountant and closed her hand around the cold, smooth, oblong shape. It was now the only link to the man who had used the name Bjarne Pedersen to syphon cash from Carsten’s operation.

Carsten had given her the case.

It had to matter.

Printed inside the lid in gold letters was the name and address of an optician in Randers: a trail which went nowhere, according to Vangede, but Jensen still wanted to speak to the optician himself. She and Gustav had left multiple messages that had so far gone unanswered.

The vicar had rattled through the funeral service with a single spirited church singer dragging the mumbling congregation through Danish hymns that Jensen remembered from school.

Gustav was keen to join the wake at a nearby bistro, but Jensen sensed they would be better off speaking to Christina before she got the chance to get drunk or mawkish, whichever came first.

The woman was no way near her dead brother in appearance, and thankfully a lot chattier, but her ravaged face and raspy voice 21suggested the siblings had shared a fondness for partying. ‘I feel so bad,’ she said, lighting up under her leopard-spotted umbrella and blowing the smoke out of one side of her mouth. ‘I should have been there for him, but I had no idea how bad he’d got.’

‘When did you last see him?’ said Jensen.

Christina shrugged. ‘Before Christmas last year, I think.’

‘And how did he seem?’

‘Not good. Depressed. Sort of withdrawn. But we didn’t talk for long. He dropped by when we were sorting Mum’s house. She died last year, and Carsten came and picked up a few keepsakes. Of course, he didn’t lift a finger to help. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved my big brother, but he could be a right arsehole sometimes.’

She closed her eyes, dragged deeply on the cigarette and shook her head as if dispelling bad memories.

‘How do you mean?’ said Jensen.

‘Just fucking unreliable. Selfish. He used to help me out now and again, with the kids and all that, and then suddenly it was like drawing blood from a stone.’

‘You mean he used to give you money?’

‘Yes, until suddenly he didn’t. He was loaded from those bars he ran while I could barely make ends meet.’

‘Actually, he was bankrupt,’ said Jensen.

‘Really?’ said Christina, her caterpillar eyebrows meeting in the middle as she frowned. ‘Who told you that?’

Jensen decided not to reply. Christina would find out soon enough that her brother had nothing left. If she was hoping to inherit, she was in for a big disappointment.

‘I’d try and ask him about it, but he’d just tear my head off. That’s why I stopped seeing him. Stopped taking the kids to him, too. Frankly, he was being a bad influence.’

Gustav and Jensen exchanged a glance. From the look of the three adolescent tearaways now squabbling on the backseat of Christina’s Kia, that particular horse had bolted long ago. 22

Christina was nearly down to the filter on her cigarette. Jensen knew they didn’t have long. ‘Did it surprise you that your brother killed himself?’ she said.

‘Surprise me? Had the shock of my life when the police came around. Thought it was one of my boys at first, nearly had a heart attack.’

‘I mean, was it out of character for Carsten?’

Christina took one last hefty drag and dropped the cigarette butt onto the tarmac, squashing it with her brown suede boot. ‘It’s always out of character, isn’t it? Until someone goes ahead and does it. The stupid sod.’

‘Look,’ said Jensen, scribbling her mobile number on a crumpled business card from Dagbladet. ‘I don’t suppose we could come and have a look at Carsten’s house? Not now, I mean, but perhaps you could think about it, give me a call?’

Christina studied the card. ‘So you’ll be writing about my brother?’ she said, her grief momentarily forgotten.

‘Yes,’ said Gustav. ‘We’re investigating whether—’

Jensen cut him off. ‘Researching. What Gustav here means to say is that we’re researching male suicide for a feature for the paper. I met your brother once, so when … well, it got me interested.’

‘Oh?’ said Christina. ‘When was that?’

‘January?’

‘And?’

‘He was pretty drunk, to be honest.’

‘Yep,’ said Christina, pocketing Jensen’s business card and getting into her Kia. ‘Sounds like my brother, all right.’

23

5

Tuesday 13:26

Regitse Lindegaard was almost half an hour late by the time she rolled up the drive to her mother’s villa in her tank-sized grey Volvo. Not that she was minded to apologise. Having run from the car to the front door in the pouring rain with her trench coat pulled up over her head, she seemed irritated rather than contrite to see Henrik and Mark already waiting in the hall. In her late fifties and made up to the hilt, she was not bad looking, if you liked a woman who had grabbed every intervention going to stay youthful. Henrik wasn’t partial himself and Regitse’s lateness was doing little to warm him towards her. He made a show of checking his watch, waiting in overbearing silence until she had finished brushing the rain off her coat sleeves and moaning about the state of Copenhagen traffic. Her perfume clung to the stale air like an unwelcome guest.

‘Detective Inspector Henrik Jungersen,’ he said. ‘And this is my colleague, Mark Søndergreen.’

Her hand was bony and cold with a sizeable diamond that dug into his flesh. ‘Regitse,’ she said.

Unlike most bereaved relatives, she had not asked to be taken 24to see her mother’s body first, but requested they meet at the villa. There had been no tears, no anxious questions about how her mother had met her end. On the face of it, this was suspicious, but in Henrik’s experience, an offender would, at the very least, have tried to conceal their indifference with some kind of act.

‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Henrik said, watching her face closely for a reaction.

Any reaction.

With the exception of a nerve twitching by the woman’s left eye as she stepped past them into the house, there was nothing there. Henrik got the impression that even if Regitse were experiencing some form of grief, which he doubted, she wouldn’t cry in front of them in a million years.

‘We still don’t have a motive for your mother’s murder. Anything you can tell us would be helpful,’ he said, as he and Mark caught her up in the living room.

‘I thought you said it was burglary?’

Her clipped accent betrayed her posh North Copenhagen roots which many years in a suburb of Aarhus had done little to soften.

‘Burglary is one option. We were hoping you could tell us if anything’s missing,’ said Henrik.

Regitse was already doing a tour of the ornaments, frowning at each painting in turn, opening boxes and lifting porcelain figurines. To Henrik’s surprise, Irene Valborg’s handbag had been found by her bed, with 3,000 kroner in her wallet. There had been no jewellery to be seen, though, except the rings on the old woman’s fingers. The killer had not bothered with those.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Everything seems to be here.’

‘How long since you last visited?’ he said, wondering how she could be so sure, but Regitse ignored the question.

‘Did you check her safe?’ she said. 25

‘Safe? What safe?’

Regitse made for the stairs, muttering under her breath. ‘Bloody amateurs.’

‘Wait. You might get a bit of a shock,’ said Mark, ever considerate.

Too late.

They found Regitse looking down at the dark stain on the landing. The oriental carpet where her mother died had been removed by forensics.

‘So, this is where he got her,’ she said, her hard exterior showing momentary signs of cracking.

‘Yes, we think she may have been trying to get to safety, closing the grille behind her when the killer struck her from behind,’ said Mark.

Slowly, Regitse recovered her composure and began to look around, more solemnly now. There were remnants of red powder left on the walls, furniture and ornaments that had been checked for fingerprints. ‘There used to be a statue of an elephant there, a bronze,’ she said, pointing to the low bookshelf on the landing where a lighter-coloured rectangle marked the shape of the plinth.

‘It has been taken away as evidence. We believe it was the murder weapon,’ said Mark.

Regitse nodded, tiptoed around the stain and made for her mother’s bedroom. The bed had been made. The room was neat with no clothes or effects lying around. No signs that Irene Valborg had been about to go to bed when she had been disturbed, nor had she only just got up by the look of things. It wasn’t unheard of for burglars to be working in the middle of the day, especially not in a quiet area like this. Still, it wouldn’t have been someone’s first choice. Did that mean the perpetrator hadn’t been a burglar after all?

Regitse aimed straight for an oil painting on the far wall, one of many gold-framed Danish landscapes adorning the walls of 26her mother’s bedroom. She lifted the painting off the wall and began to examine something behind it.

Henrik saw to his astonishment that it was the metal door to a safe that had been cemented into the wall cavity. No one on his team had spotted it. The door was unlocked.

‘It’s empty,’ Regitse said, feeling inside. ‘I thought as much. There used to be a few million kroners’ worth of diamond necklace in there. There’s your motive, inspector.’

‘Detective inspector,’ said Henrik. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Who is to say your mother didn’t sell her necklace?’

‘Sell it? Ha! You obviously have no idea what my mother was like.’

‘I get the feeling the two of you weren’t close.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ she snapped.

‘If she’d done something with the necklace, you might not have been the first to know,’ said Henrik.

‘Believe me, it was her pride and joy. Her only pride and joy. More important to her, certainly, than her nearest and dearest.’

‘An heirloom?’ asked Mark, diligently taking notes.

‘No.’

‘What then?’ said Henrik.

‘She bought it not long after I left home. Came into an inheritance.’

‘Who did she inherit from?’ said Mark.

‘Some relative, what do I know. We never saw any of my mother’s family.’

‘And did she ever wear the necklace?’ continued Mark.

‘Oh no, far too expensive for that,’ said Regitse in a mocking voice.

She had moved on to her mother’s bedside table, rummaging amongst the trinkets in the drawer. Henrik felt his patience running out. ‘How come you knew exactly where the safe was?’ he said. 27

‘Because she showed me. She was very proud of how clever she had been to get it.’

So, she had been security conscious all along, taking no chances, and yet a short while ago, she had tightened the ring of steel around her house by another couple of notches, effectively barricading herself inside.

‘My father’s gold watch is missing,’ said Regitse.

‘Are you sure?’ said Mark.

‘For God’s sake, yes, I am sure,’ said Regitse. ‘My mother kept it in this drawer ever since my father died.’

‘Expensive?’

‘Wouldn’t have thought so. My father wasn’t a materialist.’

Unlike you and your mother, thought Henrik. ‘Anything else?’ he said.

Regitse looked around. ‘I don’t believe so.’

Henrik was no expert, but there were several other valuable-looking items in the room, including paintings and silverware. The necklace could have been stolen to order, but why grab an old watch when there were other things worth more?

‘Would you know why she had new locks fitted? Or the alarm system?’ said Henrik.

Regitse shrugged. ‘No idea, but I can’t say I’m surprised. She was always paranoid about somebody taking that necklace from her. Wouldn’t even allow me to touch it.’

‘And the dog?’

Regitse Lindegaard frowned. ‘What dog?’

While Mark explained about the Alsatian, Henrik touched his temples with the tips of his fingers and closed his eyes. Nothing added up. If the necklace really had been stolen, despite Irene’s paranoia, how had the killer known it was there? And more importantly, how had he got into the safe without need to resort to an angle grinder? Could she have opened it for some other reason? Or had it been open already?

David Goldschmidt at the Forensic Institute would tell him 28for certain, but Henrik was pretty certain the old woman hadn’t been tortured to reveal the code.

‘Can you think of anyone in her circle who might have done it?’

‘Circle? My mother was eighty-six. There was a cleaner, but she sacked her just before Christmas.’

‘Oh?’ said Henrik, perking up. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because Minna rang me to complain. Been working for my mother for years and suddenly it’s “Thanks very much, here’s what I owe you, jog on.”’

Mark moved in with his notepad. ‘Can you give me Minna’s full name, please, and a number, if you have it?’

Regitse begrudgingly obliged. ‘But I am telling you, Minna didn’t do this. The woman doesn’t have it in her, and her husband’s practically an invalid.’

‘Then who did?’ said Henrik, suddenly thinking of something. ‘Is there a gardener?’

‘Troels, yes. She hasn’t sacked him, by the looks of the lawn and driveway, but then my mother always was very much about keeping up appearances. No matter that the core is rotten, if the apple is shiny and red on the outside.’

A description equally befitting you, thought Henrik, while Mark diligently noted down the details on the gardener who would have to be interviewed along with the cleaner.

‘I doubt very much that he or Minna even knew about the safe. Perhaps my mother made a mistake and told a stranger about it. Perhaps whatever cowboys sold her the security gear.’

Possible, thought Henrik, but that still didn’t explain the open safe. Nor why Irene Valborg had had to die in the process. And those were not the only things about this case that were hard to fathom. ‘How do we know that it wasn’t you who took the necklace? You could easily have got the code then pretended there had been a burglary,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you killed her.’

‘And why would I kill my own mother?’ 29

Henrik looked around at the house. ‘Big pile like this, got to be worth a few bob. I assume you’re the only beneficiary of your mother’s will?’

‘If I had wanted to kill her in order to inherit, why steal the necklace?’

‘Perhaps you didn’t intend to, but your mother got in the way. Or perhaps you made the necklace up to mislead us. Or you killed her, without thinking of the necklace, and you have only just discovered that it’s missing, to your obvious annoyance.’

He could feel Mark looking at him; he was going too far.

Regitse responded with admirable cool under the circumstances. ‘Too right I’m annoyed, but I didn’t kill her. You’re wasting your time while the real killer is out there, getting away with it.’

Was she telling the truth? If it was money she was after, she surely wouldn’t have needed to wait long for her mother to die of natural causes. Unless she was desperate?

‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why you wouldn’t visit your mother more often?’

‘I am busy. My husband has an extremely demanding job,’ said Regitse, rummaging through yet another box of trinkets.

‘Still, the odd phone call to make sure she was all right? Wouldn’t have taken you more than a few minutes.’

Regitse snapped the lid to the box shut and walked over to Henrik, standing so close to him that he could see the powder that had caught in the fine hairs on her upper lip, the mascara that had smudged in the rain and caught like black tears at the corners of her eyes. Her gaze was unflinching.

‘Your job is to find who did this and retrieve the necklace. You got that?’ she said, pushing out her chin.

Henrik folded his arms across his chest, standing four-square and looking her in the eye.

Caught in the middle, Mark’s gaze darted nervously between them. 30

‘Well,’ said Regitse. ‘What are you waiting for?’

Henrik felt heat spread from his abdomen to his chest. He had had it with being everyone’s whipping boy.

His wife’s.

Jensen’s.

Keeping it together on two hours’ sleep only to be spat at by the likes of Regitse Lindegaard. Well, she had picked the wrong day for it. ‘I don’t care who you are, or what your husband does. You don’t get to call the shots round here,’ he said, jabbing a finger at her. ‘This is my investigation.’

Regitse laughed, as Mark attempted unsuccessfully to lower Henrik’s arm. ‘You pathetic man. I am staying in Copenhagen overnight. Tell me when there’s a development.’

She made for the door.

‘There is a development right now,’ said Henrik in a loud voice, stopping her in her tracks. ‘You are coming with us.’

‘Why?’ said Regitse, the smile finally wiped off her face.

‘We’re going to need everything you just told us written down. I’m sure you’d want to assist our investigation as much as possible. It might take some time, though. Mark here is not the fastest of typists with his two sausage fingers, and he is very thorough, so I’d cancel my plans for the afternoon, if I were you.’

31

6

Tuesday 17:14

Gustav staggered over the threshold to Jensen’s new flat, dropped the box he was carrying on top of the already sizeable stack in the living room and threw himself on the floor, rolling onto his back. ‘Never again,’ he cried.

Jensen would have joined him, had she felt sure that she would be able to get up again. She headed for the kitchen tap, letting the cold water run straight into her mouth and swallowing in greedy gulps.

After the funeral they had gone to IKEA in Gentofte and it had been hell. What were those hundreds of people doing there, hoarding flatpack furniture on a rainy Tuesday in March? Gustav’s price for fetching and carrying had been a plate of Köttbullar in the cafeteria, which he had insisted on having before they start. She had watched in disgust, nursing a bottle of water as he wolfed down the meatballs, mashed potato and gravy.

‘What?’ he had said, in between mouthfuls. ‘It’s tradition. You wouldn’t have Christmas Eve without ris à l’amande and cherry sauce, would you?’

‘Actually, I would,’ she said, shivering at the thought of the 32cold rice pudding with almonds that followed the roast bird on Christmas dinner tables across Denmark. ‘I hate ris à l’amande.’

‘You know what your problem is?’ Gustav had said, pointing at her with a speared meatball. ‘You’ve been away from Denmark too long. Even your accent’s gone funny.’

‘My accent?’

‘Yeah,’ said Gustav, launching into a mocking rendition of Danish with a British accent.

She had bashed his arm with her water bottle, and he had laughed with his mouth full of half-chewed meat. Even he had flagged, though, on the tortuous trail around the warehouse, echoing with screaming kids and domestic arguments.

‘How much stuff do you need?’ he complained as she loaded the shopping trolley with bedding, towels, a clothes rail and lampshades. She also bought crockery, cutlery and pots and pans, glasses, cushions, a rug, a cafetiere, a kettle, dishtowels and a clock.

They had been queuing to pay along with dozens of other weary shoppers when Jensen’s phone had trembled into life. She recognised the Randers phone number: the optician who had once sold a pair of metal-framed spectacles to Vangede’s fraudulent accountant.

Finally.

He sounded angry. ‘Jensen?’

‘Speaking.’

‘You have left twenty-five messages on my voicemail. I don’t know who you are, but I want it to stop. Right now.’

‘I am a reporter. I am writing a story about the death of Carsten Vangede. Are you—’

‘Don’t,’ said the optician. ‘I don’t know anything about those glasses. I sell hundreds of pairs every year.’

‘So Vangede already came to see you?’

‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘But you must have a record of the prescription. The man I 33am looking for went by the name of Bjarne Pedersen. He might have—’

‘Shut up,’ said the optician, almost screaming the words.

Then he hung up.

Gustav stared at her questioningly. ‘Well?’

‘That was the optician. He sounded weird,’ said Jensen.

‘Weird how?’

‘Like he was scared.’

It had been their turn at the till then, and they had got preoccupied with lugging heavy boxes of furniture and household items from the store to the car park.

Jensen thought about it now. Had the optician been warned off by someone? If so, who?

‘Wouldn’t it have been a hell of a lot easier if you’d just got the container with your stuff shipped back to Copenhagen?’ said Gustav from the floor.

‘Perhaps. But I prefer it this way: new things, new start. Besides, I haven’t decided yet if I am staying for good.’

Gustav gestured at the boxes. ‘Looks like it to me.’

Jensen didn’t bother explaining. He wouldn’t understand that this felt like a smarter way to try out living in Copenhagen. If by the autumn she had decided it wasn’t for her, she could leave the flat to the next tenant and take off back to London.

The flat was perfect. Almost. The washing machine was broken, and she was running out of clean clothes. Quickly, she composed a message to the asthmatic estate agent (about time she earned her fee), then threw a cushion at Gustav. ‘Get up, you have work to do.’

‘Oh what?’ whined Gustav. ‘You never said.’

‘You weren’t going to leave me to unpack all this stuff by myself, were you? And I thought you wanted to be my apprentice.’

‘Yes, your journalism apprentice, not your personal handyman. Speaking of which, are you going to return to Dagbladet now?’ 34

‘Sorry, Gustav, but the answer is still no. I thought I might try out working for myself for a while.’

‘You haven’t done very well so far.’

‘Says who?’

‘Margrethe, for one.’

‘Well, it takes time to organise everything.’

‘Organise what?’

‘My office, for starters.’

Gustav hoisted himself up on his elbows and stared at her, suddenly interested. ‘And where is that?’

‘You’re looking at it. Now get up. There’s a takeaway in the offing. I know a really nice Korean not far from here. They do bubble tea. Work first, eat second.’

Now she had his full attention. In twenty minutes, he had put the kitchen stuff away while she had made the bed and hung up the clock. The flat was beginning to look like a home.

‘Can we have a break now?’ Gustav said, flopping onto the sofa. He took out tobacco and papers for a roll-up, having recently graduated from his vape. Jensen suspected he thought smoking was cool.

‘You’re not smoking that in here,’ she said.

‘Right you are, Mum,’ he said without looking up.

She was going to have to persuade him to stop smoking altogether. Later, when she had more energy for a fight.

Her phone rang, the switchboard at Dagbladet