Ruthless E-Book

Anne Mette Hancock

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: A Kaldan and Schäfer Mystery
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 416

Beschreibung

'Gripping, endearing, dark, and funny ... Highly recommended' Harlan Coben When Jan Frischof, a dying elderly man, gives a deathbed confession too unbelievable to be true, journalist Heloise Kaldan immediately knows there's a deeper story to uncover. Her gut soon proves to be right - Jan immediately backtracks and warns her that they will both be in danger if she asks any more questions. Could this kind and elderly man really be a cold-blooded killer? Heloise quickly realizes that this is a darker, and far more complicated, investigation. Jan is clearly afraid of something, but who or what he's afraid of could be a dangerous question for Heloise to find the answer to. As she digs deeper, Heloise begins to see that Jan's confession is connected to a string decades-old disappearances. But next of kin and police are lying to her at every turn, and she has no idea what else Jan could be hiding. Enlisting her friend, detective inspector Erik Schäfer, Heloise begins her descent into the past, unsure of what she will unearth. Rave Reader Reviews 'Thrilling and suspenseful' 'Well-paced and full of surprises. The final twist was a shocker' 'This was tense, atmospheric, and a twisty end that I was not expecting' 'Dark and addictive' 'Many twists and turns in this one!' 'Deceptions and twists that reveal a sinister plot in an idyllic Scandinavian setting' 'That ending just blew my mind' 'A mindblowing twist … great Scandi Noir read'

Leseprobe

ALSO BY ANNE METTE HANCOCK

The CollectorThe Corpse Flower

SWIFT PRESS

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2024

First published in English in the United States of America by Crooked Lane Books 2023 Originally published in Denmark by Lindhardt & Ringhof 2020

Copyright © Anne Mette Hancock 2020

The right of Anne Mette Hancock to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-434-8

eISBN: 978-1-80075-435-5

For my hometown

Let sleeping dogs lie.

SUNDAY JULY 14TH

Prologue

“IS THIS THE first time you’ve seen a corpse dug up?”

Homicide investigator Erik Schäfer stuck a cigarette in his mouth and looked over at the crane.

The hoist creaked and screamed as the rusty red behemoth maneuvered a clay-caked coffin out of the hole in front of them.

Heloise Kaldan fanned a fly away from her face and nodded.

“It’s no joke, I’ll tell you that.”

“It’s limited what we can find here, though. Right?” Heloise said, turning her attention to the tombstone, a black-flecked marble block that the authorities had removed before they started digging. The stone lay face down on the yellow, sunbaked grass.

Schäfer tilted his head, nodding in a way that said both yes and no.

“That depends,” he said. “For the most part, bodies in coffins are surprisingly well preserved.”

Heloise gave him a skeptical look. “Even after so many years?”

He formed a hollow with a hand the size of a baseball glove and lit the cigarette. Smoke poured out of his mouth and nostrils as he spoke.

“Corpses that lie freely out in nature decompose quickly. They are reduced to bones in a matter of no time. Months, sometimes weeks, if the weather is like now.”

Schäfer surveyed Flensburg Fjord. The sun’s rays seethed on the surface of the water, and white sails stuck up everywhere.

He turned his attention back to the crane.

“In a coffin, you are kept in good condition for many years. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not a pretty sight, but you can safely assume that there’s something resembling a human being inside that.” He pointed his chin at the coffin which, at that very instant, was lifted out of the hole.

The salty fjord air and the smell of barbecue coals from the campsite down by the beach were suddenly mixed with deep notes of rot, and the smell made Heloise take a step away.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now we have the coffin transported over to the forensic scientists and then they look at the contents.”

There was a bump as the coffin was set down on the metal stretcher in front of the refrigerated transport.

“Is it going to Aabenraa or Sønderborg?” asked a uniformed officer standing with the driver.

“No, no,” Schäfer said, waving an index finger at them. “Devil’s Island, folks.”

He walked up to the men, and Heloise could hear him explaining that the coffin was to be transported to Copenhagen. She watched him fish the warrant out of his back pocket and show it to the police officer.

She felt her phone vibrate. It was connected to a German cell-phone network because they were close to the border, and no number appeared on the screen.

“Hello?”

“Hello, am I speaking with Heloise Kaldan?” asked a soft-spoken, almost whispered voice.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“My name is Markus Senger, I work for the Vigil. I’m calling regarding Jan Fischhof.”

Heloise’s heart sank, and she let her head fall forward.

“Is he dead?” she asked, running her hand around her neck.

“No, but it won’t be long now. He’s in a lot of pain and constantly drifts in and out of consciousness, so . . . We think it’s a matter of hours.”

“But I talked with one of the caregivers last evening, and he seemed to be doing pretty well then.”

“Yes, but he started feeling very bad late last night. He asked for you several times. That’s why I’m calling.”

Heloise nodded and looked over at the German coastline on the opposite side of the fjord.

“I’m not in Copenhagen right now, but I . . .” She looked at her watch. It was just over two hours until the next departing flight. “I can be there in the late afternoon.”

“Thank you very much. Then we’ll keep our fingers crossed that you arrive in time.”

“Is there anyone with him now?”

“Yes, we have people at the house, but he doesn’t want us to come into the bedroom. He only wants to see you.”

“Okay,” Heloise nodded. “Tell him I’m on my way.”

“Thank you, I’ll tell him.”

“And Markus—was that your name?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him . . .” Heloise looked up into the cloudless nothingness above her, searching for the right words. “Tell him not to be afraid . . . and . . .” She swallowed a few times. “Tell him to wait for me.”

Heloise finished the call and met Schäfer’s gaze. He had appeared at her side and was looking at her with furrowed brows.

“Fischhof?” he asked.

She nodded and put the phone away.

“I have to go home. They expect him to die sometime today.”

Schäfer took a long pull on his cigarette as he watched her.

“All right,” he nodded, peeling a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. “But don’t let it take up too much space, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just remember, we’re not talking about a family member here. He’s not your father, so . . . maintain some perspective, Kaldan.”

Heloise held his gaze for several seconds. “He’s dying. Do you understand that? He’s dying and he’s all alone.”

Schäfer nodded. “Yes, I know, but people are dying every single day. You can’t hold everyone’s hand.”

Heloise shook her head. She was too tired to get worked up.

“I don’t plan on holding everyone’s hand. I’m talking about one person. One person I can be something for. Now. Today! Isn’t that the whole idea of the Vigil?”

“Yes, and it’s a very nice gesture,” he said, nodding. “But you have to have the right mentality for it.”

“Right. What’s your point?”

Schäfer shrugged.

“You seem pretty affected by the whole situation.”

Heloise’s gaze drifted from Schäfer’s black eye, over to the coffin, and back to Schäfer again.

“Of course I’m affected,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s been a pretty intense couple of days. Now Fischhof is about to die, and I promised him I would be there. I promised to free him of all this shit.” She pointed to the coffin.

“Oh hell, Heloise . . .” Schäfer shook his head with an overbearing look. “You damn well know better than to . . .”

“I’m going home!” Heloise turned her back on him and started walking over toward the car. “I’ve made a promise.”

Schäfer threw the cigarette away and stepped on it.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he muttered.

WEDNESDAYJULY 10

Four days earlier

CHAPTER

1

HELOISE UNLOCKED THE door with the key she had been given by the Red Cross and stepped into the dim hallway. Since the first meeting three months ago, the time between her visits to the small half-timbered house in Dragør had become shorter, and today she stopped by for the third time in a single week.

She hung her shoulder bag on the hook in the hallway and went into the kitchen to announce her arrival to one of the night nurses she heard moving around.

“Hi Ruth,” she said to the back of the small, compact lady who was wiping off the kitchen table. The woman’s movements were pointed; she did not raise her gaze, but continued her work with her head hunched over. Her hair was short like a man’s, and Heloise could see white streaks in the folds of her neck where the sun had found no way to reach in.

Heloise peered down the hall toward the bedroom, where the door was ajar.

“Is he asleep?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Ruth said. “I brought him out into the garden so he could get some fresh air.” She gave the dishcloth a hard twist and laid it over the faucet. “It’s so dark and sad in here, and he’s been hanging his head all day, so I thought he needed to get out a little bit. But of course he’s not too thrilled about it, the old grumbler. He acted like he’d been told his leg would be amputated.”

Heloise smiled. She could just hear Jan Fischhof puffing himself up over something as harmless as a bit of sunshine.

She spotted the plate on the kitchen table, where a slice of meatloaf and a few potatoes from Meals on Wheels looked untouched.

“Didn’t he want to eat anything today either?”

“Not a bite.” Ruth wiped her hands on her apron. “I told him he couldn’t have a beer unless he ate a little, but he couldn’t be pushed or persuaded.”

“But I guess he’s got his beer now, hasn’t he?”

“Has he eaten his food?” Ruth’s face was expressionless as she pulled a piece of plastic wrap over the lunch plate.

“Aw, come on, Ruth,” Heloise said, tilting her head. “If the man’s dying wish is to have his last meal served in a bottle, shouldn’t we grant it?”

Ruth pursed her lips tightly.

“Maybe that’s the headline you’re going for in your article? ‘Death By Drink’?”

The words fell hard, and Heloise got the feeling that they had been lining up to get out. She raised her eyebrows and smiled in surprise.

“Do you have a problem with me being here, Ruth?”

“Yes, I do.” Ruth turned and met Heloise’s gaze with her forehead raised and her arms crossed. A deep blush spread up her thick neck. “An old man dying isn’t supposed to be entertainment in a newspaper. This is serious, what’s going on here.”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that.”

“It is the Vigil’s job to show care and presence during the last, difficult time. We listen and comfort and do what we can to ease the great sadness of saying goodbye to life here on Earth.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m here for.” Heloise shook her head uncomprehendingly. “Don’t you think Jan seems to enjoy my visits?”

Ruth hesitated for a moment before answering. “I think your presence is stretching out the agony.”

Heloise wrinkled her brows.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

But Ruth didn’t need to say more. Heloise already knew the answer. When she had first visited Jan Fischhof, the Hospice Vigil had said that he would die before the week’s end. That was almost three months ago. Now they thought it was Heloise’s visits that had made the difference; that Fischhof had been given something to live for, and it obligated Heloise in a way she had not experienced before. She felt like she had the man’s life in her hands, though she knew that was a lot of nonsense. He would die no matter what. But she still couldn’t bring herself to walk away from him.

“He’s in a lot of pain, Heloise, and half the time he has no idea who he is or what planet he’s on,” Ruth said, referring to Fischhof’s incipient dementia. “His brain is turning to mush, and his body . . . well, you know what he looks like!” She threw out her arms. “Why do you keep coming here? For the sake of a newspaper article?” She practically spat out the words. “Let him have peace now, Heloise. Do you understand? Let him have peace!”

Heloise put her hands on Ruth’s shoulders so that they were facing each other.

“I get that you worry, but you should know that even though it started as a job for me, it’s become something else. I’m no longer here just as a reporter. I’m here because I want to be here and because Jan and I, we . . . we have bonded with each other. Do you understand?”

Ruth regarded Heloise with silent skepticism.

“It’s not about my job anymore,” Heloise continued.

Ruth nodded grudgingly. “So you’re not going to write about him after all?”

Heloise bit her lower lip for a moment as she selected her words.

“Not just now, in any case, and not in the way you are imagining. I promise.”

The ripples around Ruth’s mouth signaled that she accepted the statement. She gave Heloise a few conciliatory pats on the cheek with a moist hand. Then she put the lunch plate in the fridge and pulled off her apron with a swish.

“Well then . . . if you’re going to sit with him for a bit, I think I’ll go for today.”

“Yes, you do that,” Heloise nodded. “I’ll take good care of him.”

Ruth left the kitchen, and when Heloise heard the front door shut behind her in the hallway, she walked to the open patio door in the living room and looked out into the garden. She spotted Jan Fischhof sitting in his wheelchair under a large, chartreuse parasol. The poison-green fabric reflected on his face, making his complexion look even sicker than usual. His head was bald, his teeth large in the bony face, and there were no brows or lashes around his sunken eyes. The man was no more than sixty-seven years old, but in a short time the lung cancer had made him look like someone fast approaching ninety. He sat in his wheelchair with the oxygen tank at his side. His eyes were closed, his mouth open and limp, and his rough hands rested with palms facing up in his lap.

He looked like he was already dead, Heloise thought.

“Jan?” she called.

Jan Fischhof opened his eyes slightly, and his gaze drifted over her without focusing.

“Well, you are awake,” she smiled.

He closed his eyes again.

With her hand, Heloise shielded her eyes from the sun as she walked toward him. It was searing hot for the third week in a row. The beaches across the entire East Coast had begun to stink of rotten seaweed, the fields were dry as cotton wool, and the prophets of doom, in keeping with tradition, heralded the end of the world.

Jan Fischhof also struggled with the high temperatures. His blood vessels swelled under his paper-thin skin, and his shirt was blotched with sweat on his collar and chest. The closer Heloise got to him, the louder the wracked, raspy breathing sounded.

“You look like you’re hot,” she said, crouching down in front of him. She put a hand on one of his legs and gave it a squeeze. “Don’t you need something to drink?”

His eyelids slid open, and this time he looked more alert. He nodded slowly.

“Yeah, thanks,” he nodded. “A beer would be nice.”

Heloise smiled. “I’ll be right back.”

She got up and disappeared through the patio door. Inside the small house, it was cool and dim, and Heloise’s gaze slid over the furniture in the living room. The room seemed to have been decorated by a woman. The large-flowered sofa was equipped with embroidered decorative pillows, and on the dusty bookcases stood crystal vases and porcelain figurines of polar bears and little girls with their hands folded in prayer. There was a bouquet of heather in a wavy Aalto vase on the desk at the back of the room. The flowers had long since lost their color, and Heloise wondered whether it was Fischhof’s late wife, Alice, who had tied the bouquet a long time ago. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t had the heart to get rid of it?

Her gaze ran over the many framed family photos standing on the table next to the bouquet. Some of them were sepia colored and pointed far back in time; others looked more recent. Heloise lingered over one of them, a photo of Fischhof’s wife and daughter that looked like it was taken by a provincial photographer. The girl, whose name Heloise could not remember, was wearing a caramel-colored suede jacket and a pair of stone-washed jeans, and the lenses of her tortoise-shell glasses’ frames filled half her face. Alice stood at her daughter’s side in a bright, screaming-green shirt from Marc O’Polo with huge shoulder pads and was one big jumble of permed curls. The look could hardly be more dated, Heloise thought with a smile, and walked on into the kitchen.

She opened the refrigerator, where the middle shelf was filled with medicine bottles of various sizes and colors. Meds that all aimed to postpone the inevitable by days, hours—minutes. Fischhof had stopped taking his pills three weeks ago. All life-prolonging measures were accompanied by a sea of side effects, and he had now reached the point where he turned down anything other than a cold beer.

Heloise grabbed a Carlsberg from the shelf in the refrigerator door and went back out into the garden. She set the bottle on the table in front of Fischhof and sat down in the wicker chair next to him.

He grimaced nervously, but otherwise didn’t react.

“Jan, it’s me.” She drummed her fingers on the table to get his attention. “Heloise.”

“Heloise,” he repeated softly. He began to nod, slowly at first, then with increased speed, and the rubber hose from the oxygen apparatus bobbed in and out of his large nostrils.

He turned his head and focused on her.

“Heloise?” he said in amazement, as if it had been a long time since they had last seen each other.

She smiled at him and nodded. “How are you today?”

The old man’s face contracted. “Thoughts, thoughts,” he muttered, waving her question away.

Heloise put an elbow on the tabletop and propped her chin in the palm of her hand as she watched him.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“This and that and death. This and that and death,” he repeated, as if it were a stanza from an old nursery rhyme he had just remembered. He continued to hum the syllables. The prominent jaws kept time with a clacking sound.

Heloise pushed the bottle closer to him.

“Here, have something to drink! It’s hot today and it’s important to stay hydrated.”

Jan Fischhof reached out for the beer, put a finger in the bottle neck and quickly flicked it back up again, causing a wet plop. He put the bottle to his mouth and took a sip.

Heloise leaned back in her seat so that the braided backrest creaked, and looked around. On the other side of the white picket fence that surrounded the garden was Von Ostens Gade, a winding little cobblestoned street where lupins and peonies grew alongside the old thatched houses. At the end of the road, she could see Øresund Strait, the sound lying between Denmark and Sweden. The old quarter of Dragør was so idyllic that it almost seemed like a caricature, and for many of its inhabitants, the neighborhood was the center of the world.

For Jan Fischhof, it was even more than that. It was the place he had chosen to die in.

“Ruth told me you feel down today,” Heloise said, watching him with gentle eyes. “Is there anything you want? Something that can help your mood?”

He lowered his gaze, lifted the bottle again, and hesitated for a moment as it hit his pursed lips. Then he shook his head and took another sip.

“How about if we play cards? Your doctor says it’s good to exercise your brain.” She put her hands on the armrest, intending to go and get the cards.

Jan looked down toward the strait. He was silent for a moment.

“I once knew a girl who lived over on the other side of the water,” he said. “Claudia was her name.”

Heloise smiled and settled back down. “Were you sweet on a Swede?”

“No, I told you, she was from Glücksburg. She was a German!” He pointed down toward the water. “She worked over here one summer until something . . . yes, it was probably a summer party of some kind they’d arranged for us when I worked at Benniksgaard.”

“But we are in Dragør now, Jan. And on the other side of the water is Sweden. Not Germany.”

The old man narrowed his eyes and focused on Heloise as if he were about to lash out at her. Then a cloud slid across his face and his gaze dropped.

He nodded slowly. “Oh, yes. That’s right. Sweden.”

“Yes, I know that you were born and raised in southern Jutland, but you live in Dragør now and have for many years.”

Heloise could see that he was on the verge of diving down into the dementia swamp again.

“Can you tell me a little about Rinkenæs?” she asked in order to get him to stay afloat. “When did you move away, you and Alice?”

Something indefinable flickered across Jan Fischhof’s face, and he met Heloise’s gaze.

“What about your daughter?” she asked. “What’s her name again?”

With a force that caught Heloise by surprise, Jan Fischhof reached across the table and grabbed one of her wrists. His eyes were suddenly wide with fear.

“Do you believe in God?” he whispered.

“God,” Heloise repeated in a calm tone of voice. She carefully freed herself from his grip and tried to calm him down by stroking a thumb over the back of his veined hand. “That’s a big question.”

Heloise had gone to the Marble Church since she was a child, and it had always been her special place, her refuge. She never attended regular services, but she visited the church several times a month, and her feet always found their way up the narrow spiral staircase that led up the tower. It was safe and familiar up there, and there were lots of existential questions pressing in when she was there.

But God?

“I guess I believe in something. There must be more between heaven and earth. A meaning to it all,” she said, shrugging. “What about you? Do you believe in God?”

The old man lifted his chin and took a deep, painful breath. He squeezed his eyes tightly together, but no answer came.

“I think we’ll end up somewhere when our time here is up,” Heloise said. “Call it heaven, or whatever you want, and I think that . . .”

“What about . . . hell?”

Heloise tilted her head and smiled affectionately at him.

“You don’t have to worry about that, Jan. You can be a grumpy old fart sometimes, but you’re all right. When you knock on the gates up there, they’ll let you in.”

“But they say that you . . .” His voice dropped, and the skin around his eyes contracted as pain gnawed through his body, “. . . that you’ll be held accountable.”

The face of Heloise’s father materialized before her mind’s eye and an uneasiness began to quiver in her chest.

“Are you worried about that?” she asked, instinctively pulling away from Fischhof without letting go of his hand.

He nodded, looking like a child who feared his father’s wrath.

Heloise frowned. “Why? What do you think you have to answer for?”

The old man turned his face up to the sky and breathed in quick, shallow jerks. As he spoke, the words fell in guttural thrusts, as if they came from somewhere deep within him and hurt to say.

“Mads . . . Orek.”

Heloise leaned forward in her chair to hear him better.

“Are you saying Mads Orek? Who is that?”

Jan Fischhof shook his head. “No, Mads Orek . . . Mads Orek.”

His eyes widened, as if he saw something in his mind’s eye that terrified him, and the lines on his face seemed to smooth out for a moment. He held up a warning index finger in front of Heloise.

“It is written in Deuteronomy 24:20.”

Heloise shook her head. “I have no idea what that mea—”

“Eye for an eye, Heloise. Tooth for a tooth. The same injury he causes another must be added to himself.”

The words crackled in the air between them.

“Jan, you have to explain to me what you . . .”

“The blood!” He held up a hand in front of his mouth and whispered through the cracks between his fingers. “So much blood, Heloise, and I . . . I can’t . . .”

“What are you talking about? Where was there blood?”

“On my hands . . . On my clothes . . . Everywhere!” Tears welled up in his eyes. “I thought it was over, but . . . it goes on! You must do something, I . . . I can’t trust the others. They’re watching me, and I’m scared, Heloise. You have to help me. Will you please help me?”

“I’m right here, Jan,” Heloise said. “Breathe calmly, then try to explain to me what you’re afraid of.”

“The gates you were talking about . . .” He pointed up to the sky. “Up there!”

A cloud drifted over the sun, and it felt like the temperature dropped a couple of degrees.

“I’m not sure they’ll let me in.”

CHAPTER

2

HELOISE PARKED IN front of Detective Sergeant Erik Schäfers small red-brick house in Valby and walked up the overgrown garden path to the front door. She put a finger on the bell and waited for the sound of his steps in the hallway, but all she could hear was the engine ticking away under the hood of the car out on the street. She pressed the doorbell again and knocked on the door a few times. Then she frowned and looked at her phone.

She had sent a message twenty minutes ago asking if she could stop by, and Schäfer had answered succinctly with a single, thumbs-up emoji.

Heloise first made sure his car was in the carport. Then she started moving around the property, peering through every window of the house, before finally finding him in the backyard. He was sitting sunning himself in a garden chair made of sand-colored, woven plastic and wearing nothing but a pair of red swim shorts and a cap. His stomach was large and hairy, legs slightly spread apart.

He hadn’t heard her coming, so Heloise cleared her throat to draw attention to herself.

Schäfer turned his head in the direction of the sound.

“Hey, Kaldan!” he said.

“Hi, sorry about sneaking up on you like this, but I guess the bell doesn’t work.” She pointed toward the street entrance. “I tried knocking, but . . .”

“No worries. Come on in!” Schäfer waved her over and pointed to one of the other chairs. “Have a seat!”

Heloise sat across from him and spotted a thin gold chain glinting around his neck. She had always thought he looked like the patriarch of a New Jersey Mafia family rather than a homicide investigator from the Copenhagen Police Department, and today he had turned up the volume on his inner Tony Soprano.

“Coffee?” Schäfer squinted and pointed to the pot on the garden table. “Or maybe you’d rather have a glass of white wine? We’ve probably got a bottle inside somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I know whether it’s on ice . . .”

“No thanks, I don’t need anything.” Heloise ran her eyes over his body and met his gaze with a suppressed smile.

Schäfer raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve never seen a little pork before, is that it?” He slapped his stomach.

Heloise stuck her tongue in her cheek. “No, I . . . I’m just used to seeing you in your work clothes, and now all of a sudden you’re sitting here in swimming trunks looking all gangster-like.” She drew a square in the air around him with her finger. “We just need a stripper and a cigar to complete the picture.”

Just then, Schäfer’s wife came up the basement stairs with a laundry basket in her arms. Her hair was thick and curly, and she was dressed in a black nylon swimsuit that blended in with her dark skin. The cleft between her breasts was deep, and she had tied a pink scarf around her waist like a skirt.

Schäfer smiled contentedly at the sight of his wife. He turned his gaze to Heloise and raised an eyebrow.

“Did you say you have a cigar, too?”

Connie bared her white teeth with excitement when she caught sight of Heloise. She set the laundry basket down in the grass.

“Heloise!” she exclaimed in surprise. “Erik didn’t tell me that you would come over today.”

Connie’s Danish vocabulary was close to complete, but the pronunciation was broken, and she “sang” exotically.

Heloise stood up and hugged her.

“It was just an impulse,” she said. “I have a few things I need to talk to your husband about.”

“Won’t you stay for dinner? Erik has bought ribeye steaks and corn for the grill.”

Heloise looked at Schäfer, who nodded in agreement.

“Aren’t you going to work?” she asked. “Don’t you usually have an evening shift on Wednesdays?”

He shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“Well, in that case . . .” Heloise looked at her wristwatch. It was approaching six o’clock, and she had no other plans. “If it’s not a bother?”

Connie let out a laugh as if that were the craziest thing she’d ever heard, and before Heloise could count to ten, she was holding a glass of Chardonnay in her hand, watching as Schäfer turned steaks on the grill. He had replaced his swim shorts with a pair of dark-blue jeans, a gray T-shirt, and an apron across his stomach that read FBI’s MOST WANTED accompanied by nine photos of gruff-looking men and women. The picture in the upper-left-hand corner depicted Osama bin Laden.

“I think that’s an old list, that one,” Heloise said, tapping Schäfer in the stomach with an index finger.

“Yeah, this one?” He looked down at himself and stroked a hand over the apron. “I won it once at some employee Christmas bingo event at headquarters a hundred years ago. I assume they are all dead and gone now. The terrorists, that is. Not the employees.”

“How’s it going in there?” she asked, taking a sip of her wine. “At HQ?”

He twisted the corners of his mouth downward and shrugged.

“Fine, I guess. Augustine has moved over to a new task force dealing with gang-related matters,” he said, referring to his former partner. “So I don’t see much of her, but otherwise everything is more or less business as usual.”

“And what about the cases? Do you have anything special going on at the moment?”

“What constitutes ‘special’ these days?” Schäfer met Heloise’s gaze. “The boundaries of what is twisted sure have shifted a lot in recent years. But, no, it’s actually weirdly quiet in the homicide department right now.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, right? Fewer cases, fewer killings?”

“Sure, that’s one way of looking at it, but I have this unsettling calm-before-the-storm feeling. Hell, it’s always when you think the statistics look oh-so-nice that something sinister crawls out of the shadows.” He turned down the heat on the gas grill a bit.

Connie came out onto the patio and began to set up at the table.

“What’s the ETA on those steaks, baby?” she asked.

“Heloise prefers her meat cremated, so it just needs a few more minutes, but our ribs are done,” he said, and handed her a dish of the tinfoil-packed steaks.

He took the corn on the cob off the grill and left the last ribeye, pressing it with the tongs so that it sizzled and sputtered on the hot grating. Then he turned his gaze to Heloise.

“By the way, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said, swirling the wine around in her glass. “But I . . . how did you phrase it? I also have a feeling that something sinister is about to crawl out of the shadows.”

CHAPTER

3

“HOW’S JAN FISCHHOF doing?” asked Connie, pushing the salad bowl over to Heloise. “You’re still visiting him, right?”

Connie had a sixth sense for this kind of thing, Heloise thought. It was almost as if she instinctively sensed that this was why Heloise had come. Or perhaps she had just been with Schäfer for so many years that his ability to read people had rubbed off on her.

“Yes, I still visit him,” Heloise said. “But I’m honestly starting to regret that I involved the newspaper in it.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“I just really don’t want to write about him after all. It feels too private.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.” A vertical wrinkle appeared between Connie’s eyebrows, and she sounded disappointed. “Then I shouldn’t have encouraged you to . . .”

“No, that was a good idea Connie. It’s still a good idea to write about the Vigil. People ought to know more about what it is. But I just can’t write about Jan. I simply don’t want to.”

“Who are we talking about?” asked Schäfer.

“Jan Fischhof,” Connie said.

“Who?”

“This guy!” Heloise took her cell phone out of her pocket. She pulled out a selfie that she and Jan had taken together the week before and held the phone up in front of Schäfer.

“He’s the one Connie hooked me up with,” she said.

Schäfer glanced at the picture and nodded aloofly.

“It’s important to remember to keep these kinds of relationships at arm’s length,” he said, driving the steak knife through the meat on the plate in front of him. “I always tell Connie that too.”

“Get close, but not too close,” Connie nodded.

For the past twelve years, she had worked as a volunteer at the Vigil. She had held the hands of more dying people than she could count, and she was the one who had told Heloise that more and more Danes were leaving this world totally alone—without family around, without a single friend. She had encouraged Heloise to join as a volunteer with the purpose of writing about the experience and, in this way, create awareness about the Vigil.

If more people signed up, fewer would die alone.

Heloise poked at her steak. It was still too red for her taste, and the yellow-white fatty edge, which Schäfer shoveled into his mouth with great pleasure, led her to think of soap production and liposuction.

“Arm’s length or not, I think it’s incredible that you’ve been able to handle it for so many years,” Heloise said, looking over at Connie. “You know, you get attached to those you watch over.”

Connie shook her head. “You only have that perception because you and Jan have something special together. It takes two to tango.”

“What do you mean?”

“A lot of the old folks are tight-lipped with me. You should see them when I first walk through the door.” Connie widened her eyes so that the whites of her eyes shone in her face like car headlights. “Good God—a Negro!”

Schäfer shook his head. “There will always be someone who’s out of educational reach, darling. You know that.”

“Yes, but I’m still amazed every time. Because we are talking about people who are on the verge of dying. They are lonely and scared, and they need someone to sit by their side. But a black woman? No, that’s where they draw the line. So I give them some time to get used to it, and most people end up appreciating that I’m there. Death disarms everyone—that’s how it is. But we don’t bond in that deep way you’re talking about, Heloise. That, we do not.”

Heloise put her silverware down hard.

“I’m sorry, but why the hell do you bother helping such assholes?”

Connie smiled slightly and shrugged. “Because . . . they can’t help it.”

Heloise leaned back in her chair, flabbergasted at Connie’s indulgence.

“You’re a better woman than I.”

“Nonsense!”

“You are! I would let them die alone, those motherfuckers. Am I right?” Heloise turned her eyes on Schäfer.

“I don’t disagree,” he said.

“But Jan Fischhof is also a pretty challenging acquaintance,” Connie said. “Still, you keep on visiting him, so maybe you’re more broad-minded than you think.”

“No, because Jan is not like the people you describe. He’s a little reserved and defiant, and God knows not all the caretakers are equally fond of him, but when you get to know him, he’s . . .”

“Yes, I know,” Connie nodded. “He seems nice. I was one of the first to come visit him, and he was very polite, but he wouldn’t talk to me. Not really, at least. It wasn’t my skin color that bothered him, though. I’m sure of that.”

“Then what was it?”

Connie shrugged and poured butter sauce over her corn cob.

“He just seemed so . . . what is the word? Measured. Guarded! As if he was afraid to let anyone in. I think it was very difficult for him when his wife died, and since then he hasn’t really had anyone who . . .”

“What about his daughter, do you know anything about her?” asked Heloise, and continued, “he lost it today when I asked about her and started saying all sorts of strange things. He seemed scared.”

“In what way?”

“He said a lot of incoherent things about biblical sanctions and blood and other spooky stuff.”

“Blood?” Schäfer pricked up his ears.

“Yes, it was actually kinda scary,” Heloise said. She told them what Fischhof had said, and by the time she had finished, the plates on the table were empty. Only Heloise’s steak lay there, uneaten.

“Was he talking about a crime, do you think?” It was Schäfer who asked. He fished a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his T-shirt.

“I don’t know,” said Heloise. “But he has certainly been involved in something that he’s afraid of being punished for. He referred to lines from Leviticus. The ones that are about . . . well, what are they really about? Karma? What goes around, comes around—that kinda thing?”

“An eye for an eye,” Connie nodded, topping up the wine in Heloise’s glass. “The punishment for a crime has to match the crime, but that’s an Old Testament thing. Remind him that there is an updated version where you are told to turn the other cheek.”

Schäfer lit the cigarette and leaned back in his chair as he listened.

“His breakdown seemed to come out of the blue, but I think it was because I mentioned his daughter,” Heloise said. “We’ve never really talked about her, and the times I’ve tried to ask about her, he’s just kinda slid off the subject. But today I hit a nerve. The cup simply overflowed.”

“I do remember the daughter,” Connie nodded, staring into midair as she tried to recall the details. “I met her briefly when I was out there the first time, and I believe she lives in Stockholm or something like that. That’s why no one visits him besides us and why she contacted the Vigil so Jan wouldn’t be alone at the end. She’s married to a Swede and has one of those ABBA names, as far as I remember.”

“Agneta?” asked Heloise. “Or Anni-Frid?”

“No, I’m talking about the last name. Her married name is the same as one of the ones from ABBA. Something with a U?”

“Ulvaeus,” Schäfer said. “Björn Ulvaeus.”

“Yes, exactly.” Connie pointed at him. “Ulvaeus!”

“And you don’t remember her first name?” asked Heloise.

“Isn’t it in the papers you received from the Vigil?”

Heloise shook her head.

“Well, I can try asking some of the other caretakers if they know,” offered Connie.

“Yes, please. I would appreciate that very much,” said Heloise, turning her gaze to Schäfer. “I can’t talk you into doing me a favor, too, can I?”

He lifted his chin, already on guard. “What?”

“The name Fischhof mentioned: Mads Orek. Can you do a search on it?”

Schäfer took a drag on his cigarette. He watched Heloise as he slowly blew out the smoke.

“Well, now, you said yourself that he’s demented, so chances are that these are just ramblings. You understand that, right?”

“I’m also just asking you to do a quick search. Just to see if anything shows up on the radar. For his peace of mind.”

“His peace of mind, or yours?”

Heloise nodded.

“Mine too. After what happened with my father back in his day . . .” She gave Schäfer a long look. “If I’m going to be the one who’s there until the end, I need to know that I’m holding the hand of a decent person. Right now, an uncertainty that I can’t shake has crept in, and you know how I feel about surprises. I need to find out what skeletons he has in his closet.”

Schäfer pursed his lips and nodded.

“I know that you prefer full disclosure, and I get that.” he said. “But I can’t just go into the system and look someone up when I don’t have an investigative cause for taking an interest in them. Or, well, I could, but I’m not allowed to.”

“Why not?”

“Because those are the rules. Otherwise, people would constantly go in and search for their neighbors and their exwife’s new boyfriend and things like that. It’s an invasion of privacy, and it’s verboten.”

Heloise cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you’ve never bent those kinds of rules?”

“In the past, sure. But back then people weren’t so anal about that kind of thing. When you do a search today, you leave an electronic trail, and if someone comes along and asks questions about what you’re doing and you can’t come up with a good explanation, you risk disciplinary action.”

“But just how likely is it that someone would ask about that?”

Schäfer did not respond. Instead, he rubbed a flat hand over his stubble, making a loud scratching noise.

He and Heloise stared at each other as if trying to challenge the other to blink first.

Heloise capitulated and leaned back in her chair.

“Come on, Schäfer. For the sake of old friendship?”

“Whose friendship?” he asked dryly, snuffing the cigarette on his plate. “Yours and that old grumpy guy’s? Or yours and mine?”

Heloise smiled. “What’s the difference?”

THURSDAY JULY 11

CHAPTER

4

SCHÄFER FOLLOWED THE helicopter with his eyes as he drove. It was an AS 550 Fennec from the Copenhagen Police, and it was flying low over the residential area somewhere behind the rooftop billboards on the Sortedam Embankment. After a few peaceful months, the gang war had flared up again, and the night had offered three shooting deaths. There were no civilians among the victims—they were all criminal assholes, so it wasn’t something Schäfer really got his pulse up over. But his former partner was on the task force investigating the cases, and he knew she was up there in the iron bird. He could just picture her: black battle suit over sinewy muscles with sweatbands around her hair, Rambo style. Lisa Fucking Augustine.

Schäfer smiled at the thought, and for a second there he almost missed her.

“Do we know who they’re looking for?” he asked, nodding up at the sky. “Do they have a suspect?”

Homicide investigator Nils Petter Bertelsen, who was sitting in the passenger seat, raised his eyes and looked out through the windshield.

“Some drug dealer who killed off a few of the competitors at a pizzeria last night. A Dimitri . . . something or another.” Bertelsen snapped his fingers as he tried to think of the last name. Then he turned his gaze to Schäfer and raised his eyebrows. “It’s time for lunch, isn’t it?”

Schäfer looked at the clock on the dashboard. “It’s a quarter past ten.”

“Yeah, but I was up at five thirty, and I’m starving. There’s a kebab place down on Dronningens Tværgade, so if you drive that way, I can run in and pick up a few for us.”

“I have a lunch scheduled with Michala Friis in an hour and a half, so I’ll skip the kebabs,” Schäfer said.

The appointment he was talking about had been on his calendar for a week and a half; a lunch appointment with profiling expert and former police psychologist Michala Friis. They had to go through the details of a murder case they were both called to testify in. He as an investigator in the case, she as an expert witness for the prosecution.

“Oh?” Bertelsen looked at Schäfer with his eyes half closed as he waggled his brows up and down. “I bet she’s looking forward to it.”

Schäfer wrinkled his forehead and looked at Nils Petter Bertelsen.

“What are you talking about?”

“The investigator’s intuition, Schäfer.” Bertelsen drummed his index finger on his nose. “Don’t try to tell me you can’t smell which way the wind is blowing.”

Schäfer stopped at a red light and stared expressionlessly at Bertelsen until it changed to green and a black Tesla honked behind them.

He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Shut up . . .” Bertelsen chuckled. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you’ve lost your touch, old man. For real.”

“Old man, my ass!” snorted Schäfer. He stepped on the accelerator and turned left onto Dronningens Tværgade. “I’m not . . .”

“That’s why Michala left the police. Didn’t you know that? Have you never noticed that she—hey, slow down, it’s right here!” Bertelsen pointed through the windshield. “Do you see the sign that says Bazaar? If you stop there, I’ll run in and get some food.”

Schäfer stopped at the curb and looked at the storefront. Bazaar was not a small, dingy kebab shop with a naked bulb in the the ceiling, as he had imagined, but a neat establishment with designer furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows, and room for just over a hundred people. Its door was wide open, but the lights in the restaurant were off, and Schäfer could see the bar stools upside down on the bar counter.

“It doesn’t look like it’s open yet,” he said.

“It’s not, but the chefs are already in full swing in there, and they usually take the trouble to make me a quick takeout. I’ll be back in ten!”

Bertelsen jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

Schäfer saw him walk into the restaurant, where he was greeted by a young, tattooed hipster type. They greeted each other as if they were old friends, then disappeared into the darkness together.

Schäfer turned on the radio and flipped back and forth between stations in search for something sensible to listen to, but there was nothing but teenage noise, gangster rap, and radio hosts laughing at their own jokes. He turned it off again and sat in silence, looking out at the traffic as he thought about what Bertelsen had said.

That he had lost his touch.

Schäfer didn’t like that idea. If there was one thing he counted on it was his gut instinct. The investigator’s intuition.

He pulled the note out from his inner pocket and smoothed it with his fingers. It was the pink Post-it note that Heloise had written the name on before she’d left the night before. He had crumpled it up the second she’d closed the door behind her, but had woken up from a feverish sleep at three AM and lain there listening to Connie’s breathing in the darkness while thinking about Heloise, and Jan Fischhof’s cryptic confessions.

By half past four he had gotten up and slipped down the stairs to the kitchen, where he had fished the note out of the trash.

Something about what Heloise had said had taken hold and was now gnawing at his thoughts.

Eye for an eye . . . Tooth for a tooth . . . What you send out will come back again.

What was it that Jan Fischhof had been trying to say?

Connie regularly brought home stories from her time at the Vigil: confessions from people who, on their deathbeds, needed to confess to everything from adultery to social security fraud. Mothers and fathers who had mourned lost time with children who, for one reason or another, had dropped them. People who, in the last hours of life, had told of abuse and atrocities they had not previously dared to share. Memories they needed to leave in this world before moving on to the next one.

He took out his cell phone and entered a name into the police’s Social Security register with a stiff index finger.

CHAPTER

5

THE CELL PHONE rang somewhere under the piles of paper. Heloise Kaldan’s desk at the Demokratisk Dagblad was, as usual, littered with notebooks, clippings, and court documents of various kinds.

She grabbed the phone before it stopped ringing. “Hello?”

“Y’ello!” Schäfer’s voice crackled good-humoredly on the other end of the line. “Do you have a moment?”

“Yes, if it’s very short.” Heloise moved the phone into her other hand and continued writing the notes she was preparing. “I have an editorial meeting in three minutes.”