Death of a Nightingale

“You need to speak to Heide,” Søren was told. “And she’s still out at the scene.”

Michael Vestergaard had been found some hundred meters from his home in Hørsholm—in this weather at least a forty-minute drive from central Copenhagen. It wasn’t that Søren minded the distance. If he was going to get involved in the investigation, he might as well do it properly. He was just a bit reluctant to drag Babko with him as long as he didn’t know to whom the GUBOZ man reported. There was still no word of or from the missing Colonel Savchuk. On the other hand, the possible connection with the killing of Pavel Doroshenko was one of the things Søren needed to discuss with Mona Heide, and Babko was the best witness they had in this respect.

“Where are we going?” said the Ukrainian when Søren asked him to come along.

“To talk to one of my colleagues.”

Babko looked as if he thought the answer was somewhat lacking, but he didn’t say anything else—at least not until they reached the garage in Hambrosgade, and Søren unlocked the car door.

“Is this your car?” asked the Ukrainian.

“Yes,” said Søren.

And then Babko’s laughter exploded, loud and unreserved.

Søren considered the light blue Hyundai and didn’t think it looked especially funny. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

Babko shook his head. “No, my friend. Nice little car. All is well.”

Søren sighed. They might in theory speak the same language, or at least something closely related, but the cross-cultural understanding was still far from perfect.

“Get in,” he said. “We’re going to a place called Hørsholm.”

THE COLD BEGAN to eat its way through the soldered seams of Søren’s North Face jacket as soon as he got out of the car—so much for being “designed by mountain climbers and athletes.” The sun, which had offered a certain illusion of warmth earlier in the day, had disappeared behind a dark grey, snow-heavy cloud cover, and an arctic wind blew across the hedges.

Tundra Lane. The name fit. Even Babko, who presumably was used to these kinds of temperatures, swore and shivered in his suede jacket. He took a small, round, knitted cap out of his pocket and pulled it down so that it covered the tops of his ears.

This wasn’t the quiet residential street that Søren had imagined. True, there had been a suitable number of symmetrical housing estates just before the GPS directed them down a narrow side road. But this part of Tundra Lane was little more than a wheel track with snow-covered bogland and forest on one side and soft, hibernating golf course hills on the other. It was surprisingly isolated, considering that they were only about twenty miles from the center of Copenhagen.

Vestergaard’s house turned out to be a big box of a McMansion, made of white brick with panorama balconies in the gables and wide, shiny squares of double glazing. Several police cars were parked out front, including the incident van. It looked more like a moving van than a police vehicle, thought Søren, in spite of the orange stripe with the POLICE label. He showed his ID to the frozen uniformed officer who stood by the police tape, then went over to knock on the door of the van.

“I have an appointment with Mona Heide,” he said when a young guy in a black down jacket opened the door.

“She’s still at the scene,” said Down Jacket. “But you can wait in here.”

Søren nodded. Even though he was curious, he had known ahead of time that the investigators were unlikely to let people they considered irrelevant stomp around the scene of the crime. He crawled up the ladder-like steps and introduced Babko in English.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Down Jacket. “Asger Veng, North Zealand Police.”

The inside of the van was somewhat reminiscent of a building site trailer, thought Søren. One end was set up as a kind of miniature cafeteria, with a dining table and minimal kitchen facilities; the other served as office and command center. Between the two sections there was an even more minimal toilet. The facilities were not particularly cutting-edge technology-wise, and the comfort was pretty limited, but at least it was warm, and an industrial-strength coffee machine stood gurgling by the sink.

“Coffee?” asked Veng, who’d noticed the direction of his gaze. “They have just concluded the on-site inquest, so it won’t be long now.”

“Where did they find him, exactly?” asked Søren.

“A few hundred meters into the bushes behind the golf course. He was sitting in his own Mercedes, wearing a seat belt and everything, but in the passenger seat.”

“So he probably wasn’t driving.”

“No. And the only purpose of that drive must have been to get away from the house. It’s not a real road, just a track for working vehicles—tractors, that kind of thing—almost impossible to navigate in this weather. Getting the car out of there again should be really interesting …”

“Who found him?”

“The neighbor. She was out walking her dog. Thank goodness for dog walkers. If not for them, any number of bodies would remain unfound.” Veng poured coffee into white plastic mugs and waved a hand in the direction of a pair of black folding chairs at the dining table. “Have a seat.”

They had barely had time to follow orders before there was the sound of steps in the snow outside.

“There she is,” said Veng a bit unnecessarily. The door opened, and something that looked like a slender and athletic Teletubby swung into the van. Police commissioner Mona Heide pulled the protective suit’s hood off with an impatient gesture and revealed a becoming short, ash-blonde hairdo and a pair of tasteful gold earrings.

“Heide,” she said, offering her hand. No first name, no invitation to collegiality. She projected authority and professionalism that was in no way softened by the gold earrings or the confident, but not exactly subtle, makeup.

“Kirkegard,” Søren said, instantly provoked into the same formality.

“It’s nice of you to sacrifice your weekend.” She didn’t ask him why directly, but she was clearly wondering.

“No problem,” he said, ignoring the unspoken question.

“We’re happy to have the help in any case.” She gave a short nod at Babko, who returned the nod politely but with a bit of reserve. He still didn’t know why they were there.

“I understand that you can help us with the Ukrainian connection?” Heide continued.

“Probably,” answered Søren. “I assume you already know that Lieutenant Babko and his colleague Colonel Savchuk are here because of a death in Ukraine back in two thousand and seven?” He used their names on purpose so that Babko would know they were talking about him.

“Yes, Natasha Doroshenko’s husband. We are, of course, interested in hearing more about the particular circumstances.”

“Is she your chief suspect?”

“Let us say that we consider it likely that she is involved.”

“More than one perpetrator?” he guessed.

She didn’t answer at once. He could feel her reluctance to bring others into the confidence of her small, well-functioning group. She didn’t want to discuss her murder theories with him. He waited without pushing.

“We believe he was killed where we found him,” she said at last, “and that there were at least two people at the scene of the crime. A woman and a man.” And as if this admission had resolved her internal debate, she offered him the rest freely. “Michael Vestergaard was found at a quarter past eight this morning by his neighbor, Anna Olesen, who was out walking her dog. She called us from the crime scene on her cell phone and stayed there until the police arrived. Pretty impressive for a lady of more than eighty, you have to admit. The coroner believes time of death was sometime between eight and eleven, but there’s a significant factor of uncertainty because of the cold. It’s hard to judge what is rigor mortis and what is just deep freeze.”

“But the neighbor was sure that he was dead?”

“Yes. His throat was cut. That doesn’t leave much room for doubt.”

“Were there any other marks on him besides the cut throat?” asked Søren.

“Several blows to the face, some broken fingers—seven or eight. We won’t know for sure until we get some X-rays taken.”

Broken fingers … it sounded like the sort of coincidence that wasn’t one. Still, Søren would like to make the link a certainty rather than a question mark.

“Are there any photos that Lieutenant Babko could have a look at?” he inquired.

“Not yet. Why?”

“Pavel Doroshenko had four broken fingers. It’s apparently a common form of torture. It would be nice to know if Vestergaard’s killer did it in the same way.”

Another reflective pause. Then Heide abruptly got up and opened one of the steel cabinets that stood along one wall of the bus. She tossed two protective suits in crackling plastic onto the table.

“Here,” she said. “You can look at him in the hearse. They’ll be bringing him out in a little while.”

WHEN YOU’RE GOING to see a dead person in a hearse, you expect them to be lying down. Michael Vestergaard wasn’t.

“We couldn’t get him out of the seat without damaging him too much,” the coroner said apologetically to Heide. “It was easiest to cut the bolts and bring the lot.”

Michael Vestergaard sat straight up in his car’s front seat, which had been cut free and then secured inside the white Ford Transit. It had been sixteen degrees below zero the previous night, and the chill was immediately evident. Vestergaard’s once-white Hugo Boss shirt now created a dark armor of ice and frozen reddish-brown blood across his chest. The head lolled backward and to one side, and the lower part of his cheek was stuck to his shoulder, frozen solid. His well-trimmed hair was white with frost.

“Isn’t he unusually … frozen?” asked Søren. “Of course, blood freezes, but—”

“Blood, waste and other bodily secretions. But it also looks as if water was poured over him,” said Heide. “Possibly to wake him from a faint or as a form of torture in itself. They weren’t exactly gentle with him.”

Søren suddenly had a flashback to a POW exercise in the distant days of his youth. The abrupt cooling, the short sensation of drowning when you inhaled water instead of air. It wasn’t quite as cruel and systematic as waterboarding, but in the right—or perhaps the wrong—hands, a simple bucket was a pretty effective instrument of torture. With the current chill factor, it could also be a murder weapon, but Vestergaard had not lived long enough to die of cold.

“His hands?” said Søren. “Is it okay if Lieutenant Babko has a closer look at them?”

“Be my guest,” said Heide in English.

Babko apparently understood the ironic English phrase, because he climbed into the hearse with Søren.

The frozen body curved in a way that somehow contradicted the backward-lolling head, as if two opposing forces had been at work at the moment of death. Automatically, Søren’s mind began to replay the scene. He sensed the threat that made Vestergaard crouch forward, cradling his ruined hands against his stomach. Then the grabbing of his hair, the head that was wrenched backward, the knife slicing through tendons and arteries and throat cartilage. What Natasha had not managed a year and a half ago was now completed in one abrupt slash without hesitation or failed attempts.

“The hands,” he said in Russian to Babko. “Is it the same sort of damage as to Pavel Doroshenko’s?”

Both hands were swollen, blue-black and bloody, and on the left, especially, there were several obvious breaks. The cold and the stiffness of death had frozen the damaged fingers into a position that looked more like some marine life-form than a human hand—a meat-colored starfish, maybe, or a shattered coral formation. The outermost joints of the little and ring fingers were bent all the way back. On the middle finger, the tip was simply missing, and you could see the bone sticking out through the tissue.

With a careful, plastic-gloved finger, Babko bent the shirt’s frozen cuff back to get a better look at Vestergaard’s wrist. “There,” he said. “You can see the mark.”

There was a deep, dirty groove along the cuff edge. Thinner than a rope, thought Søren, perhaps a cable or a wire of some sort.

“Method is same,” said Babko in English so Heide and the technicians could understand him. “Same, Doroshenko.”

“Punishment or interrogation?” asked Søren, first in Russian and then in Danish.

Heide tilted her head a bit as she thought about it. “That hurt,” she said. “If it was to make him talk, he was either very tough—or he couldn’t give them what they wanted because he didn’t know.”

“Poor devil,” said the technician.

Søren didn’t say anything. Instead, he studied the shattered hands one last time. He had read the reports from the trial against Natasha, including the doctor’s testimony that described in detail what Vestergaard had done to his then-fiancé. Maybe someone, somewhere, considered this fair retribution.