Death Sentence

8

THE POLICE DIDN’T show up at the hotel that night.

I slept badly. Not because I feared a bunch of uniformed officers might kick down the door at any moment; I always sleep badly in a new place. The first night in a strange bed I barely sleep a wink and tonight was no different. In my dozing state the thoughts whirled around my head and I kept seeing Mona Weis’s blue eyes staring at me through the muddy seawater. When I finally nodded off, I had disturbing dreams about apes and cats.

Though I had little sleep, I felt surprisingly relaxed the next morning. It was as if my dopey state dulled the fear I had experienced the day before and I decided to carry out the new day’s programme as if nothing had happened. That soon proved to be impossible, but I could always pretend. What other option did I have?

The day’s programme included a hearty breakfast and I was starving. My discussion with Verner had ruined my appetite last night so there was plenty of room for an extra helping of eggs and bacon from the breakfast buffet. The thought that I might get picked up by the police at any moment undoubtedly hovered at the back of my mind and perhaps it contributed to my ravenous appetite. At any rate, I spent almost an hour at breakfast, reading the paper as plates from the buffet piled up on my table.

There was nothing new about the Gilleleje murder in the paper. It was now three days since the body of Mona Weis had been discovered and the novelty value had clearly worn off.

First on my agenda was a meeting with my editor, Finn Gelf. Finn published my first book, In the Dead Angle, and I had been with ZeitSign ever since. In those days, it was a very small firm and Finn was both managing director and editor. Since then the company had grown dramatically and Finn had increasingly delegated the editorial work to others, but not on my books. He insisted he was and always would be my editor. In a way, a great part of ZeitSign’s success is down to me, so he owes me. My breakthrough novel, when it finally came, proved to be a goldmine for them and my subsequent books have provided both parties with a regular income.

In time, a friendship developed. Finn Gelf took a chance on In the Dead Angle and The Walls Have Ears and he continued to believe in me, despite the losses his company suffered in the early years. He later told me, once we knew each other better, that he saw in me a stubbornness and a hunger for recognition. Those two traits combined provided fuel; all I needed was direction. He judged I would discover the right formula at some point and he wanted to be there when it happened. Besides, the age difference between us – ten years – wasn’t too big so he found it easy to empathize with the idealism I radiated the first time we met. Perhaps he saw himself in me a decade younger, or the man he hoped he once was.

My breakthrough novel also signalled the breakthrough for our friendship. Together, we travelled around Denmark and abroad and it was on these trips that we grew closer and started talking about other subjects than literature and the publishing industry.

Finn Gelf was the son of the travel publisher Gustav Gelf. Even as a boy, Finn was part of his father’s business. When he was old enough he started packing books for mail order, a job that earned him extra pocket money and his father’s respect. He was later apprenticed to a printer, but the printing works were owned by a brewery and he ended up producing beer labels, day in and day out. Finn, soon bored out of his mind, quit his apprenticeship and returned to his father’s business. He was given an office job on the condition that he continued his education. He managed both some A levels and a business degree and soon became an invaluable part of the company.

The ageing Gustav had imagined that his business would be carried on by his son, but when Finn introduced plans to expand their list to include other types of books, such as fiction, they fell out to such an extent that Finn left and started ZeitSign.

Despite his young age, Finn had built up a reliable network within the industry and he managed to get his publishing house up and running through solid agreements with printers and buyers. It wasn’t a highly profitable business, but he survived and was even able to make small investments in new writers. In the Dead Angle was one such gamble, and had it not been for Finn Gelf, I might never have been published at all.

I took a taxi from the hotel to Gammel Mønt. On the way, I wondered if I should tell Finn about the murder in Gilleleje. It would be right thing to do, but if the police hadn’t turned up yet, it might mean they had already solved the crime. Perhaps there was no link to the book after all; ultimately I only had Verner’s word that the details matched.

ZeitSign’s reception lay behind toned glass doors. The floor and walls were covered with pale sandstone and a polished black counter lay like an overturned monolith in the lobby. The 45-year-old receptionist, Ellen, a noble-looking woman who never lost her composure, sat behind the counter. On the wall behind her, the name ‘ZeitSign’ was displayed in large black letters.

‘Frank!’ she exclaimed when I pushed open the heavy glass doors and entered. She got up, came towards me and gave me a big hug. I returned it with gratitude. It was a long time since a woman had hugged me, possibly not since last year’s book fair, and that had probably been Ellen too.

‘How are you?’ she asked sounding overjoyed, and I mumbled that everything was just fine.

‘You look a bit tired,’ she remarked. ‘Late night, was it?’

‘Something like that,’ I replied. ‘How are you?’

Ellen started telling me about her most recent holiday with her husband and two children, who must by now both be close to twenty. I didn’t quite catch where they had been or what they had done, but I went along with her excitement and the joy, all the reassuring and comforting stories of family life. I made appropriate noises to keep her chatting until the telephone rang.

‘I had better …’ she said, nodding towards the telephone. ‘He’s expecting you upstairs … And don’t forget to pick up your post on your way out.’

I thanked her and went to the lift, which took me to the first floor.

In contrast to the light and open space of the lobby, the editorial corridor was narrow and dark. On either side were small offices where editors sat hunched over scripts or keyboards. A few of them looked up as I walked past and one or two even nodded, though I had never seen them before.

Finn’s office lay at the end of the corridor. The door was open and he was just about to go out when I arrived.

‘Frank, good to see you,’ he said and we shook hands.

His hair had turned completely white since I last saw him a year ago. He had been going grey for the last five years, but now his hair had definitively given up and surrendered to the white invasion.

He showed me into his office, which was large enough to house an enormous desk, a meeting table seating six people and an old leather sofa that had followed Finn throughout his career. Framed covers of ZeitSign’s greatest successes, including a couple of my books, hung on the walls. I left my blazer on a coat stand behind the door and sat down at the meeting table where coffee cups and pastries had been laid out. He poured me a cup of coffee without asking. I added a little milk and sipped it. Normally, I never take milk, but Finn made coffee strong enough to give me stomach ache. He sank one cup after another; he must have had his stomach galvanized.

‘So, what do you say to that?’ he asked.

‘To what?’

Finn smiled and picked up something that looked like a sheet of cardboard from the table and held it up in front of me. It was a newspaper cutting, laminated in hard plastic as if he intended to display it on his wall with the other trophies.

The headline read: ‘Young woman mutilated and drowned in Gilleleje Marina.’