Death Sentence

36

MY COMEBACK NOVEL, A Bullet in the Chamber, was fairly successful, but it would have had more of an impact if I had been willing to promote it. I stayed in the cottage and let my editor talk to the press. Finn was unhappy. He preferred his authors to flog the goods. Let the punters see the rabbit.

He was, however, delighted with the book.

‘Great craftsmanship,’ he said several times and that was precisely how I saw it. I had no deeper feelings towards A Bullet in the Chamber than a builder towards a floor he has laid or a carpenter for a shed he has put up. Yet the publication marked a turning point in my career as a writer. If I had once kidded myself that I was destined to write world-class literature, A Bullet in the Chamber was my epiphany. I now knew that I would never write the great Danish contemporary novel, but I could easily see myself as the kind of bread-and-butter writer we had always despised back in the Scriptorium days. In a way, I was relieved.

My neighbour was downright chuffed. Bent threw himself into his own promotional tour around the holiday resort. In the months that followed publication, he always carried spare copies in his old Fjällräven rucksack. He was never modest when it came to explaining his role in the creation of the book, and many people must have got the impression that he was really my ghostwriter or that I had simply taken dictation from him. Not that I cared. Bent was due some of the credit that the book had been written at all, so he deserved a pat on the shoulder. I had certainly no need for attention.

Whether it was Bent’s enthusiasm or Finn’s marketing that did it, I don’t know, but the novel sold well, although without ever reaching the heights of Outer Demons. It received a fair amount of press coverage. Some interpreted it as a critical response to Denmark’s participation in the first Iraqi war – completely unintentional from my side – but the association stuck and has haunted the book ever since. Because of this I received numerous letters from soldiers who had been posted to Iraq, and again later when Denmark joined in for the second half. Many of them told of physical and psychological trauma. They were surprisingly frank about excess drinking, family problems and the difficulty of readjusting after returning home.

A few letters contained direct threats against my life, either because I, in the sender’s opinion, had given a completely distorted picture of serving in Iraq, or because the sender felt that outsiders shouldn’t be allowed to write about it when they had never been there and seen comrades killed by IEDs or had snipers take pot shots at them.

I kept all these letters in a box like old family photos you haven’t got the heart to throw out. I sensed a kinship with those lost souls who now lived alone with only the bottle for company and the memory of a family who no longer wanted to know.

But at least I had something to do, something that could occupy my thoughts for several hours every day and provide me with a living. Writing became my fixed point and I adhered to my working routine with military precision.

I quickly discovered that being a writer is the world’s best excuse for being alone and I often used it as justification for getting rid of guests. Sometimes I would use it to stop people from visiting in the first place. If I pretended I would be writing all day, people respected it and didn’t disturb me.

Apart from giving me something to do, writing also became an outlet for the anger I discovered inside me. My divorce from Line took place through lawyers and it was a bitter experience to see my former life disappear like that.

As a result, I wrote Nuclear Families, a story about a group of housewives who are taken hostage by a robber in a supermarket. They overpower the robber, who dies when he is impaled on an umbrella stand, and the women discover they have something in common. Apart from being resourceful, they share a passion for morbidity and are all trapped in unhappy marriages. They start to meet in secret and strike a deal to murder the husbands while each wife has a rock-solid alibi. It quickly turns into a sport, one murder becomes more spectacular than the next, and the more the husband suffers the better. A police officer, a male chauvinist and a bragging caricature of Philip Marlowe, suspects a link between the murders. He has his own marital problems and it isn’t until he finally uncovers the group that he realizes the conspiracy is greater than he first presumed. His own wife has arranged for his female boss to kill him while she herself is at bingo. The police officer dies in a shooting accident on the last page of the book, just as his wife wins a full house.

Nuclear Families was a furious attack on all women and their sisterhood. It was my antidote to the injustice I felt when Line took my children from me. It wasn’t a very good book, nor was it terribly popular with my readers, but it did its job. The critics slated it, but I was used to that by now and it didn’t upset me. A sole critic enjoyed the stereotypical gender depiction and was of the view that it was a big fat ironic response to the wave of girl power that had started to spread. But there was no truth in that. It was simply a bad book.

Financially, Nuclear Families wasn’t a success, either. It paid for itself as far as ZeitSign was concerned, but once I had paid alimony and child maintenance, there was nothing left for me. Fortunately I still got royalties from the other books and public lending rights, but I had to cut my consumption down considerably, something that turned out to be easier than I had expected. There wasn’t much to spend money on in a holiday area, at least not during the winter, and as I didn’t mix with people, there was a limit to how much money I could spend on petrol and clothes. The biggest item in my household budget was alcohol, but I could always switch to a cheaper label. At this point, it didn’t really matter how many years my whisky was aged.

Some months after the publication of Nuclear Families I had a visit from Line.

It was a late afternoon in May, warm enough for me to sit outside, but still a little too chilly for shorts. I sat in the garden with my Scotch, a Macallan, and studied the lawn.

‘Frank?’

I heard her voice as if in a dream. It was a very long time since I had last heard it and now it didn’t sound like her at all or else I had forgotten how she spoke. That possibility frightened me. I had imagined her voice countless times, imagined what she might say in this or that situation, and sensed her approval or scepticism from her intonation when I asked her advice about something or other. Now her voice was alien to me.

‘Frank. Are you there?’

It was her, no doubt about it, and I panicked. I looked at myself. My clothes were a mess. A white T-shirt under an old fraying cardigan which – would you believe it – used to be her father’s. Then a pair of jeans with no belt, holes in the knees and on my feet I wore a pair of slippers that had been in the house when we bought it. I thought about hiding, but it sounded as if she was just around the corner and my car was in the drive, so I couldn’t see how I could avoid her.

I put the whisky bottle behind my chair and buttoned up the cardigan. It was missing a button midway.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Line said, coming into view.

‘Hello, Line,’ I said, as casually as I could. My throat felt dry and parched, but I suppressed the urge to grab my glass and swallow the rest of my whisky. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

But then I saw her and it was like a punch to the stomach. She had put up her hair so her neck was bared. A black top, a pair of tight jeans and white trainers made her look young and fresh. And then she smiled. I had fallen for that smile once and at that moment I did so again. There was no need for her to say anything, all she had to do was state her demands and I would have signed instantly in my own blood and agreed to whatever she wanted.

I got up, a little too quickly, and accidentally pushed the chair back and knocked over the bottle behind it. It didn’t smash, but the noise was unmistakable. Line’s gaze flickered and I needed no speech bubble to tell me what she was thinking. I chose to ignore the sound and walked towards her. Having wiped my hand on my trousers, I offered it to her. She took it and squeezed it.

‘Good to see you,’ she lied.

‘You too,’ I replied and meant it.

‘I apologize for turning up unannounced,’ she said and let go of my hand. ‘But you weren’t answering the telephone, so I started to worry.’

‘Telephone?’ I said, looking at the cottage. I remembered ripping out the cable in a drunken rage. It was several months ago. ‘Oh, right, it’s broken.’

Line nodded towards the garden chairs. ‘May I sit down?’

‘Of course,’ I replied quickly and dusted one of them down. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘I’m driving,’ she said. ‘But a glass of water would be great.’

I rushed inside the cottage and into the kitchen. It was overflowing with several days’ worth of washing-up and there were no clean glasses. I quickly rinsed one and wiped it with a piece of kitchen towel. While I waited for the water to turn cold, I opened the fridge and drank a mouthful of vermouth straight from the bottle. The taste made me grimace.

When I returned to the garden, Line was standing with her back to me at the far edge of the terrace, as if she was balancing. It was impossible to tell that her body had given birth to two girls. She was slim, narrow around the hips and had the same elegant posture she had always had and which I had always admired.

‘The lawn needs cutting,’ Line remarked, yanking me back to reality.

I shrugged. ‘I might be going for a natural look.’

Line laughed and took the glass I was offering her. I could kick myself for not having waited until the glass cooled down. She had definitely noticed that it was still warm after I had washed it and guessed why. I sipped my whisky while she drank her water. We sat down in our garden chairs.

‘I’m worried about you, Frank.’

I brushed it aside with a wave of my hand. ‘Nah, no need for that. Like I said, the telephone is out of order.’

‘No, that’s not it,’ Line said, looking earnestly into my eyes. ‘I’ve read the book.’

I looked away and swallowed a mouthful of whisky. ‘And?’

‘I couldn’t recognize you at all, Frank.’ She shook her head. ‘All that rage scares me.’

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘It’s only a book.’

‘It’s never been “only a book” with you.’

I was aware of irritation growing inside me. My enchantment had been transformed into distrust. What was she doing here? Why was she confronting me in this way? How was it any of her business what I wrote and whether or not I cut the grass?

‘Perhaps I’ve grown wiser.’

‘Have you?’

It was always the same with her, simple questions that were so hard to answer, but it wasn’t the question that had upset me. I felt ambushed. Partly because she had turned up without warning so I had to receive her unshaven, unwashed and with a house that hadn’t been cleaned for several months. Partly because she confronted me with my own cowardice in writing Nuclear Families without her being able to defend herself. All I wanted was for her to leave as quickly as possible.

‘I suppose we all grow wiser every day,’ I replied and tried to smile.

Line looked away. ‘You’re avoiding the question.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

She leaned forward, stretched out her slender hand across the table and placed it on top of mine. ‘I want you to say that you forgive me and that you forgive yourself. I want you to say you’ll take better care of yourself and start to go out a bit more.’ She fixed my gaze and I could tell from her eyes that she really meant what she had just said.

I cleared my throat. ‘I forgive you. I forgive myself and I’ll take better care of myself and I’ll start to go out a bit more,’ I said, trying to match her tone of voice as accurately as I could.

Line withdrew her hand and shook her head. ‘I don’t know why I came,’ she said, laughing bitterly. ‘Perhaps I thought you would listen this time, that you needed me, needed some help.’ She sighed. ‘There are still people who care about you, Frank. You don’t need to hate yourself and the whole world.’

She stood up and pressed her arms to her sides.

‘I’ll drive back now,’ she said. ‘But there’s something I want to tell you before you hear it from other people.’ She paused. ‘I … I’ve met someone. His name is Bjørn … he’s moving in with us next week … the girls are crazy about …’

I heard what she said, saw her struggle to express the words and serve them up like tiny hand grenades wrapped in cotton wool. I noticed the little ripple of a smile that formed when she spoke his name and noted her frustration when her reassuring words ended up sounding like gloating.

A fire ignited within me, bombs and stars exploded in my body and I felt like throwing up until my guts were spread out in front of me. But I focused all my strength on staying calm. I transformed my face into a cast of Frank Føns, a death mask that reproduced his final emotions before the execution.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Line asked.

I responded by raising my whisky glass towards her.

‘Congratulations,’ I said and drained the glass.

She shook her head. ‘Goodbye, Frank,’ she said. Her voice broke and she clasped her hand over her mouth as she hurried away from me, around the corner of the house, out of my field of vision. Soon afterwards I heard the sound of a car starting and driving off.

I stared at my glass and then across the garden.

Suddenly I felt like cutting the grass and maybe chopping down a couple of trees.

Media Whore followed soon after Nuclear Families. I finished it in record time, expelled it from my body with the rage and impotence I felt at losing Line and my girls. Someone had to pay and ultimately it was all Linda’s fault, wasn’t it? Of course it wasn’t, but at the time that wasn’t how I saw it. After Line’s visit I could no longer hate her so I had to find someone else to vent my fury on. Linda had made me betray my family and, in my opinion, that was the beginning of the end.

Media Whore proved to be moderately successful. Even though I had written it for myself, some critics felt that it captured the spirit of the age and its obsession with celebrities, and it received considerably more coverage than it deserved. Linda Hvilbjerg herself never referred to it once.

My next victim was Bjørn, Line’s new husband and my daughters’ stepfather.

You Don’t Have To Call Me Dad is about a paedophile who lives several double lives with different women, all of whom are ignorant of each other’s existence. It’s the kind of story you hear about from time to time without ever understanding how it can be possible, but I took it one step further. My main character and killer, Bjørn Vibe or Bjørn Jensen or Bjørn Christoffersen, as he also calls himself, selects single mothers with daughters, as many as possible. He charms his way into the family so effectively that the mother ends up accepting his marriage proposal – what else would she do? Bjørn is great with the kids, good-looking and has a well-paid job as a travelling sales manager. After the wedding, Bjørn’s personality changes. He batters both the mother and her children and it escalates to actual slavery where he abuses everyone in the family. His alleged job enables him to travel from one family to the next, always without warning, so they never know when he will be back or when he will leave. At some point in the relationship, he kills one of the children to assert his power, usually pretending that the mother has transgressed in some minor way. She is forced to cover everything up or her other children will suffer. Bjørn is finally punished for his attacks when one of his wives discovers the existence of one of the others. They track down the remaining wives in his harem, set a trap and torture him over a weekend. All the wives are involved and participate in the final execution where they stab him until he is one bloody pulp. At the end, the women decide to join forces, seek out men with similar tendencies and subject them to the same treatment.

It was inexcusable to portray Bjørn in this way and I hope my daughters never read that book. In fact, I hope they never read any of my books. Even though writing is my job and I wrote in order to provide for them, I don’t like the thought that they might one day read what I have written. I would dearly love them to be proud of me, but I blew that chance long ago.

If they were to read anything of mine, I hope it will be these pages. Perhaps it will help them understand me better, but I seriously doubt they will ever have an opportunity to read this.

Linda Hvilbjerg was right. My literary output is one long string of attacks on everyone around me and my next book, As You Sow, was no different. Now it was Verner’s turn. I camouflaged it as a vigilante story where the murdered characters somehow deserved to die, but I was really out to get Verner. In my eyes, he had it coming. The incident at Line’s party alone justified it, but it was just as much because I had hurt Line by having anything to do with him. Maybe things would have been different if I had distanced myself from Verner from the beginning. This was my thinking, and that was why he had to be wiped off the surface of the earth in the book.

Line never visited me again and my behaviour ensured that I was denied access to my children. My books were used as evidence when the court order was reviewed. The frequent violence and the obvious link between the plots of my books and the girls’ family circumstances made it easy for the judge, and the court order was extended. The wording of the court’s decision came as close to calling me unbalanced as is possible without actually stating it.

Not being able to see my girls was the worst. I had thought it would get easier in time, but it didn’t. Every day I wondered how they were, what they were doing and if they thought about their dad. This probably happens to every parent when their children leave home, but I had been separated from them so early that I couldn’t imagine how they could be prepared for life’s trials and tribulations without me. I believed I had hard-earned experience to pass on to them and dreamed several times that they stayed with me in the cottage in the holidays so they could get to know me.

The years in the cottage in Rågeleje seemed to me one long writing retreat. I wrote more than seven books in the Tower and every single day centred on producing my 2,500 words.

Astonishingly, I rarely felt lonely. I had become addicted to the silence in the holiday resort. Here it could be quiet like nowhere else. Another person in the house would have disturbed the cocoon of calm I surrounded myself with. The sea would often break the silence, but that wasn’t irritating, it merely emphasized the absence of other sounds.

Silence became important for my work. Previously I had been able to write anywhere, in any situation, while all sorts of things were happening around me – even children playing – but no more. I had to be alone and free from intrusive noise. Music was out of the question. Even the racket of chainsaws or lawnmowers sometimes destroyed my rhythm.

I felt best when I rose at the same time, ate the same breakfast, wrote roughly the same amount of text during the day and finally rewarded myself with a whisky in the afternoon with Bent.

I’m sure that a totally predictable life would have made me want to scream in the Scriptorium days. Back then we wrote in response to experiences and unique events, not in routine and repetition. If anyone had told me then that I would spend ten years writing in a holiday cottage, I would have laughed at them. I had wanted to travel, see the world, and I never wanted to write the same story twice.

The reality turned out to be something else. Reality was a day with fixed working hours, weeks all the same and months distinguished from each other only by the changing weather and the nature of gardening tasks.

My days were filled with thoughts of when to rake up leaves while I typed my way through quotas of words and sentences with the regularity of a train timetable.

This rhythm was only rarely disturbed – until the telephone rang one morning.