Invisible Murder

KOU-LARSEN HAD RESUMED his old habit of walking around the lake a couple times a week. It was a good, long walk that took him almost an hour these days. Back when they still had a dog he recalled being able to do it in half an hour, but then it had been almost fifteen years since Molly, last in a long series of fox terriers of that name, had died.

Helle was on her knees in the garden weeding among the perennials. She had recently acquired a pair of lined trousers with foam pads built into the knees so she didn’t have to lug her weeding mat around the garden with her, although perhaps “garden” was too generous a word to describe their approximately 800-square-meter plot. The tough, dark-green fabric made her rear end look plumper than it actually was.

“I’m going now,” he said.

She didn’t reply right away. Instead she exclaimed in disgust and jumped up, quite nimbly considering her sixty-two years.

“They’re here already!” she hissed.

“Who?” he asked, confused.

“The Spanish slugs!” She marched across the lawn to the shed on the property boundary abutting the neighbor’s. Highly illegal nowadays, and during his time in the Buildings and Safety Department of the local municipality, he had helped to reject several planning applications for just that sort of thing. This shed, however, had probably been here as long as the house, or, in other words, since 1948.

She came out of the shed a few moments later, now armed with a dandelion knife, with which she proceeded to dispatch the offending gastropod by cleaving the gleaming brown body in two.

“I need you to get me some more slug bait,” she said. “Preferably today.”

“Why the hurry? It’s just one slug.”

She straightened up and used her wrist to push the hair out of her face. Her floral gardening gloves were dark from dirt and plant sap.

“It’s an invasive species,” she said with ruthless intensity in her blue eyes. “They don’t have any natural predators here, and a sexually mature slug can lay up to four hundred eggs in one season. You have to keep them at bay.”

“Yes, yes, all right. I’ll drive over to the garden center when I get back.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just around the lake.”

“Take your phone.”

He grunted. He didn’t like the little metallic thingamajig. He struggled to read the numbers on the tiny buttons, and he had never grown completely confident in its use. But she was right, it would be wise to bring it. What if he fell and broke his hip? What if he had a heart attack out there on the lake path, and he keeled over into the reeds where no one would see him? Though whether he would be able to use this masterpiece of communication technology in that case was another matter.

He went inside, retrieved the phone from the drawer, and stuck it in the pocket of his dark-gray windbreaker.

“Okay, I’m going,” he called out to the garden.

“Remember dinner is at five-thirty today,” she called back.

Was it Wednesday again already? It must be. That was the night she had choir practice. Otherwise they always ate at 6 P.M.

IT WAS WINDY down by the lake, and he was glad for he wore his windbreaker. After a warm week when everything had blossomed all at once, it had gotten chilly again, and he had grown more sensitive to the cold with age. What with the dog walkers and the exercise fanatics there was a constant traffic on the lakefront path, and he stared at the joggers with envy as they pumped away with their muscular shorts-clad legs and carried on easy, smiling conversations with each other to demonstrate that they weren’t winded by such a trifling little trot. Just you wait, he thought, just you wait. Someday you, too, will drag yourself out of bed gasping for breath, wondering whether you can make it to the bathroom by yourself.

He had barely reached the lake park when the symptoms started. The ache in his hip—he knew that one, he could get used to that one. But also a stabbing pain in his chest, like a stitch in his side, only worse. One foot in the grave, he thought, and was once again overwhelmed by frustration that he couldn’t get that snotty-nosed puppy of a lawyer to understand that someone had to look after Helle.

She had just turned twenty-two when they got married; he had been forty-six. They had met each other at the Town Hall, where she worked as the mayor’s secretary, a job she dispatched with a cool efficiency that made her seem mature and professional compared to most of the girls in the typing pool. Yes, that’s what they used to call them, “the girls.” Without any of the artificial political correctness one had to employ these days. This was back in the ’70s when fringe purses and hot pants were starting to sneak into even the stuffiest of local government offices, but Helle stuck to classic pencil skirts, pearl necklaces, and cardigans with a Chanel-like elegance that always made him think of Grace Kelly. But it wasn’t until he discovered that her father picked her up every evening because she didn’t dare walk home alone … it wasn’t until then that he realized the depth of the vulnerability she kept hidden beneath her professional façade. It touched him deeply, and it was for this reason that he began to cautiously suggest that he would be glad to drive her home any day her father found it inconvenient.

Occasionally, he had wondered, of course. A twenty-four-year age difference was quite a gap, objectively speaking, even in those days, but it didn’t feel that way.

“My father is seventeen years older than my mother,” she had said. “And they had me late. I’m used to older people.” There had been no mocking glint in her eye, he recalled. As time went by, he discovered that she meant exactly what she said—she was more comfortable with his generation than with her own. Protest movements, bra burning, and mind-altering substances were absolutely not her thing. Young people scared her.

A man in his forties thinks only fleetingly about what will happen to his life partner when he is no longer around. His foresight then had been sorely lacking. Now he could hardly think of anything else. The savings, the house, her widow’s pension would surely suffice if she refrained from stupid spending, but that was exactly what he could not count on. Costa del Castle-in-Spain. How could she do something like that without even talking to him about it? Over half a million kroner gone just like that. She might as well have flushed it down the toilet.

He stopped and clutched his chest. Yet another runner trotted past him, this time not one of the fit and well-trained casual lot, but a panting middle-aged jogger whose stomach was bouncing out of step with the rest of him in its own syncopated rhythm. The man’s face was lobster red, and in his tortured expression, Skou-Larsen could see the fear of death shining, so he thought, with preternatural brightness.

When I turned fifty, no one expected me to buy a pair of trainers and start pounding around on park paths, Skou-Larsen thought, remembering the Georg Jensen designed cigar cutter his staff had given him to mark the occasion.

He decided his walk had been long enough. It was cold, and he wanted to go home.

He walked down Lundedalsvej instead of the parallel Ellemosevej because he couldn’t help himself. It was unwise, particularly now when he wasn’t feeling well. Also, he would be forced to lie to Helle if she asked, and she would ask, he was convinced of that.

The short access road still hadn’t been paved. They had put down a bit of preliminary gravel, deeply rutted now from the passage of trucks and heavy machinery. The fence around the construction site formed a slipshod zigzag shape, tilting on gray concrete foundation blocks, and a man with a yellow hardhat and neon yellow vest was just closing the gate behind the last truck of the day. Skou-Larsen raised a polite hand in the kind of greeting you give someone when you don’t actually want to shake their hand.

“How are things going?” he asked.

The man was pulling a thick chain through the gate. He half-turned and looked suspiciously over his shoulder, but when he spotted Skou-Larsen, he visibly relaxed. He obviously didn’t consider older gentlemen in windbreakers and tweed caps to be threatening.

“How’s what going?” he asked, not particularly courteously, Skou-Larsen thought.

“The construction. Are you making progress?” I’ve inspected hundreds of building sites in my life, Skou-Larsen thought, taking a steely, authoritative stance.

The man furrowed his brow and may have been having trouble deciding what to make of Skou-Larsen. After all, there was an outside chance that this senior citizen was not just a meddlesome nursing home candidate, but actually had some kind of influence in the chain of command above him.

“Pretty good,” he finally responded. “Of course we’re a little behind. And although we have a guard dog now, we’ve had trouble with vandalism at the site a couple of times. Not everyone likes this.” He pointed his thumb at the big sign bearing a few lines of text in Arabic script and below that in somewhat smaller type, AL-KABIR ISLAMIC CULTURAL CENTER.

“Well, I suppose not,” Skou-Larsen said in a neutral voice. “But do you still think you will be able to finish the building this summer?”

“We don’t exactly have a choice,” the man said with a wry smile. “Some Imam is coming from London to bless the whole thing for its grand opening, and obviously we can’t just rearrange his whole schedule.”

“Ah, yes. Well then, good luck with the project.”

The man nodded and then snapped a heavy padlock into place on the chain.

“Have a good day,” he said and jumped into a red station wagon with yellow plates.

Why doesn’t anyone ever say goodbye anymore? Skou-Larsen thought.

He stood there for a bit peering through the fence. Nominally, it was a remodel, but apart from the foundation, there wasn’t much left of the old factory building. White walls with arched windows had supplanted weathered concrete, and the old corrugated fiber cement roof was being replaced with shiny, glazed green roofing tiles. Farther back, behind the entrance hall, two slender towers rose on either side of a domed roof, still hidden under thick, red tarpaulins. The sign may have said Cultural Center, but the architecture clearly indicated that this was to be a proper mosque.

It was beginning to drizzle. He had to get home before it picked up; a cold could be the death of him at this point. That’s how his old bridge partner Søndergaard had died. A runny nose, a couple of sneezes, and then suddenly it was the flu, pneumonia, a death certificate, and cremation. It hadn’t even been Legionnaire’s disease or anything else exotic, just a completely run-of-the-mill virus. And the man had been three years younger than him.

He gave the pseudo-minarets one last frustrated glance. If it had been twenty-five years earlier, the building permit for the project might have been his to give or withhold. But twenty-five years earlier, nothing like this would ever have been proposed.

If only the minarets were not so damnably tall. They were actually visible from the backyard of his home on Elmehøjvej.

He reached his own front door at quarter past five. Through the open kitchen door, he could hear the sound of sizzling margarine, and there was a pleasant smell of dinner in the making. He hung his windbreaker and cap up on the hook by the door, took off his shoes, and stuck his feet into the sheepskin-lined slippers Helle had given him for Christmas.

“What are we having?” he asked with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel.

“Rissoles.” Helle had a sharp, worried wrinkle on her forehead, like an inverted figure of 1, and he sensed the tension in her. Maybe she was afraid she would be late for choir practice, even small everyday appointments often caused her a considerable amount of anxiety. She stuck the spatula under a rissole and flipped it rapidly. “Did you walk past it?”

“No,” he lied. “Why should I?”

“Remember you promised to get me the slug bait.”

“I’ll do that after we eat. The garden center is open until seven. If it can’t wait until tomorrow, that is.”

“I can’t,” she said, flipping the next rissole. “We need to finish them off before they have a chance to reproduce.”