Invisible Murder

EAD?”

The tall, bony man in the yellow hospital gown stared at Søren in disbelief. He was a little disheveled to look at. In Søren’s opinion, his thin, blond hair should have been cut a few weeks ago. It stuck out in flat, greasy tufts, and below that he could just make out the man’s pink scalp, so that he looked vaguely like a newly hatched chick. Peter Erhardsen had already been in a nervous sweat when Søren entered the room, and when he heard the news about the body, he looked as if he had been punched in the face.

“Are you sure?” He shook his head. “I mean … what did he die from?”

“We don’t know yet, but his body was so radioactive the Geiger counters found him.”

Peter Erhardsen made a strange hiccupping sound and stared fixedly down at the palms of his hands, as if he expected to find some sort of explanation there.

“The first time you went out to the repair shop was May eleventh. Is that correct?”

Peter nodded, cleared his throat, and rested his apparently unhelpful hand on the table between them. He had positioned himself in the seating area by the window instead of in the hospital bed and had tried to make the situation seem normal by offering coffee that he was then unable to produce when Søren accepted it. The man had nearly recovered and was mostly in the hospital for follow-up treatment, but he wasn’t allowed to leave his room. At the moment it looked like he desperately wished he had a coffee cup to fiddle with.

“I got a call from one of my acquaintances who’d met some Roma on Strøget,” he explained. “My friend is one of those … well, he really wanted to help them. Asked them if they needed clothes or medicine or that kind of thing. Everyone knows they have a hard time in Denmark. I mean, that’s why they’re always out begging.”

Peter looked over at Søren as if he expected some form of protest. Peter’s eyes were very light blue, and Søren thought he detected an almost aggressive obstinacy beneath the disheveled exterior. He was also guessing that Peter was unlikely to be an entertaining companion at a dinner party.

“But these Roma.… At first they didn’t want anything to do with him. They almost got angry even though my friend was just trying to help. Then suddenly, just a few days later, they called him in complete panic. Something about a young man who’d gotten sick, and they wanted someone to take a look at him. That’s why I went out there, and then I also called a nurse I know from.…”

Peter stopped and got that vacant look in his eyes again.

“The young man, was this him?”

Søren pulled out an enlarged copy of the passport photo from the dead man’s shoe and passed it to Peter. He shook his head doubtfully as he looked at the picture with his brow furrowed.

“I don’t know. I was never allowed into the room where he was. My friend called me in the morning when I was at work, and I didn’t have a chance to go out there until the afternoon, and by then they’d already had second thoughts. Or at least they wouldn’t let me see him properly. He was lying in a sort of back office. I was allowed to look in there from the doorway, that was all, but it was totally dark, and it stank to high heaven. Vomit and shit, to put it bluntly. So I called Nina. She’s the nurse I mentioned.”

“So you didn’t get a good look at him?”

“Well, I could see that there was someone lying on a mattress in there. Like I said, it was really dark because the windows were boarded up, but I could see a figure in a fetal position, I could hear him, too, of course. He was moaning, and every once in a while he would start to call out, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying. They said he was just sick to his stomach, and I didn’t think it was that serious, and Nina, well, she also said.…” Peter suddenly looked distraught. “Maybe he was already dying when I looked in at him.”

He hid his face behind his hands and sat in silence for a moment. Then he straightened himself up and looked at Søren again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just been a hard week.”

Søren nodded but didn’t offer any words of comfort. He had no interest in soothing the man’s guilty conscience.

“So you couldn’t say if it was the man in this picture?”

“No.” Peter raised a hand in a tired, apologetic motion, pushed his chair back, and got up on unsteady legs. “I have a meeting with the engineering department at eleven this morning,” he said, pointing to his watch with his long, bony index finger. “If we’re done here, couldn’t you just give me the okay.…”

He stood there with a slightly nervous, beseeching smile. Ran his hand through his thin, tousled hair. He must be almost six foot seven inches, Søren thought. Tall and gangly like a pubescent boy and apparently with the social graces to match. This man had been at the garage while the source was presumably still in the inspection pit. He had seen the people who were there at the time. And now he wanted to run off to a meeting.

“Sit down,” Søren said, knowing he was failing to hide his irritation. “We need to know who your friend is.”

Peter’s nervously optimistic smile visibly faded as he slid back down into the chair again.

“I’d rather not.…”

“Your friend, the people you talked to out there, the phone numbers you were given … everything. And we would also like access to your house.”

Now there was something akin to panic in Peter Erhardsen’s eyes.

“This is serious. For you, too,” Søren said. “We suspect potential terrorist activity on Danish soil, so if I were you, I would be bending over backward to explain exactly how you got it into your head that you and Nina Borg were going to help a bunch of Roma in Valby.”

THE WARD NURSE had lent Søren an office and a coffee mug, the side of which was adorned with an amateurish photo of an irritable looking gray Persian cat. Søren gratefully downed the coffee, stale from sitting in the thermos too long, without a thought to its quality—it was the caffeine he was after—and flipped through the notes he had made and the inept descriptions he had managed to coax out of Peter Erhardsen. Maybe the man had done his best, but it was still a pretty poor performance: Roma male, about fifty years old, possibly missing one of his upper teeth, dirty wine-colored shirt. Speaks a little English. Roma female, twenty to thirty years old, has one or more children, average height, very thin.…

There were eight people and two phone numbers, which he had Mikael Nielsen check right away. One turned out to be a pay-as-you-go phone that was turned off. The other had apparently been canceled a week ago. Neither was going to get them any further right now, and the descriptions couldn’t be used for more than a preliminary sorting of the seventy Roma who had been rounded up and were now being held downtown. The border police had also picked up a few on the Øresund Bridge heading for Sweden, so there were plenty to choose from. In the best-case scenario, it would take a few hours, but more likely days, to establish who had been at the garage. And even if the police managed to bring in most of them, it was far from certain that that would get them any closer to the source.

The initial report from Gitte was also very discouraging. The Roma they had picked up at the repair shop all denied seeing anything, no matter which language they were asked in. The police had been forced to use physical force in order to send the children to Bispebjerg Hospital to be examined, and according to Gitte, the adults who had accompanied them had been panicky and terrified to let the children out of their sight.

“They clammed up as if their lives depended on it,” as Gitte put it. Søren sank a little farther back in the desk chair, wondering whether the Roma were afraid because they had something to do with the source of the radioactivity or if they were just scared to death whenever they had any kind of official interaction. The latter was at least as likely as the former. There were places in Eastern Europe where Roma women who gave birth in the hospital risked leaving with their fallopian tubes tied. And wasn’t there something about Sweden forcibly taking Roma children into care well into the 1970s as standard practice? He had read something about that a few years earlier when the police were trying to get a handle on the integration problems in Elsinore. And then there was Peter himself, who had flatly refused to give them the name of this friend of his who had put him in touch with the Roma in Valby. Søren was increasingly convinced that the “friend” was Peter himself. He only had a vague idea why Peter would make such a bumbling attempt to distance himself from the first contact with the garage in Valby, but it would certainly have to be looked into more closely, and Søren had arranged a search warrant for the man’s home address.

He didn’t look like your classic terrorist, but then again you never could tell. Looking up Peter Erhardsen in the POLSAG register revealed that he had been arrested a couple years earlier at a demonstration at the Sandholm refugee camp, where the fence had been cut and several hundred activists had stormed in. Probably to improve conditions for the asylum seekers, which did not necessarily mean that Peter Erhardsen was anything more dire than a soft-hearted humanist. He was, however, definitely an activist, and Søren hadn’t felt entirely comfortable with the near-religious zeal he thought he glimpsed beneath Peter’s pale-faced nervousness.

The timer on his phone beeped. A quick shave with borrowed amenities and fifteen minutes for coffee and contemplation was what he had allotted himself. Now it was over. It was time to meet Peter’s partner-in-activism, the nurse, Nina Borg.