Invisible Murder

ØREN RINSED THE coffee cup in the sink in the men’s restroom, filled it with cold water, and drank. Tomorrow, or next week, or whenever this goddamn case was over and he had time to catch his breath again, he would take the time to find that article he vaguely remembered about bacteria in water coolers and send it out over the intranet. He knew his little act of protest against the tyranny of water coolers was a waste of energy, but surely a man his age was allowed to mount his moth-eaten warhorse and attack a windmill now and then.

He was holding the cup under the tap one more time when it slipped through his fingers. He grabbed for it with both hands and managed to stop it from crashing to the terrazzo floor, but water splashed onto his shirt and trousers, leaving a trail of drip marks near his fly that was not very flattering.

Oh, crap. It wasn’t so much the accident—the water would dry quickly—it was what it told him. That he was tired. That he ought to go home, or at least down to the basement to crash in one of the bunks for a few hours. He had only slept three hours the night before and had been working for more than eleven hours since then. And, well, he wasn’t eighteen anymore. But his young Hungarian colleague would be landing at Copenhagen Airport in an hour, the results from the Opel registration list would be back soon, and he really wanted to talk to Malee himself and see if he could get anything out of her that Birgitte and her colleagues in the NEC hadn’t been able to. A video wasn’t enough.

A shower. A clean shirt. And yes, an hour’s downtime. But not home in Hvidovre, that would take too long. And not in the basement either. He’d always hated those small, cell-like rooms.

He poked his head into Torben’s office. Torben was staring intently at his computer screen as he scrolled his way through some document long enough to induce cramps in anybody’s index finger.

“I’m going over to Susse’s if that’s okay,” Søren said. “Just for an hour.”

Torben nodded without looking up from his screen.

“Good idea,” Torben said. “See you later.”

Why did he suddenly feel like a loser who couldn’t go the distance? Torben hadn’t been up since a little past 3 A.M. And this wasn’t a competition to see who could stay awake the longest.

“Call if there’s anything,” he said.

Torben waved his left hand in a get-out-of-here fashion, and Søren ducked back into the hallway.

SUSSE LIVED SO enticingly close by, less than a kilometer away, in an old bungalow right next to the railway. There was a solid, white-painted wood fence around the yard to keep children and dogs in, and the garden was disheveled in that pleasant way, with narcissi in the overgrown lawn and lanky roses in need of a good pruning. The two pear trees he had planted too many years ago were still there, currently sporting delicate pink blossoms.

The children had mostly left home, one of them for boarding school, the other more permanently, but the dogs were still there. Two of them, a couple of black-and-white cocker spaniels, who barked enthusiastically and stuck their wet noses and long-haired paws up against the pane of the glass door when he rang the bell.

Susse opened the door with her phone to her ear and mimed “Come in,” continuing her conversation. “Yes, I understand that, but I still think it’s stressing Linus out that Karl is so rowdy in the classroom. I think we ought to separate them, at least for a few weeks, and see how it goes. Yes. Yeah, okay. I’ll see you.”

She lowered the phone and smiled at him.

“Do you want a cup of coffee or are you just here to lie down? You look tired.”

“No more coffee.” He made a face at the mere thought. “But do you think it would be okay if I took a shower first?”

“Of course. You just do what you need to do. I’ll be in the sunroom grading papers if you need anything.”

They exchanged a civilized peck on the cheek. She looked good, he thought. Or more to the point, she looked like a woman who was feeling good. She wore her copper-red hair in a shoulder-length pageboy, which was probably not the height of fashion. But she’d been wearing it that way for a really long time, and it suited her heart-shaped face perfectly. She was round and comfortably plump all over, and her eyes were calm, clear, and warm. He had known her for more than thirty years. They had been high school sweethearts. They got married. They bought a house together—this house, where she still lived. But the children she had had weren’t his, and the man she was co-habiting with in lifelong devotion wasn’t him either. And even though she opened the door to him time and time again with the generosity that was one of her most pronounced character traits, there wasn’t the slightest risk she would be unfaithful to Ben.

Nor did he want her to be. That wasn’t why he came. It was more just for the … peace. A little dose of calm and normality before he returned to a world where people buried young men like Snow White in underground gasoline storage tanks and went around planning how to deploy a package of explosives contaminated with radioactive material so it caused the greatest possible number of fatalities.

He took a long shower in the bathroom in the basement. Then he lay down on the bed in the guest room that was actually Ben’s practice room—rows of vinyl records, amps everywhere, three different guitars, two keyboards, and a double bass in one corner—and fell asleep as if someone had just turned off a light.

SUSSE WOKE HIM up.

“Your phone is ringing,” she said.

And it was. Again and again, louder and louder. But he hadn’t heard it.

Not until she shook his shoulder.

He grabbed the phone.

“Yeaaaaah,” he said, his throat feeling as if someone had tried to scrub it with a toilet brush.

“It’s Gitte.”

“Yes.”

“Jesper Due called from Rigshospitalet. The nurse is gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“We’re checking the video from the hospital security system. But it sounds like she left the hospital with a youngish man without saying anything to anyone. A nurse saw them together.”

He swore.

“And it wasn’t her husband? Or ex-husband, or whatever he is?”

“No. We called him.”

“And we don’t have anyone watching her?”

“No. By the time Jesper got up there, she had already walked out.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“And the flight from Budapest is late so the NBH guy isn’t here yet.”

Well, that’s something, he thought, though he would still have to find time for him eventually. International cooperation was important and good and necessary and all that, but it also required a certain amount of diplomacy, and at the moment they just didn’t have the resources to be polite on top of everything else.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said.

THE VIDEOS FROM the hospital were a grainy mess. But there was a sequence, from the front entrance, where you could clearly identify Nina Borg. She was wearing a dark tracksuit, and yes, she was with a “youngish man.” They were walking side by side, with slightly more than a meter between them. The only thing he could see for sure was that it wasn’t Sándor Horváth.

“Is she leaving of her own free will?” Gitte asked. “What do you think?”

He shook his head faintly.

“If she is under duress, he’s too far away,” Mikael said. “That’s a public area, lots of people around. If he wanted to control her, he should be closer. And there aren’t any obvious signs that he has a weapon.”

“Well, a weapon could be any number of things, of course,” Søren said. “Get as good a still of him as you can, and send it around to all divisions. The NEC, too, you never know. Maybe somebody out there knows him. Did you get hold of the daughter? And her boyfriend, who was attacked?”

“She wasn’t at school,” Mikael said. “She had been, despite the attack. But of course they understood her wanting to go home again. I’ll head over to that address in Greve and talk to her.”

“Also the boyfriend, Ulf. Bring them in here. I want to talk to both of them. And Gitte, could you make sure someone from Transportation heads over to the airport to pick up our colleague from the NBH?”

“Transportation?” she said. “They’re at a training exercise. It’s going to have to be the cafeteria lady or me. Couldn’t he take a cab?”