Invisible Murder

KOU-LARSEN’S HANDS WERE shaking. There was a stabbing sensation in his chest, and he decided that he probably ought to take one of his nitroglycerin pills. The sooner, the better, the doctor had said. It was better to ward off an attack than to try to treat one.

He still didn’t understand. Didn’t understand why a friendly, young police lady and a not-quite-as-friendly young policeman had spent more than an hour questioning him and checking out the car and the house with a Geiger counter. Or a Geiger-Müller counter, as they were now apparently called.

And it wasn’t because he hadn’t been paying attention. He’d been watching the experts on TV talking about the Summit and those dirty bombs—they always used the English words for “Summit” and “dirty bomb” even though Danish had perfectly adequate terms. He didn’t understand why everything had to be English these days. He had listened to investigative radio reports about the problem of radioactive materials from Eastern Europe. He had plodded his way through that long article in Berlingske Tidende on “Why Denmark is a Target.” He had also seen that documentary everyone was talking about—“The Making of a Terrorist” or something like that—about madrassas and training camps for suicide bombers. That video clip still stuck in his mind, the one of a young Muslim girl, no more than fourteen, talking about the greatness of Allah with a mixture of fear and pride in the dark gleam of her eyes a day before she blew herself and fourteen other people to smithereens on a street in eastern Bagdad.

He thought about the minarets in his backyard and of the dapper Mr. Hosseini and his mosque. It was hard to imagine Mr. Hosseini with an explosive belt full of TNT, but what did a terrorist actually look like?

They had asked about whether the Opel had been stolen, and he had said no. But now it suddenly occurred to him that there had been that day a few weeks ago when he’d had to adjust the seat. It was much farther forward than he cared for, which had puzzled him. Should he call the police lady and tell her that? What if someone had taken the car and put it back again without his having noticed?

Yet another stab in his chest. The pills. First he had to take one of those pills.

He trundled into the bathroom, careful not to hurry even though he was increasingly afraid that this was a heart attack coming on. Helle had put all his medications into a lunch-box-sized, white plastic crate in the cabinet over the sink. Centyl, aspirin, Fortzaar, Gaviscon, Nitromex. He shook a blister pack from the box, pressed the little tablet out of the foil, and put it under his tongue. There. Now it was just a matter of waiting. Breathing nice and easy, nice and easy. He sat down on the lid of the toilet and closed his eyes.

Then he opened them again. Because there was something was missing, wasn’t there?

Centyl, aspirin, Fortzaar, Gaviscon, Nitromex … but no box of Imovane. His sleeping pills were missing from the white crate.

He got up to see if they were elsewhere in the cabinet and was overcome by a sudden wave of dizziness. He made a grab for the sink. The medicine crate flew off to one side and the Centyl bottle hit the toilet tank with a crack and shattered, scattering shards of glass and pale-green pills all over the floor tiles.

Skou-Larsen clung to the sink for a few minutes until his dizziness subsided. Pathetic old wreck, he snarled at himself. Hopeless, helpless, useless old man. What was that crude phrase of Claus’s? Couldn’t take a crap without busting the crapper.

Saying the word crap helped a little, even though it had just been quietly to himself. He tried again.

“Crap,” he whispered to himself. “Everything is crap.”

His respectable upbringing stirred uncomfortably in him. But where had it actually gotten him, being so impeccably decent his whole life? It hadn’t protected him from having the police invade his home. And it certainly hadn’t kept his marriage alive. His sense of propriety had settled like a membrane between him and Helle so they walked around playing their carefully rehearsed roles without ever talking about anything that really mattered.

Enough of that, he decided. When she comes home, I’m going to talk to her. Really talk to her.

He decided he had better clean up the broken glass first. And gather up the pills. There was no reason to let her see how close he had come to fainting. His physical frailty was only all too noticeable as it was.

It had been years since he had touched the vacuum cleaner, but he did know where it was—in the closet under the stairs. An older model Nilfisk, good Danish quality and very durable.

There was a padded envelope in the vacuum closet, on the shelf next to the vacuum bags and the neatly folded stack of dust cloths. A grayish-white envelope without an address.

What’s that doing there? he thought. What a strange place to put it.

He opened it and peered into it.

It was full of five hundred kroner bills, and it didn’t take him long to guess how much was in there.

About six hundred thousand kroner.