Fatal Isles Read online

  36

  Twenty minutes later, Karen’s pushed her way through the noisy bar section of Restaurant Kloster and taken a seat at a table for two. After a quick glance at the blackboard, she waves the waiter over and orders cod with melted butter and horseradish.

  ‘And a half bottle of the house red,’ she adds.

  She looks around the room. Over by the bar, above a wall of bodies, arms keep shooting up, trying to catch the bartender’s attention and get in one last order before happy hour ends. The restaurant section, on the other hand, is barely half full; she observes the other patrons under the guise of studying the décor.

  Kloster is only a stone’s throw from the Dunker City Theatre; several of her fellow diners are probably heading over there when they’re done: possibly the middle-aged couple who are just now being served dessert; definitely the four dressed-up women of about sixty-five who are ordering another bottle of white with their bill and laughing uproariously. Maybe the thirty-something couple at the next table as well, though that’s less likely. The woman is talking intently about something while the man chews his entrecote and throws longing glances at the bar. From time to time, he emits preoccupied but practised grunts. Karen is overcome with the same feeling she gets when she sees a bored parent pushing his or her child on the swings in the park on a Sunday morning with an absent-minded smile, looking like they’re thinking: when is the little brat going to get tired of this? Or a dog owner on an evening walk, patiently waiting for his or her dog to finish sniffing around and do its business.

  Is the woman really so oblivious to her companion’s lack of interest, or does she not care? Is she happy being treated like a dog?

  Steam rises from the freshly boiled potato when the waiter puts her plate and a small copper jug full of melted butter down on her table. The cod looks enticing; shiny and just the right level of saltiness, it obediently flakes when Karen touches it with her fork. She can feel the burn of the horseradish behind her eyelids and smiles to herself as she chews. She’s grown comfortable eating out by herself over the years; she ignores both the fascinated and the pitying looks from the increasingly raucous bar. When the woman from the next table shoots her a vague look of condolence, Karen raises her glass in a toast and smiles back so cheerfully the woman immediately lowers her eyes and whispers something to her husband. He quickly turns his head to get the measure of their neighbour, looking Karen up and down before turning back to his food, continuing to chew with a bored look on his face. Here we are, two women, feeling sorry for each other, Karen relects.

  She thinks about Karl. His anger at her failure to be completely up front regarding Jounas’s whereabouts on the night before the murder has abated, but a certain distance has opened up between them. A note of politeness lingered in his voice the rest of the day, like a little punishment. And during their evening meeting, he was ominously quiet.

  Karl Björken is her closest confidant at work. He’s the one she turns to when she needs to talk things over or discuss ideas or wants to go for a pint after hours. Granted, he’s never openly objected to the laddish jargon that has come to characterise the CID in recent years, but he’s also never participated. If I lose his trust, Karen thinks, work is going to become a nightmare.

  *

  Halfway through her cod, Karen freezes. She has glimpsed a familiar profile by the bar; panicking, she turns her face away and casts about for a way out. But it’s already too late; he’s spotted her. Jon Bergman is walking over with determined steps and a big smile. In normal circumstances, she would have been happy to see him; now she has to make him go away.

  ‘Hey, Karen. You alone? May I join you?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she replies with emphasis.

  He’s already put a hand on the chair across from hers to pull it out but freezes mid-movement, his face incredulous. Karen puts her cutlery down on her plate and leans back.

  ‘You know I can’t talk to you while there’s an ongoing investigation.’

  ‘Fair dos,’ he replies. ‘But go on, tell me something, would you? Is Smeed still a suspect?’

  ‘Who told you he was a suspect?’

  ‘Well, when a woman’s murdered, it’s usually the husband or the ex-husband. So long as there’s no other obvious perpetrator, of course. But maybe there is . . .?’

  Karen heaves a deep sigh.

  ‘Please, Jon, there’s absolutely no chance I’m going to let anything slip. Would you please let me finish my dinner in peace?’

  ‘So there’s something that could slip? Is that what I should take from this?’

  ‘What you should take from this is that I want to eat my cod before it gets cold and that I want to do it all by myself.’

  Jon Bergman ignores her gesture toward her plate, takes a sip of his beer and puts his glass down on the table.

  ‘To think you used to be so open and free with your opinions once upon a time.’

  ‘Maybe a bit too open.’

  She wants to take it back the moment she says it, knows Jon Bergman is going to pounce.

  ‘Aha, so you’ve been gagged; you can lead the investigation, but you can’t talk about it. That’s why that sorry sod Haugen did the so-called “press conference”.’

  Jon Bergman puts quotation marks around the words with his fingers, making Karen think how much she hates it when people do that. Then she thinks that the rest of her cod will definitely have gone cold by now. She signals to the waiter that she wants to pay.

  Granted, Jon Bergman is a TV reporter and not a newspaper journalist, so she runs no risk of being misquoted in tomorrow’s paper, but she’s lost her appetite. She knows it’s just a matter of time before he drags up what happened over four years ago. A short but intense summer fling, a couple of weeks when they barely got out of bed and a few more months after that when they still met up sporadically, before it all petered out. A pleasant interlude she rarely thinks about, since she and Jon move in different circles and rarely run into each other these days. Although it was a long time ago, her credibility would be severely damaged if their brief romance were ever to become a topic of conversation around the police station water coolers. There have been too many leaks to the media; the question of who might be letting things slip is the subject of constant speculation.

  Having wine with Jon Bergman during an ongoing investigation is out of the question. Give him an inch and he’ll never let go. She bends down and pulls her wallet out of her handbag.

  ‘Well, if you won’t leave, I will,’ she says. ‘I’m in a hurry anyway,’ she adds to take some of the edge out of her words.

  ‘Bloody hell, relax, will you,’ Jon Bergman says. ‘You could give me something, for old times’ sake . . .’

  Karen hands the waiter her card without responding. He punches some buttons on the card reader, puts it on the table in front of Karen and glances down at her plate.

  ‘I hope there wasn’t a problem with your food?’ he says, studying the leftover cod sitting in its lake of butter.

  ‘Not at all,’ Karen replies, ‘I’m just in a hurry.’

  She stands up and shoots the waiter a quick smile. Jon Bergman has taken a step back and watches while Karen pulls on her coat.

  ‘I didn’t mean to ruin your dinner. Let me at least buy you a drink at the bar? Or maybe somewhere else?’

  ‘I really don’t have time.’

  He’s hard on her heels as she strides toward the exit.

  ‘You have my number,’ he hollers when she pushes the door open. ‘Call me!’

  She stops mid-movement, turns around and smiles.

  ‘All right, Jon, I promise. If I ever lose all judgement again, you’ll be my first call. But it won’t be until after the investigation is done.’

  37

  The lingering heat from the kilns envelops her as soon as she steps through the door. For a moment, she had considered driving back to Langevik after all, since her night out came to such an abrupt end, but then she realised she had in
fact managed to drink most of the red wine. Her guilt at driving home hungover and likely still technically intoxicated last Sunday morning is still hanging over her like a dark cloud. It’s true a lot of islanders routinely drive with considerable quantities of alcohol in them; the laws are toothless, the fines are low so long as there’s no accident and there are few roadside checks anyway. But Karen Eiken Hornby has promised herself: never more than one glass. The keys to Marike’s studio in Dunker’s Old Harbour are part of that promise.

  She dumps her coat and handbag on a bench in the shop part and walks into the rectangular room at the back of the building, where Marike’s precious clay is turned into art. The special blueish-green clay that tempted the sculptor to leave Copenhagen and buy land on Heimö. A swampy inland plot where nothing grows and she can’t build anything. A plot that isn’t even beautiful, but under the surface of which lurks tonnes of what Marike considers the equivalent of gold.

  The plot is how Karen and Marike first got to know each other. The seller of the land was Karen’s cousin Torbjörn; she’d been visiting one Saturday morning almost seven years ago when a tall woman with a very determined look in her eyes had turned up unannounced on Torbjörn’s porch.

  The woman had brought a map of the area on which she’d outlined a plot of land with red felt-tip pen, which – she had announced in virtually incomprehensible Danish – she wanted to buy at any cost. Those had been her words, at any cost, and they had, once he’d managed to decipher them, lit a rapacious spark in Torbjörn’s eyes.

  The negotiation had been a joke. Once his initial surprise at there being interest in the uncultivatable south-west corner of his property had subsided, Torbjörn had seized on the chance to pad his wallet. And it had soon become perfectly clear the Danish woman knew nothing about Doggerian property prices or the conditions required for building the house she was planning. Moreover, the communication difficulties, caused primarily by the incomprehensible Danish way of counting and the Doggerian currency system – both unfathomable to outsiders – had eventually forced them to switch to English, despite their Scandinavian kinship.

  At first, Karen had listened to her cousin’s deft profiteering with amusement, but in the end, she’d been unable to stay quiet. Defying Torbjörn’s furious glances, she’d stressed the negligible value of the plot and pointed out that building anything on it was absolutely out of the question. Then she’d suggested including the adjacent strip of land overlooking the Portland River, which was traditionally counted as belonging to the plot under discussion anyway, in the sale; the Danish woman could build her house there and get a really decent view into the bargain, at least in one direction.

  Her interference had cost her six months of frosty relations with her cousin, but had led to a lasting friendship with Marike Estrup.

  Now she lifts up a corner of the plastic sheet covering one of the big troughs in the studio and pinches off of a piece of clay, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger, testing the plasticity while she studies the finished sculptures lined up along the long window wall. She’s witnessed every step of the laborious process; Marike, dressed in waders, digging up clay in the field behind her house, rinsing it several times, patiently letting it dry and eventually beating it soft with her strong arms before driving it to her Dunker studio. There, the transformation begins. Karen is fascinated by the power and determination of her creative process; shapes seem to appear out of nowhere, colours change in the intense heat. She has experienced the excitement of opening the kiln doors, watched Marike’s anxious eyes as they scrutinise the results of her efforts.

  And yet, it’s still hard for her to wrap her head around the fact that the sculptures exhibited in prestigious galleries all over the world originally sprang from the sticky lump she’s rolling between her fingers.

  Then reality catches up with her and she concludes that the murder of Susanne Smeed is her own sticky lump, which may never take shape. The conversation with Wenche Hellevik has added detail to the image of Susanne Smeed; growing up in Langevik can’t have been easy for a girl from a family who stood out like peacocks among a flock of herring gulls. That probably at least partially explained Susanne’s desperate need to fit in, to belong, to force her way into a family so different from the one she was born into. And then the bitterness when it fell apart. About the divorce and being forced back to the village, only to realise the land she should have inherited had been sold and now belonged to the man she hated the most: Jounas Smeed. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Susanne bashed his head in with a poker. But the other way around? No, she can’t see that Jounas would have had a motive. And yet, the theoretical possibility, the exasperating mathematical possibility that he could have done it. And who else?

  The accounts given by Cornelis Loots and Astrid Nielsen in the late-afternoon meeting had been commendably clear and detailed. They’d spoken to both Susanne’s closest co-workers, the carers and cleaners, and to the manager of Solgården, Gunilla Moen, again. About half of the interviewees had no opinion of Susanne Smeed whatsoever, knew her by name only and had little to no contact with her personally. The other half stated without exception that Susanne – who was in charge of invoicing and processing payroll and leave applications – had been meticulous and well organised as far as her own work was concerned, but had lacked any capacity for flexibility and helpfulness; not even in charitable cases had she been prepared to go so much as an inch beyond her duty to help someone in a difficult situation. An application for leave that ended up on Susanne’s desk after the cut-off date was never granted, even if temps were queuing up to cover the shifts. Salary advances had been categorically refused, without exception. At the same time, she’d had an annoying habit of sticking her nose in, pointing out other people’s shortcomings and questioning information about overtime worked or a need for new work clothes. In brief, Susanne Smeed had been ‘a fucking busybody’, as one of the cleaners put it.

  No one had been able to tell them anything useful about Susanne’s private life. It was unclear why, according to Nielsen and Loots. Ostensibly, either because there was nothing of interest to tell, or because no one at Solgården had been interested in finding out what Susanne did outside of work. Most knew she was divorced and lived in Langevik; her older colleagues also knew who she had been married to and that there was a daughter. A few were aware that Susanne liked to holiday abroad, but that the trips had become less frequent over time; it had been a long while now since she had returned to work with a tan from the Mediterranean or Thailand.

  ‘I think she had trouble making ends meet, which is hardly a shock given the salaries here,’ Gunilla Moen had told them.

  A few more titbits had emerged. Susanne had applied for but not got the job as assistant manager just over a year before, even though she had covered for Gunilla Moen on occasion. The reason was, according to Moen, the inability to cooperate and lack of flexibility several of her co-workers had spoken of. Since then, Susanne Smeed had isolated herself, always had her lunch alone, eschewed any staff gathering that wasn’t mandatory, arrived promptly at eight and left at five on the dot. Not one minute past, not one minute to.

  But last spring, following a management decision to prohibit the private use of work phones, Susanne had come out of her self-imposed isolation and thrown an unexpected fit of rage. Four people had witnessed her screaming at Gunilla Moen that ‘she had a thing or two she could tell people about this place’ and that they should ‘watch their step’. Both Gunilla Moen and everyone else claimed to have no idea what she was referring to. Some guessed Susanne’s outburst had been caused by a drinking problem, others that she was simply a ‘typical menopausal bitch’.

  Susanne had never acted out or mentioned the affair again, but her embarrassing outburst had exacerbated the tension with her colleagues. In the end, someone had reported the whole situation as an HR issue and Susanne had been summoned to a meeting with Eira’s central head of human resources to discuss a possible transfe
r to one of the other eight nursing homes the company ran. Susanne had refused and been allowed to continue at Solgården under caution.

  Over the past few months, Susanne had missed enough work to make Gunilla Moen contact HR again, but no steps had been taken yet. The Monday before she was killed, Susanne had called in sick. This time, she hadn’t even given a reason, just left a message on the answering machine. She hadn’t been back to work since.

  The police’s IT department had concluded its investigation of Susanne’s work computer; their report was thin. Around the same time as Solgården had decided to prohibit the private use of work phones, Susanne’s private use of her work laptop had ceased completely as well. And before then, it had mostly been emails about online ordering of clothes and beauty products, a few verbose complaints addressed to the wind energy company, appeals of a number of late fees for various bills and sporadic, and more often than not unanswered, emails to her daughter.

  There was one exception: one email of a private nature had been received, but never replied to. Someone called Disa Brinckmann had sent an email to Susanne.smeed@solgården.dg at the end of May. It seemed to be written in some kind of mix of Swedish and Danish. Karen had passed the printout around the table.

  Dear Susanne!

  You probably don’t remember me, it’s been many years since we last saw each other, you were very little. But your parents may have mentioned me. For a few years, we lived together in a commune in Langevik. I have some information that may be important to you and would therefore like to get in touch with you as soon as possible.

  Regards,

  Disa Brinckmann

  Phone #: +46 40 682 33 26

  The email had been sent from [email protected], but no reply had been sent, at least not from Susanne’s work email.

  ‘She could have replied from a private account, of course, if she had one,’ Karl had suggested. ‘Or she could have called. Have we checked the number?’

  ‘It’s registered to an address in Malmö,’ Karen had told them. ‘In the south of Sweden,’ she’d then added.