Marcus Jacobsen breathed heavily while reading. The time before everything terrible in his life had happened suddenly felt very present. Inadvertently, impulses shot through his brain synapses, which hadn’t been in use for years. Repressed abstractions were woven together, creating new possibilities and images over which he had no control.
All the thoughts rushing through his head gave Marcus a headache, and what good were they anyway? There had been a time, before he retired, when he had had the power to follow his whims, but now he didn’t even know if anyone would listen to him. But somewhere in his idle existence, there was still part of him that thought and worked as a crime investigator. He had had many successes in his decades on the force. And as head of homicide in the now defunct Department A, he had had a success rate that none of his predecessors had ever been able to match, so he had good reason to look back on his career with pride. But as anyone who has worked in homicide knows, it isn’t the cases that were solved one thinks about in the quiet, dark hours, but those that weren’t solved. These were the cases that constantly kept him awake at night, the ones that made him see the perpetrator around every corner. And dark thoughts about how the perpetrators of these murders of innocent victims still walked the streets among normal law-abiding citizens gave Marcus goose bumps. Sympathy for those left behind who were unable to find closure gave rise to an irrational sense of shame for having let them down, something that pained him in particular. The torment of all the circumstantial evidence that couldn’t be proved, and the leads that hadn’t been spotted. But what good did this do him?
And then he quite literally fell over this front-page story in the pile of unread newspapers cluttering the floor in the corridor, reminding him that there would be no rest so long as people and their capacity for evil were given free rein.
He skimmed the report one more time. He had been wondering what to do about it for ten days now, but something had to happen. Of course, he knew that Lars Bj?rn and his team at police HQ must have tried to link this murder to similar unsolved cases, but were they on the same track as him? The coincidences that gnawed away at him between this new case and the old case were simply too obvious to be mere coincidences.
He read the article again, summarizing the facts.
The murder victim had been identified as the sixty-seven-year-old Rigmor Zimmermann. She had been found in the King’s Garden in Copenhagen, behind a fashionable restaurant, and that it was murder was irrefutable. No one could hit the back of their own head with such force.
The postmortem revealed that the victim had suffered a single but deadly blow with a reasonably broad and rounded object. The newspaper characterized the victim as a perfectly average retired woman with a quiet and normal life. Ten thousand kroner had disappeared from her handbag, which her daughter could say with certainty had been in the bag when her mother left her apartment on Borgergade, shortly before she was attacked. As a result, the motive was seen as financial, with subsequent attack and murder, often referred to as a robbery murder. It was still unclear what the murder weapon had been, and probably as a result of the downpour and cold April weather, no one had witnessed the crime, which a waiter at Restaurant Orangeriet thought must have happened between quarter past eight—when he had popped out for a cigarette—and half an hour later, when he went out for another nicotine fix and found the body.
There were no other real facts reported, but Marcus could picture both the body and the crime scene. The victim’s face was pressed down in the damp earth due to the force of the fall, and her body had also left an imprint on the ground. It had been a surprise attack from behind; the deceased hadn’t stood a chance. Exactly the same circumstances he had been mulling over years ago. Back then the victim had been a temporary teacher at Bolman’s Independent School, one Stephanie Gundersen; she was quite a bit younger than this latest victim, but otherwise the most obvious difference was that the first body hadn’t been urinated on.
Marcus sat for a moment, recalling the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the first victim. He thought about it a lot. And he was no stranger to convincing himself that thinking about it was pointless.
In his opinion, the murderer had struck again. The same area in the city, with only six to seven hundred meters between the two crime scenes.
He shook his head in frustration and regret. Why hadn’t they called him so that he could have seen the crime scene while it was still fresh?
For some time he stared passively at his phone, which seemed to scream at him from where it lay on the edge of the kitchen table.
Pick me up and do something about it, it seemed to say.
Marcus looked away. The case was now seventeen days old, so it could wait a while more.
He nodded to himself, reaching out for the pack of cigarettes. He needed a couple more before he could know what the heck he was going to do.
9
Thursday, May 12th, 2016
“Wow, this place is super-nice,” said Michelle, settling herself on a corner sofa and pulling her bag over.
Denise yawned, feeling the effects of last night, and looked around. She tried to see the place with Michelle’s eyes. The café was only half full, and the clientele, a small but mixed group of the unemployed, students, and two women on maternity leave, were about as lively as a funeral cortege in the rain. Denise could think of cozier places than this run-down café, but this time it was Jazmine who had chosen the place.
“I really needed to get out of the house,” continued Michelle. “Patrick’s gone crazy at the moment; I almost don’t dare speak to him. We were supposed to go on vacation together, too, but that isn’t going to happen now.”
“Why don’t you just throw him out?” asked Denise.
“I can’t; it’s his apartment. Yeah, everything is his actually.” Michelle sighed, nodding to herself. She obviously knew that she was in deep water. “I almost didn’t come to meet you because I’ve got zero money and Patrick doesn’t give me any.”
Denise bent down toward the floor, pushing the bottle of wine in the bag a little to one side so she could get to her purse.
“He’s an asshole, that Patrick. Forget him, Michelle. I can give you money,” she said, pulling out her purse and noticing the expression on their faces when she opened it.
“Here, take it,” she said, putting a note in front of Michelle from a bundle of one-thousand-kroner notes. “Now Patrick can just kiss your ass for the next week.”
“Er, thanks. That’s . . .” Michelle caressed the note with her fingers. “I don’t know . . . I mean, I probably can’t pay you back.”
Denise waved her hand dismissively in the air.
“And if Patrick finds out . . . I don’t know . . .”
“There was a lot of money in that purse,” Jazmine said dryly. They clearly wanted to ask how she had come by so much money when she was on the dole just like them.
Denise scrutinized Jazmine’s facial expression. Up until now, they had met each other only three times, and although she liked the others, the question was how much they liked her.