Next of Kin (2 page)

‘They said it might have been a bomb.'

Nervousness and a desire for sensation fought for supremacy in Katrine's eyes as she noisily sucked Southern Comfort and Coke through a straw.

‘It wasn't,' Rose informed her. ‘My mum covered the story for her paper. It was an empty suitcase.'

‘But even so,' Katrine said in a scared voice. ‘Just imagine that it could have been a possibility. Imagine we might have to walk in fear, in the town where we live.'

Rose looked around the packed café by the river. Snippets of conversations drifted through the air and reached her ears. There was talk of bombs and fundamentalists and how suddenly everything had moved much closer to home since London. People kept a closer eye on each other now, she sensed. In particular they looked out for abandoned bags and suitcases in crowded places. But what could you actually do if someone was determined to leave a bomb in a public place, or perhaps strap explosives to their bodies? How could you guard against that?

She sipped her cappuccino and tried to brush aside her worries. You couldn't go around suspecting everyone. That was the road to madness.

‘We're not going to be intimidated,' Rose said. ‘Because that's exactly what they want.'

Katrine put her glass down on the bar. ‘That's easy for you to say. It's not something you can decide just like that.'

Rose looked at her and wondered, not for the first time, how they were going to get on living together. They had been to the same school. Katrine's parents had bought her a flat in Christian Wærumsgade and Rose was renting the second bedroom to get away from home for a while.

She turned her gaze to somewhere beyond the bar mirrors, which turned the café customers into all sorts of shapes, like the distortions in the hall of mirrors at Tivoli Friheden, the local funhouse. Outside, people sat by the river, draught lager in hand, and a band was just starting to play on the steps leading down to the water. Thursday evening was known here as ‘little Friday'. She had quickly learned that students started their weekends early. In this respect it was actually easier studying law at university than going to school, even though it was taking her some time to adapt to the difference between lectures and secondary-school classes. She was having to get used to a completely new lifestyle.

‘I think you have to,' she said. ‘Decide, I mean. You have to ignore it. Think of something else.'

She managed to say it with more conviction than she actually felt. It wasn't just the bombs, she thought. It was all the other mental baggage she carried around. There was the recent year-long battle to rid herself of a fear whose origins Katrine understood to only a very small degree. There was Aziz, and how much she missed him. Then there was the relationship between her mother and Bo, which was like a rollercoaster ride in one of Denmark's holiday centres, and her mother's concerns about whether Rose was ready to be an adult and leave home.

Again Rose looked in the mirror and quickly scanned the faces around the crowded bar and the groups of people beyond. Checking her surroundings had become a habit. She didn't need any bomb threats to do that. Her heart skipped a beat when she thought she saw him standing in a corner, holding a glass. Just for a second, then he disappeared, her view blocked by a man with broad shoulders. Her heart returned to its normal rhythm. She was probably starting to see things again.

‘On the other hand, I suppose you're not a bad person to be with should the worst happen,' Katrine said. ‘If we see someone acting suspiciously you can just deliver a chop to the head. That goes for him, too, your ex. Bring it on.'

Katrine babbled away. Rose tried to smile. Katrine had got the wrong end of the stick, but it didn't matter. She knew about Rose's self-defence course and she also knew that Rose kept an illegal canister of tear gas in her bag. But she didn't know the real reason behind them and she wasn't going to, either.

‘That might not be quite the right approach,' Rose replied, her mind wandering.

Katrine was convinced that she, Rose, needed a boyfriend and regularly did her best to track down pastures new. After all, she couldn't know that even the thought of a new man caused Rose's stomach to churn in rebellion.

It had been almost a year since she last spoke to him. Every now and again she would see him in town—they still frequented the same places. On one occasion Rose had met his eyes and convinced herself that she could see the embers of what they'd once had. But he had looked away first. He avoided her and even though, somehow, it had been her fault, she still felt the rejection, as though he had abandoned her right in the middle of the dance floor.

‘May I offer you something stronger?'

A voice penetrated the noise, borne on the smell of beer and cigarettes. The broad-shouldered guy from before had taken a seat on the bar stool next to hers. He looked at her in the mirror and pointed to her cappuccino.

‘Thanks, but no. I don't drink alcohol,' Rose lied. She registered his look of surprise, but didn't want to look directly at him.

‘How about some mineral water, then? And a toothpick,' he added, grinning. ‘Let's really splash out.'

She tried to move away from him, but was wedged in on all sides. Katrine elbowed her in the ribs.

‘Go for it, for God's sake. He looks a bit like Russell Crowe,' she whispered loudly.

Rose felt outmanoeuvred. Besides, she had finished her coffee and nervousness was making her thirsty. ‘Thank you. No lemon, please,' she said to him, ignoring the crack about the toothpick.

The guy ordered her mineral water and Rose instantly regretted it. He looked more like a bum than a Hollywood star, but of course Katrine had had three drinks and her vision might have been somewhat impaired.

‘So, erm, do you come here often?'

This banality drifted over on yet another beery wave. She noticed that he had tattoos on his muscular forearms and her prejudices shamed her. He was probably quite nice, a skilled craftsman with his mum's name tattooed on his arm, but rueing it bitterly now. Rose decided just to be polite and then escape to the toilet as quickly as possible.

‘Now and then.'

‘What do you do?' he continued. ‘When you're not out on the town drinking mineral water?'

‘I'm a student.'

Layers of contempt piled up between them even before his next line.

‘You're all so bloody clever in this town. University,' he snorted into his beer. ‘Too many books and not enough sex.'

Meeting his eyes had been a mistake. She remembered something her instructor had taught her at the self-defence course. Never look them in the eyes; it could be interpreted as a come-on. Not that she thought he was a rapist.

Just as she was thinking that she felt his hand on her thigh.

‘What you need is a good seeing-to.'

He said this very close to her ear. She could feel his lips through her hair. She wanted to get up and leave, but the bar was crowded and someone jostled her towards him.

‘That's enough,' she heard herself say. ‘Don't touch me.'

He laughed. His hand moved and his arm advanced around her shoulder, pulling her closer.

‘Loosen up, for Christ's sake. You're a real looker.'

The din enveloped her and his beery breath made her feel nauseated. She wanted to push him away. She wanted to hit him and spit at him, yet she sat quite still, as though he would disappear if only she ignored him. His arm held her tight, while his other hand wandered up her thigh. She couldn't get a word out. Tears welled in her eyes.

Then, in a split second, the world changed. She saw the whole thing like a film sequence flashing past in the mirror: the grimace of pain on his face; the arm that was suddenly jerked away and the hand that let go of her thigh. The shape that moved between them with feline speed. People shrank back and a cushion of air was created around them.

‘Leave her alone,' Aziz said, forcing the man's arm further up his back. She wondered whether he had learned the move at the Police Academy.

The man half fell off the bar stool. ‘What the hell?'

He tried to turn and spit at his opponent, but Aziz pushed his arm up a notch and the man winced in pain. He sent Rose a look of hatred.

‘Paki lover. You make me sick.'

‘Apologise,' Aziz demanded.

‘Will I, fuck. You crazy or something?'

The arm went up another notch. The man screamed out loud. People stood silent while the music throbbed in time with Rose's pulse. She wanted to get away from this brawl, Kylie Minogue's voice and people staring, but she just sat rigid.

‘Apologise.'

‘Fuck off, Paki.'

Another twist. The man yelled something incoherent.

‘Not to me. To her.'

‘Sorry,' roared Russell Crowe.

‘Look at her,' Aziz commanded.

The man's eyes met hers. She could see the fear in them.

‘Sorry.'

‘Louder,' said Aziz.

‘SORRY!'

Sweat and saliva flew off his face, in her direction. She stared into his eyes. Suddenly he seemed very small and harmless.

‘Let him go,' she managed to say.

Aziz's eyes flashed with a fury she had never seen before, but it occurred to her that he must have looked the same when he pulled the knife on that day almost a year ago. A finely-strung mechanism. He was different now, though. The dreadlocks had been replaced by cropped hair. His boyish body had become a man's, thanks perhaps to a gym regime and a couple of dumbbells.

The fury abated and was replaced by something she recognised in his eyes. She wanted to protect herself, strengthen her defences, but they gave way, collapsing like a building struck by a missile. Aziz fixed his eyes on hers for a brief moment. Not even a smile. At most, a tiny movement at the corner of his mouth. Then he yanked the man off the bar stool and made his way through the crowd and out onto the busy pavement.

Rose sat for a while, the after-shock of the incident reverberating through every cell in her body. Katrine started talking in a shrill voice. Someone turned up the music and the café returned to a kind of normality.

She waited. But Aziz didn't come back.

‘It won't go anywhere else,' Dicte said to Kaiser, who was in the Copenhagen press office and about to put the newspaper to bed.

As soon as she had said it she knew what his response would be. And true to form he roared down the telephone and she had to hold it at arm's length. Bo gave her a look of support, which was easy for him to do: he wasn't the one being screamed at for refusing to follow orders.

‘How the hell do you know? How do you know they haven't sent copies of that execution to every single newspaper on the planet?'

She stared at the blue screen and wished she could take some time out to escape everything she had to confront now: the ethical considerations, the moral dilemma, the never-ending balancing act between circulation figures, informing readers and satisfying the public's endless craving for news of axe killers, rapists, incest and severed body parts. Not to mention her eternal rows with Kaiser.

‘Because it would have been on the TV or the radio news. That envelope must have been waiting here for me since this morning. I only opened my mail half an hour ago.'

‘What about the other newspapers? Have you forgotten about them?'

She had forgotten nothing. But why would anyone send the CD to a newspaper rather than a TV station? And even weirder: out of all the journalists in the country, why send it to her?

‘They wouldn't run this story without checking the facts first.'

‘What's there to check? You tell me.'

‘Precisely. We don't have anything. Anyone could have sent us that film. It could be someone who wants to make it look like terrorism. Right-wing extremists, for starters.'

She must have hit a nerve because he didn't reply. Her shoulders were so tense they were around her ears and she was gripping the phone as if it were a safety strap on a runaway bus.

‘We just can't use the story in its current state,' she went on. ‘It doesn't add up. There are no demands. None of it makes any sense. We can't even be sure that the film isn't a computer-generated hoax.'

As she spoke she played the film once again in her mind. There was nothing computer-generated about it; she was sure of that and so was Bo. But Kaiser hadn't seen it yet because the Copenhagen office hadn't been sent a copy. Only her. Shit. As if her life wasn't frenetic enough, what with bomb threats and Marie the robot shooting at suitcases, which was enough to send her blood pressure rocketing.

‘I want a cracking article,' Kaiser ordered, but she detected the hesitation in his voice. She had successfully planted a seed of doubt in his mind. ‘We'll clear the front page.'

‘Give me until tomorrow. Please. The story won't go anywhere.' Dicte realised she was repeating herself, knew she was going in circles. ‘You'll have it by tomorrow, I promise, and by then we might have some sort of explanation, no matter how far-fetched.'

She could almost hear the cogs turning inside Kaiser's head, and she pictured him sitting with his feet on his desk and a secret stash of cake in his drawer, from which he would break bits off whenever his wife, who was the arts editor, wasn't looking. That was how it had been during her time in Copenhagen under The Kaiser. She knew how his moustache would twitch when he chewed and how he would slide further and further down his chair until he was practically horizontal.

‘If I see that story anywhere else tomorrow, it'll be on your head,' he said at length.

Dicte's wisest course of action was to change the subject and pretend that he hadn't just made a huge concession. ‘What about Aarhus and Marie?'

‘What about them?'

‘Where are they going?'

‘Page seven.'

‘No front page reference?'

‘Nothing happened.'

Dicte leaned forward and sighed, steaming up her monitor. When would she ever learn? Near-disasters did not sell newspapers. She thought about the film and was tempted. At least this story, with her by-line, would smash the sound barrier. It had been a long time coming. A familiar—but unwelcome—tingle of excitement spread through her solar plexus.

‘Talk to you tomorrow,' she said, and hung up.

‘Tricky?' Bo said.

He massaged the back of her neck. She tilted her head backwards and his heat spread to her.

‘Piece of cake. Now let's go home.'

As they stepped through the door to their house in Kasted they saw that Svendsen, Dicte's dog, was on heat. The pale grey floor tiles in the hall were decorated with red stains and she was lying in her basket looking mortified. Cups and plates from that morning's breakfast were still on the kitchen table next to a vase of half-dead roses. Someone had forgotten to top up the water. When Dicte opened the wardrobe in the bedroom, her neighbour's big black kitten jumped right out at her.

She glared at Bo as though it were all his fault. ‘Who forgot to let him out?'

‘Who let him in?' he parried.

‘The dog,' she sidetracked. ‘Every time she's let in from the garden, she lets the kitten go first. He thinks Svendsen is his mum.'

Bo shrugged, sat down on the bed, then lay back on the pillows.

‘Why not? They're the same colour.'

Dicte watched the black and white kitten rush out into the kitchen in search of food. It reminded her that she hadn't eaten. Quite the opposite: she had brought up what little she had in her stomach all over the stained carpet of the newspaper office.

‘I'm hungry.'

‘Me too,' Bo said, reaching out for her.

Their kisses were meant to make the images from the film fade and die, but it was as though someone had drained Dicte's battery and only her reserves remained. Her thoughts flew off in all directions. She missed Rose, but her daughter had become an independent nineteen-year-old, and not a day went by without her mother imagining a series of assaults or rapes. She missed the way Rose dealt calmly with the dog and the kitten, the way she tended the flowers and cleared up after breakfast.

‘The other hunger, then?' Bo asked softly as he saw his hopes dashed. ‘Something fleshless?'

‘Fleshless sounds good,' she replied, turning her thoughts to the film once more. Meatless. Headless. Senseless.

She snuggled up closely to him and inhaled his scent.

‘So why me?' she asked, finally articulating what had been in the air for the last few hours.

He said nothing, so she went on.

‘Why send the film to a provincial branch and not to the main newspaper office in Copenhagen? Why send it to a newspaper and not a TV station, where it would receive much more exposure?'

Bo raised himself up on his elbow and gently nudged her out of the way. She looked up at him. At his earnest grey eyes and his delicate skin, at the stubble and his sideburns, at his ponytail. Only a few hours earlier she had wanted him, but now her desire had evaporated and turned into sheer fear. Because she was absolutely sure now, as sure as if she had heard the knell of a doomsday chime, that change was on its way.

‘Perhaps it's someone you know or who knows you,' he suggested.

‘But who could it be?'

He said nothing. The earlier gloom returned. Once more she missed Anne and she hadn't even left yet. What kind of a life had Dicte lived these last forty-four years? At the age of sixteen she had given birth to a child and handed it over for adoption. From that day forward she was shunned by her own family, rejected by all those who normal people take for granted: parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters. The loss of her child had always resided inside her, like a deep, placid lake. Social services had intervened and she had come to Aarhus to study and live in a student hall. But then in her desperation she had done something stupid and they had locked her up in a police cell where she had lain on a mattress surrounded by cold walls and impregnable windows.

She could still recall the graffiti scrawled on the unplastered walls by the cell's previous occupants. She could still smell the stale sweat and urine in the mattress.

They had been nice to her. They had given her supervised probation and yet she was still consumed with a deep-rooted aversion to the system.

Dicte stared up at the ceiling where a spider had spun its deadly trap between the rows of halogen bulbs.

She had felt trapped and there had been no one who could empathise. No one to understand. No one to love her or whom she could love in return, without exposing herself. In that way she had always been different and the close links she had were few. Others had been enemies and the thought that someone might have caught up with her was hard to handle.

‘It can't be right. I don't mix with killers and nutters. I don't even know how …'

Bo still hadn't said anything; he just kept looking at her as though he was hoping she would eventually say it herself. So she did.

‘… it feels …'

She returned his gaze. ‘Is that why, do you think?'

He was eight years her junior and had not been a part of her old life. She thought there would be times when he would tire of all the baggage she was carrying, even though he handled it well most of the time. Of course he had a past, too. But although there was the divorce from Eva and two children to look after every other weekend, it seemed as if it was always her past that took up the most room.

Bo shrugged and sat up straight on the edge of the bed next to her. He was suddenly closed and she recognised a sense of despair. Now they would have to go there again. Once more they would be cast up in a whirlwind and the blasts of reality would separate them: her, headlong into a new case; him, a powerless spectator, watching from the sidelines.

‘It's not true,' she mumbled, tugging at his sleeve to make him contradict her and turn back time, just by a few hours, to some kind of imagined state of normality. ‘Tell me it's not true.'

But he didn't. He didn't mention the other issue either, but it lay between them like a dead weight:

She knew what it was like to kill.