The Considerate Killer (13 page)

“No. I want you to be my friend. And friends help each other when things get tough. Right?
I helped you
.”

Vincent sank a small sharp lump in his throat.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Of course . . . I'll help you.”

Vincent thumped him on the shoulder—so hard and loud that it resounded.

“I knew it,” he said. “You and me. And Victor too, of course. The V-Team forever!”

“The V-Team forever,” mumbled Vincent, momentarily bedazzled. Vadim's approval washed across him like a warm Pacific wave.

He got out his cell and put some music on. Ella Fitzgerald and “Blue Moon.”

“You should start smoking,” said Vadim, glancing over at him with a half smile. “It would suit you now that you are a grown man with a dirty secret.”

Vincent nodded and drank the last of his champagne. The heat and Ella made him sleepy. He was no longer a student, no longer the best in any class, and no longer a boy who behaved well in the eyes of God . . . But what was he then?

One day before too long he would have to ask Father Abuel. You could crouch by the toilet bowl and hold back your vomit for only so long. At some point the deluge would come.

B
ut what if
it's true?” asked Nina. “What if his life really
is
in danger?”

Søren would have preferred to have this conversation in a less exposed place—at home in the house on Cherry Lane, for example. True, Viborg's new Swim Center and Water Park was so full of shrieking, splashing, shrilly screaming children and attendant grown-ups that an attacker would need to be unusually cold-blooded to act here, and the first assault had hardly seemed professional—but as Torben often said, “Only fools do not fear the amateur.” The lone madman, that invisible and ordinary man with his hidden insanity, was one of the worst nightmares of any intelligence service. Unpredictable and almost impossible to trace because he didn't communicate with anyone, but cultivated his murderous fantasies alone. Until the day he attempted to carry them out in reality . . .

It was Anton's careful begging—oddly defeated and without expectations—that had made him give in. It was the boy's half-term break, after all, it was a public place, and they couldn't shut themselves in indefinitely. He had sent off a couple of emails to Gitte in the hope of getting something on Victor even before he had so assiduously offered Caroline Westmann his assistance, but as he had pointed out himself, there was absolutely no guarantee that Facebook-Victor really
was
Victor. And the line the man had used—“My life is in danger—and so is yours”—was apparently quite effective because Nina was, as far as he could judge, deeply disturbed.

“Mommy!” shouted Anton from the one-meter board. “Mommy, look now. BOOOOOMB!”

The board gave a metallic
sprooooiiing
, and Anton threw himself into the air, bent his legs up against his body and let himself drop toward the water's surface like a small, boy-shaped missile. The splash was impressive, considering his skinny nine-year-old frame.

“Nice!” shouted Nina when Anton's head appeared again like a seal's in a hole in the ice. He grinned proudly and exuberantly, swam with only slightly awkward breaststrokes to the ladder and raced back to rejoin the line by the diving board. Water ran down his torso and legs and collected in a small puddle at his feet. The Swim Center was buzzing with the holiday crowd—the worst bottleneck was the long water slide where several children had begun to shiver with cold while they waited for their turn. Anton had sensibly thrown his affection onto one of the less populated attractions, and Ida was drifting contentedly in the warm-water pool next door.

Anton undertook a number of small jumps in place to stay warm.

“Aren't you coming in?” he shouted to Nina.

“Not today, sweetie.”

Søren cleared his throat carefully to prevent a cough—the swimming pool's chlorine vapors were not exactly what his annoyingly delicate lungs needed.
What a pair
, he thought. Nina with her fading blue-black “raccoon eyes” and the shaved, bandaged spot at the back of her head, he with his bronchial weakness. Quite pathetic, really.

He hadn't yet revealed the actual reason for his enforced medical leave, and she hadn't asked. Maybe the fractured skull had shaken her more than was first apparent.

His physical weaknesses were only half the truth, although there were plenty of them by now. It was as if his bed rest had made everything fall apart. His dodgy knee had grown worse instead of better from the break in training, go figure; infections seemed to be lining up in order to invade his compromised chest; and the doctors had begun to talk about chronic bronchitis—bronchitis, he had never had bronchitis, damnit, not even the almost obligatory pollen allergy. Colleagues had sniffled and coughed their way through the birch while he had remained unfazed. Not so anymore. To add insult to injury, something that felt like repeated stabs in his left hip turned out to be arthritis, caused by many years of favoring the dodgy knee, and as if that wasn't enough, he had begun to suffer from headaches and attacks of dizziness for the first time in his life. They had pulled out all the stops to make sure that he hadn't quietly suffered “a minor stroke” or an aneurysm—“It happens occasionally at your age, Søren, when we are forced to stay in bed for a while,” explained the surgeon, not a day over thirty-five and annoyingly chipper in spite of his twelve-hour-long workday.

Being a group leader in PET was no walk in the park. You couldn't just go home at four in the afternoon or “take a break when you need to,” as his physical therapist had recommended. He didn't damn well have the
time
to have a headache. Pinex and Tylenol became standard inventory in his briefcase and glove compartment. He wasn't stupid; he didn't exceed the maximum dosage; the problem was that
every
day was a hard day, and that the pills only took the edge off the headache and, as time passed, barely that.

His attempt to return to work had ended in the most embarrassing form of collapse. In the middle of a meeting with the fraud squad, or the Department for Special Economic Crime as it was properly called, about the flow of money in a minor but fairly complicated anti-terror case, he had begun to have tunnel vision. He tried to sit completely still, eyes deliberately unfocused, which sometimes worked, but you can't really direct a meeting without looking at the person who is speaking. He had had to suggest a break, even though he could see that the others thought they had barely started. He had planned to go and lie down on the floor in the bathroom, another occasionally successful trick, especially with the application of a wet paper towel to the forehead, if he could find a bathroom that had not yet had those noisy, energy-consuming air dryers installed instead.

Instead, he collapsed the moment he got up. Bang. No further warnings, the light just went out and returned several minutes later as he lay on his side— Recovery Position, of course, he was surrounded by people who knew their first aid—on the woodblock floor of the conference room.

He was brought to Herlev Hospital, sirens and blue lights ablaze—it seemed no humiliation was to be spared. He had, of course, also crapped in his pants—that was unavoidable when you were deeply unconscious, he knew that, but that didn't make it any damn less embarrassing. And after almost a week of observation and tests, someone mentioned the S-word for the first time:

“There is also the possibility, Søren, that this is your body's reaction to stress.”

No way. He wasn't the kind who got stressed out. It didn't matter how many times he had advised others on his staff that it could happen to anyone, and that you shouldn't consider it a weakness, but rather a sign that you had been much too strong for much too long. This was not a logic he thought could in any way apply to him.

Now he was on leave. Three months at least, “and then we'll have to see,” Torben had said.

But the writing on the wall blinked neon bright. The PET could not afford to have a group leader who was incapacitated by stress. Stress resistance was a part of the job description. It damn near
was
the job description. He knew without having seen it what Torben had written in his private notes: “Transfer to other work?” That's probably what it would have said in his own notebook had the roles been reversed, but that didn't make it any better. The question mark might even be optimistic; it might be an exclamation point.

Søren felt betrayed. By his friend, by his boss, by life in general, but first and foremost by his own body. How could it trick him in this way?

He knew, of course, that it was only in the world of fiction that the hero groaned, “It's only a scratch,” got up with a bullet in his body, and went on as if nothing much had happened. He also knew that a body with nearly fifty years on the clock healed more slowly than one with twenty-five. He had been prepared for a certain convalescence. But that he might not get better, that this might not be just a question of time—that he would have to sit here and twiddle his thumbs to avoid “physical and psychological stress”—this, he would never have believed. He was one of the tough guys. That had always been taken completely for granted as part of his identity, not something he needed to announce or pay attention to, it was just
there
—the knowledge that he could take more than most people.

That was probably why he hadn't told Nina. Because he was ashamed.

He hauled his focus back to the present and to the matter of Nina's Filipino Facebook friend and possible stalker.

“He's just trying to manipulate you,” he said. “Classic technique. If he can get you to suspend your normal judgment, he is on a roll. It's pretty much the same principal as Nigerian prince scams.”

“Nigerian prince scams?” said Nina, raising a sarcastic eyebrow. “You think he's just out to get my banking details? Aren't we short a dramatic story about an unclaimed inheritance, or something?”

“There's plenty of drama,” he said dryly. “The lure here is just fear and compassion instead of greed.”

“Mommy! Look!”

It was once again Anton's turn on the diving board.

“Yes, sweetie.”

Anton began to bounce up and down on the board to build maximum power for the jump. Then he launched himself into the air, curling up into his usual bombing style. But Søren saw in a chilling second, and Nina apparently also, that the jump was
too
vertical. He hit the board on the way down, gave a cry of pain and rotated so he hit the water's surface sideways instead of with his bottom first. The impact was so loud that Søren cringed in pure reflex. Nina had kicked her shoes off even before Anton hit the water. She dived in fully dressed—head first, Søren noted—and had hold of her son before the professional lifeguard at the end of the pool had a chance to react. Søren could hear her speaking quietly and soothingly to him.

“Lie still for a moment. I've got you. Just relax.”

She lay on her back and held him close to her chest with one arm while she kept them both afloat with powerful kicks and paddling strokes of her free arm. The other bathers made room so she could cross to the ladder, but when one of them moved to take hold of his legs, she sharply told him not to.

“It's okay,” she said. “I have him.”

The lifeguard had reached the edge of the pool.

“Is he okay?” he asked.

“We need a board or a stretcher,” said Nina. “I want to have his back and neck supported before we try to get him out.”

The lifeguard nodded briefly and professionally and sent a short signal on his walkie-talkie. Then he let himself slip into the water next to Nina. He didn't try to take Anton from her.

“I'm just here if you get tired,” he said.

Nina nodded.

“Mom, I . . . it's not that bad,” said Anton, but you could see in his pale face and trembling shoulders that he was both battered and scared.

“Good,” said Nina.

More lifeguards appeared, and Anton was carefully lifted out of the water on a stretcher. Nina climbed out, soaked and with water streaming from her T-shirt and jeans, and knelt down next to Anton.

More and more of an audience gathered around them, and the swimming pool's personnel were having a hard time keeping them at a distance.

“What happened?”

“Did he drown?”

“Did someone die?”

Søren slid routinely in front of some of the pushiest onlookers and forced them back with a mixture of brawn and authority. Most moved willingly; a pair of loud young teenagers were the only ones with whom he had to seriously use his “police” glare.

“Please give the staff room to work.” The words were polite, but the words didn't mean anything. It was the hard, completely unsmiling look and a certain steeliness in his posture that made the incipient teenage rebellion fold.

“Okay, okay. We're going . . .”

“Søren!” A hand hooked on to his sleeve. “Where's Anton? Where's Mom?” Ida's eyes were pitch-black with fearful foreboding.

“Nothing serious happened,” he said. “Ida, it's okay.”

She didn't listen. She slid under his arm and snaked her way past a couple of broad lifeguard backs.

“Anton!”

Søren could hear Nina speak calmingly to both her children, but he could no longer see them properly. What exactly it was that made him look up then, he didn't know. Maybe just the hyperawareness that his fear for Nina's safety had equipped him with.

Up on the balcony, a figure stood leaning on the railing. Or rather, several people, following the drama. But there was only one who was eagerly photographing the scene.

It could be an overzealous local journalist or some random person with enough carrion instincts to figure that there might be money to be made, especially if a death was involved. Søren had caught the glint of a lens, recognized the stance, but other details were difficult to determine. Was the coat greenish brown, as Nina had described it? He couldn't tell. It was too high up, the balcony group was backlit, and his glasses had a tendency to mist up in the steamy atmosphere.

He had to try to get closer. He looked back. The Center staff looked as if they had the situation well in hand. Anton had not been allowed to get up, but he was moving. Two lifeguards hoisted the stretcher and carried it in the direction of the changing rooms, and Nina and Ida followed them, Nina with her arm around her daughter's shoulder. Søren glanced again in the direction of the balcony. The photographer had stopped shooting and was on his way out. It was now or never if Søren was to get a better look at him.

Søren hurried toward the exit to the parking lot. It was a gamble, because there were other routes that were just as likely—the Swim Center was right next to the train station and therefore central to just about every kind of public transportation, or a taxi for that matter. But he knew he wouldn't be able to get up the stairs fast enough to maintain visual contact, so this was the only option. He was lucky. Shortly after he reached one of the tall glass doors, a man came racing down the stairs still with a camera in his left hand. Søren automatically noted certain basic details—Southeast Asian–looking, young and fairly fit, sunglasses, baseball cap and the overly large military green parka that to a certain degree blurred the outline of his shoulders and upper body and made the rest look thin and twiggy, like the legs on a stick figure. Søren fished his own car keys out of his pocket and followed him, calm and relaxed, just a man who happened to be getting his car.