The Woman from Bratislava (13 page)

‘There’s a lay-by a few kilometres up the road. Drive on up to it, nice and easy and pull in.’

‘Why should I do that?’ I said.

‘Because I say so,’ he replied and returned to his partner in the squad car, still clutching my licence. There was really nothing else for it, so off Teddy tootled at the regulation 110 kph with the squad car in his rear-view mirror, until he reached the small lay-by in which stood a block of toilets, a truck and a blue Ford Escort. The squad car drove past me and stopped behind the blue Ford. I stayed in my car, trying to do a quick calculation: how much schnapps and beer had I had and how long ago had that been? It did not look too promising. Not an outrageously high
blood-alcohol level, but it had to be more than the limit of 0.5 per cent. One of the uniforms got out of the squad car, walked up to the blue Escort and handed my licence to a man in a dark,
well-worn
leather jacket. This done, the policeman saluted and, much to my surprise, returned to the squad car, climbed in beside his partner and they drove away.

There was a woman in the Escort’s front passenger seat. The man in the dark leather jacket stepped out and walked up to my car. I recognised him now. It was the younger of the two CID
officers
who had interviewed me at my flat. What was his name again?

‘Hello, Teddy,’ he said.

‘Hello, er … what was your name again?’

‘Per Toftlund. Police Intelligence.’

‘Oh, that’s right. Hello to you, Per Toftlund. And what can I do for PET? I’m assuming this has to do with my sister?’

‘It might. For the moment could I ask you to get into my car and my colleague will drive yours back to Copenhagen. We have a lot to talk about.’

‘And if I refuse?’

‘You’ll have to blow into a plastic bag and then I think you can wave bye-bye to your licence, Teddy. You smell like a brewery.’

‘It’s just one of those days,’ I said as I climbed out of the car. I had to take a second to steady myself. Per Toftlund may have thought it was because I was drunk. And I’m sure I must have smelled somewhat of alcohol, but the real reason was my back, which had seized up, as it always did when I had been sitting in the car for any length of time. I had to stand for a moment with a steadying hand on the roof until I could straighten up and regain my balance. I could have drunk nothing but milk and I would still have been tottering about as if I were pissed.

Teddy Arrested In Bleak Danish Lay-by With Toilets And Truck
might have been the title of this picture, but my usual attempt to put a self-ironic distance between myself and the situation did not help much.
Teddy Out Of His Depth
was probably more like it.

THESE DAYS
when Per Toftlund woke, for a brief, almost
imperceptible
moment he was always afraid that he was alone in bed. Only once he had reached out an arm and touched Lise’s warm, bare thigh under her short nightie and felt her, still half asleep, take his hand, did he feel that daily, almost unreasonably satisfying feeling of happiness. Unreasonable, because, he thought to himself in the seconds between sleep and consciousness, there had to be a price to pay for such happiness. This northern-European sense of guilt evaporated, however, as soon as he was fully awake. And that did not take long. He had never lost the old habit from his army days of wakening early and being instantly and fully alert.

But these days he would lie for a while, running his hand over Lise’s swollen belly, hearing and feeling her sigh voluptuously – and, if he was lucky, discerning a kick of life from the baby inside her. Her skin was soft and warm and moist, over her drum-tight stomach it felt smooth as velvet under his hand. The bare breasts inside her nightie were taut and ready for breastfeeding. Again he felt that dangerous surge of happiness.

‘Sleep well, you two?’

‘Uhmmmm …’ she grunted. ‘She takes up so much space, she’s turning somersaults in there and I’m as big as a cow,’ she mumbled.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’re both beautiful.’ He propped himself up on his elbow and brushed a strand of hair back from her brow.

‘I’m huge,’ she said. ‘And I’m sleepy and I’ve got the day off.’

‘You’re so sweet and lovely,’ he said, as if quoting a line from a pop song. ‘And it’s only four weeks to go.’

‘Have you any idea what the thought of another four weeks feels
like in my condition. It feels like a hundred years,’ she said. ‘And I’m so sleepy, and now I’m on maternity leave.’

He kissed her on the forehead and the lips and she smiled, still with her eyes shut. He got up, closed the bedroom window, pulled on shorts, a T-shirt, track-suit top and bottoms, drank a glass of tap water then ran out of the house in Ganløse and up towards the woods north of the town. The wind was from the south-west and there was rain in it. The temperature was only a few degrees above freezing and the ground felt hard under his running shoes, even when he reached the woods and turned onto the paths winding through the mix of hardwoods and conifers. He soon settled into his stride, breathing rhythmically, and his mind turned to the day ahead and the meeting which his old boss had asked him to attend. He was looking forward to it, although he had no idea what she wanted with him. He was hoping, although he did not dare to admit it, not even to himself, that she might be going to ask him to come back. There was a chance, though he doubted it was very great. She probably just wanted to clear up a few points regarding yet another of their interminable investigations. He knew that he had got off relatively lightly with a transfer to Customs and
Immigration
after his failure to protect Sara Santander, but he missed PET and the work with counter-espionage, missed being out there operating on the fringes of the law, in that shadow world where different rules applied. Running there in the light of early March his mind also went to the new war that had broken out in Europe. NATO had commenced bombing raids on Yugoslavia and for the first time Denmark was officially party to a war of aggression against a sovereign nation. He imagined that this would mean a tightening up of domestic security and cherished a faint hope that he might be involved in this. Even if he had fucked up and Vuk the Serbian Dane had got away, that whole business had given him one gift: he had met Lise Carlsen and, wonder of wonders, she had also fallen in love with him. They had married and were expecting a baby. She had even agreed to move from the Copenhagen flat
which she had owned with her murdered husband to a new house in Ganløse. The inveterate city-dweller was now a suburbanite. For the baby’s sake.

He ran smoothly and easily, aware of how alive his body felt as he rounded his personal five-kilometre mark and started back down the trail. His mind gradually emptied of all thought and on the run home he simply felt light and clear and exhilarated by the lovely morning light flickering through the bare trees. April was just around the corner and you could feel it in the air. He would never see forty again, but he still felt in control of his body. And that was important to him. Per Toftlund was a very physical person. All his life he had sought physical challenges, from his days as a volunteer in the Royal Navy’s special forces unit until the stringent demands made on a frogman on active service became too much even for a man in his physical condition and, with the prospect of a desk job and an instructor’s post looming on the horizon, he had left to join the police. He turned the corner into the new housing estate which they would learn to call home and did his warming-down exercises by the carport. They had chosen the house because it was affordable and brand-new, so they could move straight in. The gardens had not yet been laid out. Piles of damp black soil were dotted around the little red houses. But it would be nice when it was finished. And the estate agent had told them that several families with small children had already put their names down. This had suddenly become an important factor for Per and Lise: coming to parenthood late they were looking forward to it and at the same time dreading it. The financial side was not really a problem. Lise had got a tidy sum from Ole’s life insurance and the sale of his psychology practice, but the way Per saw it this was Lise’s money. He had been persuaded to let the proceeds from the sale of the flat go towards the purchase of the house and other future family outgoings. But he refused to touch the rest of it, even though she would not hear of them keeping their finances separate. Some of it, at least, they would put in trust
for the baby. Per preferred not to think about that money. You had to manage on what you earned. That had always been his policy. Things that came too easily had a way of going just as easily.

Per showered then had a slice of toast with cheese. He kissed a still drowsy Lise as she lay there with her big belly, smelling of bed and sleep, and drove into town, to the low dun-coloured concrete building on Borups Allé which was home to the Danish Security Intelligence Service. The traffic on the road into town was heavy and sluggish. The travelling time was Lise’s biggest bugbear about suburban life. She had been used to cycling everywhere, but now if she had to be at work in the morning she was liable to end up stuck in traffic along with everyone else. Fortunately, though, that did not happen often. She would soon get used to it. The morning light was struggling to break through the dull haze and grimy drizzle that blanketed the city, making it look drab and dirty and damp. Glistening, as if someone had coated the road and the buildings with sump oil.

Seeing that ugly grey concrete block with the red windows sitting alongside the busy road, just before the big old Telephone Exchange building was like coming home, he felt. For the best part of his police career this had been his workplace. It might not possess the same sense of history as the old Police HQ, or its unique air of authority, but it probably harboured more secrets than all the other police stations put together. He knew it like the back of his hand and felt comfortable in its functional, rectilinear corridors. He went upstairs and greeted Jytte Vuldom’s secretary with easy familiarity. Vuldom was the second female head of Police Security Intelligence. Her predecessor, Commissioner Jansen, had been the world’s first female spy chief and in most parts of the world it was still a rare thing for a woman to be the head of a national secret service. Toftlund had always got on well with Vuldom. He felt she was good at her job and he had nothing against female bosses as long as they were professional – and Vuldom was. Not only that, but she was adept at walking the diplomatic tightrope between
openness and reticence when dealing with the press and
politicians
; practising the transparency necessary within a democratic society while at the same time, in the looking-glass world of the secret service, hushing up those things which had to be hushed up. In order to safeguard democracy one sometimes had to break democracy’s rules, as Vuldom had said at one of her rare, but popular seminars at the National Police Training Centre at Avnø.

Per knocked on Vuldom’s door. The lady herself was sitting at her desk with a cigarette in her hand and a cup of coffee in front of her. The desk was clear apart from a couple of green files lying next to the telephone and intercom. Per wrinkled his nose at the acrid cigarette smoke. He had not managed to persuade Lise to stop smoking altogether, even though she was pregnant, but at least she had cut down drastically, to the point where she was now not much more than a social smoker, and only the other day she had announced that she was giving it up completely. Vuldom, in her realm, smoked as and when she liked. She was in her early fifties, a woman with sharp, shrewd eyes and attractive,
fine-drawn
features. Her short hair was swept back from a level brow. Her make-up was subtle, matching her sensible skirt, shirt and rather masculine jacket, the overall image that of an independent woman exuding both femininity and efficiency. Lise had called her a role model for other women. Because she succeeded in
remaining
womanly while at the same time forging a career for herself in a world where, by and large, the men were still the bosses and the women made the coffee. Lise admired her for that. Lise saw
injustice
everywhere. Per seldom thought about life in abstract terms. He was better at tackling concrete tasks head-on and
accomplishing
them. But he could tell that Lise did have an influence on him, although she was very discreet about it, recognising, as she did, his Jutlander’s stubborn streak. Nobody could tell him anything! But he did read other books now. And he was no longer so quick to come out with dogmatic statements or opinions on matters about which he in fact knew nothing.

‘Hi, Per,’ said Jytte Vuldom in her deep, husky smoker’s voice. ‘Sit down, have a cup of coffee. Long time no see.’

Per sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk. Vuldom poured coffee for him.

‘I hear you’re going to be a father,’ she said as she filled his cup. ‘Well, I never.’

‘You could congratulate me, you know,’ Per said.

Vuldom smiled:

‘Congratulations. I just never expected it of you.’

‘Why not?’

She shrugged, took a dainty sip of her coffee.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Lone wolf and all that? How are things at HQ?’ She nodded in the vague general direction of Copenhagen, as if they could see all the way into the city centre and, down near the harbour, Police HQ where Toftlund had been stationed for the past couple of years, working mainly with the Customs and
Immigration
department at Kastrup Airport, known to most people as the passport police. It was a tedious and often heartbreaking job, having to turn away refugees, seeing them huddled like forlorn rag dolls outside of passport control. Or to be right out at the plane, denying them entry. Or to have to sit for hours checking tipsy, sun-tanned package tourists back into the country, listening again and again to the same few standard remarks about the weather there and here.

‘It’s a job,’ Toftlund said.

‘An important job. Very important, no doubt about it. But do I detect a note of dissatisfaction?’

‘Drop the act, Vuldom,’ he said, raising his voice slightly. ‘I was dumped there. I could have done worse, all things considered. But it’s not like I applied for the bloody job, is it?’

‘Temper, temper!’ she said, with a smile in her voice. ‘You had to carry the can, Per. That’s all there was to it. And you did make a mess of things, so to some extent it was fair enough …’

‘What about the politicians? What about them?’

‘Ah, now that’s a different matter. And one which we public servants need not worry our loyal little heads about,’ Vuldom said, leaning across the desk slightly: ‘That’s history, so we leave that to the historians. Our job is to take care of all the everyday crap. Which
can
turn out to be history in the making. Or a mixture of both. In which current events suddenly take on a whole new meaning. And the past, which everyone thought had been buried, forgotten, destroyed, rears its head again and – due to the sort of coincidences which lie at the heart of all intelligence work – acquires new significance.’

Toftlund grinned and said:

‘Now, now, Vuldom. Are you trying to seduce me?’

Vuldom grinned too, but her eyes were cool and calculating, exactly as he remembered them:

‘Would you like that?’

‘Oh, I think I could be persuaded.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘But my boss out at the airport won’t take kindly to me leaving him in the lurch. You should see the piles of paper on my desk. Duty rosters that never seem to work out. An enormous backlog of lieu time still to be taken. And what with all the talk on the one hand about us letting too many people in and on the other about us being too restrictive, we’ve really got our hands full.’

‘I had a word with Larsen.’

‘Oh? You were pretty sure of yourself.’

‘You were made for this job, Toftlund.’

Per sat back, leaned forward again, took a sip of his coffee and wafted away the smoke from her cigarette.

‘What about … that other business? Are the politicians going to accept me being back here? I was the scapegoat, after all.’

‘You’ve been on the sidelines long enough. Besides, people have short memories in this country. No one can remember
anything
that happened more than a week ago, the media are always coming up with some new story. They’re like children. Totally
focused on one thing at one minute, throwing themselves heart and soul into something else the next. You won’t be doing
surveillance
work anyway. And besides, no one outside our little family will ever know.’

‘When will my transfer come through?’

Vuldom picked up one of the green folders, removed a single sheet of paper from it and pushed it across the desk to him. It was a standard transfer form, used when police personnel were being moved from one department to another. It had been
completed
right down to the date. If he signed it he would actually have started two days ago.