The Princess is still alive, but will never have a life.
Torture scenes and detailed descriptions of how the victims die made my career, but I was failing to make a breakthrough now and see where I had gone wrong.
The photo had been inserted on see here, roughly halfway through the book. I leafed back and forth a couple of pages, searching through my own words to find the hidden meaning.
This section didn’t, unlike the other passages the killer had selected, concentrate on the actual killing or the torture of the victim. It took some time before that particular penny dropped. This was significant, but how? Frantically, I flicked back and reread the whole section. My frustration grew. I stood up, went back to the start and read the text aloud to myself while I gestured with my free hand.
No matter how many times I read the passage, I couldn’t understand what I was looking for.
It was a description of the police tailing one of the go-betweens for the correspondence between Inspector Vagn and the killer, an operation that turned out to be a dead end as the courier knew nothing about anything. The physical handover took place via a PO box – a rather antiquated means of communication today, but the internet wasn’t particularly widespread when I wrote the book and an anonymous email address wouldn’t have provided the same possibilities for suspense.
I tossed the book aside.
Had I been mistaken? Was the place where the photo had been inserted irrelevant or had I just failed to find the clue? I sank into the armchair beside the coffee table, leaned my head back and closed my eyes.
The post office where the PO box was located was in Østerbro. It was a majestic-looking building with broad steps and columns either side of the oak front door. I tried to replay the scene in my head. Plainclothes police officers were watching the post office, a relatively straightforward task as the building faced Fælledparken. In front of the entrance was a large gravel square with several benches where the observers could sit down. The courier, a young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a ponytail, cycled down Østerbrogade and turned into the post office.
I opened my eyes. Something didn’t add up.
I leapt up and went to pick up the book, which had landed on the floor by the window. The title page had been bent after its flight. With shaking hands I found see here. The description of the courier was correct and he did indeed cycle down Østerbrogade.
However, in real life the post office was located on the corner of Blegdamsvej and Øster Allé, not Østerbrogade as in the book.
I frowned. It was an almost unforgivable mistake. The geography of my novels is always thoroughly checked so it was beyond me how this howler had slipped through proofreading and several editions. It was one thing that I had made a mistake, that was embarrassing in itself, but that no one had spotted it was unbelievable.
I went over to the console table where the telephone stood. In one of the drawers I found the telephone directory and opened it at the front, where there was a map of Copenhagen and the area of Østerbro. Ten seconds. That’s how long it took me to verify the location of the post office.
The description in Outer Demons was wrong.
36
MY COMEBACK NOVEL, A Bullet in the Chamber, was fairly successful, but it would have had more of an impact if I had been willing to promote it. I stayed in the cottage and let my editor talk to the press. Finn was unhappy. He preferred his authors to flog the goods. Let the punters see the rabbit.
He was, however, delighted with the book.
‘Great craftsmanship,’ he said several times and that was precisely how I saw it. I had no deeper feelings towards A Bullet in the Chamber than a builder towards a floor he has laid or a carpenter for a shed he has put up. Yet the publication marked a turning point in my career as a writer. If I had once kidded myself that I was destined to write world-class literature, A Bullet in the Chamber was my epiphany. I now knew that I would never write the great Danish contemporary novel, but I could easily see myself as the kind of bread-and-butter writer we had always despised back in the Scriptorium days. In a way, I was relieved.
My neighbour was downright chuffed. Bent threw himself into his own promotional tour around the holiday resort. In the months that followed publication, he always carried spare copies in his old Fjällräven rucksack. He was never modest when it came to explaining his role in the creation of the book, and many people must have got the impression that he was really my ghostwriter or that I had simply taken dictation from him. Not that I cared. Bent was due some of the credit that the book had been written at all, so he deserved a pat on the shoulder. I had certainly no need for attention.
Whether it was Bent’s enthusiasm or Finn’s marketing that did it, I don’t know, but the novel sold well, although without ever reaching the heights of Outer Demons. It received a fair amount of press coverage. Some interpreted it as a critical response to Denmark’s participation in the first Iraqi war – completely unintentional from my side – but the association stuck and has haunted the book ever since. Because of this I received numerous letters from soldiers who had been posted to Iraq, and again later when Denmark joined in for the second half. Many of them told of physical and psychological trauma. They were surprisingly frank about excess drinking, family problems and the difficulty of readjusting after returning home.
A few letters contained direct threats against my life, either because I, in the sender’s opinion, had given a completely distorted picture of serving in Iraq, or because the sender felt that outsiders shouldn’t be allowed to write about it when they had never been there and seen comrades killed by IEDs or had snipers take pot shots at them.
I kept all these letters in a box like old family photos you haven’t got the heart to throw out. I sensed a kinship with those lost souls who now lived alone with only the bottle for company and the memory of a family who no longer wanted to know.
But at least I had something to do, something that could occupy my thoughts for several hours every day and provide me with a living. Writing became my fixed point and I adhered to my working routine with military precision.
I quickly discovered that being a writer is the world’s best excuse for being alone and I often used it as justification for getting rid of guests. Sometimes I would use it to stop people from visiting in the first place. If I pretended I would be writing all day, people respected it and didn’t disturb me.
Apart from giving me something to do, writing also became an outlet for the anger I discovered inside me. My divorce from Line took place through lawyers and it was a bitter experience to see my former life disappear like that.
As a result, I wrote Nuclear Families, a story about a group of housewives who are taken hostage by a robber in a supermarket. They overpower the robber, who dies when he is impaled on an umbrella stand, and the women discover they have something in common. Apart from being resourceful, they share a passion for morbidity and are all trapped in unhappy marriages. They start to meet in secret and strike a deal to murder the husbands while each wife has a rock-solid alibi. It quickly turns into a sport, one murder becomes more spectacular than the next, and the more the husband suffers the better. A police officer, a male chauvinist and a bragging caricature of Philip Marlowe, suspects a link between the murders. He has his own marital problems and it isn’t until he finally uncovers the group that he realizes the conspiracy is greater than he first presumed. His own wife has arranged for his female boss to kill him while she herself is at bingo. The police officer dies in a shooting accident on the last page of the book, just as his wife wins a full house.