Was he ill?
He picked up his mobile from the passenger seat and stared at the number he selected. Mona Ibsen, the display read. It had to be worth a go.
He sat there for twenty minutes, feeling the pounding of his heart increase, before eventually pressing the number and praying that counselors were willing to work on a Sunday evening.
“Hi, Mona,” he said softly when he heard her voice at the other end. “It’s Carl Mørck. I’m…” He was about to say that he wasn’t feeling well. That he needed to talk. But he never got that far.
“Carl Mørck!” she exclaimed, though without sounding particularly pleased. “I’ve been waiting for you to call ever since I got home. It’s about time.”
Sitting on her sofa in a living room so fragrant with the scent of woman reminded him of that time behind some wooden pavilions on a school outing to Tolne Bakker with the hand of a tall and slender girl down the front of his trousers. It was all so madly exciting and off-limits, and yet he hadn’t a clue what to do.
Mona wasn’t just your average girl next door, so much was plain from the way his body was reacting. Hearing her moving around in the kitchen, he felt a treacherous pounding in the region of his breast pocket. Unpleasant as hell. It would be just his luck to pass out now.
They had exchanged pleasantries and broached his latest attack. They had enjoyed a Campari and soda and then a couple more, allowing themselves to be carried along by the moment. They had talked about her spell in Africa and had come very close to kissing.
Maybe it was the thought of what ought to happen now that was making the panic kick in.
She returned with some little triangles of bread, her stab at a midnight snack, but who cared, now that they were alone and her blouse clung so magnificently to the curves of her body?
Come on, Carl, he told himself. If a bloke called Gherkin with a braided beard can do it, you can, too.
22
He had shut his wife away in a prison, trapped under heavy boxes, and there she could stay until it was over. She knew too much.
He had heard her scraping against the floor upstairs for a couple of hours, and later, when he came home with Benjamin, he heard her muffled groans.
Only now, after he had packed the boy’s things into the car, was she silent.
He inserted a CD of children’s songs in the car stereo and smiled at his son in the rearview mirror. An hour on the road and the boy would be asleep. A trip across Sjælland always did the trick.
His sister sounded sleepy on the phone but livened up no end when he told her how much he would give them for looking after Benjamin.
“You heard right,” he said. “Three thousand kroner a week. I’ll come by once in a while and make sure you’re doing it properly.”
“We’ll want a month in advance,” she said.
“OK.”
“As well as the usual on top.”
He nodded to himself. It was a predictable demand. “Same as usual, no need to worry.”
“How long will your wife be in the hospital?”
“I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see how it goes. She’s very ill. It might take time.”
No words of sympathy or regret were forthcoming.
Eva wasn’t like that.
“Go to your father,” his mother ordered him sharply. Her hair was tousled and her dress twisted up around her midriff. So his father had been rough with her again.
“What for?” he asked. “I’m supposed to finish reading Corinthians for the prayer meeting tomorrow. He told me to himself.”
With childlike naivete, he had believed his mother would save him. That she would intervene, extricate him from his father’s suffocating grip, and get him off the hook, just this once. His Chaplin impersonation was a game he liked to play. It was of no harm to anyone. Jesus must have played, too, when he was a child. They knew that.
“Get in there, now!” His mother’s lips tightened, and she took him by the scruff of the neck. It was the same grasp that had marched him off so many times before to beatings and humiliation.
“I’ll tell him you look at the neighbor when he takes his shirt off in the field,” he said.
She gave a start. They both knew it wasn’t true. That even the slightest glimpse toward liberty and a new life was a direct pathway to the inferno. They were reminded of it in church, in the prayers at table, and in each and every word read from the black volume residing close at hand in his father’s pocket. In every glance exchanged between man and woman, Satan lurked. Satan was in every smile and in every touch. That was what the book said.
No, it wasn’t true that his mother had eyes for the neighbor, but his father had never been known to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
And then his mother said the words that divided them forever.
“You spawn of the Devil,” she spat, cold as ice. “May Satan drag you down to where you belong. May the inferno sear through your skin and deliver you into pain from this day forth.” She nodded emphatically. “Yes, you may well be frightened, but Satan has already taken you. You are no longer ours to care about.”
She flung open the door and thrust him into the sherry fumes of his father’s study.
“Come here,” his father commanded, winding the belt around his hand.
The curtains were drawn, allowing only a sliver of light into the room. Behind the desk stood Eva, a pillar of salt in her white dress. Apparently, he had not beaten her, for his sleeves were still rolled down, and her sobs were restrained.
“Still playing Chaplin, are we?” his father barked.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eva avert her gaze.
This would be violent.
“Here are Benjamin’s documents. Best they’re with you, in case he falls ill.”
He handed his brother-in-law the boy’s various certificates.
“Is that likely?” his sister asked anxiously.
“No, of course not. Benjamin’s a healthy boy.”
He saw it already in his brother-in-law’s eyes. Villy wanted more money.
“A boy Benjamin’s age eats a lot,” he said. “That’ll cost us a thousand a month on its own.” If he didn’t believe him, they could look it up on the Internet.
Villy rubbed his hands together like Ebenezer Scrooge. Five thousand extra, once and for all, was what they seemed to be asking.
But they wouldn’t be getting a penny more. Most likely it would be passed on to some preacher of the kind who couldn’t care less who was footing the bill or why.
“If you and Eva should cause me any difficulties, our arrangement may have to be reconsidered. Are you with me?” he said, and left it at that.
The brother-in-law agreed reluctantly, but his sister was already far away, her hands, unused to children, investigating the boy’s soft skin.
“What color is his hair now?” she asked, her blind eyes turned upward in delight.
“The same as mine when I was a boy, if you remember,” he said and noted how the lusterless eyes then dropped.
“And spare Benjamin the bloody prayers, understand?” he said finally, before handing them the money.
He saw them nod but didn’t care for their silence.
The ransom would be paid in twenty-four hours. One million kroner in used notes. He was in no doubt.
Now he would drive up to the boathouse and make sure the kids were in a decent state. Tomorrow, when the payoff had been made, he would go there again and kill the girl. The boy would be chloroformed and dumped in a field near Frederiks on the Monday night.
He would give Samuel instructions as to what to say to his father and mother, so they would know what they had to contend with. He was to say that his sister’s killer had his informants and would always know where the family were and what they were doing. That they had enough children for him to strike at them again, so they should never, ever feel safe. If he had the slightest suspicion that they had informed anyone of what had happened, it would cost them another child. This was what Samuel was to tell them. It was a threat with no expiration date. Moreover, they were to know that he operated only under an assumed identity. The man they thought they knew did not exist. He would appear again only in a new guise.