“A rhyme to whom?”
“To you, but I don’t think you should read it. It won’t be of any help and will only do you harm.”
The Countess ignored the warning and reached for the pad. Madame handed it over without further objection and Pauline read:
Two little girls tremble with fear,
Child laughs in the dust with his catch so dear.
First girl in the bag, and the other is alone,
The one without curls will die as skin and bone.
Loathing struck the Countess then, and for a few seconds she gasped for air. She quickly got hold of herself again, sufficiently in balance to receive Madame’s toneless instructions.
“You are stubborn, the nobility often are. Now you will reap what you have sown. But sometimes stubbornness can be an advantage. You will experience that this evening.”
The drive from H?je Taastrup to S?ller?d did the Countess good. The metaphysical encounter had not been pleasant, and she was happy to escape from the strange couple. She had little to show for her visit in investigative terms. She called Simonsen and, when she did not get through, left a message about Madame’s white chapel on his answering machine, happy that it was not up to her whether the information should be taken seriously or not. The rest of the way she tried to shake off the memory of the other things she had experienced by letting Bob Marley blow her head clear at full blast.
At home she emptied the mailbox and dumped the bundle of advertising directly into the rubbish bin before she went in. The rest, three letters and a package, she tossed on the kitchen table when she was inside, after which she put on coffee, watered her flowers and quickly packed clothing for herself and Simonsen. After lugging the suitcase to the back of her car she returned to the kitchen. The coffeemaker was still gurgling, and she thought she would either have to buckle down and decalcify it or else buy a new one. While she was waiting she browsed indifferently in her mail.
The letter on top was a statement from one of her banks; she threw that out. The next was a parking ticket, and she remembered that her windscreen wipers had dispatched the first copy on to the street; she was indifferent to that as well. The last letter was a bill from her private detective for ten pictures she had already received by email. She did not bother to open that either. The package remained. In the mailbox it had been under a home-delivered Sunday paper and therefore might have come by courier on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. No sender or recipient address was given, and with a feeling of paranoid suspicion she balanced it in her hands a short while, after which she tore it open.
The book was new, as if it came straight from the printer. The dust jacket showed a bluish-grey Boeing B-52 bomber hovering over a desert of ice, elegant and at the same time powerful with its slender fuselage and the gigantic V-shaped wings, each carrying four potent jet engines. Title and author were printed in capital letters and hatched in the colours of the American flag. On Guard in the North by Clark Atkinson. She opened it to page one and noted that her present was a copy of the very rare first edition from 1983. The non-existent edition. To top it off, it came with a personal greeting from Helmer Hammer. Freehand and not without talent, the under secretary had sketched a pair of magnolias, heavy with flowers, as they appeared in early June. Behind these a few strokes suggested the geometry of the Palm House. The message was brief and personal: Dear Countess, I certainly owe you a lot of G. Best, Helmer. For good measure the G was embellished with a pair of eyes on its lower curve, so that it resembled a smiley face.
Under normal circumstances she would be happy, both with the book and this acknowledgment from the under secretary. But these circumstances were not normal, far from it. Her odyssey into recent Danish history seemed very far off and had no significance now. She squeezed Hammer’s present in among her cookbooks, poured coffee into a vacuum jug, looked at her clock and left. To begin with, however, she travelled only a short way up the street, where she stopped parallel to a parked blue Renault and rolled down her window. The driver of the other car did the same while he put a finger to his lips and then indicated behind him towards his female partner, who was sleeping in the back seat. The Countess knew him in passing, but could not remember his name. She handed over the vacuum jug and two mugs to him. He took them, whispering, “You are an angel.”
“How long are you on duty?”
“Don’t know, the plan has not quite fallen into place, but a long time. We’ve only been here a couple of hours.”
“Lousy job to be ordered out to.”
“It’s voluntary now, but it doesn’t matter. Just be sure to catch that mass murderer, and find his hostages alive.”
The Countess promised to do as he asked. Just!
CHAPTER 49