‘OK, what’s happened?’ Jeanette crouches down and tries to see into the tent.
‘The woman inside is named Fredrika Grünewald, known as the Duchess, seeing as she’s supposed to come from some noble family. We’re already checking that out.’
‘Good. What else?’
‘A few witnesses say a man called B?rje came down here yesterday afternoon in the company of an unknown woman.’
‘Have we got hold of this B?rje?’
‘No, not yet, but he’s something of a celebrity down here so it shouldn’t be difficult. We’ve put an alert out.’
‘Good, good.’ Jeanette moves closer to the opening of the tent.
‘She’s in a really terrible state. Her head has pretty much been severed from her neck.’
‘Knife?’ She stands up and straightens her back.
‘Don’t think so. We found this.’ Hurtig holds up a plastic bag containing a long steel wire. ‘This was probably the murder weapon.’
Jeanette nods. ‘And no one down here did it?’
‘I don’t think so. If she’d just been, well, beaten to death and then robbed, then maybe …’ Hurtig looks thoughtful. ‘But this is something different.’
‘So nothing was stolen from her?’
‘No. Her purse is still here, containing almost two thousand kronor and a valid monthly travel card.’
‘OK. So what do you think?’
Hurtig shrugs. ‘Revenge, maybe. After killing her, the murderer smeared her with excrement. Mostly around the mouth.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
‘Ivo’s going to check if it’s her own shit, but if we’re lucky it’ll be the murderer’s.’ Hurtig gestures towards the tent, where Ivo Andri? and a couple of his colleagues are busy putting the body inside a grey mortuary bag for transport to Solna.
The forensics team lift off the plastic acting as a tent, and now Jeanette can see the whole of the tragic little home. A small camping stove, a few tins, and a pile of clothes. Carefully she picks up a dress and notes that it’s Chanel. Hardly used.
She reads the labels on the unopened tins of food and sees that several of them have been imported. Mussels and goose liver paté. Not the sort of thing you find in the Co-op.
What was Fredrika Grünewald doing down here? she thinks. She doesn’t seem to have been short of money. There has to be another reason. But what?
Jeanette looks around at her belongings. Something’s missing. She closes her eyes tightly, trying to clear her mind, then see the whole picture without any preconceptions.
What is it I’m not seeing? she thinks.
‘Jeanette.’ Ivo Andri? taps her on the shoulder. ‘One thing, before I go. It’s not human excrement on her face. It’s dog shit.’
And that’s when she sees it.
It isn’t something missing.
It’s something that shouldn’t be there.
Denmark, 1988
DARE YOU TODAY, then, you weak fucker? Dare you? Dare you?
No, you don’t dare! You don’t! You’re too weak!
You’re pathetic! It’s hardly surprising no one cares about you!
The shabby houses on Istedgade, the hotels, bars and sex shops lining the pavements, and she turns into a calmer side street, Viktoriagade. It’s hardly been a year since she was last here, and she remembers that the hotel is very close, right next door to a record shop.
A year ago she had chosen the hotel with great care. In Berlin she had lived on Bergmannstrasse in Kreuzberg, and the circle was closed when she arrived here. Viktoriagade had been a logical place to die.
As she opens the old wooden door to the reception area, she notes that the neon sign with the hotel’s name on it is still broken. Behind the desk sits the same bored man as last time. He gives her the keys and she pays with some crumpled notes she found in a biscuit tin in Viggo’s kitchen.
Altogether she has almost two thousand Danish kronor and over nine hundred Swedish. That’s enough for a few days. Maybe the music box she stole from Viggo will be worth a few hundred more.
Room number 7, where she tried to hang herself a year ago, is on the second floor.
As she goes up the creaking wooden stairs she wonders if the crack in the porcelain sink has been repaired yet. Before she made up her mind to hang herself she had thrown a bottle of perfume against the edge, and the porcelain had cracked all the way to the drain.
But after that everything was very undramatic.
The hook in the ceiling came loose and she woke up on the bathroom floor with the belt around her neck, a thick lip and part of her front tooth missing. She had wiped up the blood with a T-shirt.
Afterwards it was as if nothing had happened. The bathroom looked exactly the same, apart from the crack in the sink and the hole in the ceiling left by the hook. It had been an almost invisible, meaningless act.
She unlocks the door and goes into the room. Just as before, a narrow bed stands by the right-hand wall, there’s a wardrobe on the left and the window onto Viktoriagade is just as filthy as it was before. The room smells of smoke and mould and the door to the little bathroom is open.
She kicks off her shoes, tosses her rucksack on the bed and opens the window to air the room.
From outside she can hear the rumble of traffic and the barking of stray dogs.
Then she goes into the bathroom. The hole in the ceiling has been filled and the crack in the sink has been repaired with silicone and has become a dirty grey streak.
She shuts the bathroom door and lies down on the bed.
I don’t exist, she thinks, then laughs.
She gets her diary and a pen out of her bag and starts to write.
Copenhagen, 23 May 1988
Denmark is a shit country. Pigs and farmers, German girls and German boys.
I am holes and cracks and meaningless acts. In Viktoriagade and in Bergmannstrasse. Then raped by Germans on Danish soil. At the Roskilde Festival, three little German boys.
Now humiliated by a Danish German bastard in a bunker built in Denmark by the Germans. Denmark and Germany. Viggo is German Danish. A German whore’s bastard Danish son.
She laughs out loud. ‘Solace Manuti. Comfort me, I am crazy.’
Crazy. How the hell can anyone be called that?
Then she puts the diary down. She isn’t crazy. Everyone else is.
She thinks about Viggo Dürer. The German bastard.
He deserves to be strangled and dumped in a bomb shelter out on Oddesund.
Born out of a German cunt, and dead in a German shithole. Then the pigs could eat him up.
She picks up her diary again.
She stops and leafs back through it. Two months, four months, six months.
She reads:
V?rmd?, 13 December 1987
Solace won’t wake up after what he did in the sauna. I’m scared she might be dying. She’s breathing and her eyes are open, but she’s completely gone. He was hard with her. Her head hit the wall while he was at it and she looked like a game of pickup sticks afterwards. Spilled out across the bench in the sauna.
I’ve bathed her face with a damp cloth, but she won’t wake up.
Is she dead?
I hate him. Goodness and forgiveness are just another form of oppression and provocation. Hate is purer.