Текст книги "Disgrace"

Автор книги: Jussi Adler-Olsen

Соавторы: Jussi Adler-Olsen
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

The past was dead.

It wasn’t until Ditlev Pram and Torsten Florin were standing in Kassandra’s living room, waiting for her one day, that she realized how impossible it was to escape the past. When she saw them scrutinizing her, she remembered how dangerous they could be.

‘Your old friends have come to visit you,’ Kassandra chirped, in her nearly transparent summer dress. She protested at having to leave her domain – ‘My Room’ – but what was about to happen wasn’t intended for her ears.

‘I don’t know why you’re here, but I want you to leave,’ Kimmie said, fully aware that that was just the beginning of negotiations over who would be in charge and who wouldn’t by the time the meeting was over.

‘You’re too deeply involved in everything, Kimmie,’ Torsten said. ‘We can’t have you pulling out. Who knows what you might do.’

She shook her head. ‘What are you talking about? That I’d commit suicide and leave ugly letters behind?’

Ditlev nodded. ‘For example. There are also other things we could imagine you might do.’

‘Such as?’

‘Does it matter?’ Torsten said, coming closer.

If they grabbed hold of her again she would smash them with one of the massive Chinese vases standing in the corner.

‘The main point is that we know where we’ve got you when you’re with us. You can’t live without it either, just admit it, Kimmie,’ he went on.

She smiled crookedly. ‘Maybe you’re going to be a father, Torsten. Or maybe you, Ditlev.’ She hadn’t intended to say it, but it was worth it to see their faces tighten. ‘Why would I want to go with you?’ She laid a hand on her belly. ‘You think it’s good for the child, maybe? I don’t.’

She knew what they were thinking as they exchanged glances. They both had children, and they’d both been through a number of divorces and domestic scandals. Another one wouldn’t destroy their reputations. Her insurrection was all that troubled them.

‘You’ll have to get rid of that child,’ Ditlev said, unexpectedly harsh.

‘Get rid of’, he’d said. With those three words, she knew the child was in mortal danger.

She raised her hand towards them to demonstrate the distance between them.

‘If you want to protect your interests, then let me be, understand? Just leave me alone – totally.’

She noted with satisfaction how her shift in tone made them screw up their eyes.

‘If you don’t, then you should know I have a box which contains items that could completely destroy you. That box is my life insurance. Rest assured, if anything should happen to me, the box will see the light of day.’ In fact she’d never planned it this way. Granted, she did have the box tucked away, but she’d never considered showing it to anyone. They were just her trophies. A little object for each life they’d snuffed out. Like the Indian’s scalps. Like the matador’s bull’s ears. Like the hearts of the Incas’ victims.

‘What box?’ Torsten asked, as the wrinkles in his fox-face became more pronounced.

‘Just things I’ve collected from our assaults. With the contents of that box, everything we’ve done can be exposed, and if you touch me or my child, you’ll die behind bars, I promise you.’

Ditlev clearly bought it. Torsten, on the other hand, seemed sceptical.

‘Name one thing,’ he said.

‘One of the earrings from the woman on Langeland. Kåre Bruno’s rubber anklet. Remember how Kristian grabbed him and shoved him off the board? Then maybe you also recall how he was standing outside Bellahøj afterwards with the anklet, laughing. I don’t think he’ll laugh when he finds out it’s currently keeping company with a couple of Trivial Pursuit cards from Rørvig, do you?’

Torsten Florin looked away from her. As if he wanted to be certain that no one was listening on the other side of the door.

‘No, Kimmie, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I don’t think he will, either.’

Kristian visited her one night when Kassandra was passed out cold from drinking.

He stood over her by the bed and said the words so slowly and emphatically that every single one of them bored into her.

‘Tell me where the box is, Kimmie, or I will kill you right now.’

He pounded her brutally until he almost couldn’t raise his arms. Pounded her abdomen and her groin and ribcage until bones cracked. But she didn’t tell him where the box was.

Finally he left. Totally drained of aggression. Fully confident that his mission was completed and that Kimmie had simply made up the story about the box and its contents.

When she came to, she was just about able to call the ambulance herself.

33

She awoke with an empty stomach and no appetite. It was Sunday afternoon and she was still at the hotel. An hour’s worth of dreams had given her the assurance that everything would fall into place. What other sustenance did she need?

She turned to her bag containing the bundle, which was on the bed beside her.

‘Today I’m giving you a present, little Mille. I’ve thought about it. You shall have the best toy I’ve ever had in my entire life, my little teddy bear,’ she said. ‘Mummy has thought about giving it to you so often, and today’s the day. Doesn’t that make you happy?’

She sensed the voices lurking, waiting for her to make a blunder, but then she stuck her hand into the bag, felt the bundle, and let the warm feelings take over.

‘Yes, I’m calm now, my love. I’m completely calm. Today nothing will be able to hurt us.’

When she’d been brought in with massive haemorrhaging in her abdomen, the staff at Bispebjerg Hospital had asked her repeatedly how something like that could have happened. One of the head doctors even suggested calling the police, but she talked them out of it. The bruises on her body, she assured them, were the result of a fall from the top step of a long, steep staircase. She’d been having dizzy spells sometimes, and she’d had one as she was standing on that top step. No one had tried to kill her, she swore. She lived alone with her stepmother. It was just a foolish and ugly accident.

The following day the nurses had given her faith that the child would survive. It wasn’t until they brought her greetings from her old school friends that she knew she needed to be careful.

Bjarne came to visit in her private room on the fourth day. It was hardly a coincidence that he was the one who’d become their errand boy. For one thing, Bjarne, unlike the others, was not a public personality; for another, nobody could bring a conversation down to basics like he could, to where empty rhetoric and offhand lies were unable to take root.

‘You say you have evidence against us, Kimmie. Is that true?’

She didn’t respond. Simply stared out the window at the pompous, run-down buildings.

‘Kristian apologizes for what he did to you. He wants me to ask if you’d like to be transferred to a private hospital. The baby’s OK, isn’t it?’

She’d given him an angry glare. It was enough to make him avert his eyes. He was well aware that he didn’t have the right to ask her anything at all.

‘Tell Kristian that it was the last time he’s ever going to touch me or have anything to do with me. Get it?’

‘Kimmie, you know Kristian. He’s not easy to get rid of. He says you don’t even have a solicitor. One that you’ve confided in about us, Kimmie. He also says he’s changed his mind and now believes you do have a box with those items you claim to have. That it seems like something you’d do. He actually grinned when he told me.’ Bjarne made an unsuccessful attempt at conveying the impression by grunting like Kristian, but Kimmie was unimpressed. Kristian never laughed at anything that could threaten him.

‘And if you don’t have a solicitor, then Kristian’s wondering who you’ve allied yourself with. You have no friends, Kimmie, apart from us. We all know that.’ He touched her arm, but she jerked it away. ‘I think you should just tell me where the box is. Is it in the house, Kimmie?’

She turned on him suddenly. ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’

It was clear that he bought it.

‘Tell Kristian that if he just stays away from me, you can keep doing what you do, for all I care. I’m pregnant, Bjarne, haven’t you lot realized that? If those items see the light of day, then I will be hung out to dry, and my baby, too. Don’t you see that? The box is just an absolute emergency solution.’

It was the last thing she should have said.

Emergency solution. If there was anything that could threaten Kristian, it was those words.

After Bjarne’s visit she could no longer sleep at night. Just lay there in the darkness, on guard, with one hand on her belly and the other next to the cord to call the nurse.

He came wearing a doctor’s white coat on the night of 2 August.

She had dozed off for only a moment when she felt his hand on her mouth and the hard pressure of his knee on her chest. He put it bluntly: ‘Who knows where you’ll disappear to when you’re released, Kimmie? We’re keeping an eye on you, but still, you never know. Tell me where the box is, and we’ll leave you in peace.’

She didn’t respond.

He punched her hard in the belly with his free hand, and when she still didn’t answer he punched her again and again until the contractions began, her legs jerked and the bed rocked.

He would have killed her if the chair beside her bed hadn’t been flung over and filled the dead silence in the room with an infernal racket. If the headlights from an ambulance hadn’t lit up the room and nakedly exposed him in all his gruesome wretchedness. If she hadn’t laid her head back and gone into shock.

If he hadn’t felt certain that she was about to die anyway.

She didn’t check out of her hotel. She left her suitcase and simply took the bag with the little bundle and a few other things and walked the short distance to the central station. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon. Now she was going to fetch the little teddy bear for Mille as she’d promised. And after that she would complete her task.

It was a clear autumn day and the S-train was filled with happy nursery-school children and their teachers. Maybe they were heading home from a museum, maybe they were on their way to the park for a few hours. Maybe the little ones would return home this evening to Mum and Dad with flushed cheeks, brimming with tales of multicoloured foliage and flocks of deer on the plains surrounding Eremitage Castle.

When she and Mille were finally reunited, it would be even lovelier than all those things. In the infinite beauty of Paradise. They would gaze at each other and laugh.

For all eternity, that’s how it was going to be.

She nodded and stared across Svanemøllen’s barracks in the direction of Bispebjerg Hospital.

Eleven years ago she’d got out of her hospital bed and taken the little child that lay under a sheet on the steel table at the foot of the bed. They had left her alone for only a moment. A woman in the next room had gone into labour, and there had been serious complications.

She had risen, dressed and swaddled her child in the sheet. And an hour later, after she’d been humiliated by her father at Hotel D’Angleterre, she’d taken the exact same route out to Ordrup that she was taking now.

On that occasion she’d known she couldn’t stay in the house. That the gang would come after her, and the next time would mean the end.

But she also knew that she badly needed help because she was still bleeding, and the pain in her abdomen felt unreal and frightening.

So she was going to ask Kassandra for more money. Make her give her what she needed.

Once again on that day she’d found out what people whose name began with ‘K’ could do to her.

All that Kassandra had angrily shoved into her hand was a lousy two thousand kroner. Two thousand from her and ten thousand from her so-called father, Willy K. Lassen, was as much as they were willing to inconvenience themselves with. And that was far from enough.

When she’d been asked to leave the house and found herself on the street with the bundle hugged to her chest and the sanitary pad between her legs once again completely soaked in blood, she knew the day would come when everyone who had mistreated her and forced her to her knees would pay for what they’d done.

First Kristian, then Bjarne. Then Torsten, Ditlev, Ulrik, Kassandra and her father.

Now, for the first time in many years, she stood in front of the house on Kirkevej, and everything looked exactly the same. The church bells up the hill no doubt still called the staid bourgeoisie to Sunday services, and the homes in the neighbourhood still towered unashamedly. The door of the house was still just as hard to open.

She recognized not only Kassandra’s preserved face when she opened the door, but also the attitude her presence always provoked in her stepmother.

Kimmie didn’t know how the hostility between them had begun. It had probably been back when Kassandra, in her misguided attempts at child-rearing, had locked Kimmie in dark wardrobes, bombarding her with torrents of cruel words, the half of which the little girl didn’t understand. That Kassandra herself had suffered in this insensitive household was arguably a mitigating factor when taking her behaviour into account. But it was no excuse. Kassandra was a devil.

‘I’m not letting you in,’ Kassandra hissed, trying to force the door closed. Exactly as she’d done the day after the miscarriage when Kimmie stood there, injured and in deep despair and need, with the bundle in her arms.

Back then she’d been told to go to hell, and it truly was hell that awaited her. Despite the horrible shape in which Kristian’s blows and the miscarriage had left her, she had been forced to walk the streets for days, hunched over, without anyone offering to help her, or even approach her.

People saw only her cracked lips and filthy hair. Edging away from the repulsive bundle in her hands and her sleeves stained brown by dried blood, they didn’t see a fever-ravaged fellow human in need. They didn’t see a person falling to pieces.

And she’d considered it her punishment. Her own purgatory that she had to endure to atone for all her terrible misdeeds.

It was a junkie from Vesterbro who saved her. Only Tine, that stick-thin waif, ignored the smell that rose from the bundle and the caked-on spittle that had accumulated in the corners of her mouth. She had seen far worse, and she took Kimmie to a room down an alley in Sydhavnen to another drug addict who once, at the dawn of time, had been a doctor.

It was his pills and D&C that got rid of the infection and staunched her bleeding. The price she paid was that she never bled again.

The following week – around the time the little parcel stopped reeking – Kimmie was ready to start a new life on the street.

The rest was history.

Entering the rooms where Kassandra’s thick perfume hung heavy, and all the lingering ghosts laughed at Kimmie as they had always done, was like being frozen in the middle of a nightmare.

Kassandra raised a cigarette to her lips. Her lipstick had long ago been sucked into dozens of earlier cigarettes. Her hands trembled slightly, but through the smoke her eyes followed Kimmie watchfully as she set her bag on the floor. It was obvious that Kassandra felt uncomfortable and her eyes would soon begin darting around. This was not a scenario she had planned for.

‘What do you want here?’ Kassandra asked. Precisely the same words as eleven years before. After the rape and the miscarriage.

‘Do you wish to keep on living in this house, Kassandra?’ Kimmie retorted.

Her stepmother tipped her head back, but otherwise remained still for a moment, thinking, her wrist limp, the blue smoke swirling around her greying hair.

‘Is that why you’ve come? To throw me out? Is that it?’

It was refreshing to watch her struggle to remain calm. This person who’d had the opportunity to take a little girl by the hand and lift her out of a cold mother’s shadow. This miserable, self-loathing, egocentric woman who’d dominated Kimmie’s life with emotional abuse and daily neglect. This woman who’d nurtured in Kimmie all that had led her to where she was today: mistrust, hatred, cold indifference and lack of empathy.

‘I have two questions that you’d be wise to answer nice and snappy, Kassandra.’

‘Then you’ll leave?’ She poured a glass of port from the carafe she’d no doubt made attempts at emptying before Kimmie arrived, and took a measured mouthful.

‘I’m not making any promises,’ Kimmie said.

‘What are your questions?’ Kassandra sucked the cigarette smoke so deeply into her lungs that nothing exited when she exhaled.

‘Where’s my mother?’

She tilted her head back, her mouth slightly open. ‘Oh my God. Is that your question?’ She turned abruptly to Kimmie. ‘Well, she’s dead, Kimmie. She’s been dead for thirty years, the poor thing. Didn’t we ever tell you?’ Once again she tilted her head back and made a few sounds that were supposed to express surprise. Then she turned again to Kimmie. This time her face was hard. Merciless. ‘Your father gave her money, and she drank it. Need I say more? Amazing that we never told you. But now that you know, does it make you happy?’

The word ‘happy’ permeated all the cells in Kimmie’s body. Happy?!

‘What about my father? Have you heard from him? Where is he?’

Kassandra knew that question was coming. She was repulsed. Just the word ‘father’ was enough. If anyone hated Willy K. Lassen, it was her.

‘I don’t understand why you want to know. For all you care, he could burn in hell, couldn’t he? Or do you just want to make sure he is? Because I can assure you, you daft girl, that your father is indeed burning in hell.’

‘Is he ill?’ she asked. Maybe what the policeman had told Tine was true.

‘Ill?’ Kassandra snuffed out her cigarette and stretched her arms with fingers spread and nails jagged. ‘He’s burning in hell with cancer in all his bones. I haven’t spoken to him, but I’ve heard from others that he’s suffering terribly.’ She pursed her lips and exhaled heavily as if she were expelling Satan himself. ‘He’s suffering terribly and will be dead by Christmas, and that’s fine with me, do you hear?’

She smoothed her dress a little and pulled her glass of port on the table towards her.

That meant Kimmie, her little one and Kassandra were the only ones left. Two cursed K’s and the tiny guardian angel.

Kimmie lifted her bag off the floor and put it on the table beside Kassandra’s carafe.

‘Tell me, were you the one who let Kristian in when I was expecting the little one here?’

Kassandra watched as Kimmie opened the bag a bit.

‘Dear God! Don’t tell me you have that hideous thing in that bag!’ She could tell from Kimmie’s face that indeed she did. ‘You’re sick in the head, Kimmie. Take it away.’

‘Why did you let Kristian into the house? Why did you let him come to me, Kassandra? You knew I was pregnant. I’d told you I wanted to be left alone.’

‘Why? I didn’t care one iota about you and your bastard child. What did you expect?’

‘And you just sat here in the living room while he beat me up. You must have heard it. You must have known how many times he punched me. Why didn’t you call the police?’

‘Because I knew you deserved it. Isn’t that right?’

‘I knew you deserved it,’ she’d said, and the voices began sounding off in Kimmie’s head.

Punches, dark rooms, derision, accusations – all of it making a racket in Kimmie’s head, and now it had to stop.

In one bound she leaped forward and seized Kassandra’s hairdo, forcing her head back so she could pour the rest of the port into her. The woman stared in confusion and surprise at the ceiling as the liquid drained into her windpipe and made her cough.

So she clamped Kassandra’s mouth shut and clutched her head in a headlock as her coughing fit and attempts to regurgitate grew stronger.

Kassandra grabbed Kimmie’s forearm and tried to shove it away, but life on the streets creates a sinewy strength that dwarfs that which an elderly woman gets from spending her days ordering people around. Her eyes grew desperate as her stomach contracted, driving gastric acid up to the mounting catastrophe about to take place somewhere between her windpipe and oesophagus.

A few, quick, futile inhalations through her nose caused further panic in Kassandra’s body, which now flailed with all its limbs to get free. Kimmie held tight and closed off every opportunity for life-giving oxygen to get in, and Kassandra went into convulsions as her chest heaved frantically, drowning her whining.

And then she became still.

Kimmie allowed her to fall right where the battle had been fought, letting the smashed port glass, the coffee table that had been knocked out of place, and the regurgitation that flowed from the woman’s mouth speak for itself.

Kassandra Lassen had always enjoyed the good things in life, and now they had taken that life from her.

An accident, some would say. Predictable, others would add.

Those were precisely the words one of Kristian Wolf’s old hunting mates had been quoted as saying when they found him with a severed femoral artery down at his Lolland estate. An accident, yes, but predictable. Kristian was known for being careless with his shotgun. One day something was bound to go wrong, the hunting buddy said.

But it was no accident.

Kristian had controlled Kimmie from the day he first laid eyes on her. He had coerced her and the others to participate in his games, and he had used her body. He had pushed her into relationships and pulled her out again. He had gotten her to lure Kåre Bruno to Bellahøj with promises of them getting back together. He had goaded her into shouting for Kristian to shove Kåre over the edge. He had raped her and beaten her, once, then a second time, so the baby didn’t survive. He’d transformed her life on multiple occasions, each time for the worse.

After she’d been living on the streets for six weeks, she saw him on the front page of a tabloid. He was smiling, had made some terrific business deals and was about to leave for a few days of relaxation on his Lolland estate. ‘No animal on my grounds should feel safe,’ he had said. ‘My aim is excellent.’

She stole her first suitcase, put on impeccable clothes and took the train to Søllested, where she got off and walked the last three miles in the twilight until she reached the estate.

She spent the night in the bushes, listening as Kristian’s constant yelling inside finally forced his young wife to flee upstairs. He slept in the living room and after a few hours was more than ready to take out his personal shortcomings and general frustrations on vulnerable pheasants and any other living creature within range.

The night had been ice-cold, but not for Kimmie. The thought of Kristian’s blood, which would soon be spilled for his sins, felt like a summer heat wave. It was life-giving and inspiring.

Ever since boarding school she had known that Kristian’s restless soul drove him out of bed long before anyone else. A couple of hours before a hunt, he would stroll round the hunting grounds to get a feel for the terrain and to ensure the best cooperation between beaters and hunters. Several years after he’d been murdered, she could still clearly recall the moment when she finally spotted him walking through the gates of his estate and out to the fields. Fully equipped in the manner the upper classes considered fitting for a killer to look: squeaky clean, foppish, and with shiny, laced-up boots. But what did they know about real killers?

Moving swiftly, she had followed him at a distance through the windbreaks, sometimes fearing that the noise of crackling leaves and twigs would alert him. If he saw her he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. An accident, he would call it. A misunderstanding. A false assumption that he’d seen a deer or some wild animal.

But Kristian didn’t hear her. Not until the moment she leaped out at him and jammed the knife into his sex organs.

He fell forward and thrashed about, eyes wide open in recognition that the face above him would be the last thing he’d see.

She pulled his shotgun over towards her, and let him bleed to death. It didn’t take long at all.

Then she turned him around, tucked her hands inside her sleeves and wiped off the weapon, stuck it in the corpse’s hand, aimed the barrel at his groin and fired.

The police report concluded that it was an accidental shooting and the cause of death was given as exsanguination following the severing of a major artery. It was the most talked-about hunting accident of the year.

Yes, it was labelled an accident, but not for Kimmie, and a rare peace settled over her.

Unlike the other gang members. She had vanished without a trace, and they all knew that Kristian would never have died in such a way without assistance.

Inexplicable, people called Kristian’s death.

But Kimmie’s old friends didn’t buy it.

It was at this point that Bjarne turned himself in.

Maybe he knew he would be next. Maybe he’d made a pact with the others. It didn’t matter.

She read about the case in the newspapers. About how Bjarne accepted the blame for the Rørvig murders, and thus she could now live in peace with the past.

She called Ditlev Pram and told him that if he, Ulrik and Torsten wanted to live in peace, too, they’d have to pay her a certain amount of money.

The procedure was agreed upon and they kept their word.

That was smart. At least it bought them a few years before their fates caught up with them.

For a moment she looked at Kassandra’s body, wondering why she didn’t feel a greater sense of satisfaction.

It’s because you’re not finished yet, said one of the voices. No one can feel happiness halfway to paradise, said another.

The third voice was silent.

She nodded and removed the bundle from her bag, then slowly made her way up to her rooms, explaining to the little one how she’d once played on those stairs, sliding down the banister when no one was watching. How she’d always hummed the same song over and over when Kassandra and her father couldn’t hear her.

Small moments in a child’s life.

‘You can stay here while Mummy finds Teddy for you, my love,’ she said, laying the bundle carefully on the pillow.

Her bedroom was exactly as she’d left it. It was here she’d lain for a few months, feeling her belly growing. Now this would be her final visit.

She opened the balcony door and felt her way in the fading light towards the loose tile. There it was, right where she remembered it. The tile moved surprisingly easily, which she hadn’t been expecting at all. It was like opening a door that had just been oiled. Dark forebodings came over her, making her skin grow cold. Then, when she put her hand in the hollow space and found it empty, the cold became a warm, burning sensation.

Her eyes feverishly scanned the tiles surrounding the loose one, but she knew it was in vain.

Because it was the right tile, the right hollow. And the box was gone.

Now all the nasty K’s in her life lined up before her as the voices howled inside her, laughing hysterically as they gave her a scolding. Kyle, Willy K., Kassandra, Kåre, Kristian, Klavs and all the others who’d crossed her path. Who had crossed it this time and removed the box? Was it the very ones whose throats she’d planned to stuff the evidence down? Was it the survivors, Ditlev, Ulrik and Torsten? Could they really have found the box?

Trembling, she noticed how the voices had gathered into one. How they made the veins in the back of her hand throb visibly.

This hadn’t happened in years. The voices concurring.

The three men had to die. For once the voices were in total agreement.

Exhausted, she lay down on the bed next to the little parcel, brimming with past humiliations and subjugations. Her father’s first, hard punch. The alcohol breath behind her mother’s fiery red lipstick. The sharp fingernails. The pinches. The yanking of Kimmie’s fine hair.

After they’d given her a thrashing she would sit in the corner, her shaking hands hugging little Teddy. It was someone she could talk to and be consoled by. Small as he was, Teddy spoke with authority. ‘Take it easy, Kimmie,’ the stuffed animal had said. ‘They’re just evil people. They will disappear one day. Suddenly they’ll be gone.’

When she grew, the tone changed. Now the teddy bear would say that she should never, ever let anyone hit her. If anyone was going to do the hitting, it should be her. She mustn’t tolerate being mistreated.

And now Teddy was gone. The only thing in her life that called forth small glimpses of happy, childhood moments.

She turned to the bundle, stroked it softly and, overcome with remorse at not being able to keep her promise, said: ‘You can’t have your teddy bear now, little angel. I’m so sorry.’