The Killing 3 Read online

  Contents

  Principal Characters

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Seventeen days later

  Praise for The Killing II

  Praise for The Killing

  Also by David Hewson

  Acknowledgements

  Principal Characters

  Copenhagen Police

  Sarah Lund – Vicekriminalkommisær, Homicide

  Lennart Brix – Head of Homicide

  Mathias Borch – Investigating officer, Politiets Efterretningstjeneste (PET); the internal national security intelligence agency, a separate arm of the police service

  Ruth Hedeby – Deputy Director

  Tage Steiner – Lawyer for internal affairs

  Asbjørn Juncker – Detective, Homicide

  Madsen – Detective, Homicide

  Dyhring – head of PET

  Politics

  Troels Hartmann – Prime Minister, heading the Liberal Party

  Rosa Lebech – leader of the Centre Party

  Anders Ussing – leader of the Socialist Party

  Morten Weber – Hartmann’s political adviser

  Karen Nebel – Hartmann’s head of media relations

  Birgit Eggert – Finance Minister

  Mogens Rank – Justice Minister

  Kristoffer Seifert – former Socialist Party worker

  Per Monrad – Ussing’s campaign manager

  Zeeland

  Robert Zeuthen – heir to the Zeeland business empire

  Maja Zeuthen – Robert’s estranged wife

  Niels Reinhardt – Robert Zeuthen’s personal assistant

  Emilie Zeuthen – the Zeuthens’ daughter, aged nine

  Carl Zeuthen – the Zeuthens’ son, aged six

  Kornerup – CEO of Zeeland

  Others

  Vibeke – Lund’s mother

  Mark – Lund’s son

  Eva Lauersen – Mark’s girlfriend

  Carsten Lassen – a doctor at the university hospital

  Peter Schultz – deputy prosecutor

  Lis Vissenbjerg – pathologist at the university hospital

  Nicolaj Overgaard – former Jutland police officer

  Louise Hjelby – girl in Jutland

  One

  Wednesday 9th November

  They always gave her the young ones. This time he was called Asbjørn Juncker, twenty-three years old, newly made up to detective from trainee, now gleefully sorting through the skeletons of wrecked cars in a run-down scrapyard on the edge of the docks.

  ‘There’s an arm here!’ he cried as he rounded the rusting husk of a long-dead VW Beetle. ‘An arm!’

  Madsen had a team of men moving out to sweep the area. He looked at Lund and sighed. Asbjørn had turned up at the Politigården from the provinces that morning, assigned to homicide. Fifteen minutes later while Lund was half-listening to the news – the financial crisis, more about the coming general election – the yard called to say they’d found a body. Or more accurately parts of one scattered among the junk. Probably a bum from the neighbouring shantytown in the abandoned dock. Someone who’d scrambled over the fence looking for something to steal, fallen asleep in a car, died instantly the moment it was picked up by one of the gigantic cranes.

  ‘Funny spot to take a nap,’ Madsen said. ‘The grab sliced him in half. Then he seems to have got cut about a bit more. The crane operator choked on his coffee when he saw what was happening.’

  Autumn was giving up on Copenhagen, getting nudged out of the way by winter. Grey sky. Grey land. Grey water ahead with a grey ship motionless a few hundred metres off shore.

  Lund hated this place. During the Birk Larsen murder she’d come here looking for a warehouse belonging to the missing girl’s father. Theis Birk Larsen was now out of jail after serving his sentence for killing the man he thought murdered his daughter. Back in the removals business from what Lund had heard. Jan Meyer, her partner who got shot during that investigation, was still an invalid, working for a disabled charity. She’d gone nowhere near him, or the Birk Larsens, even though that case was still unsettled in her own head.

  She looked across the bleak water at the dead ship listing at its final anchor. Ghosts still hung around her murmuring sometimes. She could hear them now.

  ‘You’re not really going to take a job in OPA, are you?’ Madsen asked.

  The Politigården was always rife with gossip. She should have known it would get out.

  ‘I get a medal for twenty-five years’ service today. There’s only so much of your life you can spend out in the freezing cold looking at pieces of dead people.’

  ‘Brix doesn’t want to lose you. You’re a pain in the arse sometimes, but no one does. Lund—’

  ‘What?’ Juncker squealed, clambering through the wreckage. ‘You’re going to count paper clips all day long?’

  OPA – Operations, Planning and Analysis – did rather more than that but she wasn’t minded to tell him. Something about Juncker reminded her of Meyer. The cockiness. The protruding ears. There was an odd, affronted innocence too.

  ‘They said I was going to work with someone good . . .’ the young cop started.

  ‘Shut up Asbjørn,’ Madsen told him. ‘You’re doing that already.’

  ‘I’d also like to be called Juncker. Not Asbjørn. Everyone else gets called by their last name.’

  They’d recovered six pieces of a half-naked, middle-aged man’s body. Juncker’s was the seventh.

  There was an old wheelbarrow next to the Beetle. She asked the scrapyard manager for a price. He seemed a bit surprised but came up with one quickly enough. Lund handed over a few notes and told Juncker to put it in the boot of her car.

  His hands went to his hips.

  ‘Is someone going to look at my arm or not?’

  Stroppy young men. She was getting used to them. Mark was supposed to come round for dinner that evening with his girlfriend. First visit to her new home, a tiny wooden cottage on the edge of the city. She wondered if he’d make it or invent one more excuse.

  Juncker nodded at the photographer now taking pictures where he’d been, then stuck a finger in the air like a schoolboy counting off a list.

  ‘There’s no ID. But he’s got a gold ring and some tattoos. Also the skin’s wrinkled like it’s been in water.’ He pointed at the flat, listless harbour. ‘In there.’

  Lund looked at the scrapyard man, then the derelict area beyond the nearest wall.

  ‘That used to be warehouses,’ she said. ‘What’s it now?’

  He had a sad, intelligent face. Not what she expected in a spot like this.

  ‘It was one of Zeeland’s main terminals. The warehouses were just a favour on the side to the little people.’ He shrugged. ‘Not so many little people any more. And just a few containers going through. They shut up most of it the moment things turned bad. Almost a thousand men gone overnight. I used to manage the loading side of things. Worked there ever since I left school . . .’

  He didn’t like talking about this. So he lugged the wheelbarrow over to Lund’s car, opened the boot, and set it next to a couple of rosebushes waiting there in pots.

  ‘He’s been in the water. He’s got tattoos,’ Juncker repeated. ‘There’s marks on his arm that look like they came from a knife.’

  The shantytown next door was a sprawling shambles of corrugated iron and rusting trucks and caravans set on the car park to the old dockyard. That was never there when she was hunting the murderer of Nanna Birk Larsen.

  ‘He was a bum who wandered in here looking for something to nick,’ Madsen cut in. ‘
We’ll take the photos. You can try writing up the report if you like. I’ll check it for you.’

  Juncker really didn’t like that.

  ‘There’ll be trouble if we don’t look busy round here,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ Lund asked.

  ‘Politicians on the way.’ He nodded at the scrapyard manager who was looking closely at Lund’s plants, seemingly unimpressed. ‘He told me. They’re doing a photo opportunity with all them homeless people.’

  ‘Bums don’t have votes,’ Madsen grumbled.

  ‘They don’t have gold rings either,’ Juncker pointed out. ‘Did you hear what I said? The big shots are going to talk to the men left in the dockyard. Troels Hartmann’s coming they reckon. Here in an hour.’

  Ghosts.

  This place had just acquired a new one. Hartmann had been a suspect in the Birk Larsen case, one whose ambition and arrogance almost ruined his career. Pretty boy, Meyer called him. The handsome Teflon man of Copenhagen politics. As soon as he was cleared he scored an unlikely victory to become the city’s mayor. Then two and a half years ago, after a campaign racked by vitriol about the collapsing economy, he’d emerged victor in a general election, becoming the Liberals’ Prime Minister leading a new coalition.

  ‘Hartmann was in that big case of yours,’ Juncker added. ‘I remember that.’

  It seemed like yesterday.

  ‘Were you here then?’ she asked without thinking.

  Asbjørn Juncker laughed out loud.

  ‘Here? That was ages ago. I read about it when I was in school. Why do you think I joined the police? It sounded—’

  ‘Six years,’ Madsen said. ‘That’s all.’

  Long ones, Lund thought. Soon she’d be forty-five. She had a little place of her own. A dull, simple, enclosed life. A relationship to rebuild with her son. No need of bitter memories from the past. Or fresh nightmares for the future.

  She told Madsen to keep on looking and make sure nothing untoward came near the media or the approaching political circus. Then she drove back to the Politigården, a small bay tree bouncing around in the footwell of the passenger seat, changed into her uniform, the blue skirt, blue jacket, watched all the others turning up for their long service medals. They seemed so much older than she felt.

  Brix came and nagged about the OPA job.

  ‘I need you here,’ he said. The tall boss of homicide eyed her up and down with his stern and craggy face. ‘You don’t look right dressed like that.’

  ‘How I dress is my business. Will you give you me a good reference?’ She was anxious about this. ‘I know there are things in the past they won’t like. You don’t need to dwell on them.’

  ‘OPA’s where people go to retire. To give up. You never—’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  He muttered something she couldn’t hear. Then, ‘Your tie’s not straight.’

  Lund juggled with it. Brix was immaculate in his best suit, fresh pressed shirt, everything perfect. The more he stared, the worse the tie got.

  ‘Here,’ he said and did it for her finally. ‘I’ll talk to them. You’re making a mistake. You know that?’

  The forbidding red-brick castle called Drekar was once a small hunting lodge owned by minor royalty. Then Robert Zeuthen’s grandfather bought it, enlarged the place, named his creation after the dragon-headed longships of the Vikings. A man intent on founding a dynasty, he loved the fortress in the woods. Its exaggerated battlements, the sprawling, manicured grounds running down to wild woodland and the sea. And the ornate extended gargoyle he built at the seaward end, fashioned in the fantastic shape of a triumphant dragon, symbol of the company he created.

  The ocean was never far away from the thoughts of the man who built Zeeland. Starting in the 1900s Zeuthen had transformed a small-time family cargo firm into an international enterprise with a shipping fleet running to thousands of vessels. Zeuthen’s own father, Hans, had carried on the expansion when he inherited the company. Finance and IT subsidiaries, consulting arms, hotels and travel firms, even a domestic retailing chain came to bear the Zeeland logo: three waves beneath the Drekar dragon.

  By the time Hans Zeuthen died, not long before Troels Hartmann became Prime Minister, his clan was a fixture on the nation’s social, economic and political landscape. And then the company fell into the nominal hands of his son as managing owner, heading a corporate board.

  Robert, third generation, was cut from different cloth. A quiet, introspective man of forty he was at that moment wandering round the forest outside the family home looking for his nine-year-old daughter Emilie.

  Thick woodland, bare in winter. Zeuthen marched through the trees, across the carpet of bronze autumn leaves, calling her name. Loudly but with affection. His ascent to the throne of Zeeland had come at a cost. Eighteen months before his wife Maja had left him. Soon the divorce would come through. She was now living with a doctor from the main city hospital while Zeuthen played the part of single father, looking after Emilie and her six-year-old brother, Carl, as much as he was allowed under the separation agreement, and through the ceaseless pressures of work.

  Hans Zeuthen had lived through a time of growth and prosperity. His son was experiencing none of this. Recession and business failures had hit Zeeland hard. The company had been laying off workers for four years and there was still no real sign of any recovery. Several subsidiaries had been sold off, others closed for good. The board was getting anxious. Investors were openly worrying whether the enterprise was best left in the hands of the family.

  Robert Zeuthen wondered what else they expected. Blood? The crisis had cost him his marriage. The precious bond of family. There was nothing left to give.

  ‘Emilie?’ he cried again into the bare trees.

  ‘Dad.’ Carl had walked up behind in silence, dragging his toy dinosaur. ‘Why won’t Dino talk any more?’

  Zeuthen folded his arms and gazed down at his son.

  ‘Perhaps because you launched him out of your bedroom window? To see if he could fly?’

  ‘Dino can’t,’ Carl said innocently.

  He tousled the boy’s hair and agreed with that. Then called for his daughter again. Another day and it would be time for the kids to stay with their mother. For the best part of him to leave again. And that meant Maja too.

  A figure came racing out of the trees. Blue coat, pink wellies, legs flying, blonde hair too. Emilie Zeuthen dashed towards him, launched herself at his chest, arms wide, pretty face all mischief.

  The same old challenge. The one she’d made almost as soon as she could talk.

  It said . . . catch me, Dad. Catch me.

  So he did.

  When he’d stopped laughing Zeuthen kissed her cold cheek and said, ‘One day I’ll miss you, girlie. One day you’re going to fall.’

  ‘No you won’t.’

  She had such a bright, incisive voice. A smart kid. Old for her years. Emilie led Carl a merry dance. Did that for the staff in Drekar too, not that they loved her any the less for it.

  ‘No you won’t, Dad,’ Carl repeated and got the dinosaur to give him a playful bite on the leg.

  ‘When can I have a cat?’ Emilie asked, arms round his neck, blue eyes firmly on his.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Walking. You promised.’

  ‘I said you could have a pet. Anything but a cat. I’ve got to talk to Mum about it. Between us . . .’

  Her face fell. So did Carl’s. Zeuthen had never imagined he’d lose Maja, lose them a little too. He’d no idea what to say by way of comfort, no access to the easy words he was supposed to offer.

  Instead he took them by the hand, Carl to his left, Emilie to the right, and together they walked slowly home.

  Niels Reinhardt was in the drive with his black Mercedes. Another of his late father’s bequests. Reinhardt was the family’s personal assistant, liaison man between the Zeuthens and the board, a fixer and social arranger who’d been doing this ever since Robert was a child himself. Now sixty-
four, a tall and genial man, always in suit and tie, he looked ready to go on for ever.

  The newspaper was in Reinhardt’s hands. Zeuthen had seen the story already. An exclusive claiming that Zeeland was about to renege on its promises to Hartmann’s government and abandon Denmark as its headquarters.

  ‘Where do they get these lies?’ Zeuthen asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Reinhardt replied. ‘I’ve told the board you want to convene a meeting immediately. Hartmann’s people are going crazy. He’s getting questions from the press of course.’

  Maja was on the steps of the house, green anorak and jeans. They’d met as students. Falling in love had seemed so easy, so natural. She didn’t know who he was at the time, didn’t much care when she did find out. He was the stiff, shy, plain-looking rich boy. She was the beautiful, fair-haired daughter of charming hippie parents who ran an organic farm on Fyn. They’d scarcely known a cross word until his father died and circumstances forced him to take the reins of Zeeland. After that . . .

  She marched down the steps, the face he’d come to love wreathed once more in anger and resentment. Reinhardt, always a man wise to the moment, took the children by the hand, said something about finding dry shoes and led them into the house.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said and pulled a piece of paper out of her jacket.

  Pictures of a tiny tabby kitten. Small hands stroking the creature’s fur. In one photo Emilie was clutching the little creature to her tummy, beaming at the camera.

  Zeuthen shook his head.

  ‘I’ve been to the school, Robert! She was funny with me last week. Wouldn’t talk. As if she had some kind of secret.’

  ‘She seems fine.’

  ‘How would you know? How much time do you spend with her when she’s here?’

  ‘As much as I can,’ he said and it wasn’t a lie. ‘I told her she couldn’t have a cat . . .’

  ‘Then where did she get it? She’s allergic to them.’

  ‘The kids are under supervision every hour they spend with me, whether I’m there or not. You know that, Maja. Why not ask your mother? You didn’t need to come out here for this. You could have called.’

  ‘I came here to take them with me.’