‘It won’t go anywhere else,’ Dicte said to Kaiser, who was in the Copenhagen press office and about to put the newspaper to bed.
As soon as she had said it she knew what his response would be. And true to form he roared down the telephone and she had to hold it at arm’s length. Bo gave her a look of support, which was easy for him to do: he wasn’t the one being screamed at for refusing to follow orders.
‘How the hell do you know? How do you know they haven’t sent copies of that execution to every single newspaper on the planet?’
She stared at the blue screen and wished she could take some time out to escape everything she had to confront now: the ethical considerations, the moral dilemma, the never-ending balancing act between circulation figures, informing readers and satisfying the public’s endless craving for news of axe killers, rapists, incest and severed body parts. Not to mention her eternal rows with Kaiser.
‘Because it would have been on the TV or the radio news. That envelope must have been waiting here for me since this morning. I only opened my mail half an hour ago.’
‘What about the other newspapers? Have you forgotten about them?’
She had forgotten nothing. But why would anyone send the CD to a newspaper rather than a TV station? And even weirder: out of all the journalists in the country, why send it to her?
‘They wouldn’t run this story without checking the facts first.’
‘What’s there to check? You tell me.’
‘Precisely. We don’t have anything. Anyone could have sent us that film. It could be someone who wants to make it look like terrorism. Right-wing extremists, for starters.’
She must have hit a nerve because he didn’t reply. Her shoulders were so tense they were around her ears and she was gripping the phone as if it were a safety strap on a runaway bus.
‘We just can’t use the story in its current state,’ she went on. ‘It doesn’t add up. There are no demands. None of it makes any sense. We can’t even be sure that the film isn’t a computer-generated hoax.’
As she spoke she played the film once again in her mind. There was nothing computer-generated about it; she was sure of that and so was Bo. But Kaiser hadn’t seen it yet because the Copenhagen office hadn’t been sent a copy. Only her. Shit. As if her life wasn’t frenetic enough, what with bomb threats and Marie the robot shooting at suitcases, which was enough to send her blood pressure rocketing.
‘I want a cracking article,’ Kaiser ordered, but she detected the hesitation in his voice. She had successfully planted a seed of doubt in his mind. ‘We’ll clear the front page.’
‘Give me until tomorrow. Please. The story won’t go anywhere.’ Dicte realised she was repeating herself, knew she was going in circles. ‘You’ll have it by tomorrow, I promise, and by then we might have some sort of explanation, no matter how far-fetched.’
She could almost hear the cogs turning inside Kaiser’s head, and she pictured him sitting with his feet on his desk and a secret stash of cake in his drawer, from which he would break bits off whenever his wife, who was the arts editor, wasn’t looking. That was how it had been during her time in Copenhagen under The Kaiser. She knew how his moustache would twitch when he chewed and how he would slide further and further down his chair until he was practically horizontal.
‘If I see that story anywhere else tomorrow, it’ll be on your head,’ he said at length.
Dicte’s wisest course of action was to change the subject and pretend that he hadn’t just made a huge concession. ‘What about Aarhus and Marie?’
‘What about them?’
‘Where are they going?’
‘Page seven.’
‘No front page reference?’
‘Nothing happened.’
Dicte leaned forward and sighed, steaming up her monitor. When would she ever learn? Near-disasters did not sell newspapers. She thought about the film and was tempted. At least this story, with her by-line, would smash the sound barrier. It had been a long time coming. A familiar—but unwelcome—tingle of excitement spread through her solar plexus.
‘Talk to you tomorrow,’ she said, and hung up.
‘Tricky?’ Bo said.
He massaged the back of her neck. She tilted her head backwards and his heat spread to her.
‘Piece of cake. Now let’s go home.’
As they stepped through the door to their house in Kasted they saw that Svendsen, Dicte’s dog, was on heat. The pale grey floor tiles in the hall were decorated with red stains and she was lying in her basket looking mortified. Cups and plates from that morning’s breakfast were still on the kitchen table next to a vase of half-dead roses. Someone had forgotten to top up the water. When Dicte opened the wardrobe in the bedroom, her neighbour’s big black kitten jumped right out at her.
She glared at Bo as though it were all his fault. ‘Who forgot to let him out?’
‘Who let him in?’ he parried.
‘The dog,’ she sidetracked. ‘Every time she’s let in from the garden, she lets the kitten go first. He thinks Svendsen is his mum.’
Bo shrugged, sat down on the bed, then lay back on the pillows.
‘Why not? They’re the same colour.’
Dicte watched the black and white kitten rush out into the kitchen in search of food. It reminded her that she hadn’t eaten. Quite the opposite: she had brought up what little she had in her stomach all over the stained carpet of the newspaper office.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Me too,’ Bo said, reaching out for her.
Their kisses were meant to make the images from the film fade and die, but it was as though someone had drained Dicte’s battery and only her reserves remained. Her thoughts flew off in all directions. She missed Rose, but her daughter had become an independent nineteen-year-old, and not a day went by without her mother imagining a series of assaults or rapes. She missed the way Rose dealt calmly with the dog and the kitten, the way she tended the flowers and cleared up after breakfast.
‘The other hunger, then?’ Bo asked softly as he saw his hopes dashed. ‘Something fleshless?’
‘Fleshless sounds good,’ she replied, turning her thoughts to the film once more. Meatless. Headless. Senseless.
She snuggled up closely to him and inhaled his scent.
‘So why me?’ she asked, finally articulating what had been in the air for the last few hours.
He said nothing, so she went on.
‘Why send the film to a provincial branch and not to the main newspaper office in Copenhagen? Why send it to a newspaper and not a TV station, where it would receive much more exposure?’
Bo raised himself up on his elbow and gently nudged her out of the way. She looked up at him. At his earnest grey eyes and his delicate skin, at the stubble and his sideburns, at his ponytail. Only a few hours earlier she had wanted him, but now her desire had evaporated and turned into sheer fear. Because she was absolutely sure now, as sure as if she had heard the knell of a doomsday chime, that change was on its way.
‘Perhaps it’s someone you know or who knows you,’ he suggested.
‘But who could it be?’
He said nothing. The earlier gloom returned. Once more she missed Anne and she hadn’t even left yet. What kind of a life had Dicte lived these last forty-four years? At the age of sixteen she had given birth to a child and handed it over for adoption. From that day forward she was shunned by her own family, rejected by all those who normal people take for granted: parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters. The loss of her child had always resided inside her, like a deep, placid lake. Social services had intervened and she had come to Aarhus to study and live in a student hall. But then in her desperation she had done something stupid and they had locked her up in a police cell where she had lain on a mattress surrounded by cold walls and impregnable windows.
She could still recall the graffiti scrawled on the unplastered walls by the cell’s previous occupants. She could still smell the stale sweat and urine in the mattress.
They had been nice to her. They had given her supervised probation and yet she was still consumed with a deep-rooted aversion to the system.
Dicte stared up at the ceiling where a spider had spun its deadly trap between the rows of halogen bulbs.
She had felt trapped and there had been no one who could empathise. No one to understand. No one to love her or whom she could love in return, without exposing herself. In that way she had always been different and the close links she had were few. Others had been enemies and the thought that someone might have caught up with her was hard to handle.
‘It can’t be right. I don’t mix with killers and nutters. I don’t even know how …’
Bo still hadn’t said anything; he just kept looking at her as though he was hoping she would eventually say it herself. So she did.
‘… it feels …’
She returned his gaze. ‘Is that why, do you think?’
He was eight years her junior and had not been a part of her old life. She thought there would be times when he would tire of all the baggage she was carrying, even though he handled it well most of the time. Of course he had a past, too. But although there was the divorce from Eva and two children to look after every other weekend, it seemed as if it was always her past that took up the most room.
Bo shrugged and sat up straight on the edge of the bed next to her. He was suddenly closed and she recognised a sense of despair. Now they would have to go there again. Once more they would be cast up in a whirlwind and the blasts of reality would separate them: her, headlong into a new case; him, a powerless spectator, watching from the sidelines.
‘It’s not true,’ she mumbled, tugging at his sleeve to make him contradict her and turn back time, just by a few hours, to some kind of imagined state of normality. ‘Tell me it’s not true.’
But he didn’t. He didn’t mention the other issue either, but it lay between them like a dead weight:
She knew what it was like to kill.