Three fire trucks were parked in front and the flames were licking up the walls and eating through the roof as dense smoke wafted toward the sky.
Michael parked right outside of SkagensPosten. Camilla got out of the car, shaken, and trailed him as he went over to talk to the inspector.
“It was started deliberately, no doubt about that,” an elderly fire chief said, nodding gravely toward a shattered window. “Looks like there was gasoline in the bottles that were thrown through the windows.”
“Was anybody in there?” Camilla asked, stepping closer. “What about H.C.?”
Hans Christian was SkagensPosten’s only full-time journalist, and he had worked at the paper for as long as Camilla could remember.
The inspector shook his head. “Nobody was there. We’re trying to get the fire under control before it spreads further.”
The soot had blackened the white wall and the water formed small pools, but the fire was still too violent for Camilla to get close enough to view the extent of the damages.
“What in the world is going on?” Camilla exclaimed, and she put her hands in front of her face to shield it from the heat of the flames. She shook her head uncomprehendingly as Michael began pulling her away from the fire. “It must be the same people who beat up my dad.”
She glanced once more at the flames before turning her back to the fire trucks and the men who still struggled to get the fire under control. Her chest buzzing with impotence and disquiet, she slowly started walking while Michael told her that the police had found no traces of the perpetrators of the assault, except for a married couple who thought they had seen two people leaving the paper’s small parking lot on a moped.
Camilla crossed the street and began walking home.
* * *
It was almost a week since John Lind had been put on a respirator in the neurosurgical ward. According to the doctors, it was a small miracle that he survived, but it was hard for Camilla to reconcile herself with the hospital’s latest announcement.
“His speech center is damaged and there’s a high risk of partial paralysis,” the consultant had said that morning. “Sadly, it’s likely that he’ll have trouble moving around and reduced strength in the entire right side of his body.”
Aphasia was the next word that got through to her.
“He’s suffering from aphasia, has lost his language skills, and will have trouble expressing himself,” the doctor continued, then tried to soothe Camilla by saying that John might be able to express himself in writing. Before they left the hospital, he had been taken off the respirator, so his body could begin to heal on its own.
Her thoughts were blocking each other. Assault and then fire. Everything was whirling around in her head. Brakes screeched, and a horn was pressed with a vengeance when she absentmindedly stepped off the curb to cross Sct. Laurentii Street.
“Bitch!” a man shouted after her, and she flipped him off while trying to focus her thoughts on Cyprus and her assignment. But in the middle of her personal chaos, it was hard to muster the appropriate enthusiasm about the turning over of the EU Presidency and the official celebratory ceremony that would follow. Camilla gave up, as her thoughts kept returning to SkagensPosten anyway.
On her way back from the hospital earlier in the day, she had stopped by the paper. H.C. had been sitting at his monitor with a grim look on his face, and she guessed that he had already been informed of the grievous prospects for his longtime boss and friend.
After the assault, he took over the daily management of the paper, and when Camilla had said that she would continue her dad’s series of articles about the Danish straw men acquiring properties for wealthy Norwegians, he had initially turned her down and promised that he would run it himself. She had insisted until he’d accepted, admitting that he could probably use the extra manpower. The second article in the series had just been published.
* * *
It was almost half past ten when Camilla awoke the next morning. She missed Markus down to the bone, and David, too, at least a little bit, and she needed a cigarette and a strong cup of coffee. She felt like she had been dragged from one nightmarish dream to the next during the night.
She was completely worn out and a little dizzy when she sat up. She was already fed up with sleeping on a makeshift bed in her old room.
She put on a pair of sweatpants and pulled the T-shirt from the day before over her head before she began the descent down the narrow stairway, but she stopped abruptly and listened when she heard men’s voices coming from the kitchen.
“We’re terribly sorry to hear what happened to your husband, and it’s entirely understandable if our call is a bit inconvenient.”
Camilla raced down the last steps and peered into the kitchen. Two men stood with their backs against the door, explaining that they came from The Media House in Aarhus. She concluded it was the executive vice president and the financial manager of the group and withdrew to the living room. She just couldn’t deal with any more strangers stopping by to express their grief, so she flopped onto the couch with her laptop as her stepmother invited them in for coffee.
“We’re talking millions…in the three digits,” one of the men said.
Camilla was torn from her thoughts of moneyed Norwegians who apparently didn’t care at all that SkagensPosten was continuing its series of articles about the illegal property purchases.
Now curious, she got up and headed into the kitchen, where the coffeepot was waiting. She introduced herself and listened attentively as they presented their offer.
“We could make the takeover happen pretty quickly,” the executive vice president said, looking at them from one to the other.
“But what would a possible takeover mean for the future of the paper?” Eva asked when he had finished. And Camilla began shaking her head as soon as the somewhat younger financial manager explained that SkagensPosten would become part of a chain along with seventeen other local papers, sharing common editorial guidelines as well as photo archives. They didn’t mention the printing works, but reading between the lines, she could clearly see that there was no future for exclusive art books.
The two men left their cards on the kitchen table, and silence filled the room. Camilla grabbed the sugar bowl as Eva poured coffee in their cups.
“It’s hard to think straight,” Eva exclaimed as she sat down. She fumbled for one of the little handkerchiefs in her apron pocket and dabbed at her watery eyes.
Camilla reached across the table and put her hand on her stepmother’s arm.
“Don’t even think about stuff like this right now,” she said, trying to sound soothing. “We’ve got more than enough on our plates. H.C. will see to it that everything is tidied up and squared away after the fire, and as far as I understand, Michael has arranged for some guys from the National Guard to cover up the places where the flames went through the roof. Luckily, nothing happened to the editorial office.”
Eva nodded, acknowledging this as some minor comfort, at least. Someone knocked at the door and she looked toward it. For a moment, Camilla was afraid it was the two guys from the papers returning, so she was relieved to find Michael there, telling her that the cleanup at the newspaper offices had gone well.
“A glazier will come around later today,” he said.
“Coffee?” Eva asked mechanically, rising.
“I’d love some, but I’m really here to tell you about a new development in our investigation. A new witness has come forward in connection with the assault.”
“What about the fire? Has anybody seen anything?” Camilla asked.
The detective shook his head.
“Unfortunately, it seems that most of the neighbors near the offices sat glued to their televisions, engrossed by Tour de France,” he replied apologetically. “But right now, we’re looking for two young people who have been rumored to hang out at a nearby campsite. I just came back from there. Our dogs found a bloody baseball bat near the edge of the wood. We’re sure that’s what was used. On Monday it will be sent to the CSI techs.”
“On Monday! Helloooo, it’s Saturday. How about today?” Camilla exclaimed, eyeing her old flame testily.
“It’s the weekend, you know, and when it’s not a homicide, things don’t always move along so quickly,” Michael said, sounding defensive. But she had already turned away from him.
A shadow crossed Eva’s face as she hushed her stepdaughter.
“I assumed you’d like to be kept up to date when something new happened,” Michael added as an awkward silence descended.
Camilla heaved a sigh and breathed in deeply.
“And we do. But I don’t give a shit if it’s the weekend or if the moronic neighbors are watching a bicycle race, so the whole town can burn down around them without them even noticing. And you’d better come up with something better than wasting your time on two punks from the campsite.”
She took a deep breath.
“First, my dad is almost killed, but apparently ‘almost’ doesn’t count with you guys. Then, the paper nearly goes up in flames, and you make it sound like it’s just a couple of adolescent pranks. Come on. Please!”
She smacked her hands onto the table with a bang that made Eva twitch.
Michael’s face tightened as he watched her.
“Fine, stay mad.”
Suddenly, Camilla felt as if they were still lovers. She knew that he’d had a hard time getting over their breakup when she, at sixteen, had decided to move to the other end of the country to live with her mom in Roskilde. And if she forgot for a moment, the way he looked at her now was a sure reminder.
“We don’t have reason to believe that there are more sinister motives behind this, even if your dad did publish the articles about the straw men. There is no indication that the perpetrators wanted something specific. That’s why we believe that the location was chosen arbitrarily. It looks like a burglary gone off the rails.”
Gone off the rails, well, that was one way of looking at it.
“Then what about the fire?” she demanded, bringing her hand down heavily on the table and causing the coffee to spill and run down the tablecloth. “This is not a coincidence. It’s got something to do with either the Danish straw men or the wealthy Norwegians. And you know what? This is not something I should need to be fucking telling you. The police should be able to figure this out for themselves.”
On the way out, she turned and looked back at him standing on the steps.
“I helped my dad find the names of a couple of the Norwegians involved. I’ve got them in Copenhagen, but I’ll get David to e-mail them. Spend your Sunday on that, then you’ll also get away from that nagging hag at home!”
She shouldn’t have said the last part, she knew, but hadn’t caught herself in time. To be honest, she had never quite forgiven him for getting engaged to someone else from their old class. He could have chosen anybody else, and it wouldn’t have bothered her. But it still stung a bit because Camilla had never liked her.
Either he’d not heard what she said, or he’d heard and was hurt, but he didn’t let on.
“I’m going down to the paper to put the rest of the series of articles on a laptop, so they don’t all suddenly disappear.”
“If there’s anything to your guesswork, then don’t even think about printing any more of those articles!”
He had followed her down the stairs and stood quite close.
“Of course I will,” she snapped. “I just can’t figure out how all this is connected to the fact that the people from The Media House in Aarhus showed up exactly as the last embers died out.”