Camilla remained seated in the kitchen after Michael ended the call. The smoke from her cigarette slowly drifted toward the open kitchen window.
Back in the living room, people were starting to leave. Anders was already in the hallway, calling out to his family. She watched them through the door.
Sofie had changed so much behind the thick, black hair and the heavy eye makeup. The last time Camilla had been back, her niece had been a smiling, happy fourteen-year-old with her long, blond hair tied up in a ponytail. Now it was cut and colored, and the girl seemed sullen and withdrawn. Camilla felt like giving her a hug, but instead simply looked at her while Anders kissed his mom good-bye.
* * *
“But he didn’t bite off her nipple.” Michael tried to defend himself the next morning, when Camilla barged into his small office and demanded an explanation. She hadn’t slept a wink, and thoughts were swirling around in her head.
“This is confidential,” he began and pointed to a chair. “What made us arrest him is the fact that the man lives at Ruth’s Hotel every summer for two months. In that period, he’s usually with Annette three times a week.”
Camilla quickly calculated that her friend had netted an amount close to 250,000 kroner per month, tax-free.
“But when he’s admitted to being with her, you can’t just let him go because of his fucking dental record,” she shouted across the table, frustrated.
Michael continued:
“Our CSI techs secured some pretty good bite marks from Annette’s breast, and we can tell that a big piece of the tooth next to the right front tooth is missing. The suspect doesn’t have that kind of dental injury. And we won’t get him into custody on the basis of what we have. We need more evidence to support our suspicion.”
“What about fingerprints?” Camilla asked. “And DNA?”
“The examinations are under way, and right now we’re waiting for the results. But the perpetrator was smart enough to remove his fingerprints, and that tallies with his clumsy attempt to burn down the summerhouse. He’s tried to obliterate all traces.”
* * *
Camilla was in a bad mood when she reached SkagensPosten. She nodded curtly to the two painters’ assistants who were working in the storeroom, where the fire had destroyed the walls.
H.C. was writing an anniversary article about the local sawmill. He nodded to her absently but looked up from his monitor when she started spreading out papers on the editorial table in the middle of the room.
It was her father’s series of articles. The last one was to be published this week, and that suited Camilla just fine. Following Annette’s murder, her intense indignation at the scam artists had dwindled somewhat. Of course, she would follow through with the investigative articles, but right now she had a hard time thinking about anything other than the man the police had released.
“This week, the municipality will be completely stripped bare,” she said, catching H.C.’s eyes. “They’ll have to find out who’s behind the scams.”
“Honestly, don’t you think that you were investigative enough when you wrote about the prostitution?” H.C. asked, looking away.
The blow struck her like a fist when she realized that he was indirectly accusing her of causing Annette’s death.
“You don’t think this matters, do you? Don’t touch anything that soils your fingers,” she ordered angrily. She got a cigarette going and exhaled the smoke with a snort. “Is that what you think?”
He ignored her, and Camilla knew that she ought to let it go. She was in charge, so there was no reason for discussion if she wanted to print the story.
H.C. mumbled something but still didn’t look at her.
“What was that?” She approached his desk.
He finally looked up when she was right in front of him and quietly said, “If you want to root around in the filth, it’s wise to clean up your own dirt first.”
“You imply that I’m responsible for the death of Annette,” Camilla raged, dropping some ash as she leaned toward him, so that he had to move back a little.
“No, definitely not!” he quickly defended himself.
“Then what is it you’re trying to say?”
“I’m just saying that if you poke your nose into other people’s business, then you risk that they’ll start poking their noses into your affairs.”
“And you think I don’t want to be scrutinized myself? Scrutinize away, I’ve no problem with that.”
“I’m not quite sure Anders feels the same way.”
Camilla straightened up a bit and put out her cigarette in a saucer while she looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“I really don’t think my brother is hiding any big secrets. His life is too goddamn boring for that.”
He had turned back to the monitor.
“Come on, tell me what you mean, H.C.!”
“Doing all these exposés might tempt somebody to investigate what the fishermen do with all the fish they net but can’t land at Skagen,” he finally said. “No one believes that they voluntarily throw several hundred kilos of perfectly fine fish back into the sea.”
H.C.’s face closed, and Camilla knew that he had said what he wanted to say. She also knew that there could be something to what he said. If her own stepbrother had fiddled with his catch, and someone started calculating the amount of undeclared money made this way, she would have to write about that in the paper, too.
* * *
Anders smiled in surprise as he opened the door and invited Camilla in. He told her that he had just picked up her father in Frederikshavn, and that a hospital bed was being installed in their bedroom.
“I didn’t figure we’d get it all squared away so quickly,” he said and asked her if she wanted some coffee.
Camilla shook her head. “No thanks. I want to know how much you’ve tampered with your catches, and how much undeclared money you could be accused of having made over the years.”
He had come to a halt mid-step and turned around to face her, mouth agape.
She had expected some kind of defense or attack, but instead he went and sat down at the dining table.
“Actually, I’ve wondered whether it would surface eventually,” he said and folded his hands before looking at her. “I guess it’s better to beat them to it before somebody starts talking about it behind our backs.”
Camilla nodded.
“When I go out to sea to catch my quota, I’m allowed to land a certain number of kilos of cod here in the harbor, but that’s not the only kind of fish I net. Maybe there are three or four hundred kilos of salmon in the catch, so I have an arrangement with this guy in Vedbæk. When I get close, I call him up, and then he sails out and loads. Those are the fish they serve at the good restaurants in Copenhagen. Otherwise, those damn Copenhageners wouldn’t be able to get salmon at that price.”
He finished with a dry laugh, but his serious mood soon returned.
“And you consent to my writing about it?” Camilla asked.
Anders nodded slowly.
“Everybody does it. It’s good, big fish and we can’t avoid netting them. Should we just throw dead fish back into the sea where they’re no good to anybody?”
“How much do you make?”
“Between seven and ten thousand. Nothing much. And now that the oil has become so expensive, it’s hardly worth doing the trip anymore.”
Camilla had expected much more money to be involved. It was difficult to reason with what her stepbrother had been doing, even though he was legally in the wrong.
They sat for a while in silence before she shook her head. She couldn’t decide what to do about potential accusations against a member of her own family.
“Just write the story,” Anders said, interrupting her chain of thought.
“You sure?”
He nodded and saw her out when she got up. By the door they met Sofie, who quickly dodged into her room. Camilla got just a glimpse of the silhouette of a young guy sitting on the bed.
* * *
She went straight back to the editorial office and wrote the article. When she was done, she asked H.C. to make room for it in the paper before deadline.
“Nest all cleaned up,” she tersely notified him on the way out the door before hurrying home to make it in time for dinner.
* * *
“I still don’t understand how Annette could think of it,” Camilla repeated after dinner. “What did she want all that money for?”
Her dad sat at the end of the table, where they had made room for the wheelchair.
“She probably had her reasons,” Eva said quietly.
Camilla was about to say something but was interrupted.
“I have a great deal of sympathy for your sense of justice,” her stepmom continued, “and all the things you notice and understand. But sometimes you can’t see beyond the tip of your own nose.”
She was about to protest, but she fell silent when her dad nodded.
“Who do you think paid to make sure her mother has stayed alive so far? Where do you think the money came from? The money that made it possible for her to go on extended stays at private clinics in Germany? And who do you think paid for those expensive radiation treatments? Did you think it was the municipality or our health care system? Because I can tell you it wasn’t. Annette paid for her mother, and Hanne never asked where she got the money from, because she didn’t want to hear the answer.”
The silence lay so heavily over the kitchen that it was a relief when, a moment later, there was a knock on the door and Michael entered to welcome John back home.
* * *
“The DNA matches. And we’ve found a single fingerprint to go with it. We’ve got it all except for those damn teeth,” Michael told them when Eva had poured coffee for him and the conversation had turned to the recent murder. “The tooth that made the bite mark has a big piece missing, so there’s no mistaking it.”
Camilla looked at her dad, who listened attentively. He still couldn’t speak, but he was able to communicate in writing via his laptop.
Not once had he inquired how the investigation to find the culprits, whose fault it was that he was now in a wheelchair and had to communicate in this way, was coming along. It didn’t seem to hold his interest. It seemed that he had resigned himself to the circumstances and realized that nothing much would improve even if the guilty party were caught and punished.
“Did you check if the man has been to his dentist to fix the tooth after the killing?” he now wrote.
Michael nodded. “He hasn’t.”
Again, fingers scuttled across the keyboard: “He could have looked up one of the local dentists!”
Michael nodded again.
“But he hasn’t; that’s already been looked into.”
John wrote again: “Maybe he took a little trip across the border down south?”
Michael sat for a moment before he got up and left the kitchen and the steaming cup of coffee without saying a word.