Politiken Literary Agency
Erik Valeur
Logbook from a Lifewreck
Translated into the English by Agnes Broome
Politikens Forlag
Author’s preface
A PREMONITION
The premonition came to him in his dreams, while he was sleeping, smiling in his sleep, like children do.
The woman.The sea.Her hands. Her hands were reaching out to him, as though the woman was calling for him to come.
Viggo Larssen woke with a small yelp that went unnoticed, because he always slept alone. As soon as he woke in the dark, he instantly knew what the dream meant, and that was why he would come to call the nocturnal vision of the woman The Premonitionwhen he got older.
He told no one about his fear; not his mother, not his grandmother, definitely not his grandfather, who was notorious in the neighbourhood for his bad temper and suffered from persistent, crippling migraines.
They were grownups. They wouldn’t understand and they already thought he was peculiar. That was the word the grownups would use. Like everyone else, they feared the unknown, the unusual, the visions that could not be explained. That kind of phenomenon belonged to other worlds and must never be allowed to invade their neighbourhood.
Viggo Larssen let his strange dream live on in a place no one could find, that he alone had access to. From time to time, the dream recurred. The hands.The sea.The woman, who looked like his mother.
A dark shadow, that whipped the water into white foam around her feet. But the shadow beneath the surface never reached up into the light before he awoke.
Even at that tender age, he understood that his nocturnal visions required deeper thought than anything he had encountered thus far in his young life. No one on this Earth would be able to relate to the strange dream in any way, so he preferred to be alone. He thought about death, but that was a dangerous word, and he never used it while awake. He shoved all his fear into a dark corner of his mind, like children do. When as a 15-year-oldhe recognised his premonition in another person’s description, it did not happen as the result of decades of research or heretofore unheard of perspicacity, but simply as a result of that in which Destiny has been the one true expert since the dawn of time – surpassed by neither God nor the Devil – happenstance.
The simple fact was that there was a confluence of otherwise unrelated events that no one had foreseen and no thought can explain,which created a pattern that Viggo Larssen nevertheless already knew existed.
He did not for a second doubt the existence of the pattern – but he concealed his knowledge, as he had concealed his dream.
When the dramatic events at the Solbygaard nursing home in Gentofte brought an end to this dormancy, he had long since grown up.
1 August 2015
Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes
…
… And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance!
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince
Prologue
THE MISSING WIDOW
The Prime Minister’s Office
- Thursday 1 January 2015, late at night
The Prime Minister shook his impressively massive and – as wicked tongues insisted on calling it – grotesquely heavy head.
He was clutching it between a pair of mitts large enough to envelop it completely.
A newspaper journalist had once (supposedly drawing on the work of a cranial osteologist) determined that it “weighed at least seven pounds” – more than a medium-sized bowling ball – and right now you could almost hear his thoughts rattling around behind the furrowed brow of the Head of Government, unable to find an outlet.
Once upon a time, the Prime Minister’s mother had given him a stack of comic books about trapper Davy Crockett, and now the man, long since grown-up, looked, absurdly enough, like a wounded bear in that comic, crashing through a thicket, rearing up on its colossal hind legs and emitting a deafening roar that made no noise, but that you could see soaring up and up towards the sky in enormous, oversized speech bubbles.
Raging yet silent agony, followed by legions of exclamation points, which lent the dying warrior an almost human aspect…
… in real life, not a sound escaped the thick lips that dominated the Prime Minister’s expression of tightly controlled fury. Prime Ministers rarely raise their voices in their official capacity, or even in private.
Instead he got to his feet and paced around his desk in a large, futile circle, before returning to his chair and sitting back down.
The seat and backrest were made of Congolese buffalo leather; the chair had been a gift from an African delegation that had failed to consider their host’s impressive fighting weight; every part of the relatively slender piece of furniture creaked under the bulk of his gargantuan body. The man sitting across from him had kept his seat. His head was cast in the same mould (though it was of slightly less ponderous proportions) as the Prime Minister’s, and it was obvious that the two men were closely related, and that they had been born no more than a few years apart and taken a strong likeness to the parent who had contributed the dominant genes. Their eyebrows were grey and thick, their foreheads rose up high above their broad noses, and what hair had once adorned their heads was gone, save for a wreath at the back.
The younger man leaned forward (as though to calm them both with that one gesture), but without speaking, of course; he was, after all, number two in the realm.
The positions held by the two brothers, as Prime Minister and Justice Minister respectively in the dark blue government that had succeeded the blue-red coalition in 2011, had put everyone in mind oftwo famous American counterparts, the assassinated Kennedy brothers. The press had wasted no time in annexing the wildly embellished myth of the Kennedy clan, to which Denmark suddenly had a tenuous claim, christening the two senior politicians and their broods of power hungry sons and daughters the Blegman dynasty.
The Danish nation’s first truly famous political dynasty was – much like the Kennedy clan in the sixties – headed by an imposing widow; her husband, who had been an ungodly tyrant, had passed away at a relatively young age, after which she took control of the family. The widow Blegman was almost ninety, but was deeply revered, even after the brothers had been forced to move her into the nursing home Solbygaard in the posh suburb of Gentofte. The Widow Blegman had come down with a serious case of pneumonia, which refused to clear up, but the first few months at the home, with its beautiful view of tall trees in a park-like garden, seemed to have done her a world of good.
And yet, tonight, the widow Blegman was the problem. “Where is she?!”said Palle Blegman, who since his youth had been known among his friends (and in time among him enemies as well) as The Bear. His middle name was Bjørn, and people read into that what they wanted. His voice was remarkably deep and his question was not a strange one, though his artless way of phrasing it made it sound ever so slightly inane.
The youngest member of the country’s most powerful duo, Poul Blegman, replied in a slightly higher register, but with virtually the same naïve tone, with the only thing he could say: “I don’t know”.
Neither one of the remarks would have been suitable for public consumption, or even to be heard outside the high-ceilinged room, the country’s most lavish, which people had taken to calling, slightly disrespectfully, the Bear’s Den.
The two brief utterances revealed a bewilderment the Blegman brothers never displayed publically, not when giving speeches and not when talking to voters. Here, in the embrace of desperation, their voices took on the same deep tone, the kind that ends in a rumbling in the chest long after the last syllable is spoken.
“He must have some kind of goddamn theory…” The Bear opined.
“He’s fuckingpedantic – he makes a virtue of workingincredibly… slowly, too slowly,” his only brother replied.
The object of their contempt was the capital’s most experienced police officer and the Head of Homicide – known to the nation by one single name: the Commissioner. He had obviously been asked to lead the investigation that was now expanding by the minute and would soon cover extend far beyond the nursing home in Gentofte and the affluent streets surrounding it; an investigation focused on just one person: their mother.
The Commissioner’s record was impeccable. The brothers had sent for him immediately, but with a few hours having passed with no tangible results, their patience was now wearing thin.
“He’s screwingus over…” Once again the younger of the Blegman brothers furiously underlined the central words.
The Prime Minister sat back down and raised his hands, cupping them around his chin, cheeks and temples. If anyone had seen him so openly frustrated, they would still not have believed it possible.
“I’m calling him.”
“No.” Palle Blegman shook his enormous head twice, and the two men looked more like a couple of wounded Davy Crockett bears than ever (the famous trapper could kill six or seven in a single comic book). “I’ll do it myself.”
There were journalists who had smugly renamed the Blegman dynasty the Clan of the Cave Bear, but no one dared to write that in their paper, and certainly not say it out loud on television. Even in a land with a press that took endless pride in being critical and courageous, there was something threatening and terrifying about the two brothers, which made otherwise merciless critics pull their punches, sensing that even the most modern of weapons might fail and cost the attacker his life.
The Prime Minister reached for the phone.
*
The Commissioner’s Office
-Thursday 1 January, just before midnight
The Commissioner was a stylish yet unobtrusive man. He wasn’t particularly tall, but nor did he look squat, he was neither fat nor thin, not too dark nor too light, and had it not been for his aura of authority (which sometimes came across as hostility) he would have been a perfect example of the kind of typical Dane you pass in the street every day.
To place such a calm and balanced man at the centre of the monstrous police HQ at the heart of the capital – and to have him spearhead the fight against the most gruesome of human crimes – might have seemed slightly absurd, but he was the best at what he did and everyone knew it. The Commissioner shook his head for what was at least the tenth time that night and turned to his second in command, who was known only as “Number Two” in the long hallways the Homicide Directorate. Outside of the police HQ, no one knew him at all.
“This is completely insane. Who abducts an old lady from a nursing home, and what in god’s name for?”
Number Two replied without hesitation, as was his habit: “Money”.He delivered the statement matter-of-factly. There were people in Homicide who could no longer recall his real name, and his contributions to discussions (or more penetrating analyses) were rarely of the long and convoluted kind. Consequently, he was, in his inconspicuous way, an efficient investigator and as far back as anyone could remember, he had been the Commissioner’s undisputed favourite and only confidant. They had gone through trainingtogether, they had been partners on late-night patrols around Dyrehavsbakken and in the seediest part of the city when they first joined the force.
“Ransom?” The Chief of Homicide said. “Maybe.Terrorism… no. Then they would have cut her head off and left in the middle of Rådhuspladsen a long time ago or blown up the whole nursing home, don’t you think?”
The brutal nursing home scenario madehis aide-de-camp close his eyes for a moment, possibly picturing the smoking ruins. He had a reputation for being more sensitive than his superior, behind the hard-bitten façade. The office the two of them shared at HQ was not very large and contained nothing at all beyond two armchairs, a Brazilian rosewood desk and two office chairs made of blonde walnut with wide, comfortable armrests.
“The clan… the dynasty… is affluent, but there are far richer families. Sure, they are influential, but…” – the Commissioner’s moment of hesitation was followed by another headshake – “... no, it doesn’t make sense. We allknow she’s old and frail. That’s public knowledge, so if anyone wanted the Widow dead and on her way to Heaven – or Hell – they just had to sit on their hands for a few months. It doesn’t add up.”
This was the third version of the same statement he’d made in less than thirty seconds, and Number Two could already sense his superior’s hatred of this unknown adversary – the hatred that fuelled the drive for which he was so renowned. A predecessor in his job had remarked, slightly pompously, that “you hunt a beast but capture a human” – but that was not how the current Commissioner saw things. In his view, beasts remained beasts, even if some namby-pamby judge or overly merciful god were later to have the hare-brained notion of showing leniency and forbearance. That kind of nonsense belonged in the courts on Bredgade – or the afterlife – and both places were far from Polititorvet in Copenhagen.
The first officers to arrive at what was now being termed the crime scene – Solbygaard Nursing Home – had found the Widow’s small two-room flat in an almost sterilely perfect condition. A slightly upset canary sat on the uppermost perch in a birdcage on oneof the windowsills. On the coffee table was a small stack of the New Year’s editions of various papers and a newsletter; everything seemed calm and serene.
There was no sign of a struggle – or any kind of disturbance – no one had seen her leave and no one had seen anyone go in, but that was hardly remarkable, since the staff spent most of their time in the large office above the dining hall, usually with the door locked so they could get on with their work without distractions. Piles of paper lay scattered between coffee cups: schedules, forms, tables and excel sheets, all waiting for a loving hand – of the modern kind. Evaluation and quality control was here, as in the rest of the elderly care sector, the number one priority, or at least the priority that took up the most time.
Half an hour later, the two police chiefs arrived in person; this missing person was, after all, the Prime Minister’s mother, and he was demanding action.
The first thing they had done was to seal off the Widow’s small flat, then the ward, then the entire building and finally all of the vast, parklike area southeast of Bernstorffsvej. No more than an hour had passed since the Blegman brothers had made the call. Their mother had invited them over for six o’clock; by that time she had already disappeared, and she had not turned up for dinner shortly before either. The door to her flat had been left ajar, the two senior ministers claimed, and that was, of course, an important detail to consider. It seemed out of character for the First Lady of the Blegman Dynasty to leave anything whatsoever ajar, let alone the door to her home.
The police technicians had almost immediately come upon a small piece of yellow plastic, about the size of a hand.
It was found on a windowsill between two elegant china figurines of H. C. Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard and photographs of the Widow’s three sons, the youngest of whom had died very young. They had carefully put the peculiar find in a sterile bag. It did not look like something the elderly woman would have used to beautify her view.
Ten minutes later they had found another, similar piece of plastic, this time under the Widow’s pillow. This had alarmed them considerably. Was this a sign of senility, which might explain the old woman’s disappearance, or had someone brought the yellow pieces of plastic into the flat, and if so, why?
The third clue – spotted by sharp police eyes – was the most remarkable, and naturally, Number Two did not fail to appreciate its potential significance. One logical questions to the frightened manager of the nursing home was enough for him to confirm the unsettling feeling that had been growing stronger by the minute. He was no longer in any doubt…