Death Sentence

of cigarettes and lit one. In the glow from the lighter, I saw that his face was pockmarked and it was dark around one of his eyes. He hummed to himself as he stretched his lean body and grabbed another bin bag.

My next bag contained children’s clothing. Small socks, shorts and T-shirts spilled out and buried my feet. I kicked them out of the way. People really did throw away an unbelievable amount of children’s clothes. Surely there must be something somewhere I could use. Irritably, I glanced at the man next to me. He had found a pair of corduroy trousers. He turned them over and over while nodding to himself, then he stood up and held the trousers up to his waist. His cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth and he looked down himself with approval. A little ash fell on the corduroy trousers and he brushed it off carefully.

The anger rose inside me. Those trousers would have suited me. In fact, they were too big in the waist for him and a little too short for his long skinny legs. I was supposed to have found them. I was there first. They belonged to me.

I got up and stepped over to him. At first he didn’t notice. He was focused on his trophy and grinned idiotically at his luck. Finally, he looked up. His half-open eyes stared into mine with wonder and he frowned. Without a word, I grabbed hold of the corduroy trousers and yanked them from him. However, he had a strong grip and I only succeeded in pulling him closer.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he grunted.

‘Let go,’ I said. ‘They’re mine.’

‘No, they’re bloody not,’ he replied tugging at the trousers. ‘I found them, find your own.’

I let go of the trousers, but only to shove the man hard in the chest. He fell backwards and the cigarette slipped out of his mouth. His eyes were no longer half closed, but wide open, and he stared at me in disbelief.

‘Give them to me,’ I ordered him.

He tried to get back on his feet, but I pushed him and he fell again. His head snapped backwards and he hit it against the pavement with a sickening thud.

‘Shit!’ I swore and knelt down by his side.

Wailing noises were coming from his mouth and his eyes closed for a moment. When he opened them again and looked at me, there was fear in them. He let go of the trousers and scrambled away from me.

‘You’re a psycho, man.’

I took a step towards him and held out my hand. ‘I’m really—’

‘Stay away from me!’

I picked up the trousers and got back to work. The bin bag he’d ripped open lay exposed like a cadaver and I searched through it quickly. There were several pairs of trousers, jumpers and even a pair of shoes. I cradled everything in my arms and walked back to the car. With some effort I managed to open the door to the passenger side and dumped the clothes on the seat.

The man in the long coat had reached the next set of steps where he sat down, hugging himself and glaring at me.

I ignored him, got in the car and drove off.

34

I CHANGED CLOTHES in the car. It wasn’t easy. A Mercedes Smart has roughly the same floor space as a shop cubicle, but is only half as tall. Apart from the corduroy trousers, the bin bag had yielded a jumper that fitted me, while the shoes, a pair of blue deck shoes with tassels, were one size too big, but at least they weren’t covered in blood.

I dumped my blood-soaked trousers and shoes in a skip in the car park where I had changed. I felt relieved and, as I also abandoned the car, I felt I had put as much distance between me and Linda Hvilbjerg as I could. I couldn’t banish the images of her naked body hanging in the living room, but I did my best to keep them at bay. I had to.

Now my daughter was all that mattered.

I had tried to protect Linda, but being with her had made no difference. She had been murdered right before my eyes – all right, so they had been closed and I had been in a deep sleep, but it had happened while I was near. So how would I be able to protect my daughter?

I walked back to the hotel without finding the answer. It was a long walk and I had money for a taxi, but I preferred walking. I think better when I walk and I needed some time out. I reviewed the murders. I tried to imagine the person who was capable of carrying out these killings exactly as I had described them in my books. It was risky. Murder was my home turf, not his, which ought to give me an advantage, or at least a chance to understand him. But what was he hoping to achieve? Did he mean to punish me, challenge me or was it a tribute? I was fairly sure he expected me to make the next move. He had done that with Linda. Like a chess player, he had set a trap and waited for me to make my move, a move by which I would expose myself and thus lose my knight. Now he was going for my queen and it wasn’t enough for me to lose her, I also had to feel that I had lost her.

Chess had never been my strong point, but murder was. For more than half my life I had planned murders. I had described the psyche of countless murderers to explain why they did what they did, and even though it had become just a business over the years, it was always important to me that it made sense. To me, job satisfaction was the moment everything added up. I was proud when a scene or a detail slotted into the story like a missing cog that makes everything else turn. The sensation never lasted long, but it made it all worthwhile.

I was vain about my plots. I hated it when readers sent me letters pointing out inaccuracies in the killings, things that were physically impossible or errors in the narrative. There was always some tiny piece of information it hadn’t been possible for me to check. They were usually trifles with no impact on the story, certainly not given the genre, but it still irritated me.

Take the fish in the Gilleleje murder, for instance. In the book I had described how the fish had nibbled away at the victim’s body and swum off with large chunks of her flesh. When Verner told me this hadn’t been the case, I had experienced a certain amount of pique. The same pique had hit me when I saw the colour of Verner’s hands. In As You Sow I had described them as purple and swollen, like a pair of dark leather gloves, but in the hotel room they had the same colour as the rest of his body.

Perhaps I wasn’t the expert after all.

I stopped in my tracks.

My heart must have skipped a couple of beats and was now trying to make up the shortfall. I staggered to the nearest bench where I sat down and concentrated on my breathing. I closed my eyes and pressed my palms against my ears to block out sound and make room for thought. I was on to something. I was convinced of it. It felt just like when I was close to solving a problem in a novel. An intoxicating feeling. Better than sex.

I knew what the killer wanted.

He didn’t want to punish me or celebrate me.

He wanted to educate me.

It may sound strange, and thinking back it certainly is weird, but at that moment I felt relief. I believed I now understood what the killer wanted from me, and the first step towards stopping him was precisely that. It was the cornerstone in practically all my books.

The killer had shown me there were inaccuracies in the murders I had described. In the Gilleleje murder it was the fish, at the hotel it was the hands, but Linda Hvilbjerg? I recreated the image of her hanging like a lump of meat in the elegant living room. I had received several letters regarding that murder. I hadn’t read all of them, but a couple had pointed out that the victim’s blood pressure wouldn’t be high enough after the blood loss to produce the garden sprinkler effect.

Truth be told, I had suspected that when I wrote the book, but for once I had ignored the facts. I was more