Fatal Crossing

by Lone Theils

Genres: Female Sleuths

Synopsis

"A fast-paced and skilfully plotted thriller" BARRY FORSHAW

When a picture of two Danish girls who disappeared on a boat bound for England in 1985 emerges many years later in an old suitcase from a British second-hand dealer, the journalist Nora Sand's professional curiosity is immediately awakened.

Before she knows it, she is mixed up in the case of a serial killer serving a life sentence in a notorious prison. The quest to discover the truth about the missing girls may be more dangerous that she had ever imagined...

Fatal Crossing is inspired by a real incident, in some photos of unknown girls, taken at Copenhagen Central Station, appeared in the possession of an American serial killer. Journalist and author Lone Theils was fascinated by the case, and set to work on her debut novel.

Translated from the Danish from Charlotte Barslund

Release date: February 21, 2017

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 300

Sample

1

The balding man looked like any other middle-aged, African schoolteacher. He wore light grey cords and a freshly ironed shirt. Calmly and methodically he poured Earl Grey tea into floral china cups. Nora caught a faint hint of almond oil and detergent as he leaned over the small, battered table with the tiled top and politely added milk to her tea. He dropped two lumps of sugar into his own cup and stirred it once. Then he started his account of executions, rapes, mutilations and murders.

The stories swirled around Nora's head, one atrocity overtaking the next. Schoolchildren witnessing the gang rape of their teacher before they themselves were hacked to death with machetes. Massacres of villagers that went on until the murderers were too tired to lift their arms and so they locked up the survivors with the corpses until the next day when the killing resumed. The man, who for his own security could only be referred to as ‘Mr Benn’, resumed his monotonous narrative.

Nora clutched her cup. The urge to throw hot tea into the face of the impassive man was overwhelming. To get a reaction, detect a hint of humanity in his expressionless face. Emotion. Regret.

And yet she controlled herself. Because that's how Nora Sand, foreign correspondent for the Danish weekly magazine Globalt, operates: she listens, she gathers information, and she writes. She's a pro.

‘I have one final question,’ she said in a neutral voice.

He gave her a look that had left humanity behind a long time ago.

‘Yes?’

‘Why? Why did you do it?’

He gave a light shrug. ‘Why not? It's what they deserved. They were nothing but cockroaches. All we did was clean out the kitchen.’

Nora shuddered. She fumbled with a button on her Dictaphone. Then she switched it off and got up, a little too abruptly.

Pete, who had been sitting in the corner, rose too, swapped lenses on his camera and got to work.

Shadowy photographs of the man who now called himself Mr Benn. Blurred pictures of his face. Close-ups of his dark hands. And although Mr Benn's hands were clean and his nails well manicured, Nora thought she could still see traces of blood.

They were the images of a man who had kept his liberty because he had chosen to inform on those higher up the chain of command. His evidence had enabled him to pass through the British asylum system and today he enjoyed a peaceful life in a southern English coastal town where the most exciting thing that ever happened was the annual fete. Nora wanted to throw up.

X

Pete appeared outside. Nora dug out the car keys and tossed them to him. He caught them in mid-air.

‘You drive. I’m knackered,’ she said, getting into the passenger side of his battered Ford Mondeo.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Tough?’

He was a man of few words, but when he did speak what he said was weighty and uttered in an unmistakable Australian accent.

Nora had a lot she wanted to get off her chest, but the words stuck in her throat.

‘There are limits to how much —’

Pete quietly stowed his equipment in the boot, got in and started the car. Instead of following the road that would take them back on to the motorway to London, he chose the coastal route.

Nora said nothing. They had worked together ever since she first came to London five years ago as a rookie journalist. After countless assignments and trips ranging from Africa to East European countries, they could practically read each other's minds.

The sun cast its last rays of pale daylight across the landscape, as they reached the small fishing village of Brine and parked behind a pub.

Nora shivered and pulled up her jacket collar around her ears.

They strolled down to the beach where the grey sea merged with the mother-of-pearl sky. The wind nipped at their cheeks, and half an hour later Nora could feel the poison slowly leaving her system. Or rather, it was encapsulated, reduced to a manageable size and stored in a dark place inside her on a shelf with stories of similar contents and calibre.

‘Come on, let's head back into the village. They do great fish — I’ve been here once before with Caroline,’ Pete said.

As always a touch of sadness crept into his voice when he mentioned the love of his life, who had long since gone back to Melbourne and married a surgeon.

They strolled up narrow lanes that felt eerily abandoned during the working week before the onslaught of the tourist season.

‘Hey, hang on.’

Nora had stopped outside a shop very different from the pastel-coloured motley of pottery shops and delis selling smoked fish that usually drew in the tourists. The paint on the front was peeling and the windows were filthy, but Nora could make out something behind the window pane: a scuffed, tan leather suitcase, the perfect addition to her collection at home.

She tried the door, which, much to her surprise, opened.

A smell of mould and dust wafted towards her from a room crammed full with so much stuff that the walls looked close to collapsing. Leather-bound books were stacked in tall piles along one wall, and against the other walls bookcases were laden down with crystal glasses and mismatched china.

The few gaps between the bookcases were taken up with paintings of varying quality. Nora surmised that ships were a favourite subject.

In a backroom a scratchy Glenn Miller record had just about finished being ‘In the Mood’. Behind the counter a man with a huge red beard was humming along to it while polishing a brass candlestick.

‘Welcome,’ he said with a smile.

Nora smiled back and had a quick look around the shop. She was briefly tempted by a scallop-shaped, silver plate butter dish, but her attention returned to the suitcase she had seen in the window.

‘May I have a closer look at that, please?’ she asked, pointing to it.

The man wiggled his way out from behind the counter. He was big, but moved with remarkable agility as he zigzagged between shabby second-hand furniture and tired-looking house clearance stock

He removed a tin box and a stack of LPs and eased out the suitcase from under the goods displayed in the window.

‘It came in only last week. Excellent condition,’ he said.

Nora reached out her hand to touch. Real leather. Dark brown, scratched. Just the right shabby appeal.

‘So, how much were you thinking?’ she said casually.

The man grunted and narrowed his eyes. ‘How about fifty pounds?’

Nora pulled a face. ‘I was thinking more like twenty.’

‘It's real leather,’ he countered.

Nora tried the lock. It didn’t open. She frowned. ‘Is it jammed?’

The man shrugged. ‘It's nothing that a hairpin and a bit of dexterity wouldn’t fix,’ he then said.

‘Yes, but there could be anything inside that suitcase. And it might be mouldy.’

The man took it from her and shook it. It made a low thud.

‘Hmm. Could be paper. Listen, if you agree to forty quid, you’ll get the contents for free. Sold as seen. Who knows? You might find a winning lottery ticket. Chance of a lifetime!’

Three minutes later Nora emerged, thirty pounds poorer, but holding the suitcase.

‘You’re incorrigible,’ Pete said, rolling his eyes.

‘I know, I know. But you have to agree it’ll be perfect for that spot under the coffee table next to the cabin trunk.’

Pete shook his head and dragged her onwards up the hill.

They ate freshly fried plaice with mushy peas and hand cut chips. When they were finally back in the car and Pete had put The Eagles on the CD player and programmed the satnav to ‘home’, Nora had recovered enough to start composing the article about the schoolteacher from Rwanda in her mind.

When Pete dropped her off outside her flat in Belsize Park, she was bone tired and only just managed to drag herself through the door, clean her teeth and collapse into bed.

2

The sound of Big Ben echoed through her flat. It was the special ringtone on her mobile she had assigned to her boss, Oscar Krebs. Among his staff he was known as the Crayfish because of his knack for spotting weaknesses in a story and snipping away at it with his claws until it fell apart, or the journalist came back with more convincing research. Or so he said. Others at the magazine claimed the name matched the colour of his face when he was stressed.

Nora respected his obsession with double- and sometimes triple-checking every story before it was published in Globalt. However, she was thoroughly fed up with the Crayfish's chronic inability to grasp the concept of Greenwich Mean Time. Forgetting she was one hour behind him in Copenhagen was bad enough. Insisting she was one hour ahead was even worse. Having tried repeatedly to explain it to him, Nora had come to accept that there are certain things in this world you’ll never teach your boss.

‘You’ve been up for hours, I imagine,’ the Crayfish said, sounding bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Nora squinted at the alarm clock on her bedside table. It was six thirty a.m. British time. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed.

‘Hmm.’

‘Excellent. When can you deliver Rwanda? We’ve scheduled you for page seven, and we go to print early this afternoon.’

She muttered something about two o’clock Danish time, rang off and staggered into the flat's only decent room which she had turned into a living room/study/library/kitchenette. Still half asleep she observed her usual morning ritual — she turned on her laptop, then the TV to BBC News 24, switched on the kettle — and plodded towards the tiny bathroom.

And that was where her routine was brought to an abrupt halt when suddenly she found herself sprawled on the hall floor, having tripped over the suitcase she had dumped there late last night. The lock had sprung open and a pile of Polaroids had spilled out of the gaping suitcase. Nora sat up on the floor and opened the suitcase fully.

She picked up the Polaroids and flicked through them. All were of young girls, teenagers. Lone girls standing up against walls, inside and out, in a pose with few variations. They all looked straight into the camera lens.

Some flirted openly with the camera, a smile on their lips. Others looked shy and awkward. Judging by their hair and clothes, Nora took the pictures to range from sometime in the 1980s, based on the MC Hammer trousers, hair gel and oversized sweatshirts, up until the 1990s, where there was one picture of a girl wearing a T-shirt with U2 on it.

The collection must be that of an amateur photographer; this much she had learned from working alongside Pete. It wasn’t a professional portfolio, rather a quirky little insight into a provincial photographer's tentative attempt to master the difficult art of photography. A man who was fascinated by young women, but who had clearly never learned anything about choosing a subject or lighting, and didn’t possess an ounce of artistic flair. She shrugged and was about to close the suitcase when her eyes were drawn to an image that stood out from the rest.

Two girls in the same picture. A smiling blonde, slightly chubby, but pretty. Next to her a petite, dark-haired girl scowled at the photographer. It must have been summer; they were wearing shorts and standing against a white background. She dated the faded ‘Feed the World’ T-shirt to one or two years after the Live Aid concert in 1985.

But it wasn’t the T-shirt that had caught her attention. It was the sign with the big red arrow behind the two girls and the caption, in Danish, that read: Car Deck 2.

She put the Polaroid to one side and went to the loo, cleaned her teeth and splashed water on her face. Made herself a cup of strong Nescafé, adjusted the colour with milk, sat down in front of the computer and turned on the Dictaphone.

Mr Benn's emotionless voice filled the room, and in the hours that followed there was nothing but him and his horrors in Nora's life. Her fingers flew across the keyboard.

X

Nora had submitted her article and while she waited for feedback, she made a half-hearted attempt at tidying up the piles of paper on her desk. She checked the fridge and wondered if she had the energy for a trip to Whole Foods in Kensington. She could spend hours at their three floors stocked with exquisite foods and would always come home with an empty purse and her arms laden with Italian goat cheese, spelt crackers, organic blackcurrants or cheesecake from the bakery. But she could feel that today wasn’t one of those days.

Something about the picture from the car deck kept troubling her; it evoked the sadness you feel when looking at old photographs of soldiers, grinning young men who thought they were immortal, but today exist only as letters carved on a mossy war memorial in Normandy.

She tried to shake off the sense of tragedy. By now the two girls had probably been married and divorced several times over, and forgotten all about a ferry crossing made decades ago.

Yet Nora picked up the Polaroid of the two girls once more. One dark, the other fair. The gaze of the blonde girl was hard, as if challenging whoever had been behind the lens: What the hell do you want? The dark one looked shy. Her head was tilted and her gaze turned downwards, as if she dared only peer up indirectly at the spectator.

She turned over the picture. Nothing on the back.

The hiss of her entryphone interrupted her thoughts.

‘Yes?’ she answered tentatively.

‘Good afternoon — this is the police. Someone has reported a domestic disturbance,’ she heard in Danish spoken with a broad north Jutland accent.

Argh! It had completely slipped her mind that she was meant to be having lunch with Andreas today.

The two of them had been friends since Sixth Form, but at their leavers’ ball Andreas had too much to drink and declared her his undying love. When Nora had felt unable to reciprocate his feelings and asked if they could just stay friends, he had avoided her from that moment on.

Soon afterwards Nora had gone Interrailing, then travelled to England for her gap year, and Andreas was accepted by the Police Academy. Since graduating he had worked his way up the ranks and was now with Violent Crimes. Nora had kept an eye on him from afar and now time appeared to have healed his wounded pride. He had found her on Facebook and sent her a message saying he would be in London for a couple of weeks as he was taking part in a Scotland Yard course on terror cells.

Nora checked her diary, which had ended up under an old copy of the Guardian, a WHO report on child poverty and an article about immigration torn from The Economist.

Quite right. It read: Lunch, Andreas 1.30 p.m.

‘So what's it to be?’ he said through the intercom.

She buzzed him in. ‘Come upstairs. I’ll be ready in a sec.’

The square shoulders and the corn-yellow hair over brown eyes were Andreas, just as she remembered him. And yet she could see that the years had left their mark on his face. He had grown up.

He opened his arms without a word and she disappeared into his enormous embrace.

‘Still as lovely as a mermaid,’ he said with that crooked smile of his.

Nora rolled her eyes.

‘At least you haven’t grown a walrus moustache like a cartoon copper. That would have been more than I could handle.’

She flung out her hand and invited him into her flat, which seemed even more microscopic with a towering, muscular policeman inside it.

‘I’ve been working since I got up this morning. I need a quick shower before we go anywhere. Would you like some coffee while you wait?’

‘Really? I thought you were taking me to lunch in your Kung Fu dressing gown. You’ve grown rather dull in your old age, haven’t you?’ Andreas grinned and had a good look around her flat.

Nora pretended to be affronted, pointed to the kettle and tossed her head.

‘Water. Coffee. Milk in the fridge. I’ll be in the bathroom.’

She let the warm water cascade over her body while she wondered where to take Andreas. There was the organic Honey Bee Café around the corner, or they could go to the tapas bar by the tube station. She dismissed the idea. Too exotic for the North Jute he still was. She decided on the little Turkish place behind the supermarket.

She dried her hair and quickly put on a nearly clean white T-shirt, a pair of black jeans and sandals. A line around her blue-green eyes and a dab of lip gloss later she was pretty much ready to have lunch in style.

When she returned to the living room, Andreas was sitting pensively with a mug of coffee in one hand and the Polaroid of the two girls in the other.

‘Is this a story you’re working on?’

Nora shook her head.

‘I bought an old suitcase yesterday and that picture was one of a bundle caught behind the lining,’ she explained, gesturing towards the suitcase still lying in the hall. ‘I don’t know what it is, but something about that photo bugs me. And I’m annoyed that I can’t place it. It feels as if I ought to know,’ she said.

Andreas narrowed his eyes. ‘It looks like one of the girls is wearing a bracelet. Do you have a magnifying glass?’

Nora rummaged around some drawers and found one under a pile of safety pins, coloured chalk and old chargers she had never got round to throwing out.

She took the Polaroid from Andreas. He was right; on the wrist of one of the girls she could make out a bracelet with individual letters on single beads. It was out of focus, but Nora thought she could read an ‘L’ ... and possibly an ‘E’ or an ‘I’.

Lene? Line? Lisette? Lea? None of those names brought her any closer to finding out what it was about the picture that intrigued her. Was there something familiar about the ferry where the picture had been taken?

Andreas interrupted her train of thought. ‘I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had any breakfast yet, so how about it? Am I going to get something to eat today or what?’

X

Soon they were seated in Abdul's and Andreas had impressed Nora by ordering from the menu like a regular customer. Köfte, cacik and pide, and he even said Tesekkür to Abdul, who had put on his best smile in honour of the occasion.

Nora raised her eyebrows.

‘What?’ Andreas said archly. ‘Or maybe you don’t think Aalborg Airport has international departures?’

‘I’m sorry. Only I remember you as more of a meat and two veg kind of guy. I had to nag you for hours to get you to try lasagne,’ she said with a rather sheepish smile.

‘People change,’ he said with a light shrug.

Abdul fetched a jug of ice water and Nora's thoughts started circling the picture of the two girls once more.

‘Something about that photo keeps bothering me. It's as if I ought to know the girls,’ she began.

Andreas nodded. ‘Same here.’

‘OK. Two girls. One of them has a name starting with L. Or maybe she had a boyfriend whose name began with an L. On a ferry? Lise on the ferry? Line? Lis ...?’

And suddenly, just as Abdul placed a red plastic basket of warm Turkish bread on the table, the penny dropped.

‘Lisbeth!’ she said, slapping her forehead. ‘Christ Almighty, Andreas! It's Lisbeth. L for Lisbeth. Don’t you remember the case? The girls from the England ferry?’

It was one of those cases that sometimes featured in documentaries. Last Easter when she went back to Denmark and had lunch with Trine in her holiday cottage, Nora had caught the end of a programme which declared — yet again — that what had happened to Lisbeth and the other girl, whose name Nora couldn’t remember, was still a mystery.

Andreas nodded, tore off a chunk of bread and popped it into his mouth. ‘Yes. I remember that.’

Nora racked her brains to recall the case. ‘Something about them going missing from that ferry. And how they were never seen again.’

Andreas shrugged. ‘It's an old case. My guess is they ended up at the bottom of the sea. And they’ll never be found. Come to think of it, my Uncle Svend works with one of the guys who investigated the original case.’

Their food arrived, and they fell silent while they filled their plates. When they had been eating for some time, Nora could no longer restrain herself.

‘Please would you call your uncle? I have to know right now.’

Andreas leaned back and watched her through half-closed eyes.

‘You don’t think it can wait until we’ve finished our lunch?’

‘Please? I’ll get the coffee,’ she tempted him.

Andreas let out a small sigh and found his mobile.

Nora caught Abdul's eye and signalled ‘coffee’ while Andreas rang his uncle.

The coffee arrived in a small copper jug with tiny glasses and two pieces of Turkish Delight neatly arranged on a white paper doily.

Nora poured coffee for Andreas and herself, while he spoke to his uncle. She sipped the strong coffee and added a lump of sugar to take the edge off the extreme bitterness.

Andreas rounded off the call. ‘All right then, give my love to Annika.’

He took his time, drank some coffee, pulled a face and added sugar.

Nora looked daggers at him. ‘Right. Out with it.’

‘You were spot on. My uncle works with Karl Stark, who was a young sergeant in Esbjerg back when the girls disappeared. He has never been able to let the case go.’

‘So what happened?’

‘My uncle could only remember a few things: the two girls lived in a care home for troubled kids near Ringkøbing. Eight of the kids and three adults were on a three-day trip to London. But on the ferry Lisbeth and Lulu disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Or deep water, if you like. Never to be seen again. Lisbeth's black backpack was found on the sun deck, and that's the only clue.’

‘Ah, that was it. Her name was Lulu, the other one,’ Nora interjected.

‘A TV programme investigated the case last year, so I’m guessing that was the documentary you caught the end of,’ Andreas ventured.

Nora thought for a moment.

‘Hmm. Does your uncle still live in Esbjerg?’

‘No, he met the love of his life, Annika, and they’ve moved to Dragør. He works for the Copenhagen Homicide Unit now, as does Karl Stark. Do you want me to ask my uncle for his number?’

Nora nodded. ‘Yes, please.’

Without being asked Abdul brought more coffee. And winked at Nora when she sent him a puzzled look.

‘It's a special day, Miss Nora. Lovely to see you without your mobile, and not here just to get a takeaway to eat at your desk,’ he grinned.

Andreas shook his head and smiled. ‘Some things never change. Or maybe they do?’ he said.

And so began the inevitable conversation. About who was doing what. What had happened to Ole, Klaus and Red Rita; who had married, who was at home with the kids or wedded to their career.

‘And how about you?’ Nora asked lightly when Andreas had accounted for divorces, civil service careers and one twin birth among their former classmates.

She had checked his Facebook profile the moment he had contacted her, obviously, but information was sparse. He hadn’t listed his status as married or single. All she had been able to deduce from the groups he belonged to was that he continued to compete in tri-athlons, hadn’t lost his enthusiasm for Monty Python and was still a Chelsea supporter.

‘Yes, what about me?’ Andreas echoed.

At that moment her mobile rang. It was the Crayfish.

‘Hey, you. Not a bad article. But I want you to rewrite some sections. I think it might be possible to identify him from the geographical information, so disguise it. And shorten the third paragraph. He's repeating himself. I’m just sending it back to you now. Your deadline is in thirty minutes. Bye.’

He had rung off before she had time to reply.

Nora fished out a twenty-pound note from her purse and placed it on the table.

‘Sorry. Work,’ she explained.

Andreas's face was inscrutable.

Nora tried to placate him. ‘How long are you in town?’

She was rewarded with one of his crooked smiles. ‘Off you go. And let's keep in touch by email.’

3

Nora woke up to a short trumpet fanfare announcing that the budget airline was congratulating itself on arriving yet again on time at Copenhagen Airport.

It was one of those red-eye flights, which meant she had to wake up before four a.m. to get to Stansted Airport, and she had gone straight back to sleep before the plane had even taxied down the runway.

The book she had been planning on reading — an ambitious tome about oil conflicts in Africa — lay unopened on her lap, and she stuffed it back into her handbag before she got up and headed for the arrivals hall.

There he was in all his glory, waving a Starbucks paper cup, as if she wouldn’t have spotted his dark green suit immediately. She knew no one else who wore a waistcoat. Especially not in June. Most of his beaming face was covered by a grey beard. Christian Sand was a prominent historian specialising in sixteenth-century Denmark and had named his daughter after the famous princess Leonora Christine.

‘Dad. There really was no need for you to pick me up.’

Always a pleasure. Anyway, I had some time on my hands before going to that conference in Stockholm next week. I’m working on a new theory about Leonora Christine and her husband's flight from imprisonment in Hammershus Castle,’ he explained in an animated voice as he grabbed Nora's suitcase.

They drove home to Bagsværd in the small, pea-green Fiat Punto that had ferried her father around for over a decade. The car had originally belonged to her mother, but after she left them, her father had kept it as a token of almost twenty years of largely happy marriage.

The house had an unmistakable smell of dad. Dusty books, pipe smoke, leather, and rye bread cold-proving in a big clay bowl in the utility room. He made them coffee in a cafetière in the kitchen, while Nora dumped her suitcase in her old bedroom on the first floor. Her stripped-pine bed was where it always had been; even her old Tintin posters were still on the walls. It was always possible that something might one day prompt Christian Sand to take an interest in interior design and update the house, but Nora couldn’t currently imagine what it might be.

She unpacked her party dress with the spots and put it on a hanger to give it time to straighten out before tomorrow evening.

‘The party starts at five. We’ll stop by Aunt Ellen's first to give her and Uncle Jens a lift to the hotel,’ her father explained. ‘David isn’t going. He's at the allotment. He can’t cope with all those people,’ he added with a small sigh.

It came as no surprise to her. Her highly intelligent older brother had never been officially diagnosed as autistic, but going by what Nora had read, that was pretty much what he was.

His job as an actuary with a leading insurance company made full use of his mathematics talent and also allowed him to work from home most of the time, and thus avoid contact with those baffling and frustrating human beings that peopled the world.

On a good day he was a bit introverted and shy. On bad ones he was out of reach. You dealt with David on his own terms, or not at all.

‘Never mind, I’m sure it’ll be a great party, Dad. Got your speech ready?’

Her father nodded.

Nora had been looking forward to seeing her favourite aunt, who lived in Kalundborg, and had made sure to take time off to go to her seventieth birthday party.

‘All right then, if you must, but make sure you pop into the office, seeing as you’re in Copenhagen anyway,’ the Crayfish had ordered her.

And she intended to do just that before having a late lunch with Louise at Danmarks Radio's Ørestad complex.

She took the S-train from Bagsvӕrd Station, got off at Nørreport and walked the rest of the way to Globalt's editorial offices which occupied two floors in a building with an antiquarian bookshop on the ground floor.

‘Heeey, Miss Sand,’ Anette in reception called out brightly.

In a long line of journalists, editors-in-chief, photographers, proofreaders and researchers worn out by working for a magazine as ambitious as Globalt, Anette was possibly . . .