The corpse flower, p.1
The Corpse Flower, page 1
THE CORPSE FLOWER
A NOVEL
ANNE METTE HANCOCK
To my parents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WRITING A FIRST novel sometimes feels like arbitrarily creating a plot in a vacuum. That’s why it’s crucial to have a private fan base to cheer the book along and a direct line to oracles you can pepper with research questions. I have been blessed with both in my work on The Corpse Flower.
My biggest thanks go to my parents, Jette Aagaard and Per Anders Jensen, for cheering me along and for just basically being the best parents in the world. To my brother, Anders Aagaard Jensen, for introducing me to the thriller and mystery genre way back at the dawn of time and for helping with the final touches on the first draft.
To my friend and partner in crime, author Katrine Engberg: thank you—for everything!
My heartfelt thanks to police sergeant Jesper Arff Rimmen, and to medical examiner and professor of forensic medicine Hans Petter Hougen. Thank you to army psychologist Mette Arff Rimmen and to resident doctor Liv Andrés-Jensen. Thanks to a “murder mystery heroine’s aging uncle,” journalist Jon Kaldan, for generously loaning me the family name.
A huge thank-you to my brilliant publisher in the U.S., Crooked Lane Books, and to my superstar agent at Nordin Agency, Anna Frankl.
Last but most importantly: thank you to my children, Vega and Castor. The sun rises and sets with you.
CHAPTER
1
ANNA REGULARLY DREAMED about killing him. About creeping up on him and swiftly running the blade across his throat. That was why, on this particular morning, she didn’t sit up in bed with a jolt but calmly blinked as she woke from yet another dream that left a kaleidoscope of violent images on the inside of her eyelids and filled her with excitement.
Is it over?
She lay still in the darkness as reality sunk in.
She checked the clock on the tiled floor next to her bed: 5:37 AM. It was the longest she had slept since renting the house.
A dog’s barking echoed through the cloisters of the old monastery on the neighboring street. Two barks followed by a short, suppressed howl, then total silence. Anna raised herself up on her elbows and listened. She was about to lie down again when she heard a spluttering car approaching slowly.
She got out of bed and quickly made her way to one of the bedroom’s two windows. A wave of unease washed over her. She opened one of the faded green shutters slightly, sending a ray of morning sun through the room in a narrow beam, and looked down into the street two floors below her. Apart from a cat waving its tail languidly on the wall of the overgrown courtyard garden of the building opposite, Rue des Trois Chapons lay deserted.
Anna scanned the houses.
Her gaze stopped at the ground-floor window of the building across the road. It was wide open. Normally, all the windows in that house were covered with shutters. This was the first time she had seen any sign of life in the run-down property. The dark hole in the wall seemed to zoom in on her like a probing eye.
Her fingers started tingling, and she felt her pulse throb in her ears.
Is it him? Have they found me?
She stayed hidden behind the shutters until she’d gotten her breathing back under control. Then she nodded in an effort to reassure herself. There was no one down there. No one was hiding in the shadows.
In fact, very few people frequented Rue des Trois Chapons. The small street ran from the church on the square to the town’s high street and was winding and narrow. You could touch the cobblestone houses on both sides by simply extending your arms. At street level, a sweet stench revealed that stray cats sought refuge there at night. They’d lurch and squeal pitifully in their search for company. But Anna rarely saw any people here. Not in this alleyway.
She closed the window and walked naked up the uneven stone steps. On the rooftop terrace she turned on the water hose, and it started wriggling on the tiles. She picked it up and washed herself in the spray. The cold water hurt, her body still warm from sleep, but she didn’t flinch.
She brushed off the water and raked her fingers through her wet hair. She let her fingertips sink into her hollow cheeks and studied her reflection in the window of the terrace door. She had lost weight. Not much, no more than maybe three or four pounds, but her breasts were smaller, her arms lean and her face gaunt. She couldn’t decide what she looked like more: an overgrown child or an old woman. Both made her stomach turn.
She put on a jersey dress and a pair of espadrilles and walked downstairs to the kitchen, where she found a lump of baguette and a jar of fig jam. She ate by the open window and listened to the clatter of stalls being assembled on the market square.
Yesterday, she had sent the letter.
She had made the three-hour drive to Cannes, where she’d first picked up the FedEx package at La Poste on Rue de Mimont. Back in the car, she had ripped it open and made sure the money was inside. Then she’d popped the letter into the post box outside the post office and driven back to Rue des Trois Chapons.
In a few days, she would send another letter. And then another.
In the meantime, all she could do was wait. And pray.
She swallowed the last mouthful of baguette and put on a cap, grabbed her backpack and left the house. She walked down the high street to the market in the square, where she stopped between the stalls and shoppers to savor the atmosphere.
A group of children had gathered around a small, rickety table. On the table was a cardboard box, and inside it, a kid goat was being fondled by the children’s eager hands. A sturdy man in dirty dungarees pushed his way between a pair of twin boys and stuffed a bottle into the goat’s mouth. With the other hand, he held out a plastic basket to the parents who were watching and smiling at their children’s excitement. Reluctantly they fished out some coins from their pockets and tossed them into the basket. The man thanked them mechanically and immediately yanked the bottle from the mouth of the hungry goat, milk spraying all over.
Anna watched the man repeat the performance. She was about to angrily snatch the bottle from his hand when she noticed an elderly couple sitting under a flourishing wisteria at the café across the street.
The man was bald and wearing a bright-yellow polo shirt. His attention was fixed on a croissant. His shirt was what had caught Anna’s eye, but it was the small, apple-cheeked woman in the chair next to him that made her stop dead in her tracks.
She didn’t have time to register what the woman was wearing or eating. All she saw was the camera she was holding up and the look of disbelief on her face as she stared directly at Anna.
Anna turned and walked with measured steps to the nearest street corner and turned around it.
Then she started to run.
CHAPTER
2
“IT’S NOT THE same thing. It’s not even close to being the same thing.”
Detective Sergeant Erik Schäfer looked perplexedly at his colleague across the desk.
He and Lisa Augustin had shared an office for almost a year, and not a day had gone by without them having an amicable but heated discussion of some sort. Today was no exception.
“Sure it is,” she said. “You’re just from an older generation, so you have a different mind-set. Society has brainwashed all of us into believing that one thing is completely normal and socially acceptable while the other is morally up there with fraud and manslaughter. Ultimately there’s no difference between the two, but for reasons unknown to us, we’ve decided to think there is.” Augustin emphasized her point by waving with the half-finished turkey sandwich in her hand.
“Right, explain it to me again, then,” Erik Schäfer said. “You’re telling me there is no difference between having sex and getting a massage? Same ball game?”
“I’m telling you that they’re both physically satisfying at a very intimate level. Imagine that you and Connie have both booked a full-body massage—”
Schäfer found the prospect highly unlikely.
“—and your massage therapist is a woman, hers a man. You’re both shown into a small, dimly lit room with some sort of bed-like device. You undress, and then you let a total stranger rub their oily hands up and down your naked body. You can smell the rose oil, meditative seductive feel-good music is playing, while you lie on your separate beds thinking, ‘Oh, that’s great, please don’t stop, yes, right there, oh, that feels so good.’ ”
“You’ve got mustard on your chin.” Schäfer looked at her matter-of-factly and pointed to the yellow stain.
She found a crumpled napkin in the Subway sandwich bag in front of her and wiped the mustard off while she continued to build her case.
“Afterwards, you and Connie meet up, pay the check, and tell each other how wonderful it was. You’ve never felt better, and no one seems upset by the fact that the other person has just been physically satisfied by a stranger. Quite the contrary, in fact. You actually agree that you really ought to do this more often.” She turned up the palms of her hands and shrugged wildly, implying that you had to be exceptionally stupid not to see the logic of her argument.
Schäfer blinked a couple of times. “So, you’re saying that getting a massage should be as forbidden as having sex with someone other than your partner?”
“No, dummy. I’m saying that both ought to be equally legit.”
Erik Schäfer’s eyes widened.
“It’s a scientific fact,” she continued. “Marital bliss increases with fewer restrictions in a relationship; couples would be far less likely to split up if especially the wife was allowed to hook up with someone other than her husband.”
“You’re full of shit!”
Augustin laughed out loud.
“This is all just because you think like a man,” Schäfer went on, referring to the fact that in her twenty-eight years, Lisa Augustin had scored more women than he had in nearly twice that amount of time.
“You don’t believe me?” She turned 180 degrees in her chair and was starting to pound the keyboard on her computer to find the evidence for her claim when Schäfer’s phone rang.
“Saved by the bell,” he laughed, and answered the call. “Hello?”
“Hi, there’s a woman down here who wants to talk to you.” The voice on the other end belonged to a receptionist on the ground floor of police headquarters.
“What’s her name?”
“She won’t say.”
“She won’t say?” Schäfer echoed. “Why the hell not?”
Augustin stopped typing and looked up at him with a frown.
“She’ll only say that she has something important to show you. Apparently it’s about one of your murder investigations from three years ago.”
Schäfer regularly received emails and phone calls from members of the public who thought they had valuable information to contribute. It was rare, however, for someone to turn up in person, and even rarer for them to have information about a case that old.
“All right, get an officer to take her up to the second floor and put her in interview room one.”
He hung up and stood.
“Who was that?” Augustin asked, nodding to draw his attention to the button on his trousers, which he had discreetly opened under his desk to make room for his stomach while he ate his lunch.
“That was my wife,” Schäfer replied. He pulled in his stomach and buttoned his pants. “She’s just had sex with the gardener, so she thought I deserved an Indian head massage. The massage therapist is making her way up the stairs as we speak.”
CHAPTER
3
FINE, ALMOST SILENT September rain descended upon Copenhagen for the fifth day in a row. The summer, which was long over, had been grayer than usual, and it was starting to feel like the four seasons had been replaced by one long, muddy autumn.
Heloise Kaldan was closing her kitchen window, where water was dripping onto the windowsill, when her cell phone started buzzing.
It had been ringing off the hook all weekend. This time she didn’t recognize the number. She rejected the call and popped a dark-green capsule in the Nespresso machine, and immediately it started spluttering out a pitch-black lungo.
From her living room she had a view of the huge, verdigris dome of the Marble Church. The old attic apartment on the corner of Olfert Fischers Gade had been neither spacious nor appealing when she had bought it. It hadn’t even had a real bathroom, and the old kitchen, which was now Heloise’s favorite room, had been downright disgusting. But from the small living room balcony, she had a clear view of the Marble Church, and that was one of the few criteria she had insisted on from the estate agent: she’d have to be able to see the dome from at least one window in the apartment.
As a child, she had seen her father every other weekend, and the dome had been their special place. Every other Saturday they had first gone to get hot chocolate and cream cakes at Conditori La Glace, where he had charmed all the waitresses, and then strolled down Bredgade toward the church, where they had made their way up the winding stairs with familiar ease and crossed the squeaky floorboards in the loft under the roof before sitting down on one of the benches in the cupola at the top.
Snuggled up, they had savored their view of Copenhagen. At times the city had been covered in snow, at other times bathed in sunshine, but mostly it had just been gray and windswept. Her father had pointed out historical buildings and told her long, spellbinding tales about the country’s old kings and queens. She had sat there listening, gazing at him with an expression that revealed that in her eyes, he was the nicest and wisest man in the whole wide world.
On every visit, he had taught her three new words she was to practice before their next meeting.
“Right, let me see,” he had said as he moistened the tip of his finger and pretended to be leafing through an invisible dictionary.
“Aha! Today’s words are braggart, baroque, and … opulent.”
Then he had explained their meaning and given examples of amusing contexts they could be used in, and Heloise had lapped it all up. She had loved the times the two of them spent together at the top of the church, and it was there, cuddled up safely against his big belly, that her love of storytelling had been born.
In the first apartment she had moved into as an adult, she’d had an unobstructed view of the dome from her bedroom window, and over time it had become her lucky mascot: a memento of a safe and meaningful childhood. Whenever she traveled, she missed the dome more than anything.
It was, however, rare for her to be standing as she was now, looking toward the church on an early Monday afternoon. Normally she would be at an editorial meeting at the newspaper where she worked, discussing this week’s main issues and planning her research.
But not today.
Today’s papers lay spread out in front of her on the kitchen table. The Skriver story was on the front page of every single one of them.
She opened page two of Demokratisk Dagblad, her workplace for the past five years, and read the editorial. The editor in chief was apologizing for a story published a few days earlier about the fashion mogul Jan Skriver’s investment in an environmental disaster of a textile factory in Bangalore that used child labor. The paper had “acted naïvely in its search for the truth,” he wrote. The piece was filled with pathos and well-choreographed hand-wringing, and its sole purpose was to make the paper appear honest, neutral, and—this was the crucial bit—to dodge any management responsibility.
Fair enough. It wasn’t the editor in chief’s fault. It was hers. She had written the story, she had trusted her source, and she had allowed something resembling trust to trump due diligence.
How the hell could she have been so stupid? Why hadn’t she checked and double-checked her facts? Why had she trusted him?
Her cell phone started vibrating again. This time it was a number she couldn’t dismiss. She let it ring three times before she answered in a weary voice.
“Kaldan speaking.”
“Hi, it’s me. Were you asleep?” Her editor, Karen Aagaard, sounded tense.
“No, why?”
“Your voice sounds a little rusty, that’s all.”
“I’m up.”
Heloise had been up most of last night and had finished off the bottle of white wine she and Gerda had opened yesterday. She had mulled over the story and examined it from all angles, reviewed every single detail in the course of events in an attempt to get to grips with it, but no matter how hard she’d tried, it had remained blurred, fuzzy. Or perhaps she just didn’t like what she was seeing? She was a journalist—a damn good one, too—and it just wasn’t like her to be so horribly wrong. She was furious with herself—and with him.
“I know I told you to take today off,” Karen Aagaard said, “but The Shovel wants to see you.”
Carl-Johan Scowl, aka The Shovel, was a greasy garden gnome of a man who worked as readers’ editor at Demokratisk Dagblad, taking his lead from the guidelines for good press ethics. He dealt with readers’ complaints about errors in the newspaper’s stories, and whenever he knocked on your door, you knew it would be a long day, maybe a long week, and possibly the end of your career.
“Again?” Heloise closed her eyes and let her head fall backward. She felt emotionally drained at the prospect of yet another exhausting review of the sequence of events. They had been over it three times already.
“Yes, you need to come in so that we can finish it off. There are still a few things he wants to go over before we can move on. Surely you’d like that too?”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Heloise said, and hung up.
She grabbed her black leather jacket, kicked aside a pile of junk mail on the doormat, and slammed the door behind her.
