Dead Souls Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Elsebeth Egholm

  The right of Elsebeth Egholm to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2014

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 9815 7

  Cover design www.the-parish.com

  Images © Trevillion and the-parish.com

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Elsebeth Egholm

  Praise

  About the Book

  Also by Elsebeth Egholm

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Epilogue

  About Elsebeth Egholm

  Elsebeth Egholm is a former journalist who is now the bestselling Danish ‘Queen of Crime’. Her books have been bestsellers in Germany, France, Sweden, Italy and Norway. In 2011, she published Three Dog Night which was the start of a new series introducing ex-convict Peter Boutrup and was an instant bestseller. This is the second in the series.

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.crimefilesinternational.com

  www.elsebethegholm.dk

  Praise for Elsebeth Egholm

  ‘Very promising’ Daily Mail

  ‘A rich mix of damaged but endearing characters . . . the narrative has multiple layers without becoming overcomplicated . . . at times brutal but the gruesomeness is balanced with evocative descriptions’ Big Issue

  ‘No one does it better. She easily takes a seat next to Jussi Adler-Olsen as Denmark’s queen of crime’ Dagbladenes Bureau

  ‘Thrilling and brutal’ Ekstra Bladet

  ‘A highly recommended, bleak and captivating crime novel’ Information

  About the Book

  For fans of Jussi Adler-Olsen and Camilla Lackberg comes Danish crime sensation Elsebeth Egholm.

  On All Hallows’ Eve, ex-convict Peter Boutrup is visiting his best friend’s grave when her estranged mother appears. Her son, Magnus, has disappeared, and she begs Peter to look for him.

  The next day a young nun is pulled out of the moat at the convent in Djursland. She has been garrotted and Peter, who works there as a carpenter, was the last person to see her alive. Meanwhile, diver Kir Røjel finds an old box resting on the seabed. Inside are human bones. They are sixty years old, but the victim had also been garrotted.

  While Peter is looking for Magnus, Detective Mark Bille Hansen is assigned to the case. He is determined to link the bones in the box with the girl in the moat - but the hunt for the truth leads both he and Peter down a path so dark, they fear they may never return.

  By Elsebeth Egholm and available from Headline

  Three Dog Night

  Dead Souls

  To my mother

  Author’s Note

  In Dead Souls I have – as in all my novels – used reality as the stage set while the plot and the cast are fictitious.

  On this occasion I have taken a couple of extra liberties with St Mary’s Abbey, the Cistercian convent on North Djurs, and the ancient Sostrup Manor House, which is run by the nuns as holiday accommodation. I have always been fascinated by the convent and the house. And as my main character, Peter, is a carpenter living in this area, nothing could have been more natural than to give him a job at the manor house and thus involve him in these mysterious events.

  I would like to emphasise the following:

  I have never visited the nuns, so none of the characters I describe is based on real people. Nor am I aware of any events which may have happened in the convent’s recent history. I know the place only from the outside, as any ordinary, curious tourist would. The inspiration for this story was the moat, the thick walls and the idyllic yet sinister atmosphere, combined with religion.

  Prologue

  30 August

  The Koral Strait, Kalø Bay

  THE WATER WAS clear, a summer blue.

  The rubber dinghy with the divers on board slowed down. Kir was sitting on the gunwale and gazing across the shimmering sea towards the ruins of Kalø Castle. It all felt unreal, as if her soul were still somewhere off the Horn of Africa. As if a Somali pirate boat might suddenly appear on the horizon and she and her colleagues would be ordered to board it and overpower the crew. Every movement required for such an operation was encoded in her body. One push of the button and the machine would be activated.

  ‘OK. We’re here. Drop the anchor.’

  Her muscles tensed up under her drysuit. Her brain pumped adrenaline to her arms and legs. But her boss was no longer
Captain Herman Søderberg; this time it was Commander Allan Vraa. She was no longer an elite soldier on board the Absalon but a mine diver on a summer mission in the Koral Strait. And she no longer had her weapon at the ready as she had in war-torn, troubled waters; she was searching the approach channel for shipping through peaceful Kalø Bay for explosives.

  Allan Vraa watched a yacht sail past. It was crossing the bay a little further out. Two children on the sundeck waved to the divers in their dinghy. Kir had a flashback to the German hostages they had freed near the Somali coast. One of the boys had had hair so blond it was white, just like the boy on the deck of the yacht. His name was August, like the month that would soon be over.

  ‘Watch out you don’t rescue a couple of hapless tourists,’ Vraa said and winked to Kir. ‘It can be hard to kick the habit.’

  ‘Can’t keep a good woman down.’

  He waved back to the children.

  ‘Ready?’

  She and Niklas looked at each other. This was a cushy number, clearing explosives off the seabed in Kalø Bay. They did it every three years. It wasn’t long since the Royal Danish Navy divers had finished clearing up after the Occupation. Now they were looking for new munitions that might have rolled down the slope of the seabed beneath the drag of heavy barges carrying coal to Studstrup Power Station. Kir had missed out on the start of the fun. It was only two days since she had landed at Karup after her stint in Africa, which was meant to have lasted three months but had quickly turned into six. This was her first day back at work.

  She adjusted her mask one last time. Then she held up a thumb and fell backwards into the water. It wasn’t until the moment she hit the sea, which embraced her now with its usual chilly distance, that she became fully aware she was back in Denmark. This was, after all, where she had been born and had grown up.

  The team consisted of eight divers and they worked in shifts – no diver was allowed to work at these depths for more than forty minutes every twelve hours – and they had managed to cover a fair stretch of the approach channel.

  Kir was dreaming about her tuna sandwiches as she trawled the sea floor for the final ten minutes before resurfacing. She loved swimming through the water twenty metres down, watching plaice hide in the sand or meeting a codfish or an eel going about its business. Green and brown tongues of seaweed reached up from the sand and caught the rays of the sun. It was perfectly quiet. She herself was almost noiseless. Her diving equipment recycled most of the air and the bubbles passed through a bubble minimiser, which made them so tiny all she could hear was a faint hiss. The dinghy, too, was non-magnetic and low-noise so as not to trigger any lurking mines. Not that there were any mines left in Kalø Bay, but there was a huge number of artillery shells and aerial bombs and a fair amount of handgun ammunition. Divers were under instructions only to clear munitions with a total load in excess of fifty kilos. Otherwise they would be diving here forever.

  Kir propelled herself forwards and her hands groped at seaweed, plants and sand. Slightly ahead of her there was a clearing as though a bomb had exploded and killed all living things, leaving behind a crater and only sand. She knew the crater well, she had been here before, but the seabed changed as the current reshaped the sand and from time to time new items were revealed.

  She swam closer. There was an object lying in the sandy hollow. She had reached it now and could touch it. It felt like the corner of a wooden box or a small coffin. She dug deeper into the sand. It took time to free the box, which was indeed made of wood, but with metal fittings, a padlock and four metal corners.

  Working away, she told herself it was probably nothing of any importance. Of course the box wouldn’t be filled with grenades or weapons. There must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for its being here.

  Once she had uncovered it, she cradled it in her arms and started her ascent. She was received by a surprised though cheerful Allan Vraa, who took the weight of the mysterious box and said:

  ‘You are like a Labrador. You have the strangest ability to find just about anything.’

  ‘A Labrador is a retriever,’ Kir said as she squirmed on board like a whale beaching. ‘It assumes that if someone has thrown an object, it’s meant to fetch it back.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Allan Vraa said. ‘Someone dropped this box so that you could have a chance to show off by retrieving it.’

  ‘Whoever threw it must be very patient,’ Kir said. ‘I think it’s been there for years.’

  The box was covered with seashells and algae. It was also misshapen and looked as if only the metal was holding it together.

  ‘I wonder what it could be.’

  ‘Why don’t we take a look?’ her boss said.

  ‘Better watch out. Could be dangerous,’ she teased him as he produced a pair of bolt cutters from their kit. ‘Perhaps it’s infectious. An ancient virus, like in the grave of King Tut.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Vraa said, forcing the bolt cutter handles together, and the padlock sprang open. He opened the box and both of them peered inside.

  ‘What the hell . . . Doesn’t that look like . . .’

  Kir looked at the heap.

  ‘Bones?’

  ‘But not from an animal,’ Vraa said.

  Carefully, she picked one up.

  ‘A femur?’

  She examined it. The bone had yellowed with age. She could see that it had been broken and that the fracture had healed.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Vraa pointed.

  ‘A number. Thirty-one.’

  She looked inside the box again.

  ‘They’re all numbered.’

  ‘Sick bastard,’ Vraa said, shaking his head. ‘First, he deboned his victim and then he numbered her bones. Christ Almighty.’

  ‘Hold your horses . . .’ Kir began. ‘There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation.’

  Vraa glared at her belligerently.

  ‘And what might that be?’

  She fell silent. She couldn’t think of anything either.

  ‘Close the box,’ her boss said. ‘And call Aarhus police and tell them we’ve got something to cheer them up.’

  Evening

  Gjerrild Clif

  Peter read the text message from Cato and jumped out of bed. The girl next to him sat up with her hair in a tangle and her make-up smeared. She pulled the duvet to cover her breasts.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  He threw on some clothes.

  ‘You’ve got to go!’

  She looked startled, but then she slowly began to get dressed, on the brink of tears.

  ‘You’re a real douche bag, did you know that?’

  Her name was Joy and he had met her at a club called Summertime. She meant nothing to him and he meant nothing to her, but neither of them had admitted it to themselves yet. The sex had been OK, but something had been missing. The most important ingredient.

  ‘It’s nothing personal. Someone’s coming.’

  ‘Your girlfriend?’

  She looked upset. He knew it was a temporary feeling. Tomorrow she would be just as relieved as he was.

  ‘I don’t have a girlfriend. As you well know. Now get a move on, or . . .’

  ‘Or what?’

  There was no time for diplomacy.

  ‘Listen. You’re a nice girl. It’s me.’

  He stretched out his arms. ‘I just haven’t got time for a relationship right now, OK?’

  She had her own car, thank God. Five minutes later she drove out of his life. He read the text message again. Cato said simply that his enemies were on their way. Peter had been expecting them for a long time. Now it had kicked off.

  He looked at his watch. It was eleven in the evening and dusk had wreathed the cliff and the sea in darkness. He had thirty minutes, maximum.

  He spent the time checking the alarm system. He took the dog with him as he made his tour and together they inspected the PIR sensors, which he had positioned one hundred metres from his cottage on the cliff. They w
ere wired together and the cables went up to the house where they were connected to two bells and four vibrators. The sensors were the first bulwark against Rico’s henchmen, who would undoubtedly arrive on noisy motorbikes with a whole arsenal of weapons, insignia and rippling muscles. There was no shortage of expressions to describe bikers, but discreet wasn’t one of them.

  There were six of them, Cato had said. Six men. Six avengers from Midnight Cowboys on their way from their clubhouse in Aarhus. This was the price for having killed their leader in Lisbjerg Forest earlier that winter. An unavoidable killing and one which had benefited Rico, the current leader of the gang. The court case that had followed had ended in Peter being acquitted on the grounds of self-defence, but his beef with the bikers was far from over. There was a code to be honoured. He had known that all along. He hadn’t issued his guests with a printed invitation, yet he had known they would come.

  After making sure that every cable was properly connected and that the system was working, he checked the second phase of his defence. Fifty metres from the house he had placed seven wireless bells at access roads and paths and various strategic places behind bushes and trees. Whenever he was at home he always carried a battery-powered remote control. On each bell he had disconnected the cable that would make it ring and replaced it with an old-fashioned light bulb, but he had carefully smashed the glass. Each bulb had then been put in a plastic bag, along with a little black powder from a screamer firework. He had put the bag inside a 1.5 litre pop bottle filled with petrol.

  He checked each of the seven firebombs to make sure they hadn’t been knocked over by passing animals or stolen by walkers in the area. Even though he lived on his own in the cottage on the cliff, the place attracted many wildlife enthusiasts who came to watch the birds, catch sea trout or simply enjoy the rugged North Djur landscape. But all seven bottles were exactly where he had put them. His alarm system was ready.