His legs trembling, he ran over to the twenty-four-hour convenience store. The automatic doors opened, the scent of cinnamon and butter hitting him just as he spotted the humming, blond checker. Water dripped into Frederik’s eyes from the visor of his cap, and he wiped it off, fresh water and salt.
“Help, damn it! Call the police!”
The checker stared at him wide-eyed. Then she dropped her tray of cinnamon rolls and reached for the phone.
* * *
RAIN POURED DOWN on Copenhagen, blurring the contours of tile roofs and plastered facades. The sky sent cascades of unseasonably warm water straight onto the umbrellas and cobblestones of Old Market Square.
Investigator Jeppe Kørner squinted his eyes shut and decided to risk an upward glance. Not a single reassuring patch of clear sky on the horizon. Maybe the world really was dissolving, the oceans claiming back the last remaining landmasses. He wiped his face with a wet hand, stifled a yawn, and ducked under the crime scene tape. Water seeped into his sneakers at the seams, making them squelch with every step.
Through sheets of rain he saw miserable plastic-draped silhouettes busy erecting pavilion canopies around the fountain, the kind people rent for garden parties hoping they won’t need them. Jeppe ran to the closest pavilion for shelter and looked at his watch. It was a little after seven, and the sun was just rising somewhere behind the rain clouds, not that it made much difference. Today daylight would be no more than varying shades of gray.
A naked body floated in the fountain in front of him, reflecting the light from the crime scene work lamps. Jeppe took in the scene as he pulled a protective suit over his wet clothes. The body was lying facedown, like a snorkeler in the Red Sea. A woman’s body, as far as he could tell from the shoulder width and the arch of the back. Naked, middle-aged, dark hair with some gray, the scalp just visible between wet locks of hair.
“The name of the fountain is Caritas, did you know that?”
Jeppe turned around and found himself eye to eye with crime scene technician J. H. Clausen. The hood of his blue protective suit outlined a wrinkled face, making him look like a wet garden gnome in an oversize space suit.
“You’ll be pleased to hear that the answer is no, Clausen. I did not know that.”
“Caritas means ‘charity’ in Latin,” Clausen explained, wiping his bushy eyebrows and then shaking water off his hands. “That’s why the figure on top is a pregnant woman. The symbol of altruism, you know.”
“I’m more interested in why there’s a body in the basin.” Jeppe nodded toward the fountain. “What have we got?”
Clausen looked around and found an umbrella leaning against one of the legs of the pavilion. He opened it and tentatively took a step out under the open sky.
“Damned weather, impossible working conditions,” he muttered. “Come on!”
Tall Jeppe had to walk in a stoop to fit under Clausen’s umbrella. At the stone rim of the basin they stopped to look at the body. Droplets ran down the white skin, making it look like a marble statue. A police photographer was trying to find workable angles all while shielding his camera from the rain.
“The medical examiner will obviously need to get her up out of the basin for a postmortem before we can say too much about her,” Clausen began. “But she’s female, Caucasian, average height. I would guess about fifty years old.”
A gust of wind gently nudged the body, so it floated past them to the other side of the basin.
“She was found by a paperboy at five forty a.m.,” Clausen continued. “The call came in to emergency services from the convenience store on the corner two minutes later. The first responders pulled her to the edge of the fountain and tried to resuscitate her, per protocol. I don’t know why the body hasn’t been taken out of the water yet. The paperboy and shop clerk are sitting in the store with an officer, waiting to be interviewed. The shop clerk arrived at five a.m. and is positive that there wasn’t anything in the fountain at that point, so the crime must have occurred sometime between five and five forty this morning.”
“You’re saying this is the crime scene?” Jeppe pulled his hood back to get a better view of the large public square. “She was killed in the middle of Strøget?”
Clausen turned to Jeppe, which caused the umbrella he was holding high above their heads to tilt. Rain gushed down on the both of them. Jeppe’s hair was instantly soaked.
“Oh, sorry, Kørner, for crying out loud! Did you get wet? Well, I’m being inaccurate. She could hardly have been killed here, for a number of reasons.”
“I guess it would be too risky…” Jeppe tried to ignore the raindrops sneaking down the back of his neck and inside his raincoat.
“Yes, the risk of someone coming by would be too big. The mere fact that someone has dared to dump a body in the fountain at Old Market Square is… well, that’s beyond my comprehension.” Clausen shook his head, dumbfounded. “But that’s not the only reason. Can you see those small incisions in the skin on the front of her arms? They’re facing down toward the water, so they’re hard to see.”
Jeppe squinted to get a better look through the rain. Bobbing in the surface of the water, a symmetrical pattern of small, parallel cuts was visible on the wrists, gaping gashes of whitish flesh. An image of a whale rotting on the beach flashed through Jeppe’s brain, and he swallowed his discomfort.
“There’s no blood in the water?”
“Exactly!” Clausen nodded in affirmation. “She must have bled profusely, and yet there’s no sign of blood, not in the fountain and not around it. We would have found some if she had been killed here, despite the rain. She died somewhere else.”
“There’s plenty of surveillance cameras we could retrieve recordings from.” Jeppe looked around at the old house facades. “If the killer dumped the body, there must be footage of that.”
“If?” Clausen sounded indignant. “She didn’t cut herself and then jump naked into the fountain, I can promise you that.”
“What were they made with, the cuts?”
“I can’t say yet. Nyboe needs to get her up onto the table first,” Clausen said, referring to Professor Nyboe, the forensic pathologist, who usually conducted autopsies for major murder cases. “But no matter what, the murder weapon isn’t here in the square. The dogs have been looking for half an hour and haven’t found anything. Also there’s no sign of her clothes.”
Something buzzed in Jeppe’s pocket. He wiped his hand on the seat of his pants and carefully took out his phone. Seeing Mom on the screen, he declined the call. What did she want now?
“In other words,” he said, “someone brought a naked body to the middle of Strøget and tossed it in the fountain early this morning?”
“Looks like it, yes,” Clausen said, his face apologetic, as if he were partly responsible for the absurd scenario.
“Who the hell does that?” Jeppe rubbed his burning eyes. He was short on sleep, and in the few hours he had slept, he had tossed and turned. Dealing with a dead woman in a fountain wasn’t exactly how he had imagined spending his day.
Disconnected lyrics from Supertramp’s annoying rain song ran through his head: “Oh no it’s raining again. Too bad I’m losing a friend.” If only Jeppe could at least pick the music his tired brain had to torment him with. Usually snippets of ultra-commercial pop music ran on a continual loop underneath his thoughts when he was stressed out. “It’s raining again. Oh no, my love’s at an end.” Jeppe pulled his hood back up and strode over to the convenience store, where the paperboy was waiting.