The Absent One (18 page)

His eyes scanned the bus stop on Gammel Kongevej, where a man in a light-coloured coat stood staring up at the building. Carl had seen the guy from time to time during his many years on the force. Finn Aalbæk. A gaunt ghost of a man who used to camp at Antonigade Police Station so his little detective agency could sponge bits of information from Carl and his colleagues. It had been at least five years since Carl had last seen him, and he was still just as ugly.

‘Do you know the man in the light-coloured coat down there?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen him before?’

She stepped to the window, sighed deeply and tried to focus on the man. ‘I’ve seen someone in the same coat in the central station. But he’s too damn far away for me to really see him.’

He saw her enormous pupils. Even if the man stood right in her face she would hardly have recognized him.

‘And the man you saw at the train station. Who’s he?’

She moved away from the window and bumped into the table, so he had to grab her. ‘I’m not sure I want to talk to you,’ she sniffled. ‘What has Kimmie done?’

He escorted her to the settle bed and eased her on to the thin mattress.

Let’s try another angle
, Carl thought, glancing round. The room was ten square yards and seemed as devoid of personality as possible. Apart from the rat cage and clothes piled in the corners, there were very few objects in the apartment. A few sticky magazines on the table. Stacks of beer-reeking plastic shopping bags. The bed and its coarse, wool blanket. A sink and an old refrigerator, on top of which was a grimy soap dish, a well-used towel, a tipped-over bottle of shampoo and a small collection of hairpins. There was nothing on the walls and nothing on the windowsill.

He looked down at her. ‘You’re growing your hair long, right? I think it’ll look good on you.’

Instinctively she reached for her neck. So he was right. That was what the hairpins were for.

‘You also look nice with shoulder-length hair, but I think long hair will look very good on you. You have fine hair, Tine.’

She didn’t smile, but behind those eyes of hers she was jubilant. For a brief instant.

‘I’d like to hold your rat, but I’ve become allergic to rodents and the like. I’m very sorry about that, in fact. I can’t even hold our little kitty any more.’

Now he had her.

‘I love that rat. It’s name is Lasso.’ She smiled with what had once been a row of white teeth. ‘Sometimes I call it Kimmie, but I haven’t told her that. It’s because of the rat I’m called Rat-Tine. It’s just so cute, don’t you think? Especially when you know you’ve got your nickname from it.’

Carl tried to agree.

‘Kimmie hasn’t done anything, Tine,’ he said. ‘We’re looking for her because there’s someone who misses her.’

She bit the inside of her cheek. ‘I don’t know where she lives. But tell me your name. If I see her I’ll pass it on.’

He nodded. Years of fighting the authorities had taught her the art of caution. Completely wasted on junk and yet still on her guard. Quite impressive, and at least as irritating. It would certainly not help the case if she told Kimmie too much. Then they ran the risk of Kimmie disappearing for good. Eleven years’ experience and Assad’s hunting her had demonstrated that she was capable of it.

‘OK, I need to be honest with you, Tine. Kimmie’s father is seriously ill, and if she hears that the police are searching for her, then her father will never see her again, and that would be a terrible shame. Can’t you just tell her to call this number? Don’t mention the illness or the police. Just have her call.’

He wrote his mobile number on his pad and gave her the page. He’d have to make sure to charge the battery.

‘And if she asks who you are?’

‘Then just tell her you don’t know, but that I said it was something that would make her happy.’

Tine’s eyelids closed slowly. Her hands lay relaxed on her thin knees.

‘Did you hear that, Tine?’

She nodded with her eyes closed. ‘Yeah, OK.’

‘Good. I’m glad to hear it. I’ll be going now. I know there’s someone looking for Kimmie at the central train station. Do you know who?’

She looked at him without raising her head. ‘Just someone asking whether I knew Kimmie. He probably wanted her to contact her father, too, right?’

Down on Gammel Kongevej he grabbed hold of Aalbæk from behind. ‘An old offender, out getting some sun,’ he said, resting a heavy fist on his shoulder. ‘What are you doing here, old boy?’ he went on. ‘Long time no see, eh?’

Aalbæk’s eyes were bright – but not with the joy of recognition.

‘I’m waiting for the bus,’ he said, turning his head away.

‘OK.’ Carl looked at him. Strange response. Why did he lie? Why not just say: ‘I’m on an assignment. I’m shadowing someone.’ It
was
his job, after all, and they both knew it. He hadn’t been accused of anything. He didn’t need to reveal whom he was working for.

No, but now he had revealed himself. No doubt about it. Aalbæk was certainly aware that it was Carl’s path he was crossing.

‘Waiting for the bus,’ the man had said. What an idiot.

‘You really get around in your job, don’t you? You didn’t by any chance take a trip to Allerød yesterday and mess up one of my photographs? What do you say, Aalbæk? Did you?’

Aalbæk turned round calmly to face Carl. He was the type of person who you could kick and punch without
getting a reaction. Carl knew a guy born with underdeveloped frontal lobes who was simply unable to become angry. If the brain had a similar area that controlled emotion and stress, in Aalbæk’s case it had been replaced with an echoing vacuum.

Carl tried again. Why the hell not?

‘What are you doing here? Can’t you tell me that, Aalbæk? Shouldn’t you be up at my place in Allerød instead, drawing swastikas on my bedposts? Because there’s a connection between what we’re both working on right now, isn’t there, Aalbæk?’

His facial expression didn’t exactly suggest a desire to oblige. ‘You’re still a sarky old git, eh, Mørck? I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Why are you standing here, staring up at the fifth floor? It wouldn’t happen to be because you hope Kimmie Lassen drops by to say hi to Tine Karlsen, would it? You’re the one asking round the central train station for her, aren’t you?’ He got in Aalbæk’s face. ‘Today you connected Tine Karlsen up there with Kimmie, didn’t you?’

The thin man’s jaw muscles worked under the skin. ‘I don’t know who or what you’re blathering on about, Mørck. I’m here because a father and mother wish to know what their son is doing with the Moonies on the second floor.’

Carl nodded, recalling how slick Aalbæk was. Of course he was able to fabricate a cover story when he needed one.

‘I think it might be nice to see your business receipts from this last period of time. I wonder if one of your employers is interested in finding this Kimmie? I think so.
I’m just not completely sure why. Will you tell me that voluntarily, or do I need to fetch those receipts myself?’

‘You can fetch whatever the hell you like. Just remember a warrant.’

‘Aalbæk, old boy.’ He thumped him so hard on the back that his shoulder blades collided. ‘Will you tell your employer that the more they harass me privately, the more I will go after them. Is that understood?’

Aalbæk was trying not to gasp for air, but when Carl was out of sight, he surely would. ‘I’ve understood enough to know that you’re losing it, Mørck. Leave me alone.’

Carl nodded. That was the disadvantage of being the head of the country’s unquestionably tiniest investigative unit. If he had a few more men, he’d put a couple of his best magnets on Finn Aalbæk. He had a strong hunch it would pay to tail this stick figure, but who would do it? Rose?

‘You’ll hear from us,’ Carl said, heading off down Vodroffsvej. Then, when he was out of sight, he ran as fast as he could down the cross street and back around the Codan Building, ending up on Gammel Kongevej again, near Værnedamsvej. In a few breathless leaps he was on the other side of the street in time to see Aalbæk standing beside the lake, talking into his mobile.

Maybe he was hard to ruffle, but he certainly didn’t look happy.

During the time Ulrik worked as a stock market analyst he had made many investors richer than anyone else in his line of business, and the key words were ‘information, information, information’. In this field, wealth was created neither through coincidence nor luck. Certainly not luck.

Nobody in the business had as many contacts, and there wasn’t a single media conglomerate where he didn’t know someone. He was confident and careful, and he scrutinized the publicly traded companies thoroughly and by every imaginable means before he estimated the profitability of their stocks. Sometimes he was so thorough, in fact, that businesses asked him to forget what he’d learned. And his acquaintances with people who were caught in a bind, or who knew someone who knew someone who needed help getting out of an ugly situation, spread like ripples in the water until they eventually covered the entire ocean upon which society’s largest platforms floated.

In some less advanced countries this would have made Ulrik an extremely dangerous man who for many would have been a much better ally with his throat slashed – but not here. In tiny Denmark the system was so ingenious that if you knew some dirt about somebody, they also knew something just as bad about you. If it wasn’t hushed up the one person’s offence quickly infected the other’s.
A strange, practical principle which meant that no one would say anything about anyone else, not even if they were caught with their hands in the biscuit tin.

Because nobody wanted to spend six years in prison for insider trading. And nobody wanted to saw off the branch they were sitting on.

Up in his slowly growing money tree, Ulrik spun a spider web that in polite circles was called a ‘network’ – this wonderful, paradoxical word that functioned as intended only if the net filtered out more people than it caught.

And Ulrik made exceptionally good catches in his network. The kinds of people others read about. Respected people. The crème de la crème. All of them people who’d risen from their origins and were now soaring towards a stratum where one needn’t share the sunlight with riff-raff.

These were the people he hunted with. The ones he walked arm in arm with at the Freemason’s lodge. The ones who understood the importance of sticking with their own kind.

Ulrik was thus a vital cog in the boarding-school gang’s wheel. He was the gregarious one everyone knew, and behind him stood his childhood pals, Ditlev Pram and Torsten Florin. It was a strong, albeit oddly matched, triumvirate, one that was invited to everything worth being invited to.

This afternoon they had begun their high jinks at a reception in a downtown gallery that had connections to both the theatre scene and the royal family. Afterwards they’d wound up at a lavish soirée in the company of parade uniforms, medals and knightly orders. The event
featured well-prepared speeches written by underlings who had not been invited, while a string ensemble tried to draw those present into Brahms’ world, and the champagne and self-praise flowed generously.

‘Is it true what I’m hearing, Ulrik?’ the cabinet minister at his side asked, his alcohol-dulled eyes trying to measure the distance to his glass. ‘Is it really true that Torsten killed a couple of horses with a crossbow on a hunt this summer? Just like that, in an open field?’ He tried again to pour a few drops in his much-too-tall glass.

Ulrik reached out in support of the man’s efforts. ‘Do you know what? Don’t believe everything you hear. And, by the way, why don’t you come and hunt with us sometime? That way you can see for yourself what it’s all about.’

The minister nodded. This was exactly what he’d wanted, and he would love it. Ulrik knew such things. Another important man snared in his net.

Then he turned to his dinner companion, who’d been attempting to get his attention all evening.

‘You look beautiful tonight, Isabel,’ he said, laying a hand on her arm. In another hour she would learn what she’d got herself into.

Ditlev had assigned him the task. They didn’t get a bite every time, but this was a sure thing. Isabel would do whatever they asked her to – she seemed to be up for a little of everything. Of course she would whimper along the way, but the years of boredom and lack of satisfaction would certainly be a plus. Perhaps she’d find it more difficult bearing Torsten’s method of handling her body than that of the others, but on the other hand they’d seen evidence that it was precisely this way of Torsten’s that made
them dependent. Torsten understood women’s sensuality better than most. In any event, she’d keep it to herself. Rape or not, she wouldn’t run her mouth off. Why hazard the risk of losing access to the many millions her impotent husband controlled?

Ulrik stroked her forearm, up along her silken sleeve. This cool fabric, primarily worn by warm-blooded women – he simply loved it.

He nodded to Ditlev at one of the tables across from him. It should have been the signal, but a man was standing at Ditlev’s side, stealing his attention. He was whispering something to Ditlev, who sat there holding a forkful of salmon mousse, ignoring all else. His eyes were staring blankly into space as the wrinkles on his forehead deepened into furrows. It was impossible to misinterpret these signs.

With an appropriate excuse, Ulrik stood up and tapped Torsten on the shoulder as he passed his table.

The neglected woman would have to wait until next time.

He heard Torsten excuse himself to his dinner companion. In a moment he would kiss her hand, which was expected of a man like Torsten Florin. A heterosexual man who dressed women ought to also know how best to undress them.

The three of them met in the foyer.

‘Who was the guy you were talking to?’ Ulrik asked.

Ditlev’s hand fidgeted with his bow tie. He hadn’t fully recovered from what he’d just heard. ‘That was one of my people from Caracas. He came to tell me that Frank Helmond has told several of the nurses that we were the ones who attacked him.’

It was precisely this kind of mess Ulrik hated. Hadn’t Ditlev sworn he’d had the situation under control? Didn’t Thelma promise that she and Helmond would keep their mouths shut if the divorce and his plastic surgery went smoothly?