The Absent One (27 page)

‘You’re too ill, Hardy. If only you weren’t in such bad shape.’ He held a long pause, hoping Hardy would release him from his anguish, but he said nothing. ‘Get a little more feeling back first, Hardy. We’ll wait and see what happens.’

He watched his friend’s eyes slowly close. The busted hope had snuffed out the spark in him.

‘We’ll wait and see,’ he’d said.

As if Hardy could do anything else.

Not since his first, green years in the homicide division had Carl got to work as early as he did the next morning. It was Friday, but the Hillerød motorway was devoid of traffic for several long stretches. The officers arriving in the garage at headquarters slammed their car doors sluggishly. The clocking-in desk smelled of Thermos coffee. There was plenty of time.

Entering his basement was something of a shock. A ruler-straight row of tables in the corridor, nicely elevated to elbow height, bid welcome to Department Q’s domain. Oceans of paper were lined up in small stacks, apparently sorted according to a system that was bound to create some problems. Three noticeboards hung in a row on the wall with various clippings from the Rørvig case. On the very last table Assad lay in a deep sleep, snoring in the foetal position on a small, lavishly decorated prayer rug.

Further down the hall, from Rose’s office, came a noise that at best could be described as a Bach melody set to unrestrained whistling – all in all, quite an organ concert.

Ten minutes later Rose and Assad were sitting before him, cups steaming, in the office which Carl, the day before, had called his, but now almost couldn’t recognize.

Rose watched as he removed his coat and draped it over the back of the chair. ‘Nice shirt, Carl,’ she said. ‘You remembered to put the teddy bear in this one, I can see. Well done.’ She pointed at the bulge in his breast pocket.

He nodded. It was to remind him to shoo Rose on to a
new, unsuspecting department when the opportunity presented itself.

‘What do you say then, boss?’ Assad said, making a sweeping gesture round a room where nothing seemed visibly out of order. A joy to behold for Feng Shui fans. Clean lines, the floor included.

‘We got Johan to come down here and help us. He came back to work yesterday,’ Rose said. ‘After all, he was the one who set everything in motion.’

Carl tried to put a little glow into his frozen smile. It wasn’t that he wasn’t pleased. Just a little overwhelmed.

Four hours later they sat at their respective desks waiting for the Norwegian delegation to arrive. They all had their roles to play. They’d discussed Johan’s list of assaults and had received verification that two easily identifiable fingerprints found on one of the Trivial Pursuit cards matched those of the murdered Søren Jørgensen, and another one, less well preserved, matched the sister. Now the question was, who had taken the cards from the crime scene? If it was Bjarne Thøgersen, then why were the cards in a box found at Kimmie’s house in Ordrup? And if others had been in the summer cottage beside Thøgersen, it would really be a radical departure from the court’s interpretation of events at the time of sentencing.

The euphoria spread all the way into Rose Knudsen’s office, where Bach’s mistreatment had now been supplanted by a concentrated effort to dig up facts about Kristian Wolf’s death, while Assad tried to get leads on where a ‘K. Jeppesen’ – Kimmie & Co.’s Danish teacher – now lived and worked.

There was quite enough to do before the Norwegians came.

When it got to twenty minutes past ten, Carl knew what that meant.

‘They’re not coming down here unless I fetch them,’ he said, setting off with his briefcase.

He trotted up the rotunda’s stone steps to the third floor.

‘Are they in there?’ he shouted to a pair of his weary colleagues, who were busy untying Gordian knots. They nodded.

There were at least fifteen people in the canteen. Besides the homicide chief there was Deputy Commissioner Lars Bjørn, Lis with her notebook, a pair of alert young blokes in boring suits who Carl guessed were from the Justice Ministry, and five colourfully dressed men who, in contrast to the rest of the gathering, received him with polite, toothy smiles. One point for the guests from Oslo-stan.

‘Oh my, if it isn’t Carl Mørck, what a pleasant surprise,’ the homicide chief exclaimed, meaning the opposite.

Carl shook hands with everyone, including Lis, and introduced himself extra clearly to the Norwegians. He himself didn’t understand a lick of what they were saying.

‘Soon we’ll continue the tour in the lower chambers,’ Carl said, ignoring Bjørn’s glare. ‘But first I would like to quickly explain my principles as head of the newly established unit, Department Q.’

He stood in front of the whiteboard, the notations on which they’d apparently been discussing, and said: ‘Do all you guys understand what I’m saying?’

He noted their eager nods and the four scallops on Lars Bjørn’s dark blue tie.

For the next twenty minutes he walked them through the Merete Lynggaard investigation, which the Norwegians – judging by their facial expressions – were well acquainted with, and topped it off with a brief account of their current case.

It was clear the chaps from the Justice Ministry were unacquainted with the latter. They’d never heard of that case, he figured.

He turned to the homicide chief.

‘During our investigation we’ve come into the possession, just yesterday, of highly unambiguous evidence that at least one member of the gang, Kimmie Lassen, can be connected directly or indirectly to the crime.’ He outlined the events, assured everyone there was a reliable witness to his removal of Kimmie’s box from the house in Ordrup, and watched as Lars Bjørn’s look grew darker and darker.

‘She could have got the metal box from Bjarne Thøgersen. She lived with him!’ the homicide chief interjected. True enough. They had already discussed that possibility down in the basement.

‘Yes, but I don’t think so. Look at the date on the newspaper. It’s from the day that Kimmie, according to Bjarne Thøgersen, moved in with him. I believe she folded it up and hid it because she didn’t want him to see it. But there may be other explanations. We can only hope we track down Kimmie Lassen, so we can interrogate her. To that end we will request an all-points bulletin be sent out, plus reinforcements of a few men to monitor the area around Copenhagen’s central station and shadow the drug addict
Tine and, not least of all, Messrs Pram, Dybbøl-Jensen and Florin.’ Here he glanced at Lars Bjørn with a venomous glint in his eye before turning to the Norwegians. ‘Three of those pupils who were once suspected of committing the double murder in Rørvig. They are now well-known men in Denmark,’ he explained, ‘who today live as respectable citizens in the upper echelons of Danish society.’

Now the homicide chief’s forehead, too, was beginning to display a frown.

‘You see,’ Carl said, directly addressing the Norwegians, who were knocking back their cups of coffee as if they had sat through a sixty-hour flight without food or drink, or at the very least came from a country that hadn’t seen a coffee bean since the German invasion, ‘as you know through your and Kripo’s generally fabulous work in Oslo, such lucky coincidences often throw light on other crimes that were never solved, or even reveal other cases not previously classified as crimes.’

At this point one of the Norwegians raised his hand and asked a question in his sing-song dialect that Carl needed to have repeated a couple of times before a liaison officer came to his rescue.

‘What Superintendent Trønnes would like to know is whether a list has been drawn up of the possible crimes that could be linked to the Rørvig murders,’ came the translation.

Carl nodded politely. How the hell could the man find so much coherent meaning in all that chirping?

He pulled Johan Jacobsen’s list from his briefcase and fastened it to the whiteboard. ‘The homicide chief assisted
in this part of the investigation.’ He glanced appreciatively at Marcus, who in return smiled politely around at the others, while simultaneously resembling a bundle of question marks.

‘Our homicide chief has placed a civil employee’s personal investigative work at Department Q’s disposal. Without fine colleagues like him and his team, and without cross-disciplinary collaboration, it would be impossible to get so far in an investigation in such a short period of time. We must remember that this case, which is more than twenty years old, has been the object of our interest for two weeks only. So thank you, Marcus.’

He raised an imaginary glass to Jacobsen, knowing that all this would boomerang on him sooner or later.

Despite attempts – Lars Bjørn’s being especially eager – at redirecting Carl’s agenda, it was very easy to hustle the Norwegians down to the basement.

The liaison officer made an effort to keep Carl abreast of their Norwegian brothers’ commentary. They apparently admired Danish thrift and considered that results should always take precedence over daily demands for resources and fringe benefits. That interpretation would most likely be met with a certain amount of irritation when it made the rounds upstairs.

‘There’s a guy here who’s asking me questions all the time I can’t understand a word of. Do you speak Norwegian?’ he whispered to Rose, as Assad heaped praises and medals on the Danish Police’s policy for integrating foreigners and also explained his present slave labour with surprising skill and comprehensiveness.

In the most intelligible and perhaps most attractive-sounding Norwegian Carl had yet to lend an ear to, Rose said, ‘Here we have the key to our work process,’ and proceeded to go through a stack of papers she had systematized during the early hours of the morning.

As much as he hated to admit it, the presentation was rather impressive.

When they reached Carl’s office, the large-screen TV was displaying a sunny, guided tour of the Holmekollen ski resort. Assad had put in a DVD promoting the wonders of Oslo that he’d purchased around the corner at Politiken’s Bookshop ten minutes earlier, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The justice minister would be flashing his teeth in an ecstatic smile when they gathered for lunch in another hour.

The Norwegian who’d been asking all the questions, who by now had mumbled his name and was apparently the senior officer, invited Carl over to Oslo with a heartfelt discourse on brotherhood. If he couldn’t get Carl to Oslo, then at the very least he would have to join him for lunch, and if he didn’t have time for that either, then, if nothing else, there had to be time for a warm handshake, because he’d earned it.

After they’d gone, Carl looked at his two assistants with something that for a fleeting moment could be construed as warmth and gratefulness. Not because the Norwegians had been shepherded so smoothly through the department, but because he predicted that he would soon be called up to the third floor to continue his brief on the case and have his badge returned. If he got it back, that
meant his suspension was a thing of the past, almost before it had started. And if it
was
a thing of the past, then he wouldn’t have to attend psychotherapy sessions with Mona Ibsen. And if he didn’t have to do that, then they had a dinner date. And if they had a dinner date, then anything was possible.

He needed to offer some nice words of thanks to Assad and Rose, which, while not praising them to the stars, would at least express a promise that in honour of the occasion they could go home an hour early.

The next phone call changed that plan.

The message Assad had left with Rødovre High School had resulted in a return call from one of its senior teachers, a certain Klavs Jeppesen.

He’d agreed to meet with Carl, and, yes, he had indeed taught at that boarding school in the mid-eighties. He remembered the time well.

They hadn’t been the best days of his life.

She found Tine huddled under the stairwell of a building on Dybbølsgade, close to Enghave Plads. Filthy, bruised and dying for a fix. She’d been there for almost an entire day and refused to budge, one of the resident vagrants had said.

She was sitting as far back in the stairwell as she could. Totally obscured by darkness.

She lurched in surprise when Kimmie stuck her head in.

‘God, is it you, Kimmie, love?’ she called out, relieved, and threw herself into Kimmie’s arms. ‘Hi, Kimmie. Hey, hey, you’re just the person I wanted to see.’ She shook like a fluttering leaf. Her teeth chattered.

‘What happened?’ Kimmie asked. ‘Why are you sitting here? Why do you look like that?’ She stroked Tine’s swollen cheek. ‘Who beat you up, Tine?’

‘You got my message, didn’t you, Kimmie?’ She pulled away and looked at Kimmie with yellow, bloodshot eyes.

‘Yes, I saw it. Well done, Tine.’

‘Do I get the thousand kroner then?’

Kimmie nodded, drying sweat from her friend’s forehead. Her face was terribly battered. One eye was nearly closed, her mouth was crooked, and there were haematomas and bluish-yellow bruises everywhere.

‘You can’t go to the places you used to, Kimmie.’ She
crossed her shaking arms over her breast to calm her body. It didn’t work. ‘The men were at my place. It wasn’t too good. But now I’ll stay here, won’t I, Kimmie?’

Kimmie was just about to ask again what had happened when she heard the front door creak open. It was one of the tenants, coming home with the day’s trophies clinking in a plastic grocery bag. Not one of those who’d taken over the neighbourhood recently. Lots of home-made tattoos covered both his forearms.

‘You can’t stay here,’ he said nastily. ‘Sod off, you dirty whores.’

Kimmie stood up.

‘I think you should go up to your room and leave us alone,’ she said, moving a few paces towards him.

‘Because otherwise … ?’ He set the bag between his feet.

‘Because otherwise I’ll beat the shit out of you.’

He loved hearing that, evidently. ‘Hello, bitch, you sound pretty tasty. Either you can sod off and take your disgusting junkie whore with you, or you can come up to my place. What do you say? For all I care that sow can rot wherever she likes, if you come with me.’

He was trying to get his hands on her when his bloated beer belly received her hard fist. Then she punched him again, deforming his surprised expression. There was a crash on the stairway.