The Absent One (6 page)

‘Find us the Rørvig victims’ mother’s address, Assad. She’s moved several times over the last few years, and apparently doesn’t reside at the address listed in Tisvilde’s Civil Registration System. So be a little creative, Assad, OK? Call her old neighbours. The telephone numbers are right there. Perhaps they know something.’ He pointed at a mess of notes he’d just pulled from his pocket. Then he got a notebook and wrote a to-do list.

He had the distinct sense that a new case was unfolding.

‘Honestly, Carl, don’t waste your time on a case that has already led to a conviction.’ Homicide Chief Marcus Jacobsen was shaking his head as he pawed through the notes on his desk. In just eight days there were four new, gruesome cases. In addition to that, there were three requests for leave of absence and two officers had called in sick, one of which was probably out for good. Carl was well aware what the homicide chief was thinking: who could he transfer, and from which case? But that was his problem, thank God.

‘Focus on your visitors from Norway instead, Carl. Everyone up there has heard about what you did in the Merete Lynggaard case, and they want to know how you structure and prioritize your assignments. I think they have a bunch of old cases they’d like to put a lid on. Concentrate on cleaning up your office and instructing them on solid Danish police work. If you do that, they’ll have something to take with them when they go to the minister’s later in the day.’

Carl let his head slump. Would his visitors be going to a coffee klatsch afterwards with the country’s blow-hard justice minister and gossiping about his department? That was certainly not encouraging.

‘I need to know who is tossing cases on my desk, Marcus. Then we’ll see what happens.’

‘Fine, Carl. You make your own decisions. But if you take up the Rørvig case, we’ll stay completely out of it. We don’t have even one man-hour to squander.’

‘Just relax,’ Carl said, rising to his feet.

Marcus leaned towards the intercom. ‘Lis, come here a moment, will you? I can’t find my calendar.’

Carl’s eyes roamed to the floor. There lay the homicide chief’s calendar. More than likely it had fallen off the desk.

With the tip of his toe he gave it a nudge so that it disappeared under the desk’s drawer unit. Maybe his meeting with the Norwegians would vanish the same way.

He glanced at Lis affectionately as she eased past him. He preferred the pre-metamorphosis version of her, but hey, Lis was Lis.

From over by her desk, Rose Knudsen and her dimples, deep as the Mariana Trench, seemed to be saying,
I’m looking forward to joining you
down in Department Q.

He didn’t return the show of dimples, but then again, he didn’t have any.

Down in the basement Assad was ready, afternoon prayers completed. He wore an oversized windbreaker and held a small leather briefcase under his arm.

‘The mother of the murdered siblings lives with an old
friend in Roskilde,’ he said, adding that they could get there in less than half an hour if they stepped on the gas. ‘But they’ve also called from Hornbæk, Carl. It wasn’t such good news.’

Carl pictured Hardy. Eighty-one inches of lame flesh, face turned towards the Sound, watching the pleasure boatmen sailing for the final time that season.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked. He felt awful. It had now been more than a month since he’d last visited his old colleague.

‘They say he cries so very often,’ Assad replied. ‘Even though they give him a lot of pills and all, he still cries.’

It was a completely ordinary detached house at the end of Fasanvej. The names Jens-Arnold and Yvette Larsen were etched on to the brass plate, and below that a small cardboard sign in block letters:
MARTHA
JØRGENSEN
.

A woman fragile as fairy dust and quite a few years beyond the age of retirement greeted them at the door. She was the kind of attractive old woman who brought a slight smile to Carl’s lips.

‘Yes, Martha lives with me. She has since my husband died. She’s not feeling so well today, I should say,’ she whispered in the corridor. ‘The doctor says it’s progressing rapidly now.’

They heard her friend coughing before they stepped into the conservatory. She sat staring at them with deep-set eyes. There was a variety of pill bottles in front of her. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, flicking ash from her cigarillo with a trembling hand.

Assad made himself comfortable in a chair covered
with faded wool blankets and wilted leaves from the potted plants on the windowsill. Without hesitation, he reached out and took Martha Jørgensen’s hand. ‘Let me tell you, Martha. The way you are feeling right now, I have also seen my mother go through that. And it was not much fun.’

Carl’s mother would have withdrawn her hand, but not Martha Jørgensen.
How did Assad know to do that?
Carl thought, as he considered what role he would play in this production.

‘We have time for a cup of tea before the home help arrives,’ Yvette Larsen said, smiling insistently, and afterwards Martha wept softly as Assad explained why they had come.

They drank tea and ate cake before she gathered her wits to speak.

‘My husband was a policeman,’ she finally said.

‘Yes, we know that, Mrs Jørgensen.’ It was the first time Carl spoke to her.

‘One of his old colleagues gave me copies of the case file.’

‘I see. Was it Klaes Thomasen?’

‘No, not him.’ She wheezed, and with a deep drag on her cigarillo quelled a coughing fit. ‘It was someone else. Arne he was called. But he’s dead now. He gathered everything in a folder.’

‘May we have a look at it, Mrs Jørgensen?’

She raised a nearly transparent hand to her head, her lips trembling. ‘I’m afraid not. I don’t have it any longer.’ Her eyes narrowed. Apparently she had a headache. ‘I
don’t know who I loaned it to last. Quite a few people have had a glimpse at that folder.’

‘Is this it?’ Carl handed her the pale green folder.

She shook her head. ‘No. It was grey, and it was much bigger. It was impossible to hold in one hand.’

‘Are there other materials? Anything you can let us have?’

She glanced at her friend. ‘Can we tell them, Yvette?’

‘I don’t really know, Martha. Do you think we should?’

The ailing woman fixed her deep-set blue eyes on a double portrait on the windowsill, resting between a rusty watering can and a tiny sandstone figure of St Francis of Assisi. ‘Look at them, Yvette. What did
they
ever do?’ Her eyes grew moist. ‘My little ones. Can’t we do it for them?’

Yvette placed a box of After Eight mints on the table. ‘I suppose we can,’ she sighed, and moved towards the corner where old, crumpled-up Christmas paper and recyclable, corrugated cardboard boxes were stacked: a mausoleum to old age and those days when scarcity was an everyday word.

‘Here,’ she said, pulling out a Peter Hahn box, stuffed to the brim.

‘Over the past ten years Martha and I have added newspaper clippings to the files. After my husband died, it was just the two of us, you see.’

Assad accepted the box and opened it.

‘They’re about unresolved assault cases,’ Yvette went on. ‘And the pheasant killers.’

‘The pheasant killers?’ Carl said.

‘Yes, what else would you call people like that?’ Yvette rummaged around a bit in the box to find an example.

Yes, pheasant killers did seem a fitting description. Standing together in a large PR photo from one of the weeklies were a couple of members of the royal family, some bourgeois riff-raff and Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen, Ditlev Pram and Torsten Florin – each holding a broken-open shotgun, with one foot triumphantly planted before scores of dead pheasants and partridges.

‘Oy,’ Assad exclaimed. There wasn’t much more to say on the matter.

They noticed something stirring in Martha Jørgensen, but couldn’t tell where her agitation was leading.

‘I won’t stand for it!’ she suddenly cried out. ‘They must be got rid of, every single one of them. They beat my children to death and killed my husband. To hell with them, I say.’

She tried to get up, but instead fell forward under her own weight, crashing forehead first against the edge of the table. It seemed almost as though she hadn’t noticed.

‘They, too, must die,’ she hissed, with her cheek on the tablecloth. Then she proceeded to lash out with her arms, knocking over the teacups.

‘Calm down, Martha,’ Yvette said, ushering the gasping woman back to her stack of pillows.

When Martha got her breathing under control and once again sat passively puffing on her cigarillo, Yvette led them into the dining room next door. She apologized for her friend’s behaviour, explaining that the tumour in her brain was now so large that it was hard to know how she would react. She hadn’t always been that way.

As if they deserved an apology.

‘A man came to visit and told Martha he’d known Lisbet
well.’ Yvette raised her almost non-existent eyebrow a smidgen. ‘Lisbet was Martha’s daughter, and the boy was called Søren. You know that, right?’ Assad and Carl nodded. ‘Maybe Lisbet’s friend still has the file, I don’t know.’ She gazed towards the conservatory. ‘Apparently he expressly promised Martha he’d bring it back someday.’ She looked at them so sadly, one felt the urge to give her a hug. ‘He probably won’t be able to do so before it’s too late.’

‘This man who took the case file, can you remember his name, Yvette?’ Assad asked.

‘I’m afraid not. I wasn’t there when she gave it to him, and her memory isn’t what it used to be.’ She patted the side of her head. ‘The tumour, you know.’

‘Do you know if he was a policeman?’ Carl added.

‘I don’t think so, but maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Why didn’t he take this with him then?’ Assad asked, referring to the Peter Hahn box under his arm.

‘Oh, that. It was just something Martha wanted to do. Someone has already confessed to the murders, haven’t they? I helped her collect newspapers clippings because it was good for her. The man who borrowed the case file probably didn’t believe they were especially important. And they most likely aren’t.’

They asked about the key to Martha’s summer cottage, which Yvette told them about, and made inquiries about the days around the time of the murders. But Yvette had nothing else to add. As she explained, it had happened twenty years ago. And besides, it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone wanted to remember.

When the home help arrived, they said goodbye.

Hardy kept a photograph of his son on his bedside table, the only hint that this prostrate figure with matted, greasy hair and tubes in his urinary tract had once had a life other than that which the respirator, the permanently turned-on television and the busy nurses provided for him.

‘Took your bloody time to get your arse here,’ he said, eyes fixed on an imaginary point a thousand yards above the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries in Hornbæk. A place with a 360-degree view, and from which a person could fall so hard and far that he’d never wake up again.

Carl racked his brain for a good excuse, but gave up. Instead he picked up the framed photo, saying, ‘I hear Mads has begun studying at the university.’

‘Who told you that? Are you banging my wife?’ he said, without even blinking.

‘No, Hardy. Why the hell would you say such a thing? I know because … because, oh, I don’t fucking remember who at headquarters told me.’

‘Where’s your little Syrian? Have they thrown him back into the sand dunes?’

Carl knew Hardy. This was just small talk.

‘Tell me what’s on your mind, Hardy. I’m here now, OK?’ He breathed deeply. ‘In the future I’ll visit you more often, old boy. I’ve been on holiday, I’m sure you understand.’

‘Do you see the shears on the table?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘They’re always there. They use them to cut the gauze.
And the tape that secures my probes and syringes. They look sharp, don’t you think?’

Carl looked at them. ‘Sure, Hardy.’

‘Couldn’t you take them and stab me in my carotid artery, Carl? It’d make me very happy.’ He laughed briefly, then stopped suddenly. ‘My arm is twitching, Carl, right below my shoulder muscle, I think.’

Carl frowned. So Hardy felt some twitching, the poor man. If only it were so. ‘Do you want me to scratch it for you, Hardy?’ Pulling the blanket a bit to the side, he considered whether he should yank the shirt down or scratch over it.

‘Damn it, you dumb bastard. Listen to what I’m saying. It’s twitching. Can you see it?’

Carl moved the shirt. Hardy had always made it a point to look attractive. Well groomed and tanned. Now, apart from delicate, pale blue veins, his skin was white as a maggot’s.

Carl touched Hardy’s arm. There wasn’t a muscle left; it felt like tenderized hung beef. And he didn’t notice any twitching.

‘I can feel you in one small spot, Carl. Take the shears and prick me, but not too fast. I’ll tell you when you hit it.’

Poor man. Paralysed from the neck down. Just a touch of feeling in one shoulder was all that was left. Everything else was just the hope of a person in despair.

But Carl did as Hardy asked. Quite systematically, from his elbow down and then up and all the way round. When he neared the back of Hardy’s armpit, he gasped.

‘There, Carl. Use your pen to mark it.’

He did. A friend was a friend, after all.

‘Do it again. Try to trick me. I’ll tell you when you hit the mark. I’m closing my eyes.’

When Carl reached the spot again, Hardy grinned, or perhaps it was a grimace. ‘There!’ he cried. It was goddam unbelievable. Enough to give you the shivers.

‘Don’t tell the nurse, Carl.’

Carl wrinkled his brow. ‘Huh? Why not, Hardy? This is wonderful news. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope in spite of everything. Then they’ll have something to work from.’

‘I’m going to try to enlarge the spot. I want my one arm back, do you hear?’ Only then did Hardy look at his old colleague for the first time. ‘And what I use the arm for isn’t anyone’s business, got it?’

Carl nodded. Whatever improved Hardy’s mood was fine with him. The dream he had of picking up the shears by himself and stabbing himself in the throat was apparently all he’d been living for.