The Absent One (9 page)

As he lit his fag his mobile rang. It was Rose.

The game was in the archives at Holbæk, she said. The file was gone, but the game was still there.

So she wasn’t completely hopeless after all.

‘Call them again,’ Carl said, inhaling a deep drag of smoke into his lungs. ‘Ask them about the pies and wedges.’

‘Wedges?’

‘Yes, that’s what they call the tiny thingamabobs you get when you answer correctly. You put them in the pies. Just ask them which wedges are in which pie. Note which, pie for pie.’

‘Pies?’

‘Yes, damn it. They’re also called wheels. Wheels or pies, it’s all the same thing. The round pieces that the small triangles fit into. Don’t you know Trivial Pursuit?’

She emitted that ominous laughter again. ‘Trivial Pursuit? Today, in Denmark, it’s called Bezzerwizzer, Gramps!’ Then she hung up.

They would never be best friends.

He took another puff to calm his racing pulse. Maybe he could exchange Rose for Lis. Lis probably wouldn’t
mind gearing down to his speed. Punk hair or not, she sure would be a major aesthetic improvement to the basement, next to the photos of Assad’s aunts.

At that moment the extraordinary sound of splintering wood and breaking glass was followed by a few of Assad’s foreign phrases that clearly had nothing to do with afternoon prayers. But the shattered window had quite a stunning effect: light poured into every nook and cranny, leaving no doubt that spiders had lived like kings in this house. Cobwebs hung like festoons from the ceiling; on the long shelves, souvenirs sat in dust so thick that all colours melded into one.

Carl and Assad went through the events they’d read about in the reports.

In the early-afternoon hours someone entered the house via the open kitchen door and killed the boy with a single blow from a hammer, which was later found a few hundred yards away. The boy probably never felt a thing. Both the coroner’s report and the autopsy indicated he died on the scene. His rigid grip on the cognac bottle attested to that.

The girl had certainly tried to get away, but the attackers had got to her first. Then she’d been pummelled to death, exactly where the dark stains were on the rug – which was where they’d also found the remains of the victim’s brain mass, spit, urine and blood.

The investigators had presumed that the killers had removed the young man’s bathing trunks in order to humiliate him. The trunks were never found, but the notion that the siblings had been playing Trivial Pursuit with the girl in her bikini and the boy naked had never
been a credible one. An incestuous relationship was absolutely unimaginable. Each had a sweetheart, and each lived a harmonious life.

The brother and sister’s sweethearts had slept over with them in the cottage the night before the assault, but in the morning had driven to Holbæk where they attended school. They were never suspects. They had alibis. Besides, they were completely devastated by the murders.

His mobile rang again. Carl glanced at the number on the display and fortified himself by taking another deep drag from his cigarette.

‘Yes, Rose.’

‘They thought your question about pies and wedges was very strange.’

‘And?’

‘Well, they had to go look, didn’t they?’

‘And?’

‘The pink pie had four wedges. A yellow, a pink, a green and a blue.’

Carl glanced down at the pie. That was what he had at his end, too.

‘The blue, yellow, green and orange pies weren’t used. They were in the box with the rest of the wedges, and they were empty.’

‘OK. What about the brown pie?’

‘The brown pie had a brown and a pink wedge in it. You following me?’

Carl didn’t respond. He just looked down at the empty brown pie sitting on the board. How very odd.

‘Thanks, Rose,’ he said. ‘Well done.’

‘What’s new, Carl?’ Assad asked. ‘What did she say?’

‘There should be a brown and a pink thingamajig in the brown pie, Assad. But it’s empty.’

They both stared at it.

‘Should we be looking for the two small thingies that are missing, I wonder, then?’ Assad said. He bent down and peered under an oak bench that was pushed up against the wall.

Carl drew yet another deep pull of smoke into his lungs. Why had someone replaced the original Trivial Pursuit game with this one? It was so obvious that something was off. And why was the locked kitchen door so easy to open after all these years? Why had this case been tossed on his basement desk in the first place? Who was behind it?

‘They celebrated Christmas in the cottage once,’ Assad said. ‘That must have been cold then.’ He yanked a festive paper heart from the depths under the bench.

Carl nodded. It couldn’t have been colder in this house than it felt now. Everything in it was saturated with the tragedy of the past. Who was even left from that time? An old woman who would soon die of a tumour in her brain, that was about it.

He focused on the panel doors leading to the bedrooms.
Father, mother and child we see. Count them quickly: one, two, three.
He peeked into each room, one after the other. As expected, he saw the usual pine beds and small night tables draped with what resembled remnants of chequered tablecloths. The girl’s room was adorned with posters of Duran Duran and Wham!, the boy’s with Suzy Quatro wearing tight black leather. In these bedrooms, beneath the sheets, the future had seemed bright
and infinite. And in the living room behind him, that future had been brutally torn from them. Which meant that he was standing on the very axis upon which life revolved.

The threshold where hope had met reality.

‘There’s still alcohol in the cupboards, Carl,’ Assad called out from the kitchen. So there had been no burglars in the house, in any case.

Observing the house from the outside, a strange unease came over Carl. This case was like grabbing at quicksilver: poisonous to touch, impossible to hold. Liquid and solid at the same time. The many years that had passed. The man who’d turned himself in. The gang formed at school, now roaming the upper echelons of society.

What did he and Assad have to go on? Why bother continuing at all, he asked himself, turning towards his partner. ‘I think we should give the case a rest, Assad. C’mon, let’s go.’

He kicked at a tuft of grass in the sand and pulled out his car keys to emphasize his decision. But Assad didn’t follow. He simply stood there, gazing at the living room’s smashed window, as if he’d opened the route to a holy place.

‘I don’t know, Carl. We are then the only ones who can do anything for the victims now, do you realize that?’

Do anything for
, Assad had said, as though somewhere inside of him, his Middle Eastern soul had a lifeline to the past.

Carl nodded. ‘I don’t think we’ll find anything else out here,’ he said, ‘but let’s head up the road a little way.’ He lit
another fag. Breathing fresh air through puffs of cigarette was simply the best.

They walked for a few minutes against a soft breeze that carried the scent of early autumn, until they came to a summer cottage from which they heard sounds indicating that the last retiree hadn’t yet retreated to his winter abode.

‘That’s right, there aren’t many of us left up here now, but it’s only Friday, you know,’ said a ruddy man who they found behind the cottage, wearing a belt hitched all the way up to his chest. ‘Just come back tomorrow. Saturdays and Sundays it’s teeming with people around here, and it’ll be like that for at least another month.’

Then, when he caught sight of Carl’s badge, his mouth began to run. Everything gushed out in one long litany: thefts, drowned Germans, speed demons down around Vig.

As though the old geezer had been trapped in an extended Robinson Crusoe-like state of silence, Carl thought.

At this point Assad seized the man’s arm. ‘Was it you, then, who killed the two children in the house down on that road called Ved Hegnet?’

He was an old man. In the middle of a breath, he seemed to shut down. He stopped blinking and his eyes glossed over like a dead man’s; his lips parted and turned blue, and he couldn’t even bring his hands to his chest. He simply stumbled backwards and Carl had to leap to his assistance.

‘Good God Almighty, Assad! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ was the last thing Carl said before loosening the man’s belt and collar.

Ten minutes passed before the old man recovered. In all that time his wife – who’d hurried in from the scullery – didn’t utter a single peep. They were ten very long minutes.

‘Please, please excuse my partner,’ Carl said to the stunned man. ‘He’s here on an Iraqi–Danish police-exchange programme and doesn’t understand all the nuances of the Danish language. Sometimes our methods are at loggerheads.’

Assad said nothing. Perhaps the word ‘loggerheads’ threw him off.

‘I remember the case,’ the man said at last, following a few squeezes from his wife and three minutes of deep breathing. ‘It was terrible. But if you want to ask someone about it, then ask Valdemar Florin. He lives here on Flyndersøvej. Just fifty yards further, on the right. You can’t miss the sign.’

‘Why did you say that about the Iraqi Police, Carl?’ Assad asked, chucking a stone into the water.

Carl ignored him and stared instead at Valdemar Florin’s residence, which towered above the hill. Back in the eighties, that bungalow had been a regular feature in the weekly magazines. This was where the jet set came to let their hair down. Legendary parties where anything went. Rumours circulated that whoever tried to match Florin’s parties would have a mortal enemy for life.

Valdemar Florin had always been an uncompromising man. He trod a fine line at the edge of the law, but for inscrutable reasons had never been arrested. Granted, he’d been involved in a few settlements over rights and
sexual harassment of young girls in his workplace, but that was it. When it came to business, Florin was a jack of all trades. Buildings, weapons systems, colossal pallets of emergency foodstuffs, sudden ventures in the Rotterdam oil market; he could do everything.

But that was all history now. When his wife, Beate, killed herself, Valdemar Florin lost his grip on the rich and beautiful. From one day to the next, his houses in Rørvig and Vedbæk became fortresses no one wished to frequent. Everyone knew he was into very young girls and had driven his wife to suicide. Even in those circles something like this was unforgivable.

‘Why, Carl?’ Assad repeated. ‘Why did you say that about the Iraqi police?’

Carl looked at his diminutive partner. Beneath his brown skin his cheeks were flushed, though it was unclear whether it was from indignation or the cold breeze from Skansehage.

‘Assad, you cannot threaten anyone with those kinds of questions. How could you accuse the old man of something he so clearly hadn’t done? What good did it do?’

‘You’ve done that yourself.’

‘Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

‘And the Iraqi police, what about that?’

‘Forget it, Assad. I made it up.’ But when they were shown into Valdemar Florin’s living room, he could feel Assad’s eyes on his neck, and he filed this in the back of his mind.

Valdemar Florin was sitting in front of his panorama window, from which they could see across Flyndersøvej and
further out in an almost endless view across Hesselø Bay. Behind him, four double glass doors opened on to a sandstone terrace and a swimming pool that lay in the middle of the garden like a dried-up, desert reservoir. At one time this place had buzzed with activity. Even members of the royal family had visited.

Florin sat calmly reading a book. His legs rested on a footstool, there was a fire in the woodstove, and a dram on the marble table. All told it was a very tranquil scene, if one disregarded the many, many book pages spread across the wool carpet.

Carl cleared his throat a couple of times, but the old financier kept his concentration trained on his book, and didn’t turn his attention to them until he’d finished the page, tore it out and tossed it on the floor with the others.

‘That way I know how far I’ve got,’ he said. ‘To whom do I owe the pleasure?’

Assad glanced at Carl, eyebrows quivering. There were some idioms he still could not immediately process.

When Carl showed him his badge, Valdemar Florin’s smile vanished. And when Carl explained that they were from the Copenhagen Police, and why they were there, he asked them to leave.

He was close to seventy-five years old, and still the thin, arrogant weasel that snapped at people. But behind his bright eyes was a latent, easily roused peevishness itching to get out. It just needed a little encouragement, then it had free reign.

‘Yes, we’ve come unannounced, Mr Florin, and if you wish us to go, we will. I have enormous respect for you, so
naturally I will do as you request. If it suits you better, I can also return early tomorrow.’

Somewhere behind Florin’s armour a reaction flickered. Carl had just given him what everyone wishes for. To hell with caressing people, flattering them and showering them with gifts. The only thing people really long for is respect. Give your fellow humans respect and they’ll dance, his teacher at police academy had said. Bloody right.

‘I don’t fall for compliments,’ the man said. But he had.

‘May we sit, Mr Florin? Just for five minutes?’

‘What is this about?’

‘Do you believe Bjarne Thøgersen acted alone when he killed the Jørgensen siblings back in 1987? Someone is making a different claim, you should know. Your son is not a suspect, but a few of his companions could be.’

One of Florin’s nostrils flared as if he were about to mutter a curse, but instead he threw the rest of his book on the table.

‘Helen,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Fetch me another whisky.’ He lit an Egyptian cigarette without offering them one.

‘Who? Who claims what?’ he said with a peculiar alertness in his voice.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. But it seems pretty evident that Bjarne Thøgersen wasn’t alone.’

‘Oh, that little nobody.’ His tone of voice was scornful, but he didn’t elaborate.

A girl of about twenty entered the room wearing a white pinafore over a black uniform. She poured whisky and water as if it were something she did perpetually. She didn’t acknowledge their presence.