The Absent One (13 page)

‘How can you be so certain he was the one who put the case file on your desk?’ Lars Bjørn asked. ‘Did you find his fingerprints on it?’

‘No. I got the results of the analysis today and there weren’t any fingerprints. I just know it, OK? Johan’s the one. If he’s not back by this afternoon I’ll be going over there. Then you can say whatever you like.’

Johan Jacobsen lived in a co-op flat on Vesterbrogade, across from the Black Horse Theatre and the now defunct Mechanical Music Museum. In fact, he lived right where the decisive battle between the anarchist squatters and police occurred in 1990. Carl remembered those days all too well. How many times had he donned riot gear and beaten up girls and boys nearly his own age?

Not exactly the best memories from the good old days.

They had to ring the buzzer on the brand-new intercom a few times before Johan Jacobsen let them in.

‘I didn’t expect you this soon,’ he said softly, showing them into his living room. From here there was a view of the old tiled roofs of the theatre and adjacent inn.

The room was large, but not a very pretty sight. Clearly untouched by a woman’s expert hand and critical eye for quite some time. Gravy-caked plates were stacked on the kitchen worktop, Coke bottles were strewn on the floor. It was a dusty, greasy pigsty.

‘Please excuse the mess,’ the man said, removing dirty clothes from the sofa and coffee table. ‘My wife left me about a month ago.’ His face made the nervous twitch they’d seen so many times at the police station. As if sand had blown in his face and he’d just managed to keep it from getting in his eyes.

Carl shook his head. It was too bad about the wife. He knew the feeling.

‘You know why we’re here?’

He nodded.

‘So you admit straight away that you were the one who put the Rørvig file on my desk, Johan?’

He nodded again.

‘Why didn’t you simply give it to us, then?’ Assad said, thrusting out his lower lip. If he put on a military-style cap, he would resemble Yasser Arafat.

‘Would you have accepted it?’

Carl shook his head. Hardly. A twenty-year-old case with a conviction? No, he was certainly correct on that score.

‘Would you have asked me where I got it? Would you have inquired why I was interested in the case? Would you have bothered to take the time to have your interest aroused? I’ve seen the piles on your desk, Carl.’

Carl nodded. ‘And so you put the replacement Trivial Pursuit box in the cottage as a lead. It couldn’t have been very long ago, since the lock on the kitchen door opened so easily. Am I right?’

Johan nodded.

Just as Carl thought. ‘OK, so you wanted to know whether we’d get properly hooked on the case. I can understand that. But you took quite a risk doing it that way, didn’t you, Johan? What if we hadn’t noticed the game? What if we hadn’t discovered the names written on the cards?’

He shrugged. ‘You’re here now.’

‘I don’t understand it so well.’ Assad sat down in front
of one of the windows facing Vesterbrogade. With the light cascading in behind him, his face turned completely dark. ‘So you’re not satisfied that Bjarne Thøgersen admitted he’d done it?’

‘If you had been in the courtroom during sentencing, you wouldn’t be satisfied, either. Everything was predetermined.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Assad said. ‘Hardly strange when the man turns himself in –’

‘What do you find unusual about the case, Johan?’ Carl interrupted.

The man avoided Carl’s eyes and looked out of the window, as if the grey sky might calm the storm inside him.

‘They were smiling the whole time,’ he said, ‘every single one of them. Thøgersen, the defence lawyer. The three arrogant bastards sitting in the public gallery.’

‘Torsten Florin, Ditlev Pram and Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen. Are they who you’re referring to?’

He nodded while stroking his quivering lips in an attempt to still them.

‘They sat there smiling, you say. That’s a very weak basis for pursuing the case, Johan.’

‘Yes, but I know more now than I did then.’

‘Your father, Arne Jacobsen, worked the case?’ Carl asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And where were you at the time?’

‘I was at Holbæk Technical College.’

‘Holbæk? Did you know the victims?’

‘Yes.’ He said it almost inaudibly.

‘So you also knew Søren?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, a little. But not as well as Lisbet.’

‘You listen now, you,’ Assad broke in. ‘I can tell from your face that Lisbet had told you she wasn’t in love with you any more. Isn’t that right, Johan? She didn’t want you after all.’ Assad’s eyebrows formed a frown. ‘And when you couldn’t have her, you killed her, and now you want us to figure it out so we can arrest you, so you don’t have to commit suicide. Isn’t that right?’

Johan blinked rapidly a few times, then his face hardened. ‘Does he need to be here, Carl?’ he asked in a measured tone.

Carl shook his head. Assad’s outbursts were unfortunately becoming a habit. ‘Go into the other room, Assad. Just for five minutes.’ He pointed at a side door behind Johan.

At this Johan jerked like a jack-in-the-box. There were many indicators of fear, and Carl knew most of them.

So he looked at the closed door.

‘No, not in there. It’s too messy,’ Johan said, standing in front of the door. ‘Go and sit in the dining room, Assad. Or have a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I just made some.’

But Assad had also noticed Johan’s reaction. ‘No thanks, I prefer tea,’ he said, squeezing himself behind Johan and throwing the door wide open.

Behind the door was another high-ceilinged room. There was a row of tables along one wall, covered with stacks of files and loose papers. But most interesting was the face hanging on the wall, staring down at them with melancholy eyes. It was a yard-high photostat of a young
woman, the girl who’d been murdered in Rørvig. Lisbet Jørgensen. Unruly hair on a cloudless background. A real summer snapshot with deep shadows across her face. Had it not been for her eyes, the size of the photo and its unusually prominent position, he would hardly have noticed it. He did now.

As Carl and Assad entered the room it became clear to them that this was a shrine. Everything in here was about Lisbet. There were fresh flowers beside one wall with clippings about the murder. Another wall was adorned with characteristic square Instamatic photos of the girl, plus a few letters and postcards, even a blouse. Happy and cruel moments, side by side.

Johan didn’t say a word. Simply stood in front of the photostat and let himself be drawn into her eyes.

‘Why didn’t you want us to see this room, Johan?’ Carl said.

He shrugged, and Carl understood. It was too intimate. His soul, his life, his broken dreams – all was laid bare on these walls.

‘She broke up with you that night,’ came Assad’s accusation again. ‘Tell it like it is, Johan. It would be best for you then.’

Johan turned and glared at him. ‘All I will say is that the girl I loved most in the entire world was massacred by people who right now are looking down on us from the highest ranks of society and laughing. The fact that somebody as fucking insignificant as Bjarne Thøgersen is the one paying the price comes down to one thing, and that’s money. Judas money, cold hard cash, filthy lucre, for God’s sake. That’s what it boils down to.’

‘And now it has to stop.’ Carl said. ‘But why now?’

‘Because I’m alone again, and I can’t think about anything else. Can’t you see that?’

Johan Jacobsen was just twenty when Lisbet said yes to his marriage proposal. Their fathers were friends. The families had visited one another often, and Johan had been in love with Lisbet for as long as he could remember.

He had been with her that night, while her brother had made love with his girlfriend in the next room.

They’d had a serious talk, and then they’d made love – as a parting gesture, as far as she was concerned. At dawn he’d left in tears, and later that same day she was found dead. In just ten hours he’d plummeted from the highest peak of joy into deep lovesickness and finally into hell. He had never really recovered from that night and the following afternoon. He’d found a new girlfriend whom he’d married, and they’d had two children, yet it was only Lisbet he thought about.

When his father, on his deathbed, told him that he’d stolen the case file and given it to Lisbet’s mother, Johan had driven up to see her the very next day and retrieved the folder.

Since then, these papers had become his most cherished possessions, and from that day forward, Lisbet filled more and more of his life.

Finally she simply filled too much. And so his wife left.

‘What do you mean by “filled too much”?’ asked Assad.

‘I talked about her constantly. Thought about her night and day. All the clippings about the case, all the reports. I simply had to read about her all the time.’

‘And now you want to get rid of it all? That’s why you got us involved?’ Carl asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And what have you got for us? All this?’ Carl spread his arms out over the stacks of paper.

He nodded. ‘If you read all of it, you’ll know that it was the school gang that did it.’

‘You’ve made a list for us of other assaults. We’ve already seen it. Is that what you mean?’

‘That’s only a partial list. I’ve got the full one here.’ He leaned over the table, lifted a stack of newspaper clippings and pulled out a sheet of paper from underneath.

‘It starts here, before the Rørvig murders. This boy went to the same boarding school, it states in the article.’ He pointed at a page in
Politiken
from 15 June 1987. The headline read: ‘Tragedy in Bellahøj. Man, 19, Falls to Death from Ten-Metre Diving Board’.

He ran through the cases, many of which Carl recognized from the list that had been delivered to Department Q. Three or four months separated the different incidents. A couple of them had resulted in deaths.

‘It’s possible they’re all accidents then,’ Assad said. ‘What do they have to do with the boarding-school kids? They aren’t necessarily connected with one another at all. Do you have any proof?’

‘No. That’s your job.’

Assad swung his head dismissively. ‘Honestly, there’s absolutely nothing in this. You’ve just become sick in your head because of this case. I feel sorry for you. You should see a psychologist then. Can’t you go to that Mona Ibsen
at headquarters instead of sending us on a wild duck chase?’

On their drive back to headquarters, Carl and Assad were quiet, each absorbed in thought. Between their ears, the case was moving full speed ahead.

‘Make us a cup of tea, Assad,’ Carl said down in the basement, pushing the plastic grocery bags containing Johan Jacobsen’s papers into the corner. ‘Go easy on the sugar, OK?’

He put his legs up on the desk, turned on the news programme on Channel 2, unplugged his brain and expected nothing more from the day.

The next five minutes changed that.

He picked up the telephone on the first ring and his eyes rolled towards the ceiling when he heard the homicide chief’s dark voice.

‘I’ve talked to the police chief, Carl. She sees no reason why you should dig deeper into this case.’

At first Carl made a show of protesting, but when Marcus Jacobsen wouldn’t give him additional reasons why, he felt the temperature rising around the nape of his neck.

‘I’ll repeat: why?’

‘That’s just the way it is. You should prioritize your assignments so that you’re concentrating exclusively on cases that haven’t resulted in a conviction. The rest you should file away in the metal cabinets down in the archive.’

‘Aren’t I the one who actually decides what to prioritize?’

‘Not when the police chief says something else.’

So that conversation was over.

‘Nice mint tea with a little sugar,’ Assad said after the
conversation ended, handing him a cup. It looked as though the teaspoon could stand upright in the sea of syrup.

Carl accepted the scalding hot and sickeningly sweet beverage, knocking it back in one gulp. Christ, he was getting used to the glop.

‘You shouldn’t sulk, Carl. We’ll let the case rest for a few weeks until this Johan comes back to work. Then we’ll quietly pressure him day after day. He’ll confess everything sooner or later. You’ll see.’

Carl studied Assad’s cheery face. If he didn’t know any better he’d think it was painted on. Just an hour earlier he had been aggressive, insistent and flushed-faced on account of this case.

‘Confesses what, Assad? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘That night Lisbet Jørgensen told him she didn’t want him any more then. She probably said she’d found another guy. So he came back that morning and killed them both. If we dig a little deeper we’ll probably find out there was some sort of shit between Lisbet’s brother and Johan. Maybe he went completely crazy.’

‘Forget it, Assad. The case has been taken from us. Besides, I don’t believe your theory in the slightest. It’s too twisted.’

‘Twisted?’

‘Yes, for God’s sake, and I’m not talking about a pretzel. If Johan had done it, he’d have fallen apart a hundred years ago.’

‘Not if he’s screwed up in the head.’ He tapped the bald patch on his crown.

‘Someone who’s screwed up in the head doesn’t give leads like the Trivial Pursuit cards. He throws the murder weapon right in your face and looks the other way. Anyway, didn’t you hear what I said? We’ve been taken off the case.’

Assad glanced indifferently at the flat-screen TV on the wall, where the news was reporting on an assault on Store Kannikestræde. ‘No, I didn’t hear that. I don’t want to hear that. Who took us off the case, did you say?’

They could smell Rose heading their way before they saw her. She was suddenly standing there, arms full of office supplies and bakery bags patterned with Christmas elves. In every sense of the word, she was early.

‘Knock-knock!’ she said, rapping her forehead twice on the door frame. ‘Here comes the cavalry, tah-dahhhh! Scrumptious pastries for everyone.’

Carl and Assad stared at one another. One with a pained expression on his face, the other with Christmas lights in his eyes.