The Absent One (22 page)

But Kimmie did dare, and they knew it. They watched her movements closely. Cultivated her zeal during class. Her legs sprawled between rows of chairs, her dress inching up. Dimples on display as she sashayed up to the teacher’s desk. The see-through blouses and the bedroom voice. Two weeks went by before she awakened desire in the only teacher at the school whom practically everyone liked. Wakened it so emphatically that a person had to laugh.

He was the most recent addition to the faculty. Baby-faced, yet a real man. The year’s highest final exam scores in Danish at the University of Copenhagen, so the story went. But he was not the archetypal boarding-school teacher, not at all. He expounded on society beyond the school grounds in nuanced terms. The texts he had them read ranged widely.

Kimmie went to him to ask if he would tutor her for exams. Before the end of the first session he was a lost cause, martyred by the sight of the curves her thin cotton dress so generously revealed.

His name was Klavs with a ‘v’, a name he was at pains to explain as the result of his father’s poor judgement and overblown interest in the world of Walt Disney.

None dared to call him Klavs Krikke, the Danish version of Horace Horsecollar from
Donald Duck
, but she managed to bring out his inner steed anyway. After three
sessions, he no longer kept a record of tuition hours. He received her in his flat, already half undressed and with the radiators at full blast. Captured her with uncontrollable kisses, restless hands against her bare skin. Lit by a tireless lust that burned his brain empty, he was indifferent to pricked-up ears and envious glances. To rules and regulations.

She was going to tell the headmaster that he’d forced her, curious to see where it would lead. See if she could regain control of the situation.

But it didn’t work.

The headmaster called them to his office at the same time. Let them sit silently and uncomfortably next to each other in the waiting room with the secretary as their chaperone.

And after that day, Klavs and Kimmie never spoke again.

What happened to him afterwards was none of her concern.

The headmaster told Kimmie to pack her things, the bus to Copenhagen was leaving in half an hour. She needn’t bother wearing her school uniform. In fact, he asked her not to. From now on she could consider herself expelled.

Kimmie studied the headmaster’s flushed cheeks for some time before meeting his eyes.

‘It’s possible that you …’ she paused a moment, stretching out the unforgivable insult of using the familiar form to address him ‘… that
you
don’t believe he forced me. But can you be certain that tomorrow’s tabloids will see it the same way? Can you imagine the scandal? “Teacher rapes pupil at …” Can you see it?’

She would stay quiet on one simple condition. Yes, she would go. Simply pack her things and leave the school immediately. She didn’t care, as long as the school didn’t notify her parents.
That
was her condition.

He protested, saying it was improper for the school to receive money for a service it didn’t provide, so Kimmie disrespectfully tore the corner from a page of the nearest book on the headmaster’s desk and jotted something down.

‘Here is my bank account number,’ she said. ‘You just transfer the money into my account.’

He sighed regretfully. With that slip of paper, decades of authority vanished.

Raising her eyes in the fog, she felt a calm wash over her. Over at the playground, children’s voices shrieked light-heartedly, prodding her.

In the entire playground there were only two small children and their nanny. The children were bumbling about, playing tag between autumn-silenced jungle gyms.

She approached them through the mist and silently observed the girl, who held something in her hand that the boy wanted.

She’d once had a little girl like that.

She felt how the nanny was watching her. How her warning bells had rung the instant Kimmie emerged from the bushes in filthy clothes, her morning hair wild.

‘I didn’t look this way yesterday,’ she shouted to the nanny, ‘you shoulda seen me.’

If she’d been wearing the get-up she had on at the central station, things would have been different. Everything
would have been different. Maybe the nanny would’ve even talked to her.

Listened to her.

But the nanny didn’t listen. She sprang forward, resolutely blocking Kimmie’s path to the children, her arms outstretched. She called for the children to come to her this instant, but they didn’t want to. Didn’t the woman know that little trolls like these didn’t always listen? It amused Kimmie.

So she thrust out her chin and laughed in the nanny’s face.

‘Come
here
!’ the nanny screamed at the kids hysterically, glaring at Kimmie as if she were pure filth.

Which is why Kimmie stepped forward and punched her. She wasn’t going to let this person make her out to be some kind of monster.

The nanny lay on the ground yelling at Kimmie that she bloody well better not hit her, that she would bloody well fix her good and proper. She knew plenty of people who could.

Then Kimmie kicked her in the side. Once, and then again, so she fell silent.

‘Come over here, little girl, and show me what you have in your hand,’ she lured. ‘Is that a little stick you have there?’

But the children were frozen in place. Standing with their fingers held out stiffly, howling for the nanny to come.

Kimmie moved closer. She was such a cute little girl, even though she was crying. And she had such long, pretty hair. Brown hair, just as little Mille had had.

‘Come here, my dear, show me what you’ve got in your hand,’ she said again, approaching cautiously.

She heard a hissing from behind, and though she whirled around, she couldn’t ward off the hard, desperate blow to her neck.

She fell face first into the gravel and felt her abdomen slam against a rock that marked a fork in the path.

Meanwhile, the nanny flew silently around her and grabbed the children, one in each arm. A real Vesterbro hussy. Tight jeans and greasy hair.

Kimmie raised her head and watched as the two screaming children’s faces in the woman’s arms disappeared behind the bushes and further into the open.

She’d once had a little girl like that. Who now lay in a coffin at home under the bed. Waiting patiently.

Soon they would be reunited.

‘This time I’d like for us to talk completely openly to each other,’ Mona Ibsen said. ‘Last time we didn’t make it as far as we should have, did we?’

Carl surveyed her world, the posters of beautiful nature scenes, palms, mountains and the like. Bright, sun-splashed colours. Two chairs made of precious wood, wispy plants. Such astonishing tidiness. There were no accidental elements here. No small thingamajigs to distract. And still, lying on the sofa with his mind opening up, there was this enormous distraction that made him able to think only about tearing the woman’s clothes off.

‘I will try,’ he said. He would do everything she asked of him. He wasn’t that busy.

‘You assaulted a man yesterday. Can you explain why?’

He protested, as was to be expected. Proclaimed his innocence. Still, she looked at him as if he were lying.

‘We probably won’t get anywhere unless we go backwards a little in the sequence of events. It may make you uncomfortable, but it’s what we need to do.’

‘Shoot,’ he said, eyes squinting just enough so he could watch what her breathing did to her breasts.

‘You were involved in a shooting in Amager in January. We discussed it before. Do you remember the exact date?’

‘It was the 26th of January.’

She nodded as if it were an especially good date. ‘You managed to get off relatively unharmed, but one of your colleagues, Anker, died, and another is currently lying paralysed in the hospital. How are you coping with all this now, Carl, eight months later?’

He stared at the ceiling. How was he coping? He really had no idea. It just never should have happened.

‘Of course I’m sorry it happened.’ He pictured Hardy at the spinal clinic. Sad, silent eyes. Two hundred and sixty-four pounds of dead weight.

‘Does it upset you?’

‘Yeah, a little.’ He tried to smile, but she was looking down at her papers.

‘Hardy told me he suspects that whoever shot the three of you had been waiting for you in Amager. Did he tell you that?’

Carl confirmed that he had.

‘Did he also tell you that he thinks it was either you or Anker who alerted them?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

Now she was sizing him up. In his mind, her eyes flashed with eroticism. Carl wondered if she was aware of this, and how wildly distracting it was.

‘Maybe he’s right,’ he replied.

‘Of course it wasn’t you, I can see that by looking at you. Am I right?’

If it had been him, could she expect any response other than a denial? How dumb did she think people were? How well did she think she could read a face?

‘No, it wasn’t me. Of course not.’

‘But if it was Anker, then something must’ve gone horribly wrong in his life, wouldn’t you say?’

I may have the hots for you
, Carl thought,
but if I’m going to continue with this, ask me some proper questions, damn it.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, hearing his own voice like a whisper. ‘Hardy and I will have to consider that possibility. Once I’m through being the victim of a little, snot-nosed private detective’s lies, and once the powers that be stop putting obstacles in my path, we’ll see what we can find out.’

‘At police headquarters they call it the “nail-gun case” because of the murder weapon. The victim was shot in the head, was he not? It looked like an execution.’

‘Possibly. Given the situation, I didn’t manage to see much. I’ve not been involved in the case since. It also had an offshoot, but you probably already know that. Two young men were killed in Sorø the same way. It is believed that the perpetrators are one and the same.’

She nodded. Of course she knew. ‘The case plagues you, doesn’t it, Carl?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say it plagues me.’

‘What plagues you then, Carl?’

He clutched the side of the leather sofa. Now was his chance. ‘What plagues me is how every time I try to invite you out, you say no.
That
plagues me, damn it.’

He left Mona Ibsen’s office feeling buoyant. Granted, she had reprimanded him and then forced him to run the gauntlet of a series of questions oozing with doubts and accusations. Many times he’d had the desire to spring angrily from the sofa and demand that she believe him.
But Carl stayed put and answered politely, and the end result was that she – without affection but with a harried smile – agreed they could go out to dinner
when
she was finished with him as a client.

Maybe she thought that making this vague promise protected her. That he would forever live with the suspicion that his treatment had not been completed. But Carl knew better. He would have that promise realized.

He glanced down Jægersborg Allé and through Charlottenlund’s mangled city centre. All it took was a five-minute walk to the S-train and a half-hour ride later he’d again find himself passively sitting in his adjustable office chair in his corner of the basement. Not exactly the best setting for his newly won optimism.

He needed something to happen, and at headquarters there was simply
nada
.

When he reached the start of Lindegårdsvej, he looked up the street. He was well aware that at the opposite end the city name changed to Ordrup, and that it would make sense to take that walk now.

He punched in Assad’s number on his mobile and glanced automatically at the battery’s power level. He’d just charged it, and yet it was already half-dead. Irritating.

Assad sounded surprised. Were they allowed to talk?

‘Rubbish, Assad. We just shouldn’t parade it around that we’re still in business. Listen, could you do a little research and find people we can speak with at the boarding school? There’s an old yearbook in the big folder. In it you can see who was in their class. Either that, or find one of the teachers who was there during the years 1985 to 1987.’

‘I’ve already checked it out,’ he said. Hell, of course he had. ‘I have a few names then, but will go further, boss.’

‘Good. Transfer me to Rose, would you?’

A minute passed, then he heard her breathless voice. ‘Yes!’ There was not a hint of him being addressed as ‘boss’ in her rhetoric.

‘You’re putting tables together, I gather?’

‘Yes!’ If such a short word could express frustration, accusation, iciness and tremendous annoyance at being interrupted in the midst of more important objectives, then Rose Knudsen really had the touch.

‘I need Kimmie Lassen’s stepmother’s address. I know you gave me a note, but I don’t have it with me. Just give me the address, OK? Don’t ask me lots of questions, please!’

He was standing right outside Danske Bank, where well-preserved men and women patiently waited in long queues. Just as they did in working-class suburbs like Brøndby and Tåstrup on paydays like today, but that made more sense. Why in the world would people with deep pockets like those who lived in Charlottenlund queue up in front of a bank? Didn’t they have people to pay their bills for them? Didn’t they use Internet banking? Or was there something he didn’t know about wealthy people’s habits? Perhaps they purchased stocks with all their payday pocket change, just as the vagrants in Vesterbro bought fags and beer?

Well, everyone does what they can with what they’ve got
, he thought. He glanced over at the chemist shop’s facade and noticed Bent Krum’s sign in the window of the building:
BARRISTER WITH AUDIENCE BEFORE THE SUPREME
COURT
. This right to higher audience might definitely come in handy with clients such as Pram, Dybbøl Jensen and Florin.

He sighed.

To walk past Krum’s office would be like ignoring every temptation in the Bible. It was almost as though he could hear the Devil laughing. If he rang the doorbell, walked up and interviewed Bent Krum, not ten minutes would pass before he would have the police chief on the line, and that would mean the end of Department Q and Carl Mørck.