The Absent One (33 page)

‘Ahem … Well, we don’t yet know with certainty if it’s the cause, but they have discovered hand-grenade fragments of the type our soldiers are equipped with.’

‘The house was blown up by hand grenades, in other words?’

She was bloody good at stretching out time.

‘Possibly, yes.’

‘How much more is known about the woman?’

‘She was a regular around here. Shopped at the Aldi up
there,’ he pointed up Ingerslevsgade. ‘Bathed over there once in a while.’ He turned and pointed towards DGI City. ‘Naturally we’re asking anyone in the area with any information to contact the police. The description has yet to be finalized, but we believe we’re looking for a white woman, thirty-five to forty-five years of age, around five foot six inches, and of average build. Her clothing varies, but is generally a little untidy as a result of her living on the streets.’

Carl sat in silence, a hunk of pastry dangling from the corner of his mouth.

‘He’s with me,’ he said at the barricade tape, as he and Assad slipped through the chain of police and military technicians.

There were a whole lot of people walking about on the tracks and a lot of questions being asked. Was it an attempt to sabotage a train? And if that was the case, had a specific train been targeted? Had there been prominent people on any of the trains that had just passed by the building? The air buzzed with such queries and speculations, and the journalists’ ears were enormous.

‘You begin on that side, Assad,’ Carl said, pointing behind the house. There were bricks everywhere, large and small, in a real hotchpotch. Splinters of wood from doors and roof, tarpaper and roof gutters in shards and pieces. Some of the debris had flattened the chain link fence, behind which photographers and journalists were ready for action if human remains were found.

‘Where are the railroad workers who’ve seen her?’ Carl asked one of his colleagues from headquarters, who
pointed over his shoulder at a few men who stood clustered together like paramedics in their luminescent uniforms.

As soon as he showed them his badge, two of them began speaking at once.

‘Wait! One at a time,’ he said, aiming a finger at one of the men. ‘You first. What did she look like?’

The man seemed quite content with the situation. In an hour he would be off work and it had been a wonderfully varied day.

‘I didn’t see her face, but she usually wore a long skirt and a quilted jacket; but then other times she could be wearing something completely different.’

His partner nodded. ‘Yes, and when she was on the street she often dragged along a suitcase.’

‘Aha! What kind of suitcase? Black? Brown? On wheels?’

‘Yes, the kind on wheels. A big one. The colour changed sometimes, I think.’

‘That’s right,’ the first one said. ‘I think I’ve seen both a black one and a green one.’

‘She always glanced around as if she were being hunted,’ added the second.

Carl nodded. ‘And she probably was. How come she was allowed to live in that house anyway, once you discovered her there?’

The first man spat on the gravel at his feet. ‘Hell, we weren’t using it. And the way this country is being run, you’ve got to accept that some people get left behind.’ He shook his head. ‘Naw, I didn’t want to spill the beans on anyone. What the hell good would that do me?’

His mate agreed. ‘We have at least fifty such buildings from here to Roskilde. Just think about how many people could live in them.’

Carl preferred not to. A couple of drunken vagrants, and there would be chaos on the tracks.

‘How did she get into the grounds?’

They each grinned. ‘Hell, she just unlocked the gate and let herself in,’ one replied, pointing at what used to be a gate in the fence.

‘OK. And how did she get a key for it? Did someone lose a key?’

They shrugged their shoulders up to their yellow helmets and laughed until it spread to the rest of the bunch. How the hell should they know? As if they checked those gates.

‘Anything else?’ Carl asked, glancing round at the group of men.

‘Yes,’ one of the others said. ‘I think I saw her up at Dybbølsbro Station the other day. It was a little late, and I was returning with the transporter over there.’ He pointed at one of the track-repair cars. ‘She was standing on the platform right up there, facing the tracks. As if she was Moses about to part the sea. I bloody well thought she was thinking of jumping in front of the train, but she didn’t.’

‘Did you see her face?’

‘Yes. I was the one who told the police how old I thought she was.’

‘Thirty-five to forty-five. Wasn’t that what you said?’

‘Right, but now that I think about it, she was probably closer to thirty-five than forty-five. She just looked so sad. A person seems much older then, don’t you think?’

Carl nodded and pulled Assad’s photograph from his coat pocket. The laser printout had been slightly battered; the folds were deep now. ‘Is this her?’ he asked, holding the photo in front of the man’s nose.

‘Yes, damn it, it is.’ He seemed absolutely flummoxed. ‘She didn’t look quite like that, but hell, that’s her all right. I recognize her eyebrows. It’s rare that women have such broad eyebrows. Wow, she looks a lot better in that photo.’

As the men crowded around the picture and made comments, Carl turned his attention to the levelled building.

What the hell happened here, Kimmie?
he thought. If he had just found her a day earlier, they’d be a whole lot further along now.

‘I know who she is,’ Carl said, turning to his colleagues, each of whom was standing around in his black leather coat, lacking precisely the man who could say that exact sentence.

‘Would you guys call Skelbækgade Police Station and tell the search team that the woman who lived here is a Kirsten-Marie Lassen, also known as Kimmie Lassen? They have her Civil Registration Number and other information about her. If you find anything out, I’m the first you call, understood?’ He was about to go, but stopped. ‘One more thing. Those vultures over there,’ he pointed at the journalists, ‘they mustn’t get her name under any circumstances, OK? If they do, it will interfere with an ongoing investigation. Pass it on!’

Carl looked at Assad, who was practically on his knees, searching the rubble. Oddly enough, the crime-scene techs left him alone. Apparently they had already appraised
the situation and ruled out any suspicion of terrorism. Now all that remained was to convince the overeager reporters of this.

He was glad that wasn’t part of his job.

He leaped over what used to be the door of the building, a wide, heavy, green thing, half-covered with white graffiti, pushed through the hole in the fence and out on to the street. It wasn’t hard to find the sign that still hung on one of the galvanized fence posts.
GUNNEBO
,
LØGSTRUP FENCE
, it read, along with a list of telephone numbers.

He pulled out his mobile and rang a couple of the numbers without any luck. Fucking weekends. He’d always hated them. How could anyone do police work when people were off hibernating?

Assad will have to talk to them on Monday
, he thought.
Someone there might be able to explain how she came into possession of the key.

He was about to wave Assad over; he wasn’t going to find anything the crime-scene techs had overlooked anyway. But then he heard the sound of a car braking, and saw the homicide chief climb out just as it halted halfway on to the kerb. Like everyone else, he was wearing a black leather jacket, though his was a bit longer, a little shinier and probably also more expensive.

What the hell is he doing here?
Carl thought, following him with his eyes.

‘They haven’t found any bodies,’ Carl called out, as Marcus Jacobsen nodded to a pair of colleagues behind the overturned fence.

‘Listen! Can you take a little ride with me, Carl?’ he said,
when they were facing each other. ‘We’ve found the drug addict you’re looking for. And she’s very, very dead.’

This wasn’t the first time he’d seen it: a corpse under a stairwell, pale and pathetically hunched over with wispy hair spread out across the remains of tinfoil and filth. An abused creature with a swollen face, resulting from a blow. Hardly more than twenty-five years old.

An overturned bottle of chocolate milk sailing around on a white plastic bag.

‘Overdose,’ the doctor said, pulling out his dictaphone. Of course they would have to do an autopsy, but the medical examiner was familiar with the situation. The needle was still hanging from the mistreated vein on her ankle.

‘Agreed,’ said the homicide chief. ‘But …’

He and Carl nodded to each other. Marcus had had the same thought. Overdose, sure. But how? A seasoned junkie like her?

‘You went to talk to her. When was that, Carl?’

Carl turned to Assad, who stood wearing his customary quiet smile. Strangely unaffected by the gloomy atmosphere in the stairwell.

‘On Tuesday, boss,’ Assad replied. He didn’t even need to peek at his notebook, it was almost frightening. ‘Tuesday afternoon, the 25th,’ he added. Soon he would say it was at 3.32 or 3.59 or something. If he hadn’t seen Assad bleed, Carl would have thought he was a robot.

‘That’s quite a while ago. A lot could have happened since then,’ the homicide chief said. He fell to one knee and cocked his head, eyes fixed on all the bruises on the woman’s face and throat.

Yes, she’d clearly got those after Carl’s meeting with her.

‘These injuries were not inflicted immediately before she died. Do we agree on that?’

‘A day before, I would say,’ the medical examiner said.

There were loud noises in the stairwell, and one of the men from Bak’s old unit came down the stairs with a person that one would definitely prefer not to count as a family member.

‘This is Viggo Hansen. He’s just told me something I think you’ll want to hear.’

The hefty man scowled at Assad and got a suitably haughty glance in return. ‘Does he have to be here?’ he said flat out, revealing a couple of tattooed forearms. A pair of anchors, a swastika and a KKK. Nice lad.

When he walked past Assad, he bumped his flabby belly into him, and Carl’s eyes opened wide. He bloody well hoped Assad wouldn’t react.

Assad nodded, absorbing it. Lucky for the sailor.

‘I saw that slut with another whore yesterday.’

He described her, and Carl retrieved his tattered laser print.

‘Was this her?’ he asked, contracting his nostrils. The rancid odour of sweat and piss was almost as strong as the stench of alcohol that reeked through the sot’s rotten teeth.

He rubbed his sleepy, unappealing eye sockets and nodded, making his double chins flap together. ‘She pounded away at the junkie there. Look at all the bruises. But I broke it up and kicked her out. She had a big mouth, the bitch,’ he said, vainly trying to straighten his posture.

What a clown. Why was he lying?

One of their colleagues arrived and whispered something in the homicide chief’s ear.

‘OK,’ Marcus Jacobsen said. Hands in his pockets, he stared at the idiot, the expression on his face suggesting he might pull out his handcuffs any second.

‘Viggo Hansen. You’re a familiar face, I hear. Over ten years in total behind bars for violence and sexual assaults on single women. You claim that you saw this woman beat the deceased. Knowing the police as well as you do, shouldn’t you be a little smarter than that?’

He breathed deeply. As if he were trying to spool back to a more appropriate starting point. As if he could just manage it.

‘Now tell us what really happened. You saw them standing here, talking, and that was it. OK. Anything else?’

He looked down at the floor, his humiliation palpable. Maybe Assad’s presence caused it. ‘No.’

‘What time was it?’

He shrugged. The alcohol had destroyed his sense of time. No doubt it had been years since he’d had one.

‘Have you been drinking the whole time since you saw them?’

‘Just for fun,’ he tried to smile. Not a pleasant sight.

‘Viggo admits that he swiped a few beers that were lying under the stairwell here,’ said the officer who’d brought him down from the flat. ‘Some beers and a bag of crisps.’

Things that poor Tine certainly never got much pleasure out of.

They asked him to stay home the rest of the day and try
to hold back on the drinking. They didn’t get anything out of the rest of the building’s tenants.

The long and short of it was that Tine Karlsen had died. Probably alone, and with no one to miss her apart from a large, hungry rat named Lasso that she now and then called Kimmie. She was just another number in the statistics. If it weren’t for the police, she would already be forgotten in the morning.

The crime-scene techs turned the stiffened corpse over and found only a dark stain of urine beneath her.

‘I wonder what she could have told us,’ Carl mumbled.

Marcus nodded. ‘Yes, the incentive to find Kimmie Lassen has certainly not lessened now.’

It was just a question of whether this would make any difference.

He dropped Assad off at the explosion site, asking him to snoop around to find out if the investigation had led to any discoveries. Afterwards he was to go back to headquarters and see if he could help Rose with anything.

‘I’ll try the pet shop first, then I’ll drive out to Rødovre High School,’ he shouted, as Assad trudged determinedly towards the explosives experts and crime-scene techs who were still swarming about the terrain.

Nautilus Trading A/S stood like a pale green oasis among the other pre-war buildings on a little crooked street that was doubtless next in line to give way to unsellable luxury boxes. Large trees with bright yellow leaves planted in oak barrels stood outside, and posters showing exotic animals were pasted across the entire facade. A considerably larger
business than he had imagined, and probably also much larger than back when Kimmie had worked there.

And naturally it was closed. Saturday peace had settled in.

He walked round the buildings and found a recess with an unlocked door.
DELIVERIES
, it read.