The Absent One (37 page)

And when the man in front of her had nothing more to say, she spoke coldly:

‘You have two choices. Jump, or be shot. We’re five storeys up. You have a good chance of surviving if you jump. There are bushes down there, you know. Isn’t that why they’re planted so close to the building?’

He shook his head. If something couldn’t be happening, this was it. He had seen a lot in his time. But this kind of thing just didn’t happen.

He managed a pathetic smile. ‘There aren’t any bushes down there. Just concrete and grass.’

‘Are you expecting mercy from me? Did you show Tine any?’

He didn’t respond, but stood stock-still with furrowed brow, trying to convince himself she didn’t mean it. After all, she had just made love to him. Or something that resembled it, in any case.

‘Jump, or I’ll shoot you in the crotch. You won’t survive that, I promise you.’

He moved a step closer and followed the pistol with terrified eyes as she levelled it at him and her finger curled round the trigger.

It probably would have ended with a bullet, had it not been for the alcohol pulsing heavily through his veins. Instead he vaulted over the railing, trying to cling to it at the same time, and might have succeeded in slinging himself on to the balcony below if she hadn’t slammed the stock of her weapon on his finger joints until they cracked.

There was a dull thud when he landed on the ground. No scream.

Afterwards she turned to the balcony door and stared briefly at the broken wooden figurine that lay grinning on the rug. She returned its smile, bent over, gathered up the empty shell casing and put it in her bag.

When she slammed the door behind her after an hour of carefully cleaning glasses and bottles and everything else, she was content. The figurine stood quietly, propped up against the radiator with a tea towel wrapped attractively around its midsection.

Like a chef ready to receive his establishment’s next guests.

Carl heard thunderous crashings and deep rumbling coming from the living room, as if all the elephants in the world were chewing on his long-suffering IKEA furniture.

So Jesper was throwing a party again.

Carl rubbed his temples and prepared his scolding.

When he opened the door he was met with deafening noise, the light of a flickering television and Morten and Jesper at each end of the sofa.

‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he shouted, confused by the omnipresent sound and the room’s relative emptiness.

‘Surround sound,’ Morten reported with a certain degree of pride, after he’d lowered the volume a bit with the remote control.

Jesper pointed around at the array of loudspeakers hidden behind easy chairs and the bookshelf.
Cool, huh?
his glance said.

Peace was truly a thing of the past for the Mørck family.

They handed him a tepid Tuborg and tried to smooth out his dark mien by informing him that the stereo was a gift from one of Morten’s friend’s parents who couldn’t use it.

Wise people.

It was at that moment Carl felt the urge to give them a surprise of their own.

‘I have some information for you, Morten! Hardy has asked if you’d like to take care of him here, in the house. For pay, I mean. His bed would stand right where your groovy bass speaker is right now. We can always move it behind the bed. That way there’s a place to lay his urine bag.’

He took a sip, looking forward to their reaction when the information settled into their Saturday-heavy brains.

‘For pay?’ said Morten.

‘Hardy is going to live
here
?’ Jesper put in, pouting. ‘Yeah, well, whatever. I couldn’t care less. If I can’t get a youth residence down on Gammel Amtsvej asap I’ll move in with Mum at her allotment.’

He would have to see it to believe it.

‘How much do you think it pays?’ Morten continued.

Right then Carl’s head began pounding again.

Two and a half hours later he awoke staring at his clock radio that said SUNDAY 01:39:09, his head filled with images of earrings made of amethyst and silver and names such as Kyle Basset, Kåre Bruno and Klavs Jeppesen.

In Jesper’s room the gangsta rappers’ New York had been resurrected and Carl was feeling as if he’d inhaled a large dose of mutated influenza virus. Dry sinuses, crispy eye sockets and an overwhelming weariness in his body and limbs.

He lay there struggling for quite some time before he finally hefted his legs over the side of the bed and considered whether a steaming hot shower could scorch off some of the demons.

Instead, he turned to the clock radio and listened to the
news report that yet another woman had been found beaten up and half dead in a rubbish container. This time on Store Søndervoldsstræde, but the particulars were exactly the same as on Store Kannikestræde.

It was a strange coincidence of two-part street names, he thought, both beginning with ‘Store’ and ending with ‘stræde.’ He tried to recall whether there were other street names like them in Department A’s district.

That was mainly why he was already awake when Lars Bjørn called.

‘I think it would be a good idea if you got dressed and came out here to Rødovre,’ he said.

Carl wanted to say something hard-hitting, like how Rødovre wasn’t their jurisdiction or something about infections and epidemic diseases, but Bjørn stopped him cold when he reported that private detective Finn Aalbæk had been found dead on the grass, five storeys below his balcony.

‘His head looks like his, but his body is quite a few inches shorter. He must have landed square on his feet. His spinal column is shoved halfway into his cranium,’ he said, leaving nothing to the imagination.

Somehow this helped Carl’s headache. In any case, he forgot about it.

Carl found Bjørn in front of the high-rise with graffiti behind him as tall as a man.
Kill your Mother and rape your fucking dog!
didn’t exactly make him appear more cheerful. Nor was he trying to hide the fact that the area west of Valby Bakke wasn’t his turf at all; he was just trying to redeem himself.

‘What are you doing out here, Lars?’ Carl asked, as he looked across Avedøre Havnevej at the glowing windows of some flat buildings that stood behind half-defoliated trees not a hundred yards away. It was Rødovre High School, which he had practically just left. So the party for the school alumni was still going on.

Strange feeling. Just a few hours earlier he’d been over there, talking to Klavs Jeppesen, and now Aalbæk lay dead over here on the other side of the street. What the hell was going on?

Bjørn looked at him gloomily. ‘I assume you remember that one of headquarter’s trusted colleagues, now present, was very recently accused of having assaulted the deceased. So Marcus and I agreed that we ought to be out here to see what this was all about. But maybe you can tell us, Carl?’

That was a hell of a tone to take on a dark, cold September morning.

‘If you had put a tail on him as I’d asked, then we’d probably have known a little more, wouldn’t you say?’ Carl grumbled, as he tried to decipher what was up and what was down on the lump that had bored into the grass ten yards away.

‘It was those clowns over there who found him,’ Bjørn said. He pointed at a hedge surrounding the day-care centre and then at a mix of immigrant boys in tracksuits with stripes down the legs and pale Danish girls in ultra-tight jeans. Apparently not all of them thought it was real cool. ‘They’d just been planning to mess about on the day-care centre playground, or kindergarten or whatever the hell it is. But they didn’t make it that far.’

‘When did it happen?’ Carl asked the medical examiner, who’d already begun packing up his equipment.

‘Well, it’s fairly cold tonight, but he’s been lying in the lee of the building, so I would venture that it was between one and one and a half hours ago,’ he said with tired eyes, longing for his duvet and his wife’s warm posterior.

Carl turned to Bjørn. ‘I want you to know that yesterday evening I was right there, at Rødovre High. I spoke with a former boyfriend of Kimmie’s. It’s a coincidence, pure and simple, but put in the report that I mentioned it.’

Bjørn removed his hands from the pockets of his leather jacket and pushed his collar up. ‘Were you now?!’ He looked straight into his eyes. ‘Have you ever been up in his flat, Carl?’

‘No. I assure you I haven’t.’

‘You’re completely certain?’

Oh, come on
, Carl thought, feeling his headache gloating in its hideout.

‘Oh, come on,’ he said, at the lack of anything better. ‘That’s simply too far-fetched. Have you been up in the flat?’

‘Samir and the boys from Glostrup Station are up there now.’

‘Samir?’

‘Samir Ghazi. Bak’s replacement. He’s from Rødovre Station.’

Samir Ghazi. It seemed Assad was getting a kindred spirit with whom he could share his syrupy soup-tea.

‘Did you come across a suicide note?’ Carl asked up in the flat, after he’d squeezed the calloused fist that every seasoned policeman in Zealand would recognize as Police
Superintendent Antonsen’s. Just a few seconds in his vice-like grip and a person was never the same. One day Carl would tell him he could go easy on the hydraulics.

‘Suicide note? No, nothing like that. And you can kick my arse if there hasn’t been someone up here to lend a hand.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There sure as hell aren’t very many fingerprints in here. Nothing on the doorknob to the balcony. Nothing on the front row of glasses in the kitchen cupboards. Nothing on the edge of the coffee table. On the other hand, we’ve got a set of very clear prints on the balcony railing, presumably Aalbæk’s, but why the hell would he hold on to the railing if he’d already decided to jump?’

‘Second thoughts? It’s not unheard of.’

Antonsen chuckled. He did that every time he met detectives outside his own district. A highly conciliatory form of condescension if ever there was one.

‘There’s blood on the railing. Not much, just a bit. And I bet we’ll find bruising on his hands from a struggle when we go down and look in a moment. Yup, there’s something fishy here.’

He sent a couple of crime-scene techs to check the bathroom and pulled an agreeable-looking, dark man in front of Carl and Bjørn.

‘One of my best men, and now you’re nicking him from me. Look us both in the eye and say you’re not ashamed.’

‘Samir,’ the man said, introducing himself and extending his hand to Bjørn. So apparently the two hadn’t met before now.

‘All I’ll say is that if you don’t treat Samir right,’ Antonsen
said, ‘you’ll have me to deal with.’ He gave his man a shoulder squeeze.

‘Carl Mørck,’ Carl said, and gave the man a handshake equal to Antonsen’s.

‘Yes, that’s him.’ Antonsen nodded, in response to the quizzical expression on Samir’s face. ‘The man who solved the Merete Lynggaard case, and who gave Aalbæk a few jabs, so they say.’ He laughed. Finn Aalbæk had clearly never been a favourite of the other districts, either.

‘The splinters here on the carpet don’t appear to have been there very long,’ one of the crime-scene techs said, pointing at some microscopic fragments in front of the balcony door. ‘They’re lying very nearly on top of everything else.’ He squatted in his white lab coat and observed the fragments at close range. Bizarre lot, these police techs. But clever. Give them credit where credit was due.

‘Could it be from a wooden bat or something?’ Samir asked.

Carl glanced round the flat and found nothing strange, apart from the fat wooden figurine standing beside the balcony door with a tea towel wrapped around its midriff. A nice, carved Hardy with bowler hat and the whole nine yards. The figurine’s partner, Laurel, was all the way over in a corner of the room and didn’t seem quite so active. Something didn’t seem right.

Carl bent over, removed the towel and tipped the figurine forward a little. It looked promising.

‘You’ll have to turn it over yourselves, but as far as I can see, this figurine’s back has seen better days.’

They gathered around it and measured the size of the bullet hole and the mass of the imploded wood.

‘A relatively small calibre. The projectile didn’t even exit the other side, it’s still in there,’ Antonsen said. The crime-scene techs nodded.

Carl agreed. Most likely a .22. But deadly enough, if that’s what the shooter intended.

‘Did any of the neighbours hear anything, like shouts, or shots?’ Carl asked, sniffing the bullet hole.

They shook their heads.

Strange, and yet not strange. The high-rise was in terrible condition, and mostly abandoned. Scarcely more than a few residents on the entire floor. Probably no one lived directly above or below, either. The days of this red box were numbered. Hardly a loss if the eyesore were to topple in the next storm.

‘It smells pretty fresh,’ Carl said, pulling his head away from the bullet hole. ‘Fired at a distance of a couple of yards, wouldn’t you say? And tonight.’

‘Absolutely,’ said the crime-scene tech.

Carl stepped on to the balcony and peered over the railing. Hell of a fall.

He stared out over the sea of lights in the low buildings across the street. There were faces in every window. There was no lack of curiosity, even on a pitch-black early morning.

Then Carl’s mobile rang.

She didn’t introduce herself and she didn’t have to.

‘You’ll think I’m kidding, Carl,’ Rose said. ‘But the night shift down in Svendborg has located the earring. The duty officer knew exactly where it was. Isn’t that fantastic?’

He looked at his watch. What was more fantastic was that she thought he was ready for news at this time of day.

‘You weren’t sleeping, were you?’ she asked, not waiting for a response. ‘I’m heading into headquarters now. They’re emailing an image of it.’

‘Can’t it wait until daybreak, or Monday even?’ His head was pounding again.

‘Any idea who would have forced him over the edge?’ Antonsen asked, when Carl clapped his mobile shut.

He shook his head. Yes, who could it be? Surely someone whose life Aalbæk had ruined with his snooping. Someone who maybe thought he knew too much. But it could also be someone in the group connected to Kimmie. Carl had plenty of ideas, just none that were substantial enough to broadcast.