The Absent One (38 page)

‘Did you check his office?’ Carl asked. ‘Client files, appointment book, messages on his answering machine, emails?’

‘We’ve sent people over there, and they say it’s nothing but an old, empty shed with a mailbox.’

Carl wrinkled his brow and looked about him. Then he walked over to the desk standing against the wall, picked up one of Aalbæk’s business cards and punched in the number to the detective agency.

Not three seconds passed before a phone rang in the front hall.

‘So! Now we know where his office really is,’ Carl said, glancing around. ‘Right here.’

It was definitely not obvious. No ring binder, no file folder with receipts visible. Nothing of the kind. Only book-club books, some decorative items and loads of Helmut Lotti CDs and others of the same ilk.

‘Turn over every single thing in the flat,’ Antonsen said. That would probably take some time.

He’d been lying in his bed for no more than three minutes with every conceivable flu symptom circulating through his organism when Rose called back. This time her motor mouth was running at full throttle.

‘It
is
the earring, Carl. The one from Lidelse Cove matches the earring found in Kimmie’s box. Now we can positively link that earring with the two missing persons on Langeland. Isn’t that wonderful?’

It was, of course, but at her tempo it was hard to get a word in edgeways.

‘And that’s not all, Carl. I just got replies from some emails I sent Saturday afternoon. You can talk to Kyle Basset. Isn’t that cool?’

Carl drew his shoulders up to his ears and pushed himself wearily towards the head of the bed. Kyle Basset? The boy they’d teased at boarding school. Yeah, that was … ‘cool’.

‘He can meet you this afternoon. We’re lucky, because he’s normally not in his office, but Sunday afternoon he happens to be there. You’ll meet at two in the afternoon, which just gives you time to get a return flight at 4.20 p.m.’

Carl sat up abruptly in bed, as if a spring in his back had been released. ‘
Flight?!
What the hell are you talking about, Rose?’

‘It’s in Madrid. He’s got an office in Madrid, you know?’

Carl’s eyes opened wide. ‘
Madrid!
There’s no fucking way I’m going to Madrid. You can bloody well go yourself.’

‘I’ve already booked the ticket, Carl. You’re flying with
SAS at 10.20. We’ll meet at the airport an hour and a half earlier. You’re already checked in.’

‘No, no, no. I will fly absolutely nowhere.’ He tried to swallow a thick clump that had gathered in his throat. ‘Nowhere whatsoever!’

‘Wow, Carl! Are you afraid of flying?’ She laughed. The kind of laughter that made a decent retort impossible.

Because, truth be told, he
was
afraid of flying. As far as he knew, anyway, because the only time he’d ever tried it, he had flown to a party in Aalborg and, to be on the safe side, had deliberately drunk himself so silly both on the way there and back that Vigga had practically broken her back dragging him around. For the next two weeks he’d clung to her in his sleep. Who the hell could he cling to now?

‘I don’t have a passport, and I won’t do it, Rose. Cancel the ticket.’

She laughed again. A really uncomfortable mixture, this combination of headache, gnawing horror and waves of her laughter in his ears.

‘I’ve fixed the passport issue with the airport police,’ she said. ‘They’ll have a document for you there for pick-up later this morning. Take it easy, Carl, I’ll give you some Frisium. You just need to be at Terminal 3 an hour and a half before the flight. The Metro takes you right there, and you don’t even need to take a toothbrush. But remember your credit card, OK?’

Then she hung up, and Carl was alone in the dark. Incapable of recalling when it had all gone wrong.

‘Just take two of these Frisium,’ she had said, before shoving a couple of tiny pills into his maw and two more into his breast pocket with the teddy bear for the return flight.

He’d glanced confusedly around the terminal and ticket desks for an authoritarian soul who might find some kind of fault with him: the wrong clothes, the wrong look. Anything to deliver him from taking the dreaded escalator to perdition.

She had given him a detailed printout of his itinerary, along with Kyle Basset’s business address, a pocket dictionary and strict orders not to swallow the two remaining pills until he was seated in the plane home. All that and a lot more. A few minutes from now he wouldn’t be able to repeat half of it. How could he? He hadn’t slept a wink the entire night, and a swiftly developing, explosive case of diarrhoea was churning in his nether regions.

‘They can make you a little drowsy,’ she said in conclusion, ‘but they work, trust me. You won’t be afraid of anything after taking them. The plane could crash, for that matter, and you wouldn’t even notice.’

He saw that she regretted that last part as she guided him to the escalator with his provisional passport and boarding pass in hand.

Already halfway down the runway sweat began trickling from Carl, so that his shirt grew noticeably darker and his feet began to slide in his shoes. The pills had started doing their job, he’d noticed, but the way his heart was presently thumping in his chest, he might just as well die of a heart attack.

‘Are you all right?’ the woman next to him asked cautiously, extending her hand for him to hold on to.

As the plane climbed thirty thousand feet into the atmosphere he felt as though he were holding his breath. The only thing he sensed was the turbulence and the inexplicable creaking and bumping of the fuselage.

He opened the fresh-air nozzle, then closed it. Leaned his seat back, felt to see if his life vest was under it and said no thank you each time the stewardess approached.

And then he went out like a light.

‘Look, that’s Paris down there,’ the woman beside him said at one point, from far, far away. He opened his eyes and recalled the nightmare, the exhaustion, the influenza aches in all his joints, and finally saw a hand pointing out the shadows of something that the hand’s owner believed was the Eiffel Tower and the Place d’Etoile.

Carl nodded and couldn’t possibly have cared less. As far as he was concerned Paris could kiss a certain place on his person. He just wanted out of the plane.

She could see how he was feeling so she took his hand again and held it until he awoke with a start as the plane hit Barajas Airport’s runway.

‘You were completely out of it,’ she said, pointing at the sign for the Metro.

He patted the little talisman in his breast pocket and
then felt his inside pocket where he kept his wallet. For a brief, tired moment he discussed with himself whether his Visa card would be of any use in such a foreign place.

‘It’s easy,’ the woman told him, after he’d explained to her where he needed to go. ‘You buy the Metro card right over there and then you ride the escalator down. Take the train to Nuevos Minesterios, change to the number 6 line and go to Cuatro Caminos, then take the number 2 line to the Opera. After that it’s just one stop on the number 5 line and you’re at Callao. At which point you only have to go about a hundred yards to the place where you have your meeting.’

Carl looked around for a bench that could give his leaden head and legs a little tour in the land of rest.

‘I’ll show you the way. I’m heading in the same direction. I saw how you were feeling in the plane,’ a friendly soul said in perfect Danish, and Carl directed his gaze towards a man of obvious Asian ethnicity. ‘My name is Vincent,’ he said, shuffling off with his luggage rolling behind.

This wasn’t exactly how he’d envisioned a peaceful Sunday as he laid himself ponderously under his duvet only a few hours earlier.

After a smooth, half-unconscious rumbling along on the Metro he emerged from the labyrinthine corridors of Callao Station and stood eyeing Gran Via’s iceberg-like, monumental structures. Neo-impressionistic, functionalistic, classicistic colossi, if anyone were to ask him to describe them. He had never seen anything like it: the noises, the scents, the heat and the incredible bustle of
busy, dark-haired people. There was only one person he saw who he could identify with. An almost toothless beggar sitting on the pavement right in front of him with a cornucopia of coloured plastic lids before him, each of which was open for donations. There were coins and bills in every single one. Currencies from around the globe. Carl couldn’t understand half of what was going on, but there was self-irony lurking in the man’s flashing eyes.
Your choice
, his eyes said.
Will you donate beer, wine, spirits or fags?

The people milling around him smiled. One pulled out a camera and asked if he could snap his picture. The beggar grinned broadly and toothlessly while hefting a sign into view.

It read:
PHOTOS
, 280
EUROS
.

It worked. Not only on the assembled crowd, but also on Carl’s wilted state of mind and atrophied funny bone. His eruption of laughter came as a strikingly welcome surprise. This was self-irony at its finest. The beggar even handed him a business card listing his website,
www.lazybeggars.com
. Chortling, Carl shook his head and reached into his pocket in spite of his general aversion to people who begged on the street.

It was at this moment that Carl snapped back to reality, his whole being inflamed with the desire to kick a certain female colleague in Department Q clear off the playing field.

Here he was, feeling like shit in a country he didn’t know. Dosed up on pills that muddled his brain. His immune response mechanisms were causing every joint in his body to ache. And now his pocket was gapingly empty as well. He’d always smiled whenever he heard about
incautious tourists, and now he – the deputy detective superintendent who spotted danger and suspicious characters everywhere – was one of them. How stupid could a person be? And on a Sunday.

Status quo: no wallet. Not even any lint in his pocket. The price of spending twenty minutes packed into an overfilled Metro. No credit cards, no provisional passport, no driver’s licence, no crisp banknotes, no Metro tickets, no telephone list, no health-insurance card, no plane tickets.

A person couldn’t sink any lower.

They gave him a cup of coffee in a waiting room at KB Construcciones, SA, and let him fall asleep facing dusty windows. A quarter of an hour earlier a desk clerk had stopped him in the foyer of Gran Via 31 and refused to have his appointment verified for several minutes since he was unable to present any form of identification. The guy couldn’t stop running his mouth off and his words were incomprehensible. Finally Carl shook his head angrily, found the hardest tongue-twister for foreigners to say in Danish, and yelled: ‘Rødgrød med fløde!’ (‘Strawberries with cream!’)

That helped.

‘Kyle Basset,’ said a voice miles away, after he had dozed off again.

Carl opened his eyes cautiously, afraid he’d wound up in purgatory, his head and body throbbed so much.

He was handed another cup of coffee in front of the gigantic barred windows in Basset’s office, and now with a relatively clear head he saw a face in its mid-thirties that
knew very well what it stood for. Wealth, power and immoderate self-confidence.

‘Your colleague briefed me,’ Basset said. ‘You’re investigating a series of murders that may be connected to the people who assaulted me at my boarding school. Is that correct?’

He spoke Danish with an accent. Carl looked around. It was an enormous office. Down on Gran Via people were storming out of shops with names like Sfera and Lefties. In these surroundings it was practically a miracle that the man still understood Danish at all.

‘It
could
be a series of murders, we don’t know yet.’ Carl drank the coffee greedily. A very dark roast. Not exactly something that helped his fermenting intestines. ‘You say outright that they were the ones who assaulted you. Why didn’t you say so back when there was a case against them?’

He laughed. ‘I did, and much earlier. To the relevant party.’

‘And that was?’

‘My dad, who was an old boarding-school mate of Kimmie’s father.’

‘I see. And what came out of that?’

He shrugged and opened a chased silver cigarette case. Such things apparently still existed. He offered Carl a cigarette. ‘How long do you have?’

‘My flight leaves at 4.20.’

He glanced at his watch. ‘Oops, then we don’t have very long. You’re taking a taxi, I assume?’

Carl inhaled the smoke deeply. That helped. ‘I’ve got a little problem,’ he said a bit sheepishly.

He explained how he had been pickpocketed on the Metro. No money, no provisional passport, no plane ticket.

Kyle Basset pushed a button on the intercom. His commands didn’t sound friendly. More like the kind he’d say to people he held in contempt.

‘I’ll give you the short version then.’ Basset gazed at the white building across the street. Maybe there were painful reminiscences showing in his eyes, but it was hard to tell, petrified and hard as they were.

‘My father and Kimmie’s father agreed that when the time came, however long that took, she would be punished. I was OK with that. I knew her father well. Willy K. Lassen, yes, and for that matter, I still know him. He owns a flat just two minutes from mine in Monaco and is quite an uncompromising person. Not someone you’d want to provoke, I would say. Not back then, in any case. He’s gravely ill now. Not much life left in him.’ He smiled. It seemed a rather odd reaction.

Carl pursed his lips. So Kimmie’s father
was
seriously ill, as he’d tried to convince Tine. Well, how about that? As he’d learned over the course of time, reality and fantasy have a tendency to blend together.

‘Why Kimmie?’ he said. ‘You only name her. Weren’t the others equally guilty? Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen, Bjarne Thøgersen, Kristian Wolf, Ditlev Pram, Torsten Florin? Weren’t they all there?’

Basset folded his hands as the burning cigarette dangled from his lips. ‘Are you saying you think they consciously selected me as their victim?’

‘I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know much about the incident.’