The Absent One (43 page)

He ran into Lars Bjørn at the reception desk, and he didn’t look too good, either.

‘It’s those damn rubbish-bin assaults,’ he said.

They nodded to the officer behind the glass and walked together out to the colonnade.

‘You’ve probably noticed the coincidence between the names “Store Kannikestræde” and “Store Søndervoldstræde”,’ Carl said. ‘Are you keeping an eye on the other streets?’

‘Yes, we have continual surveillance on both Store Strandstræde and Store Kirkestræde. Plainclothes female officers are out there, so we’ll see if that tempts the assailant. Which is why we can’t spare any officers to help on your case, but you probably know that.’

Carl nodded. At this moment he hardly cared. If whatever it was that was making him feel this worn out, slow-witted and woolly-headed was anything like jet lag, then he bloody well failed to understand what on earth a ‘fairy-tale holiday’ could be. Nightmare holiday was a far more appropriate term.

Rose greeted him with a smile in the basement corridor, which no doubt he would soon manage to swipe off her face. ‘Well, how was Madrid?’ was the first thing she said. ‘Did you have time for a little flamenco dancing?’

He simply didn’t have the energy to respond.

‘Come on, Carl. What did you see down there?’

He fixed his heavy-lidded eyes on her. ‘What did I see? Apart from the Eiffel Tower and Paris and the inside of my eyelids, I saw absolutely nothing.’

She started to protest.
That’s not possible
, said her look.

‘I’ll be blunt, Rose. If you ever do anything like that again, you’ll soon be calling yourself an ex-Department Q colleague.’

He slipped past her and headed for his chair. The padded upholstery awaited him. Just four or five hours’ slumber with his legs up on the desk and he’d be good as new. Of that he was certain.

‘What’s going on?’ came Assad’s voice, the instant Carl entered dreamland.

He shrugged. Nothing, other than that he was about to come unglued. Was Assad blind, or what?

‘Rose is upset. Were you mean to her, Carl?’

He was about to get riled again, but then saw the papers Assad had under his arm.

‘What have you got for me?’ he said tiredly.

Assad sat in one of Rose’s metal monstrosities. ‘They haven’t found Kimmie Lassen yet. They’re searching everywhere, so it’s probably a question of time then.’

‘Is there any news from the explosion site? Have they found anything?’

‘No, nothing. As far as I know they’re finished now.’ He pulled out his papers and glanced through them.

‘I got in touch with those folks at Løgstrup Fence,’ he said. ‘They were very, very friendly. They had to go all the way around in their department before they found someone who could tell us something about the key in the fence.’

‘OK,’ Carl said, eyes closed.

‘One of their employees had a locksmith come to Inger Slevs Gade to help a lady from the ministry who had ordered some extra keys then.’

‘Did you get a description of the woman, Assad? It was Kimmie Lassen, I presume?’

‘No, they couldn’t find out which locksmith it was then, so I didn’t get a description. I’ve told the whole story to the people upstairs. Maybe they would like to know who could have had access to the house that exploded.’

‘OK, Assad. Fair enough. So we’ll cut that string.’

‘What string?’

‘Doesn’t matter, Assad. My next assignment for you is to make a case file on each of the other three, Ditlev, Ulrik and Torsten. I want information about all kinds of things. Tax statements, business ventures, residencies, marital status and all the rest. Just build up the files bit by bit.’

‘Who do I start with then? I have some stuff about all of them already.’

‘That’s good, Assad. Do you have anything else we should discuss?’

‘Up in homicide they told me to let you know that Aalbæk’s mobile many times had been in contact with Ditlev Pram’s.’

Of course it had.

‘That’s good, Assad. So there’s a connection between them and this case. That means we have a pretext for visiting them.’

‘Pretext? What kind of text is that?’

Carl opened his eyes and looked into a pair of dark
brown question marks. Honestly, every now and then it was a bit much. Maybe a few private sessions in the Danish language could remove a few feet of the language barrier. On the other hand, there was the risk that he’d suddenly start speaking like a bureaucrat.

‘And I’ve found Klavs Jeppesen,’ Assad said, when Carl didn’t react to his question.

‘That’s good, Assad.’ He tried to remember how many times he’d already said ‘that’s good’. He wouldn’t want to overuse the expression. ‘And where is he?’

‘He’s in the hospital.’

Carl straightened in his chair. What
now
?

‘Well, you know,’ Assad said, making a slashing motion across his wrist.

‘Jesus Christ. Why’d he do that? Is he going to survive?’

‘Yes. I’ve been out there. I went already yesterday.’

‘Well done, Assad. And?’

‘Not much. Just a man without backbones.’

Backbones? There it was again.

‘He’s come close to doing it for many years, he said.’

Carl shook his head. No woman ever had that kind of effect on
him
. Unfortunately.

‘Did he have more to say?’

‘I don’t think so. The nurses threw me out.’

Carl smiled wearily. By now Assad must have become accustomed to it.

Then his assistant’s facial expression changed. ‘I saw a new man up on the third floor earlier today. An Iraqi, I think. Do you know what he’s doing here?’

Carl nodded. ‘Yes, he’s Bak’s replacement. He’s from Rødovre. I met him out at the high-rise early Sunday
morning. Maybe you know him. His name’s Samir. I don’t remember his surname.’

Assad lifted his head a little. His full lips parted slightly and a set of faint wrinkles formed around his eyes, which weren’t caused by smiling. For a moment he seemed far away.

‘OK,’ he said softly, nodding slowly a few times. ‘Replacement for Bak. So that means he’s staying?’

‘Yes, I assume so. Is something wrong?’

Suddenly Assad’s expression changed back. His face relaxed and he looked directly at Carl with his usual unconcerned air. ‘You’ve got to figure out how to be good friends with Rose, Carl. She’s just so hard-working and so … so sweet. Do you know what she called me this morning?’

He was no doubt going to find out in a second.

‘Her “favourite Bedouin”. Isn’t that just sweet then?’ He flashed his overbite and shook his head, pleased as Punch.

Irony wasn’t exactly the man’s strongest suit.

Carl plugged in his mobile to recharge it and studied the whiteboard. The next step would have to be direct contact with one or more from the gang. Assad would have to go with him, so there would be a witness in case they gave themselves away.

Apart from that, he had yet to meet with their solicitor.

He rubbed his chin and gnawed at the inside of his cheek. It was bloody unfortunate that he’d done that number on Krum’s wife. Claiming Krum was having an affair with his own wife! How idiotic could one person
be? It certainly wasn’t going to make it any easier to arrange a meeting with him.

He looked up at the board where the solicitor’s number was listed and punched it in.

‘Agnete Krum,’ said a voice.

He cleared his throat and threw his voice into a higher register. Recognition was good if a person was famous. Not if he was infamous.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t live here any more. If you would like to get in touch with him, I suggest you call his mobile.’ Sounding sad, she gave him the number.

He called it right away and then listened to the message on Bent Krum’s voicemail, saying he was out preparing his yacht for the new season, but could be reached the next day at the same number between nine and ten.

Son of a bitch
, Carl thought. He called Krum’s wife again. The boat was in Rungsted Harbour, she said.

That was hardly a surprise.

‘We’re going for a drive, Assad, so get ready!’ he shouted across the corridor. ‘I just need to make one more call, OK?’

He punched in the number to his old colleague and rival at Station City, Brandur Isaksen, who was half Faroese, half Greenlander and one hundred per cent North Atlantic in his very soul. The Icicle of Halmtorvet, he was called.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I’d like to know about one Rose Knudsen whom I’ve inherited from your department. I’ve heard she caused
some friction with you lot at City. Can you tell me what it was?’

Carl hadn’t expected the uproarious laughter that followed.

‘You’re the one who got her?’ Isaksen howled ominously. Hearing him laugh was about as uncommon an occurrence as hearing him say anything friendly.

‘I’ll sketch it out for you,’ he went on. ‘First she backed her Daihatsu into three of her colleagues’ private cars. Then she put her leaky teapot on the chief’s handwritten notes for the weekly reports. She ordered all the office girls around. Bossed all the investigators and nosed about in their work. And last of all she shagged two colleagues at a Christmas party, as far as I understand.’ At this point he seemed about to fall off his chair – it was apparently that hilarious. ‘Is it you who got her, Carl? Don’t give her anything to drink, I’m warning you.’

Carl sighed. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yes, she has a twin sister – not an identical twin, but one who’s at least as strange.’

‘Aha, and what about her?’

‘Well, wait till she starts calling Rose at work. You’ve never heard two women do so much yakking. In short, she’s clumsy, unmanageable and sometimes extremely contrary.’

In other words, nothing he didn’t already know, apart from the bit about the alcohol.

Carl hung up and stared into space while his big ears attempted to decipher what was going on in Rose’s office.

He got up and sneaked into the hallway. Yep, she was on the telephone.

He crept up close to the door frame and turned his ear directly towards the open door.

‘Yes,’ she was saying, softly. ‘Yes, you’ve got to accept that. Uh-huh, yes, of course. Really … ? Well, then, that’s lovely …’ And much, much more in the same vein.

Then Carl put his head in the doorway and gave her a trenchant look. One could always hope it would have some kind of effect.

Two minutes later she hung up. The effect hadn’t been too dramatic.

‘Well, are you sitting here having a nice chat with your friends?’ he asked acidly. His comment apparently bounced off the silly girl.

‘Friends?’ she said, breathing deeply. ‘Hmm, I guess you could call them that. It was a department head at the Justice Ministry. He just wanted to say they’d got an email from Kripo in Oslo, in which they praise our department and say that it’s probably the most interesting thing that has happened in Nordic crime history in the last twenty-five years. And now the Ministry just wanted to know why you haven’t been nominated for superintendent.’

Carl swallowed. Were they starting that bullshit again? He’d be damned if he was going back to school. He and Marcus had abandoned that idea long ago.

‘How did you respond?’

‘Me? I began talking about something else. What would you have liked me to say?’

Good girl
, he thought.

‘Hey, Rose,’ he said, gathering himself. It wasn’t so easy to apologize when a guy came from a hick town like Brønderslev
.
‘I was a little sharp with you earlier. Forget it.
The trip to Madrid was actually OK. I mean, the entertainment value was above average, now that I think about it. In any case I saw a tramp without teeth, had all my credit cards stolen and held a strange woman’s hand for at least twelve hundred miles. But next time, give me a little orientation first, OK?’

She smiled.

‘And there’s one more thing I just thought of, Rose. Was it you who spoke to a maid that called from Kassandra Lassen’s house? I didn’t have my police badge, you’ll recall, so she called here to check my identity.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘She asked you to describe my appearance. Do you mind telling me what you told her?’

A pair of traitorous dimples planted themselves in her cheeks.

‘Weeell, I just said that if it was a guy wearing a brown leather belt and super-worn-out size 10½ black shoes who looked totally unremarkable, then there was a considerable probability that it was you. And if she could also see a bald spot on his crown that looked like a pair of butt cheeks, then there could be no doubt.’

She’s bloody merciless
, he thought, sweeping his hair back a bit.

They found Bent Krum all the way out on pier number 11, sitting in an upholstered easy chair on the quarterdeck of a yacht that no doubt cost more than a man like Krum was worth.

‘That boat there is a V42,’ said a boy in front of the promenade’s Thai restaurant. He was certainly well educated.

Whatever enthusiasm Krum might have displayed upon seeing a guardian of the law enter his white paradise, followed by a deeply sunburned and thin-haired representative of Alternative Denmark, was very hard to detect.

But he didn’t get a snowball’s chance in hell to sling out any professional protests.

‘I’ve spoken with Valdemar Florin,’ Carl said, ‘and he suggested I talk to you. He said you would be the right person to speak for the family. Do you have five minutes?’

Bent Krum shoved his sunglasses above his forehead. He might just as well have left them up there the whole time, seeing as there was no sun. ‘Five minutes is all. My wife is expecting me at home.’

Carl smiled broadly.
Fat chance
, the smile said, and Bent Krum, being the sly, old rat he was, recognized it immediately. Perhaps he’d be more careful about lying in the future.

‘You and Valdemar Florin were present in 1986, when the youths were brought down to the Holbæk Police Station under suspicion of having committed the murders in Rørvig. He suggested to me that a couple of them stood out from the others in the group, but thought this was something you could better elaborate on. Do you know what he was referring to?’

In the sunlight he was a pale man. Not without pigmentation, but anaemic-looking. Bleached and worn down by all the villainy he’d had to defend over the years. Carl had seen it time and again. No one could look paler than a policeman with unsolved crimes in his baggage or a solicitor with all too many solved ones.