The Absent One (50 page)

She went over to Carl and pulled the tape from his mouth. ‘I know who you are,’ she said. Nothing else.

‘I know who you are, too,’ Carl said, and took a deep, liberating breath.

Their exchange of words made the men cease with their protesting.

Florin came up right beside the bars. ‘If you two policemen don’t do something now, she’s the only one here who’ll be breathing in five minutes. Do you realize that?’
He looked Carl and Assad in the eyes, one after the other. ‘Kimmie’s not like us, OK? She’s the one who kills people, not us. It’s true that we’ve assaulted people, that we’ve beat them senseless, but Kimmie is the only one who has killed.’

Carl smiled, shaking his head. Survivor types like Florin were like that. No crisis was to be viewed as anything other than the beginning of a success. No one stayed down for ever, until the day the Grim Reaper paid a visit. Florin was used to fighting, and he did so without scruples. Hadn’t he and his friends just tried to kill Carl? Hadn’t they thrown Assad into the hyena’s cage?

Carl turned to Kimmie. He had expected to see a smile, but not this joyous, icy grimace. She stood there as if in a trance, listening.

‘Yeah, just look at her. Is she concerned? Does she look like she has any feelings? Look at her finger. It’s dangling. Does it make her whine? No. She won’t whine about anything, including our deaths.’ The words came from the floor of the cage, where Ditlev Pram lay with his fist stuck into his nasty wound.

For a moment the dreadful events the gang had called forth filed past in Carl’s mind. Could they be speaking the truth? Or was it just part of their fight for survival?

Then Florin spoke again. He wasn’t a king now. Wasn’t a leader. He was simply himself. ‘We acted on Kristian Wolf’s orders, you understand? We found the victims according to Kristian’s instructions. And we beat them all together until we weren’t having fun any more. And all the while that evil woman stood there with her head back, waiting for her turn. Well, naturally, once in a while she
took part in the punishments, too.’ Florin paused and nodded, as if he could see it all before him. ‘But she was always the one who did the killing, you’ve got to believe us. Apart from the time Kristian had an issue with her old boyfriend, Kåre, it was always Kimmie. We prepared the way for her, nothing more.
She
was the killer. Only her. And that’s how she
wanted
it.’

‘Oh God,’ Dybbøl Jensen groaned. ‘You’ve got to stop her. Can’t you see that Torsten’s telling the truth?’

Carl could feel the mood shifting in the room – and deep within himself. He watched Kimmie open her shoulder bag quite slowly, and he could do nothing, bound and exhausted as he was. The men held their breath. Carl saw that Assad was now closely following events in anticipation of what was to come, and with all his strength was trying to get to his knees.

She found what she wanted in the bag and pulled out a hand grenade. She held the safety latch and pulled out the pin.

‘
You’ve
done nothing, my little friend,’ she told the hyena, looking directly into its eyes. ‘But you can’t very well live with that leg, you know that, don’t you?’

She turned to Carl and Assad as Dybbøl Jensen screamed his innocence from inside the cage, promising he would accept the punishment he deserved if only they would help him.

‘If you value your lives,’ she said, ‘you’ll step back a bit.
Now!
’

Carl protested, but did as he was told, with his hands bound behind his back and his pulse racing. ‘You, too,
Assad,’ he said, and watched as his partner crab-walked backwards.

When they were far enough away, she stuck the hand holding the grenade into her shoulder bag and in one movement slung it through the bars into the furthest corner of the cage, then leaped aside as Florin threw himself on the bag in a vain attempt to toss it back through the bars of the cage. It exploded, leaving the hall an inferno of fearful animal cries and endless echoes.

The blast threw Carl and Assad against a number of smaller cages that fell on top of them and which a moment later shielded them from a downpour of glass shards.

When the dust had finally settled and only the noise of the animals remained, Carl felt Assad’s arm reach out and touch his leg through the wreck of metal cages.

He pulled his boss towards him and made certain that Carl was OK before reporting that he, too, was OK. Then he tugged the tape from Carl’s wrist.

It was a dreadful sight to behold. Where the cage had once stood there were now metal pieces and body parts, a torso here, arms and legs there. Frozen expressions in dead faces.

Carl had seen a lot in his time, but never anything like this. Usually by the time he and the crime-scene techs arrived on site, the blood had stopped flowing and the bodies lay lifeless.

Here the border between life and death was still visible.

‘Where is she?’ Carl said, turning his eyes from what had once been three men in a stainless-steel prison cell. Forensics were certainly going to have enough to
rummage through. ‘I don’t know,’ Assad said. ‘She’s probably lying here somewhere.’

He hoisted his boss to his feet, and Carl’s arms were like two dead appendages that had nothing to do with him. Only his throbbing shoulder had a life of its own.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, moving towards the doorway with his friend.

That’s when they saw her standing there, waiting for them. With wild, dust-filled hair and eyes so deep they seemed to convey the sorrows and unhappiness of the entire world.

They told the dark-skinned men to withdraw. That they wouldn’t be held responsible for any of this and were out of danger. That they should concentrate on getting the animals out. And extinguish the fire. The women pulled their children close while the men stared at the hall, from which smoke now poured, black and threatening, above the shattered glass roof.

Then one of them shouted a few words, and suddenly they were all in motion.

Kimmie walked along voluntarily with Assad and Carl. Showed them the path to the firebreak. Pointed at the hasps that opened the lock. She was the one who, with few words, led them down sun-splashed forest paths to the train tracks.

‘You can do with me as you wish,’ she had said. ‘I’m no longer alive. I admit my guilt. We’ll go down to the train station. My bag is there. I’ve written down everything I remember.’

Carl tried to keep pace with her as he told her about the
box he’d found and about the terrible uncertainty that relatives of the victims had lived with for years, which could now be put to rest.

She seemed remote when he spoke about people’s sorrow at having lost a loved one. About how not knowing who had murdered their children or how their parents had disappeared had scarred them for life. People Kimmie hadn’t known. The others who had suffered besides the victims themselves.

None of this seemed to register with her. She simply wandered ahead of them through the forest, her arms limp at her side and her broken finger jutting out. The killing of her three former friends had clearly also meant the end for her as well. She had said as much herself.

People like her don’t survive long in prison
, he thought to himself. He just knew.

They reached the railway a good hundred yards from the platform. Here the tracks sliced through the forest as if drawn with a ruler.

‘I’ll show you where my bag is,’ she said, heading towards a bush close to the rails.

‘Don’t pick it up, I’ll do it,’ Assad said, forcing his way ahead of her.

He gathered up the duffel bag and walked the last twenty yards to the platform, holding the bag away from his body as if some mechanism inside would spear him if he shook it too much.

Good old Assad.

When they reached the end of the platform, he unzipped it and turned it upside-down, despite her protests.

Sure enough, there was a notebook inside. A quick riffling through it revealed that the first few pages were packed with descriptions of locations, incidents and dates.

It was an incredible sight.

Then Assad reached for a small, cotton bundle and yanked at its corner as the woman gasped and raised her hands to her head.

So did Assad when he saw what was inside.

A tiny mummified person with empty eye sockets. Its head completely black, its stiff fingers sticking out. Dressed in clothing scarcely bigger than a doll’s.

They saw her rush to the child’s corpse and made no move to stop her from snatching it up and clutching it tightly.

‘Little Mille, little Mille. Everything’s OK now. Mummy’s here and she will never leave you again,’ the woman sobbed. ‘We’ll always be together. You’ll get a little teddy, and we’ll play together every single day.’

Carl had never experienced that definitive, interconnected feeling people have when they hold their offspring in their arms immediately after birth. But he’d felt the absence of that feeling, at least theoretically. At a slight distance.

Now he looked at the woman and felt a sharp pang of regret and loss, so deep in his heart that it made him able to understand. And he raised his injured arm to his breast pocket, pulled out the small talisman – the teddy bear he had found in Kimmie’s metal box – and handed it to her.

She said nothing. Stood as if paralysed, staring at the toy animal. Slowly she opened her mouth and cocked her
head. Stretched her lips as if she were about to cry, vacillating for an endless moment between a smile and tears.

At her side stood Assad, uncharacteristically disarmed and vulnerable. With a wrinkled brow and an inner stillness.

She reached cautiously for the teddy bear. As soon as she felt it in her hand, she loosened up, filled her lungs to capacity and threw back her head.

Carl wiped his nose, which had begun to drip, and tried to look away so he wouldn’t surrender to the tears. Glanced down the tracks to where a group of travellers was waiting for a train, and where Carl’s car was parked beside the whistle-stop’s shelter. He turned around and saw the train creeping towards them from the other side.

He focused again on the woman, who was now breathing calmly and hugging the teddy bear and the child’s corpse close to her.

‘Well,’ she said, exhaling a sigh capable of loosening decades of emotional knots, ‘now the voices are completely silent.’ She gave a short laugh as tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘The voices have ceased, they’re gone,’ she repeated, raising her eyes up to the sky. Suddenly she radiated a peacefulness Carl didn’t understand.

‘Oh, little Mille, now it’s just you and me. It has finally come to pass.’ A sense of release sent her spinning around and around, embracing the corpse in a dance without steps that seemed to make her levitate.

And when the train was ten yards away, Carl watched as her feet danced to the side and hit the edge of the platform.

Assad shouted a warning just as Carl raised his head
and gazed directly into Kimmie’s eyes, which were full of gratitude, her mind now seemingly at peace.

‘Just you and me, my beloved, little girl,’ she said, stretching out the one arm.

A second later she was gone.

Only the frantic screeching of train brakes remained.

It was a twilight lit up by columns of blinking, blue lights coming from the train crossing and along the road heading towards the estate. The entire landscape was awash with this blueness and the air rang with the yowling sirens of fire engines and police vehicles. Police badges were everywhere, along with ambulances, a sea of journalists and cameras, and inquisitive locals standing on the fringes as people received crisis counselling. Down on the tracks themselves, crime-scene techs and paramedics were busy, all getting in each other’s way.

Carl was still dizzy, but his shoulder wound was no longer dripping blood; the medics had made sure of that. It was inside that he was bleeding. The lump in his throat was still large.

He sat on the wooden bench at the Duemose whistle-stop, leafing through Kimmie’s notebook. Her notes disclosed the gang’s deeds – they were mercilessly honest. The assault on the brother and sister in Rørvig. How they’d been selected at random. How they had humiliated the boy and undressed him after the fatal blow. The twin brothers whose fingers they’d chopped off. The couple that had vanished at sea. Kåre Bruno and Kyle Basset. Animals and people, one after another. Everything was there. Plus the fact that it was always Kimmie who had committed the murders. The methods were different,
and she’d documented each one in detail. What was incredibly difficult for Carl to comprehend was that this was the same person who had saved his and Assad’s lives. The same woman who lay there, under the train, together with her dead child.

Carl lit a cigarette and read the final pages. They spoke of remorse. Not in Aalbæk’s case, but in Tine’s. That she hadn’t wanted to give her an overdose. There was a tone of tenderness in the ugliness of the words, a kind of presence and insight that was missing in her descriptions of all the other atrocious acts. She’d used words like ‘farewell’ and ‘Tine’s last, heavenly high’.

This notebook would send the media into a frenzy and stock values plunging, once those men’s complicity was revealed.

‘Take the notebook to headquarters and make copies immediately, OK, Assad?’

He nodded. The aftermath would be hectic, but short. With no one else other than this trio implicated, apart from the man who was already in prison, it was primarily a question of informing bereaved relatives and ensuring proper distribution of the no doubt enormous damages to be paid by the estates of Pram, Florin and Dybbøl Jensen.

He gave Assad a quick hug and waved off the crisis psychologist who had decided it was now Carl’s turn.

When the time came, he had his own crisis psychologist.

‘I’m driving to Roskilde now, so you go with the crime-scene techs back to headquarters, OK? I’ll see you tomorrow, Assad. Then we’ll talk about all of this, eh?’

Assad nodded again. He’d already resolved it all in his head.

At that moment things between them were good.

The house on Fasanvej in Roskilde seemed so dark. The blinds were shut and all was quiet. On the car radio they were reporting on both the violent events in Ejlstrup and the arrest of a dentist whom the police were convinced was behind the rubbish-bin assaults downtown. He had been arrested during an attempted attack on an undercover female officer on Nikolaj Plads near Store Kirkestræde. What the hell had the idiot been thinking?