The Absent One (52 page)

Then, he envisaged, he would use all his strength to dig
into the timber around the door with the broken glass. He would see if he could hollow out the planks where the hinges were placed. And if the worst should happen and the car came before he was finished, he would stand in wait for the man. He would wait behind the door with the broken glass in his hand. That was what he told himself he would do.

He leaned forward, folded his freezing fingers behind his back and prayed for forgiveness for his wicked thought.

Then he scraped again in the space between the planks in order that the bottle might come free. He scraped and scratched until the neck angled sufficiently for him to grab hold of it.

He listened.

Was that an engine? Yes, it was. The powerful engine of a large car. But was it approaching or simply passing by in the distance out there?

For a moment, the low sound seemed to become louder. He began to pull so desperately at the neck of the bottle that his knuckles cracked. But then it died away. Had it been the wind turbines, rumbling and whirring? Maybe it was something else entirely. He had no idea.

He expelled warm breath from his nostrils. It steamed the air around his face. He wasn’t so afraid any more, not now. As long as he thought about the grace of God, he felt better.

He pressed his lips together and kept on. And when finally the bottle came free, he struck it so hard against the timber of the floor that his brother lifted his head with a startled jolt and looked around in terror.

Again and again, he brought the bottle down against
the floor. It was hard to get a swing with his hands behind his back. Too hard. Eventually, when his fingers were no longer able to maintain their grip, he let the bottle slide from his hand, turned himself around and stared emptily at it as dust gently descended through the cramped space from the beams.

He couldn’t break it. He simply wasn’t able. A pathetic little bottle. Was it because they had drunk blood? Had Jehova abandoned them?

He looked at his brother, who rolled deliberately back into his blanket and fell back on to his bedding. He was silent, not even attempting to mumble a word through his adhesive tape.

It took a while to gather the things he needed. The hardest part was to stretch himself sufficiently within the confines of his chain as to be able to reach the tar between the roofing planks with the tips of his fingers. Everything else was at hand: the bottle, the sliver of wood from the timbered floor, the paper on which he was seated.

He pushed off one of his shoes and stabbed so sharply at his wrist with the sliver that tears welled involuntarily in his eyes. He let the blood drip on to his polished shoe for a minute, perhaps two. Then he tore a large shred of paper from his bedding, dipped the sliver of timber in his blood and twisted his body, pulling at his chain until able to see what he was writing behind his back. As best he could, and in the smallest of handwriting, he put down in words what was happening to them. When done, he signed the letter with his name, rolled up the paper and stuffed it inside the bottle.

He allowed himself plenty of time to press the lump of tar down into the neck. He shifted his weight so as better to see, and checked and double-checked to make sure it was well done.

When finally there was no more to do, he heard the dull sound of a car engine. This time there was no mistake. He cast a pained glance at his little brother and stretched for all his might towards the light that seeped in through a broad crack in the timbered wall, the only opening through which the bottle would be able to pass.

Then the door was opened and a thick shadow stepped inside amid a flurry of white snowflakes.

Silence.

And then the plop.

The bottle released.

Carl had woken up to better prospects.

The first thing he registered was the fountain of acid bubbling in his oesophagus. Then, after opening his eyes to see if there was anything that might assuage his discomfort, the sight of a woman’s obliterated and slightly salivating face on the pillow next to him.

Shit, that’s Sysser
, he thought, and tried to recall what errors he might have committed the previous evening that could have led him to this. Sysser of all people. His chain-smoking neighbour. The chattering odd-job woman who was soon to be pensioned off from Allerød Town Hall.

A dreadful thought struck him. Gingerly, he lifted the duvet only to discover with a sigh of relief that he still had his boxer shorts on. That was something, at least.

‘Christ,’ he groaned, removing Sysser’s sinewy hand from his chest. He hadn’t had a head on him like this since the time he was still with Vigga.

‘Please, spare me the details,’ he said, encountering Morten and Jesper in the kitchen. ‘Just tell me what the lady upstairs is doing on my pillow.’

‘The bitch weighed a ton,’ his bonus son proffered, raising a freshly opened carton of juice to his lips. The day Jesper discovered how to pour the stuff into a glass was something not even Nostradamus would hazard a guess at.

‘Yeah, sorry, Carl,’ said Morten. ‘She couldn’t find her key, you see, and you’d already crashed, so I reckoned …’

‘Definitely the last time anyone catches me at one of Morten’s barbecues,’ Carl promised himself, and cast a glance into the front room where Hardy’s bed was.

Since his former colleague had been installed in these chambers a fortnight ago, all semblance of domestic familiarity had gone down the drain. Not because the elevation bed occupied a quarter of the floor space and took away the view of the garden. Not because drops hanging from gallows or potties filled with piss made Carl queasy in any way. And not even because Hardy’s paralysed corpus emitted an unceasing flow of foul-smelling gasses. What changed everything was the guilty conscience all this gave rise to. The fact that Carl himself possessed full control of his limbs and could chug around on them whenever it suited him. Moreover, the feeling of having to compensate for it all the time. Having to be there for Hardy. Having to do good for the paralytic.

‘No need to have a cow about it,’ Hardy had said a couple of months back, pre-empting him as they discussed the pros and cons of moving him away from the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries at Hornbæk. ‘A week can go by here without me seeing you. I reckon I can do without your tender loving care a few hours at a time if I move in with you, don’t you?’

The thing was, though, that Hardy could be just as quietly asleep as now, and yet still be so present. In Carl’s mind, in the planning of his day, in all the words that had to be weighed before being uttered. It was fatiguing, a bind. And home wasn’t meant to fatigue you.

Then there was the practical side of things. Laundry, changing the sheets, the manhandling of Hardy’s enormous frame, shopping, liaising with nurses and authorities, cooking. So what if Morten did take care of it all, what about the rest of it?

‘Sleep well, old mate?’ he ventured as he approached the bed.

His former colleague opened his eyes and forced a smile. ‘That’s it then, eh, Carl? Back to the treadmill. A fortnight gone in a flash. Didn’t half go quick. Morten and I’ll do all right, just say hello to the crew for me, eh?’

Carl nodded. Who would fancy being Hardy? If only he could change places with someone for a day.

One day for Hardy.

Apart from the usual lot at the duty desk, Carl didn’t meet a soul. Police Headquarters was like it had been wiped out, the colonnade winter grey and discouraging.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ he called out as he entered the basement corridor.

He’d been expecting a raucous welcome, or at least the stench of Assad’s peppermint goo or Rose’s whistled versions of the great classics, but the place was dead. Had they abandoned ship while he’d been having a fortnight’s leave to get Hardy moved in?

He stepped into Assad’s cubbyhole and glanced around in bewilderment. No photos of ageing aunts, no prayer mat, no boxes of sickly sweet cakes. Even the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling were switched off.

He crossed the corridor and turned on the light in his own office. The familiar preserves in which he had solved
three cases and given up on two. The place to which the smoking ban had yet to percolate down and where all the old files that made up Department Q’s domain had lain safe and sound on his desk in three neatly ordered piles according to Carl’s own infallible system.

He stopped dead at the sight of a wholly unrecognizable, shiny desk. Not a speck of dust. Not a scrap of paper. Not a single closely written sheet of A4 on which he might rest his weary legs and thereafter dispatch into the wastepaper basket. No files. Wiped out.

‘ROSE!’ he yelled, as emphatically as he was able.

And his voice echoed through the corridors in vain.

He was the little boy lost. Last man standing. A rooster with nowhere to roost. The king who would give a kingdom for a horse.

He reached for the phone and pressed the number for Lis on the third floor, Homicide Division.

Twenty-five seconds passed before anyone answered.

‘Department A, secretary speaking,’ the voice said. It was Mrs Sørensen, the most indisputably hostile of all Carl’s colleagues. Ilse the She-Wolf in person.

‘Mrs Sørensen,’ he ventured, gentle as a purring cat. ‘This is Carl Mørck. I’m sitting here all forlorn in the basement. What’s going on? Would you happen to know where Assad and Rose are?’

Less than a millisecond passed before she put the phone down. Cow.

He stood up and headed for Rose’s domicile a little further down the corridor. Maybe the mystery of the missing files would be solved there. It was a perfectly logical
thought, right up to the excruciating moment at which he discovered that on the corridor wall between Assad’s and Rose’s two offices someone had now affixed at least ten soft Masonite boards which had then been plastered with the contents of the files that a fortnight ago had been lying on his desk.

A folding ladder of shiny yellow larch indicated where the last of the cases had been put up. It was one they’d had to shelve. Their second unsolved case in a row.

Carl took a step back to get the full picture of this paper pandemonium. What on earth were all his files doing on the wall? Had Rose and Assad become completely unhinged all of a sudden? Maybe that was why they’d vanished, bloody imbeciles.

They hadn’t the guts to stick around.

Upstairs on the third floor it was the same story. The place was deserted. Even Mrs Sørensen’s chair behind the front desk yawned empty. He checked the offices of the homicide chief as well as his deputy. He wandered into the lunchroom, then the briefing room. It was like the place had been evacuated.

What the fuck’s going on?
he thought to himself. Had there been a bomb scare? Or had the police reform finally got to the point where the staff had been kicked out into the street so all the buildings could be sold off? Had the new, so-called justice minister had a fit? Had everything gone tabloid?

He scratched the back of his neck, then picked up a phone and called the duty desk.

‘Carl Mørck here. Where the hell is everyone?’

‘Most of them are gathered in the Remembrance Yard.’

The Remembrance Yard? What the hell for? The 19th of September was six months away yet.

‘In aid of what? As far as I’m aware, the anniversary of the internment of Danish police officers isn’t even remotely round the corner. What are they doing?’

‘The Commissioner wanted to speak to a couple of departments about adjustments following the reform. Sorry about that, Carl. We thought you knew.’

‘But I just spoke to Mrs Sørensen.’

‘Most likely she’s had all calls sent on to her mobile, I’m sure that’ll be the explanation.’

Carl shook his head. They were stark raving mad. All of them. By the time he reached the Remembrance Yard, the Justice Ministry would probably have changed everything round again.

He stared through the door at the chief’s soft, enticing armchair. That was one place, at least, where a man could close his eyes without an audience.

Ten minutes later he woke up with the deputy’s paw on his shoulder and Assad’s cheerful, round eyes peering into his face from ten centimetres away.

There’d be no peace now.

‘Come on, Assad,’ he said, extracting himself from the chair. ‘You and I are going downstairs to pull all those sheets of paper off the wall sharpish, you understand? And where’s Rose?’

Assad shook his head. ‘We cannot, Carl.’

Carl stood up and tucked his shirt into his trousers. What the hell was he on about? Of course they could. Wasn’t he supposed to be the boss around here?

‘Just come on, will you. And get hold of Rose. NOW!’

‘The basement’s closed off,’ Deputy Commissioner Lars Bjørn butted in. ‘Asbestos from the piping insulation. Health and Safety have been round and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

Assad nodded. ‘Indeed, we had to bring all our stuff up here. There is hardly any room, but we did find a nice chair for you,’ he added, as though it could ever be a comfort. ‘There is only the two of us. Rose did not fancy it, so she is off on a long weekend. She will be back later on today, though.’

They might just as well have kicked him in the gonads.

She sat staring into the candles until they burnt out and darkness wrapped itself around her. It wasn’t the first time he’d left her on her own, but he’d never done it on their anniversary before.

She inhaled deeply and got to her feet. Lately, she’d given up standing by the window to wait for him, had stopped writing his name with her finger on the pane as it steamed up from her breath.

It wasn’t like there had been no warning signs the first time they met. Her friend had had her doubts, and her mother had told her straight out. He was too old for her. There was something shifty about him. A man you couldn’t trust. A man you couldn’t fathom.

So now she hadn’t seen her friend or her mother for a very long time. And for that reason her desperation increased; all the while her need for human contact was greater than ever. Who could she talk to? There was no one there.