The Absent One (10 page)

When she slipped around behind him her hand brushed through Florin’s thin hair. She’d been trained well.

‘Quite honestly,’ Florin said, as he sipped, ‘I would like to offer my assistance, but it has been a long time, and I think it’s better to let the case rest.’

Carl disagreed. ‘Did you know your son’s friends, Mr Florin?’

A crooked smile spread over Florin’s face. ‘You are so young, but I can tell you, if you didn’t already know, that I was rather busy back then. So no, I didn’t know them. They were just some youths Torsten had met at boarding school.’

‘Did it surprise you that they were suspects? I mean, they were nice young people, right? They all came from good homes.’

‘I don’t know if it bloody surprised me or not.’ He squinted at Carl over the rim of his glass. They had seen a great deal, those eyes. Including challenges far greater than Carl Mørck.

He set his glass down. ‘But during the investigation back in 1987, a few of them stood out,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, my lawyer and I made certain we were present at Holbæk Police Station when the young men were interrogated. My lawyer acted for all six of them throughout the investigation.’

‘Bent Krum, right?’

Assad had asked the question, but Valdemar Florin gazed straight through him.

Carl nodded to Assad. Bull’s eye. ‘ “Stood out”, you said. Who do you think stood out during the hearing?’

‘Perhaps you should call Bent Krum instead and ask him, since you know him. He still has an excellent memory, I’m told.’

‘Is that so? Who says?’

‘He’s still my son’s lawyer. And Ditlev Pram’s and Ulrik’s.’

‘I thought you said you didn’t know the youths, Mr Florin. But still you name Ditlev Pram and Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen in such a way that one might believe otherwise.’

He nodded curtly. ‘I knew their fathers. That’s how it was.’

‘And Kristian Wolf and Kirsten-Marie Lassen, did you know their fathers, too?’

‘Barely.’

‘And Bjarne Thøgersen’s?’

‘An insignificant man. Didn’t know him.’

‘He owned a lumber yard in northern Zealand,’ Assad interjected.

Carl nodded. He remembered that himself, actually.

‘Listen,’ Valdemar Florin said, staring through the skylights at the crystal-clear sky. ‘Kristian Wolf is dead, OK? Kimmie disappeared and has been missing for years. My son says she wanders around the streets of Copenhagen, toting a suitcase. Bjarne Thøgersen is in jail. What the hell are we discussing?’

‘Kimmie? Kirsten-Marie Lassen, is that who you’re talking about? Is that what she’s called?’

He didn’t respond. Simply took another sip and reached for his book. The audience was over.

When they left the house, they could see Florin through the veranda windows as he slammed his mistreated book
on the table and reached for the telephone. He seemed angry. Maybe he was warning his lawyer that they might turn up. Or calling Securitas to find out if they sold a warning system that ensured guests like them were rejected at the gate.

‘He knew all kinds of things, Carl,’ Assad said.

‘Yes, perhaps. With people like him it’s hard to tell. They’ve been taught their entire lives to be careful what they say. Did you know Kimmie was living on the street?’

‘No, it’s not noted anywhere in the files.’

‘We need to find her.’

‘Yes. But we could talk to the others first, couldn’t we?’

‘Yes, maybe.’ Carl gazed across the water. Of course they should talk to all of them. ‘But when a woman like Kimmie Lassen turns her back on her rich family and ends up on the street, there’s a reason. Those kinds of people could have unusually deep wounds that are well worth poking, Assad. So we need to find her.’

When they got to the car by the summer cottage, Assad pondered things for a moment. ‘I don’t understand the part about that Trivial game, Carl.’

Great minds think alike
, Carl thought. He said: ‘We’ll make another pass through the cottage, Assad. I was just about to suggest it. In any event, we have to bring the game home to have it examined for fingerprints.’

This time they inspected everything. The outbuildings, the garden behind the house where weeds were a yard high, the storage hut that housed the gas flasks.

By the time they returned to the living room, they had made no progress.

As Assad dropped to his knees again to search for the two wedges missing from the brown pie, Carl scanned the souvenir shelves and all the furniture.

Finally his attention settled on the pies and the Trivial Pursuit board.

It was obvious that one should take another look at the pies lying there on the central hexagon. Tiny flashes of a larger picture. One pie containing exactly the wedges it should, the other with two missing. A pink and a brown.

Then it dawned on him.

‘Here’s another Christmas heart,’ Assad mumbled, pulling it from under a corner of the rug.

But Carl said nothing. He bent over slowly and picked up the cards that lay in front of the card boxes. Two cards with six questions each, each question marked with a colour corresponding to the colours of the wedges.

At this moment he cared only about the brown and pink questions.

He flipped the cards over and looked at the answers.

He felt as though he’d just taken a giant leap, causing him to heave a deep sigh. ‘Here. I’ve got something, Assad.’ he said as quietly and as composedly as he possibly could. ‘Have a look.’

With Christmas heart in hand, Assad rose and peered over Carl’s shoulder at the cards.

‘What?’

‘A pink and a brown wedge were missing, right?’ He gave one card to Assad, then the other. ‘Look at what’s been written over the pink answer on this card and the brown answer on this one. What do they say?’

‘It says “Arne Jacobsen” on the one card and “Johan Jacobsen” on the other.’

They stared at one another a moment.

‘Arne? The same name as the police officer who took the file from Holbæk and gave it to Martha Jørgensen. What was his surname? Do you recall?’

Assad’s eyebrows shot up. He lifted his notebook from his breast pocket and skimmed his notes until he found the conversation with Martha Jørgensen.

Then he whispered a few unintelligible words and glanced up.

‘No, she didn’t give a surname.’

He whispered a few more words in Arabic and looked down at the game. ‘If Arne Jacobsen is a policeman, who is the other one then?’

Carl got his mobile out and phoned Holbæk Station.

‘Arne Jacobsen?’ the duty officer said. No, he’d better talk to one of their older colleagues. It took him a moment to transfer the call.

After that, only three minutes passed.

Then Carl clapped his mobile shut.

It often happens the day a man turns forty. Or the day he earns his first million. Or, at the very least, when the day comes where his father retires to a life of crossword puzzles. On that day, most men will know what it’s like to finally be free of patriarchal condescension, overbearing comments and critical glares.

But that’s not how things had gone for Torsten Florin.

He had more money than his father and had distanced himself from his four younger siblings, who, unlike him, hadn’t managed to make anything significant of themselves. He had even been on television and in the newspapers more often than his father. All of Denmark knew him. He was admired, especially by the women his father had always hankered after.

Yet whenever he heard his father’s voice on the telephone, he still felt awful. Like a difficult child, inferior and scorned. It gave him this indefinable knot in his stomach that would only disappear if he slammed the phone down.

But Torsten didn’t slam the phone down. Never when it was his father.

And after such a conversation, no matter how short, it was nearly impossible for Torsten to drive the anger and frustration from his body.

‘The eldest child’s lot,’ was how the only decent teacher at boarding school had once put it, and Torsten had hated
him for it. For if it were true, how could a man change anything? The question had occupied his thoughts day after day. Ulrik and Kristian had felt the same way.

This painful, shared hatred of their fathers had united them. And when Torsten helped beat their blameless victims to a pulp or twisted the necks of his teacher’s carrier pigeons – or later in life, when he gazed into a competitor’s horrified eyes just as they realized he’d created another new, unsurpassed collection – his thoughts turned towards his father.

‘Bloody arsehole,’ he said, trembling, when his father hung up. ‘Bloody arsehole,’ he hissed to his diplomas and the myriad hunting trophies mounted on the walls. Had it not been for the designers, his chief purchaser and four-fifths of the firm’s best clients and competitors in the adjacent room, he would have bellowed out his rage. Instead, he grabbed the old yardstick he’d been given on the fifth anniversary of the firm’s founding and smashed it into the mounted head of a chamois.

‘Arsehole, arsehole, arsehole!’ he whispered fiercely, hacking the small goat-antelope trophy again and again.

When he noticed the sweat gathering at the nape of his neck, he stopped and tried to think clearly. His father’s voice and what he’d told him filled his mind more than was healthy.

Torsten looked up. Outside, where the forest met the garden, a few hungry magpies flitted about. They cawed cheerfully while pecking at the carcasses of birds that earlier had felt his wrath.

Fucking birds
, he thought, and knew that now he was growing calmer. He lifted his bow from the wall hook,
grabbed a few arrows from the quiver behind his desk, opened the terrace door and shot at the birds.

By the time their chattering had quieted, the rush of anger burning inside his head had vanished. It worked every time.

He walked across the lawn, pulled the arrows from the birds, kicked the cadavers into the forest with the others, went back to his office, listened in on his guests’ ceaseless jabber, hung his bow back on its hook and tossed the arrows back in the quiver. Only then did he phone Ditlev.

‘The police were up in Rørvig talking to my father,’ was the first thing he said when Ditlev answered.

There was a moment of silence on the other end. ‘O
K
,’ Ditlev replied, emphasizing the last syllable. ‘What did they want?’

Torsten breathed deeply. ‘They wanted to know about the brother and sister up at Dybesø. Nothing specific. If the old fool understood correctly, someone contacted the police and sowed doubt on Bjarne’s guilt.’

‘Kimmie?’

‘I don’t know, Ditlev. As I recall, they didn’t say who.’

‘Warn Bjarne, OK? Immediately. What else?’

‘Dad suggested the police contact Krum.’

The laughter on the other end of the line was classic Ditlev: totally ice-cold. ‘Krum? They won’t get anything out of him,’ he said.

‘No. But apparently they’ve begun some sort of investigation, and that’s bad enough.’

‘Were they from Holbæk Police?’ Ditlev asked.

‘I don’t think so. The old man thought they were from Copenhagen’s Homicide Division.’

‘Jesus Christ. Did your father get their names?’

‘No. As usual, the arrogant bastard wasn’t listening. But Krum will get them.’

‘Forget it. I’ll phone Aalbæk. He knows a couple of blokes at police headquarters.’

After the conversation, Torsten sat staring blankly into space for a while as his breathing grew deeper. His brain was permeated with images of terrified people begging for mercy, screaming for help. Memories of blood, and the laughter of the others in the gang. Them all talking about it afterwards. Kristian’s photo collection that brought them together night after night, smoking until they were high or pumped up with amphetamines. In such moments he recalled everything and he both revelled in it and hated himself for doing so.

He opened his eyes wide to sink back into reality. Typically it took a few minutes for him to get the frenzy of rage out of his bloodstream, but the erotic arousal always remained.

He put his hand to his crotch. His cock was hard again.

Shit! Why couldn’t he control these feelings? Why did it continue, on and on?

He locked the door to the adjacent suites, from which the voices of half of Denmark’s fashion barons and baronesses could be heard.

He inhaled sharply and sank slowly to his knees.

Then he folded his hands and let his head fall forward. Sometimes it simply felt necessary. ‘Our Father who art in heaven,’ he whispered a couple of times. ‘Forgive me. For I cannot help myself.’

Ditlev Pram quickly updated Aalbæk on the situation, ignoring the fool’s complaints about late nights and lack of manpower. So long as they paid his price, he better just keep his trap shut.

Then he swivelled his office chair and nodded pleasantly at his trusted colleagues around the conference table.

‘Excuse me,’ he said in English. ‘I have a problem with an old aunt who’s always straying from home. This time of year, we obviously need to find her before nightfall.’

They smiled agreeably, understanding what he meant. Family comes first. That’s how it was where they came from, too.

‘Thank you for a good briefing.’ He smiled broadly. ‘I’m very pleased that this team has become a reality. Northern Europe’s best doctors congregated in one place – could one wish for anything more?’ He smacked his palms on the tabletop. ‘Let’s get started, shall we? Will you begin, Stanislav?’

His head of plastic surgery nodded, flicking on the overhead projector. Stanislav showed them a man’s face on which lines had been drawn. ‘We will make incisions here, here and here,’ he said. He’d done the procedure before. Five times in Romania and twice in the Ukraine. In every case but one the feeling in the facial nerves had
returned startlingly fast. He made it sound uncomplicated. A facelift, he claimed, could now be done with just half the incisions doctors typically used.

‘Take a look here,’ he said, ‘right at the top of the sideburns. A triangular area is removed and the skin is pulled up and sewn together with only a few stitches. Simple and straightforward.’