The Absent One (17 page)

‘I see! And what would you like me to do about it?’

‘I’d like you to tell me who’s shutting down my investigation. Would you rather I call the police chief myself?’

‘She’ll be here this afternoon. We’ll see what she says.’

‘Can I count on it?’

‘We’ll see.’

On the way out of the homicide chief’s office Carl slammed the door a little harder than usual, then found himself staring directly into Bak’s pale, sickly, morning face. The black leather coat that was always glued on to him now hung nonchalantly over his shoulder.
Now I’ve seen everything
, thought Carl.

‘What’s up, Bak? I hear you’re leaving us. Did you inherit money or something?’

Bak stood a moment, as though considering whether the sum total of their shared working life was ending in a minus or a plus. Then he turned his head slightly and said: ‘You know how it is. Either you’re a damn good policeman, or you’re a damn good family man.’

Carl considered putting a hand on his shoulder, but settled on proffering one instead. ‘Last day today! I wish you luck and happiness with the family, Bak. Even though you’re a total arsehole, know that you wouldn’t be the worst to have back if you chose to return after your leave of absence.’

The tired man looked at Carl, surprised. Or maybe the right word was ‘overwhelmed’. Børge Bak’s microscopic emotional displays were difficult to interpret.

‘You’ve never been especially kind, Carl,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But I guess you’re all right.’

For the two men this was a shocking orgy of compliments.

Carl turned and nodded towards Lis, who stood behind the front desk with at least as many papers as those lying
on the basement floor waiting to be put on one of the tables Rose had already assembled.

‘Carl,’ Bak said, his hand resting on the door handle to the homicide chief’s office. ‘Marcus isn’t the one stopping your investigation, if that’s what you think. It’s Lars Bjørn.’ He raised his index finger. ‘You didn’t hear that from me.’

Carl cast a glance at the deputy commisioner’s office. As usual, the blinds were down, but the door was open.

‘He’ll be back at three. There’s a meeting with the police chief, as far as I know,’ were Bak’s final words to him.

He found Rose Knudsen on her knees in the basement corridor. Like a full-grown polar bear sliding across the ice, she lay with her legs splayed out and both elbows on a piece of folded-out cardboard. Around her were table legs and metal brackets and an array of Allen keys and tools. Four inches below her nose lay a jumble of assembling instructions.

She’d ordered four height-adjustable tables, and Carl certainly hoped that after all that effort they would indeed materialize.

‘Weren’t you supposed to visit Bispebjerg Hospital, Rose?’

Without budging from her patch of floor, she merely pointed at Carl’s door. ‘There’s a copy on your desk,’ she said. Then she was lost in the assembly diagrams once more.

Bispebjerg Hospital had faxed her three pages and, sure enough, they were lying on Carl’s desk. Stamped and dated and exactly what he wanted. Kirsten-Marie Lassen. Admitted 24 July to 2 August 1996. Half the words were in Latin, but their meaning was clear enough.

‘Pop in here for a minute, will you, Rose,’ he called out.

There was a series of groans and curses from the corridor floor, but she did as he asked nonetheless.

‘Yes?’ she said, with pearls of sweat on her mascara-massacred face.

‘They found the case record!’

She nodded.

‘Have you read it?’

Again she nodded.

‘Kimmie was pregnant and was admitted due to bleeding following a violent fall down a flight of stairs,’ he said. ‘She received good care and apparently made a good recovery, and yet she lost the child. There were signs of new injuries. Did you also read that?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s nothing here about the father or any relations.’

‘That was all Bispebjerg had, they said.’

‘I see.’ Again he paged through the file. ‘So she was four months along when she was admitted. After a few days the doctors believed her risk of miscarriage had passed, but on the ninth day she miscarried anyway. In the follow-up examination they found new bruises from a blow to her abdomen. Kimmie explained them by saying she’d fallen out of bed.’ Carl fumbled after a cigarette. ‘That’s really hard to believe.’

Rose backed a couple of steps away, eyes squinting as she rapidly fanned the air with one hand. So she couldn’t tolerate cigarette smoke. All right then! There was something that could keep her at a distance.

‘No police report was filed,’ she said. ‘But then again, if that had been the case, we would have already known.’

‘It doesn’t say whether doctors performed a D&C on her or anything like that. But what does this mean?’ He pointed a few lines down the page. ‘
Abortus incompletus
. Doesn’t that mean miscarriage?’

‘I phoned them. It means that not all the placenta passed with the miscarriage.’

‘How big is the placenta in the fourth month?’

She shrugged. Clearly this had not been part of her curriculum at business college.

‘And she never got a D&C?’

‘No.’

‘As far as I know that can be fatal. Infections in the abdominal cavity are no laughing matter. She was also injured by the blows. Badly, I imagine.’

‘That was why the doctors wouldn’t discharge her.’ She pointed at the surface of his desk. ‘Did you see the note?’

It was a small, self-adhering yellow thing. How the hell did she expect him to see something that tiny on his desk? Next to it, the needle in the haystack was nothing.

‘Call Assad,’ it read.

‘He called half an hour ago. He said he’d probably seen Kimmie.’

Carl felt a lurch in his gut. ‘Where?’

‘At the central train station. You’re supposed to phone him.’

He tore his coat off the hook. ‘The station’s only four hundred yards away. I’m
outta
here!’

Out on the street, people were walking around in short sleeves. The shadows were suddenly long and sharp, and everyone seemed to be trying to out-smile each other. It
was late in September and a little more than twenty degrees, so what the hell were people smiling for? They ought to be raising their faces towards the ozone layer in horror. He removed his coat and slung it over his shoulder. Next there would be people wearing sandals in January. Long live the greenhouse effect.

He pulled out his mobile, punched in Assad’s number and realized his battery was dead. This was the second time in just a few days that had happened. Fucking useless battery.

He entered the central station and scanned the crowd. It looked hopeless. So he made a fast, fruitless round of the sea of suitcases.

Son of a bitch
, he thought, heading to the train depot’s police station near the exit to Reventlowsgade.

He needed to call Rose now to get Assad’s number. He could already hear her gravelly, mocking laughter.

The personnel behind the front desk at the police station didn’t know him, so he pulled out his badge. ‘I’m Carl Mørck. Hi. My mobile is dead. Can I use your telephone?’

One of the cops pointed at an old contraption behind the desk while trying to console a young girl who’d wandered away from her big sister. Ages ago Carl had been the cop on the beat, consoling children. It was actually sad to think about.

Just as he was about to dial the number, he spotted Assad through the blinds. He was standing next to the stairwell to the public lavatories, half hidden behind a flock of excited high-school students wearing rucksacks. He didn’t look too good, scoping out the territory in his wretched coat.

‘Thanks for letting me use the phone,’ Carl said, and hung up.

Only five or six yards separated them by the time Carl was outside the police office and about to hail Assad, when someone came from behind Assad and grabbed his shoulder. He was dark-skinned, about thirty years old, and didn’t seem particularly friendly. In one jerk he spun Assad round and began shouting curses at him. Carl didn’t understand what he was saying, but Assad’s expression left no doubt. Friends they weren’t.

A couple of the girls among the flock of students looked at them indignantly.
Lowlife! Tossers!
their faces seemed to say through arrogant masks.

Then the man lashed out at Assad, and Assad struck back with an incredibly precise and devastating blow that stopped the man in his tracks. For a moment he stood wobbling, as the schoolteachers discussed whether or not to get involved.

But Assad didn’t care. He grabbed the man roughly and clutched him tight, until he began shouting again.

Then, as the school group angled away from the scene, Assad caught sight of Carl, and his reaction was instantaneous. He shoved the man away and gave him a hand gesture that invited him to fuck off. Before the man reached the stairway to the train platform, Carl managed to get a glance at him. At his razor-sharp sideburns and glistening hair. He was a handsome guy with a hateful gaze. Not the kind of man one wished to see again.

‘What just happened?’ Carl asked.

Assad shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Carl. He’s just some idiot.’

Assad’s eyes roamed all over. Towards the police station
behind Carl, towards the schoolchildren, towards Carl, and beyond. This was a completely different Assad to the one who made mint tea in the basement. A man with a score to settle.

‘You’ll tell me what that was all about when you’re ready, OK?’

‘It was
nothing
. Just a neighbour of mine.’ Then he smiled. Not convincingly, but almost. ‘You got my message then? You know your mobile is completely dead, right?’

Carl nodded. ‘How do you know it was Kimmie you saw?’

‘A junkie prostitute called out her name.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘I don’t know. She managed to get away in a taxi.’

‘Bloody hell, Assad. You followed her, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. My taxi was right behind hers, but when we reached Gasværksvej, her taxi had stopped just around the corner. She was already gone then. I was just a second too late, and she was gone.’

Success and failure, all at once.

‘Her taxi driver said that she’d given him five hundred kroner. She’d just hopped in the back seat, shouting, “Drive to Gasværksvej! Fast. The money’s all yours.” ’

Five hundred kroner for five hundred yards. That’s desperation.

‘I searched for her, of course. Went in all the shops to hear if they’d seen anything. Rang doorbells.’

‘Did you get the taxi driver’s number?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bring him in for questioning. There’s something fishy about this.’

Assad nodded. ‘I know who the junkie prostitute is. I have her address.’ He handed him a note. ‘I got it from this police station ten minutes ago. Her name is Tine Karlsen. She has a bedsit down on Gammel Kongevej.’

‘Well done, Assad. But how did you get the information from the officers? Who did you say you were?’

‘I showed them my ID from headquarters.’

‘That doesn’t allow you to get that kind of information, Assad. You’re a civil employee.’

‘Well, I got it anyway. But it would be good then if I got a badge now that you’re sending me out so much, Carl.’

‘I’m sorry, Assad, but I can’t do that.’ He shook his head. ‘You said they knew her at the station. Has she been arrested?’

‘Oh, yes. Many times. They are rather tired of her. She usually goes around begging for money near the train station’s main entrance.’

Carl looked up at the yellow building buttressed against Teaterpassagen. Lots of sets of rooms on the lower four floors, attic rooms at the top. It wasn’t difficult to guess where Tine Karlsen lived.

The door to the fifth floor was opened by a gruff-looking man in a threadbare blue dressing gown. ‘Tine Karlsen, you say? Follow me.’ He led Carl past the stairwell and into a corridor with four or five doors. He pointed at one as he clawed his grey beard. ‘We don’t like having the police running around up here,’ he said. ‘What did she do?’

Carl squinted, drawing one of his acerbic smiles from his goody bag. The man earned wads of cash on these
small, crappy rooms. So he could bloody well treat his tenants properly.

‘She’s an important witness in a renowned case. I request that you give her the support she needs. Do you understand?’

The man let go of his beard. Did he understand? He had absolutely no idea what Carl was talking about. But it didn’t matter – so long as it worked.

She didn’t open her door until he’d pounded on it for what seemed an eternity. Her face was extraordinarily ravaged.

Inside the room he was met with a pungent, nasty odour, the smell a pet’s cage exudes when it isn’t cleaned often enough. Carl remembered all too well that phase of his stepson’s life – when his hamsters mated day and night on his desk. In no time the number had multiplied fourfold, and that trend would have continued if the boy hadn’t lost interest and the animals hadn’t begun eating each other. In the months before Carl donated the rest of the critters to a day-care centre, the stink was a permanent fixture of the home atmosphere.

‘You’ve got a rat, I see,’ he said, bending towards the little monster.

‘His name’s Lasso and he’s completely tame. Would you like me to take it out so you can hold it?’

He tried to smile. Hold it? A mini-pig with a hairless tail? He’d sooner eat its fodder.

It was at that point Carl decided to show her his police badge.

She glanced disinterestedly at it and wobbled over to the table. With an experienced hand, she pushed a syringe
and some tinfoil fairly discreetly under a magazine. Heroin, if he were to venture a guess.

‘I understand you know Kimmie?’

Had she been arrested with a needle in her veins or shoplifting or jerking off a customer on the street she wouldn’t have batted an eye. But that question made her jump.

Carl moved to the dormer window and looked out over the soon-to-be barren trees that ringed St Jørgen’s Lake. Hell of a nice view this junkie had.

‘Is she one of your best friends, Tine? I’ve heard you two are close.’

He leaned right up against the window and gazed down at the footpath alongside the water. Had the girl been normal, she might be jogging around the lake a few times a week like the ones doing so now.