The Absent One (24 page)

She laughed briefly, scrutinizing him, then hung up with a smile on her lips.

What the hell was so funny?
he wondered.
Ten to one she’d talked to Rose.

She didn’t elaborate on the reason for her chuckle, but exited the room and left him alone with all his unanswered questions in a young girl’s abandoned flat that seemingly had nothing to tell.

He inspected everything a number of times, and just as many times the housekeeper appeared in the doorway. She had taken on the role of guard, and she believed she could do that best by watching him as one eyes a hungry mosquito sitting on one’s hand. But nothing bit her. Carl had neither made a mess nor put anything in his pocket.

Apparently Kimmie had been in a rush to leave. She had vacated the flat in a fast, yet thorough, fashion. Things she didn’t want others to see had no doubt been deposited in the rubbish bins by the house’s cobblestone driveway, which he could see from the balcony.

The same was true of her clothes. There were small piles on the chair beside her bed, but no underwear. Shoes were scattered about in the corners of the room, but no dirty socks. She had considered what was OK to leave behind, and what was too intimate. And that was precisely what characterized the search: nothing intimate remained.

Even decorations on the walls, which normally could give an indication of attitude or taste, were missing. There was no toothbrush in the small marble bathroom. No tampons in the chest or cotton swabs in the wastebasket next to the toilet. Not the slightest trace of anything in the toilet bowl or the sink.

Kimmie had left the place so clinically devoid of personality that all he could tell was that it had once been occupied by a female. But she could just as well have been a spinster in the Salvation Army as a hip, upper-class girl from the expensive end of the postal codes.

He gently lifted the bed sheets and tried sniffing out her scent. He raised her blotting pad to see if she’d forgotten a little note beneath it. He fished around the
bottom of the empty wastebasket, looked in the back of the kitchen drawers, put his head in the hollow space under the sloping roof. Nothing.

‘It’ll be dark soon,’ said Charlotte, the housekeeper, implying that he should consider finding another place to play police officer.

‘Is there an attic or anything else above here?’ he asked hopefully. ‘A hatch or some stairs I can’t see from here?’

‘No, there’s just this.’

Carl looked up. OK, so an attic above the flat didn’t exist.

‘I’ll just make one more pass,’ he said.

He lifted all the rugs and searched for loose floorboards. Gently removed the spice posters in the kitchen to see if they covered up a hollow space. Knocked on the furniture and on the bottoms of the wardrobe and kitchen cupboards. There was simply nothing there.

He shook his head, reprimanding himself. Why
would
there be anything?

He closed the door of the flat behind him and remained on the landing a moment, partly to see if anything out there was of interest, and when there wasn’t, partly to drive away the irritating feeling that he had in fact overlooked something.

Then his mobile rang, and he snapped back to reality.

‘It’s Marcus,’ came the voice. ‘Why aren’t you in your office, Carl? And why does it look the way it does down there? The corridor is overflowing with pieces of I don’t know how many tables, and your office is covered with yellow sticky-notes. Where are you, Carl? Have you forgotten that you have visitors from Norway tomorrow?’

‘Shit!’ he said a little too loudly. Yes, he’d happily forgotten all about it.

‘OK?’ came from the other end of the line. He knew the homicide chief’s OK’s. They weren’t the kind of thing a person went looking for.

‘I’m on my way to headquarters now.’ He looked at the clock; it was already past four.

‘Now?! No, don’t you worry about anything at all.’ He didn’t sound as though it were up for discussion. He sounded angry. ‘I’ll take care of the visit you have tomorrow, and they
won’t
be coming down to that mess of yours.’

‘What time did you say they’re coming?’

‘They’re coming at 10 a.m., but you can save yourself the trouble, Carl
. I’m
taking over, and you’ll make yourself available for questions,
if
we want your commentary.’

Carl stared at his mobile for a moment after Marcus Jacobsen hung up. Right up until that second those dried-cod sheiks could have kissed him in a particular place, but now his attitude had changed completely. If the homicide chief wanted to take over, then Carl damned sure wouldn’t let him.

He cursed a few times and glanced out of the skylight that topped off the impressive stairwell. The sun was still out and beamed through the glass panes. Even though it was knocking-off time, he didn’t have any desire to go home.

His head was in no way ready to make the trip up Hestestien, along the fields and home to Morten’s culinary concoctions.

He noticed the shadows falling sharply through the window, and he felt his forehead forming a frown.

In houses of this vintage, the window frames in rooms with slanting roofs were usually set twelve inches into the wall. But here they were set in much deeper, by almost another ten inches. That meant, if he should venture a guess, that the house had been given additional insulation at a later date.

He craned his neck and discovered a slim crack in the transition from the ceiling above the stairwell to the sloping wall. His eyes followed the crack all the way round the landing and ended where he started. Yes, the sloping walls had settled a tad; the house hadn’t been born with such well-insulated walls, that much was clear. There were at least six inches of extra insulation, finished off with gypsum plasterboard. It had been smoothed out with putty and painted quite nicely, but it was common knowledge that after a certain amount of time cracks were inevitable.

He turned around, opened the door to the flat again, went directly to the outer wall and scanned all the sloping surfaces. Here, too, cracks had appeared in the join along the ceiling, but otherwise there was nothing remarkable.

The hollow space was there, somewhere, but apparently it wasn’t possible to hide anything inside it. Not from the inside anyway.

He repeated the words to himself. ‘Not from the inside anyway!’ He saw the balcony door. He grabbed the handle, pushed the door open and stepped outside, where the slanted roof tiles formed a picturesque background.

‘Remember, it was a long time ago,’ he whispered to himself and let his eyes roam from one row of tiles to the next. He was on the north side of the house; moss had collected all the rainwater’s nutrients and now covered
most of the roof like stage scenery. He turned towards the tiles on the other side of the balcony door and recognized the irregularity immediately.

The roof tiles were positioned evenly and firmly, and here, too, there was moss everywhere. The difference, however, was that one of the tiles right at the spot where the top row connected to the apex was slightly staggered from the others. The roof was constructed with pantiles, the kind of tiles that overlap one another, where each one has a small knob on the underside to prevent it from falling off the wooden crossbeams. But this particular tile was about to slide: almost as if the knob had been hacked off, it lay loosely on the beam between the other tiles.

When he lifted it, it loosened without any difficulty.

Carl took a deep drag of the chill September air.

A rare feeling of standing before the brink of something exceptional spread through his body. Kind of like what Howard Carter must have felt when he made the small hole in the grave-chamber door and suddenly found himself in Tutankhamun’s tomb. Because lying before Carl in a hollow of insulation material under the tiles was a shoebox-sized, unpainted metal box wrapped in transparent plastic.

Suddenly his heart started pounding furiously. Then he called out to the housekeeper.

‘Do you see that box?’

She came in and bent reluctantly to peer under the tiles. ‘There’s a box. What is it?’

‘I don’t know, but you’re my witness that I found it there.’

She looked at him sullenly. ‘OK, I do have eyes in my head, if that’s what you’re asking?’

He held his mobile towards the hollow space and snapped a few images. Then he showed them to her.

‘Do we agree that it was this hollow space I’ve just photographed?’

She set her hands on her hips. Evidently he wasn’t to ask her any more questions.

‘Now I’m going to remove it and take it to headquarters.’ It wasn’t a question, but a confirmation. Otherwise she would scurry down and wake Kassandra Lassen, and that would probably create a scene.

Then he allowed her to go. She went off, shaking her head, her trust in the intelligence of authority having suffered a setback.

For a moment he considered calling in the crime-scene techs, but thought better of it when he envisioned the miles of plastic crime-scene tape and men in white jumpsuits everywhere. They had enough to do, and he couldn’t wait. Plain and simple.

So he put on his gloves, lifted the box out carefully, put the tile back in place, took the box inside, set it on the table, unwrapped it and opened it – all in one fluid, unconscious movement.

On top was a little teddy bear, not much bigger than a box of matches. It was a very pale colour, almost yellowish, with worn plush on its face and limbs. Maybe it had been Kimmie’s most cherished possession at one time, her only friend. Maybe someone else’s. Then he pulled out a piece of newspaper from beneath the teddy bear.
Berlingske Tidende
, 29 September 1995, it said in the corner.
The same day she moved in with Bjarne Thøgersen. Beyond that, there was nothing of interest. Just endless job announcements.

He looked in the box expecting to find a diary or letters that would shed light on earlier thoughts and deeds. Instead he found six small plastic pockets, the kind used to collect stamps or put recipes in. He hefted the whole lot from the metal box.

Why hide these things so well?
he thought to himself, and knew the answer the instant he saw the contents of the bottom two pockets.

‘Fuck me!’ he blurted out.

There were two cards from a Trivial Pursuit game. One in each pocket.

After five minutes of deep concentration, he grabbed his notepad and carefully described the position of the plastic pockets relative to the rest of the box’s contents.

Afterwards he scrutinized each of them carefully, one at a time.

One pocket contained a man’s wristwatch, one an earring, another had something that resembled a rubber band, and finally a handkerchief.

Four pockets in addition to the ones with the Trivial Pursuit cards.

He chewed on his lip.

That made six in all.

Ditlev raced up the stairs to Caracas in four strides.

‘Where is he?’ he shouted to the secretary and dashed off in the direction her finger pointed.

Frank Helmond lay in his room alone, having fasted and been prepped for his second operation.

When Ditlev entered the room, Helmond didn’t look at him with respect.

Strange
, Ditlev thought, letting his eyes wander up the sheet to his bandaged face.
This idiot’s lying here, showing me no respect
.
Has he learned nothing? Who was it that hurt him, and who patched him together again?

When it came down to it, they had agreed on everything. Treatment of the numerous deep gashes in Helmond’s face would be accompanied by a light facelift and tightening of the skin around the neck and chest. Liposuction, surgery and capable hands – that’s what Ditlev could offer him. And when you added his wife and a small fortune into the bargain, the point had been reached where it was surely reasonable to demand from Helmond, if not appreciation, then at least that he regard their agreement with a certain degree of humility.

But the bargain hadn’t been kept, because Helmond had talked. There were nurses at this moment who must be wondering about what they’d heard, and who needed to be made to see sense.

Because regardless how drugged the patient had been, the words had been uttered: ‘It was Ditlev Pram and Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen who did this.’

He had said
that
.

Ditlev didn’t bother making an introduction. The man had no choice but to listen to him anyway.

‘Do you know how easy it is to kill a man under anaesthetic without being detected?’ he asked. ‘Oh, don’t you? In any case, you’re now ready for your next operation tonight, Frank. I just hope the anaesthetists have a steady hand. In spite of everything, I am paying them to do their work properly, you know.’ He aimed a finger at Helmond. ‘And just one more, simple matter. I’m assuming that we now agree you’ll keep your trap shut and stick to our agreement? Otherwise you’re risking having your organs end up as spare parts for people who are younger and fitter than you, and that wouldn’t please you very much, would it?’

Ditlev tapped the drip that was already fastened to Frank’s arm. ‘I don’t hold grudges, Frank. So you shouldn’t either, do you understand me?’

He pushed hard on Helmond’s bed and turned away. If that didn’t do it, then the little loser was asking for it.

On his way out he slammed the door so violently that a passing porter examined it when Ditlev had turned his back.

Then he made his way directly to the laundry. It would take more than a verbal lashing to exorcize the ugly feeling that Helmond’s mere presence created in his body.

His newest acquisition, a girl from the part of Mindanao where a man got his head chopped off if he went to
bed with the wrong woman, had yet to be tried out. He’d watched her with great satisfaction. She was exactly how he liked them. With shy eyes and a strong sense of her own insignificance. That, combined with her availability, lit a fire in him. A fire that longed to be extinguished.

‘I have the Helmond situation under control,’ he said, later that day. Behind the wheel, Ulrik nodded, satisfied. He was relieved, that much was evident.