The Absent One (41 page)

She didn’t respond.

He punched her hard in the belly with his free hand, and when she still didn’t answer he punched her again and again until the contractions began, her legs jerked and the bed rocked.

He would have killed her if the chair beside her bed hadn’t been flung over and filled the dead silence in the room with an infernal racket. If the headlights from an ambulance hadn’t lit up the room and nakedly exposed him in all his gruesome wretchedness. If she hadn’t laid her head back and gone into shock.

If he hadn’t felt certain that she was about to die anyway.

She didn’t check out of her hotel. She left her suitcase and simply took the bag with the little bundle and a few other things and walked the short distance to the central station. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon. Now she was going to fetch the little teddy bear for Mille as she’d promised. And after that she would complete her task.

It was a clear autumn day and the S-train was filled with happy nursery-school children and their teachers. Maybe they were heading home from a museum, maybe they were on their way to the park for a few hours. Maybe the little ones would return home this evening to Mum and Dad with flushed cheeks, brimming with tales of multicoloured foliage and flocks of deer on the plains surrounding Eremitage Castle.

When she and Mille were finally reunited, it would be even lovelier than all those things. In the infinite beauty of Paradise. They would gaze at each other and laugh.

For all eternity, that’s how it was going to be.

She nodded and stared across Svanemøllen’s barracks in the direction of Bispebjerg Hospital.

Eleven years ago she’d got out of her hospital bed and taken the little child that lay under a sheet on the steel table at the foot of the bed. They had left her alone for only a moment. A woman in the next room had gone into labour, and there had been serious complications.

She had risen, dressed and swaddled her child in the sheet. And an hour later, after she’d been humiliated by her father at Hotel D’Angleterre, she’d taken the exact same route out to Ordrup that she was taking now.

On that occasion she’d known she couldn’t stay in the house. That the gang would come after her, and the next time would mean the end.

But she also knew that she badly needed help because she was still bleeding, and the pain in her abdomen felt unreal and frightening.

So she was going to ask Kassandra for more money. Make her give her what she needed.

Once again on that day she’d found out what people whose name began with ‘K’ could do to her.

All that Kassandra had angrily shoved into her hand was a lousy two thousand kroner. Two thousand from her and ten thousand from her so-called father, Willy K. Lassen, was as much as they were willing to inconvenience themselves with. And that was far from enough.

When she’d been asked to leave the house and found
herself on the street with the bundle hugged to her chest and the sanitary pad between her legs once again completely soaked in blood, she knew the day would come when everyone who had mistreated her and forced her to her knees would pay for what they’d done.

First Kristian, then Bjarne. Then Torsten, Ditlev, Ulrik, Kassandra and her father.

Now, for the first time in many years, she stood in front of the house on Kirkevej, and everything looked exactly the same. The church bells up the hill no doubt still called the staid bourgeoisie to Sunday services, and the homes in the neighbourhood still towered unashamedly. The door of the house was still just as hard to open.

She recognized not only Kassandra’s preserved face when she opened the door, but also the attitude her presence always provoked in her stepmother.

Kimmie didn’t know how the hostility between them had begun. It had probably been back when Kassandra, in her misguided attempts at child-rearing, had locked Kimmie in dark wardrobes, bombarding her with torrents of cruel words, the half of which the little girl didn’t understand. That Kassandra herself had suffered in this insensitive household was arguably a mitigating factor when taking her behaviour into account. But it was no excuse. Kassandra was a devil.

‘I’m not letting you in,’ Kassandra hissed, trying to force the door closed. Exactly as she’d done the day after the miscarriage when Kimmie stood there, injured and in deep despair and need, with the bundle in her arms.

Back then she’d been told to go to hell, and it truly was hell that awaited her. Despite the horrible shape in which Kristian’s blows and the miscarriage had left her, she had been forced to walk the streets for days, hunched over, without anyone offering to help her, or even approach her.

People saw only her cracked lips and filthy hair. Edging away from the repulsive bundle in her hands and her sleeves stained brown by dried blood, they didn’t see a fever-ravaged fellow human in need. They didn’t see a person falling to pieces.

And she’d considered it her punishment. Her own purgatory that she had to endure to atone for all her terrible misdeeds.

It was a junkie from Vesterbro who saved her. Only Tine, that stick-thin waif, ignored the smell that rose from the bundle and the caked-on spittle that had accumulated in the corners of her mouth. She had seen far worse, and she took Kimmie to a room down an alley in Sydhavnen to another drug addict who once, at the dawn of time, had been a doctor.

It was his pills and D&C that got rid of the infection and staunched her bleeding. The price she paid was that she never bled again.

The following week – around the time the little parcel stopped reeking – Kimmie was ready to start a new life on the street.

The rest was history.

Entering the rooms where Kassandra’s thick perfume hung heavy, and all the lingering ghosts laughed at Kimmie
as they had always done, was like being frozen in the middle of a nightmare.

Kassandra raised a cigarette to her lips. Her lipstick had long ago been sucked into dozens of earlier cigarettes. Her hands trembled slightly, but through the smoke her eyes followed Kimmie watchfully as she set her bag on the floor. It was obvious that Kassandra felt uncomfortable and her eyes would soon begin darting around. This was not a scenario she had planned for.

‘What do you want here?’ Kassandra asked. Precisely the same words as eleven years before. After the rape and the miscarriage.

‘Do you wish to keep on living in this house, Kassandra?’ Kimmie retorted.

Her stepmother tipped her head back, but otherwise remained still for a moment, thinking, her wrist limp, the blue smoke swirling around her greying hair.

‘Is that why you’ve come? To throw me out? Is that it?’

It was refreshing to watch her struggle to remain calm. This person who’d had the opportunity to take a little girl by the hand and lift her out of a cold mother’s shadow. This miserable, self-loathing, egocentric woman who’d dominated Kimmie’s life with emotional abuse and daily neglect. This woman who’d nurtured in Kimmie all that had led her to where she was today: mistrust, hatred, cold indifference and lack of empathy.

‘I have two questions that you’d be wise to answer nice and snappy, Kassandra.’

‘Then you’ll leave?’ She poured a glass of port from the carafe she’d no doubt made attempts at emptying before Kimmie arrived, and took a measured mouthful.

‘I’m not making any promises,’ Kimmie said.

‘What are your questions?’ Kassandra sucked the cigarette smoke so deeply into her lungs that nothing exited when she exhaled.

‘Where’s my mother?’

She tilted her head back, her mouth slightly open. ‘Oh my God. Is that your question?’ She turned abruptly to Kimmie. ‘Well, she’s dead, Kimmie. She’s been dead for thirty years, the poor thing. Didn’t we ever tell you?’ Once again she tilted her head back and made a few sounds that were supposed to express surprise. Then she turned again to Kimmie. This time her face was hard. Merciless. ‘Your father gave her money, and she drank it. Need I say more? Amazing that we never told you. But now that you know, does it make you happy?’

The word ‘happy’ permeated all the cells in Kimmie’s body.
Happy?!

‘What about my father? Have you heard from him? Where is he?’

Kassandra knew that question was coming. She was repulsed. Just the word ‘father’ was enough. If anyone hated Willy K. Lassen, it was her.

‘I don’t understand why you want to know. For all you care, he could burn in hell, couldn’t he? Or do you just want to make sure he is? Because I can assure you, you daft girl, that your father is indeed burning in hell.’

‘Is he ill?’ she asked. Maybe what the policeman had told Tine was true.

‘Ill?’ Kassandra snuffed out her cigarette and stretched her arms with fingers spread and nails jagged. ‘He’s burning in hell with cancer in all his bones. I haven’t spoken to
him, but I’ve heard from others that he’s suffering terribly.’ She pursed her lips and exhaled heavily as if she were expelling Satan himself. ‘He’s suffering terribly and will be dead by Christmas, and that’s fine with me, do you hear?’

She smoothed her dress a little and pulled her glass of port on the table towards her.

That meant Kimmie, her little one and Kassandra were the only ones left. Two cursed K’s and the tiny guardian angel.

Kimmie lifted her bag off the floor and put it on the table beside Kassandra’s carafe.

‘Tell me, were you the one who let Kristian in when I was expecting the little one here?’

Kassandra watched as Kimmie opened the bag a bit.

‘Dear God! Don’t tell me you have that hideous thing in that bag!’ She could tell from Kimmie’s face that indeed she did. ‘You’re sick in the head, Kimmie. Take it away.’

‘Why did you let Kristian into the house? Why did you let him come to me, Kassandra? You knew I was pregnant. I’d told you I wanted to be left alone.’

‘Why? I didn’t care one iota about you and your bastard child. What did you expect?’

‘And you just sat here in the living room while he beat me up. You must have heard it. You must have known how many times he punched me. Why didn’t you call the police?’

‘Because I knew you deserved it. Isn’t that right?’

‘I knew you deserved it,’ she’d said, and the voices began sounding off in Kimmie’s head.

Punches, dark rooms, derision, accusations – all of it making a racket in Kimmie’s head, and now it had to stop.

In one bound she leaped forward and seized Kassandra’s hairdo, forcing her head back so she could pour the rest of the port into her. The woman stared in confusion and surprise at the ceiling as the liquid drained into her windpipe and made her cough.

So she clamped Kassandra’s mouth shut and clutched her head in a headlock as her coughing fit and attempts to regurgitate grew stronger.

Kassandra grabbed Kimmie’s forearm and tried to shove it away, but life on the streets creates a sinewy strength that dwarfs that which an elderly woman gets from spending her days ordering people around. Her eyes grew desperate as her stomach contracted, driving gastric acid up to the mounting catastrophe about to take place somewhere between her windpipe and oesophagus.

A few, quick, futile inhalations through her nose caused further panic in Kassandra’s body, which now flailed with all its limbs to get free. Kimmie held tight and closed off every opportunity for life-giving oxygen to get in, and Kassandra went into convulsions as her chest heaved frantically, drowning her whining.

And then she became still.

Kimmie allowed her to fall right where the battle had been fought, letting the smashed port glass, the coffee table that had been knocked out of place, and the regurgitation that flowed from the woman’s mouth speak for itself.

Kassandra Lassen had always enjoyed the good things in life, and now they had taken that life from her.

An accident, some would say. Predictable, others would add.

Those were precisely the words one of Kristian Wolf’s old hunting mates had been quoted as saying when they found him with a severed femoral artery down at his Lolland estate. An accident, yes, but predictable. Kristian was known for being careless with his shotgun. One day something was bound to go wrong, the hunting buddy said.

But it was no accident.

Kristian had controlled Kimmie from the day he first laid eyes on her. He had coerced her and the others to participate in his games, and he had used her body. He had pushed her into relationships and pulled her out again. He had gotten her to lure Kåre Bruno to Bellahøj with promises of them getting back together. He had goaded her into shouting for Kristian to shove Kåre over the edge. He had raped her and beaten her, once, then a second time, so the baby didn’t survive. He’d transformed her life on multiple occasions, each time for the worse.

After she’d been living on the streets for six weeks, she saw him on the front page of a tabloid. He was smiling, had made some terrific business deals and was about to leave for a few days of relaxation on his Lolland estate. ‘No animal on my grounds should feel safe,’ he had said. ‘My aim is excellent.’

She stole her first suitcase, put on impeccable clothes and took the train to Søllested, where she got off and walked the last three miles in the twilight until she reached the estate.

She spent the night in the bushes, listening as Kristian’s constant yelling inside finally forced his young wife to flee upstairs. He slept in the living room and after a
few hours was more than ready to take out his personal shortcomings and general frustrations on vulnerable pheasants and any other living creature within range.

The night had been ice-cold, but not for Kimmie. The thought of Kristian’s blood, which would soon be spilled for his sins, felt like a summer heat wave. It was life-giving and inspiring.

Ever since boarding school she had known that Kristian’s restless soul drove him out of bed long before anyone else. A couple of hours before a hunt, he would stroll round the hunting grounds to get a feel for the terrain and to ensure the best cooperation between beaters and hunters. Several years after he’d been murdered, she could still clearly recall the moment when she finally spotted him walking through the gates of his estate and out to the fields. Fully equipped in the manner the upper classes considered fitting for a killer to look: squeaky clean, foppish, and with shiny, laced-up boots. But what did they know about real killers?