Have you seen Eik?” Louise asked Olle Svensson, when she ran into him in the hallway outside the lounge. The thin-haired investigator had shared an office with Eik before Rønholt moved Eik in with Louise and made them partners.
“No, he didn’t come to lunch. He’s probably outside sucking on one of his cancer sticks.” Olle sipped at his coffee.
Louise shook her head. “It’s been over two hours now since he went down to pick up some cigarettes and walk Charlie, and I just think it’s strange he isn’t back yet.”
She didn’t like the look on Olle’s face. His brown eyes widened, and she really didn’t want to hear what he was about to say. Suddenly she wondered if he and Eik had, in fact, talked about moving his things out of her apartment later that day. Or if it actually had been said in jest.
“Is there any more coffee in there?” she asked, nodding at his cup. Before he could answer, she was on her way into the lounge.
Rønholt was right, Louise thought, as she walked back into the office. Everything was simply too awkward. She couldn’t even mention her partner’s name to anyone else in the department without it sounding suggestive. But where the hell was he? Surely he wasn’t so aggravated by her asking if he had the tickets that he just took off!
Annoyed now, she walked over to the window. This was just pathetic. Had it been anyone else in the department, she would simply have assumed he’d gone for the day and had forgotten to say good-bye. Or else that something had come up.
Or would she?
She leaned forward and stared at the dog leashed to a hook in front of the convenience store. It looked exactly like Charlie. For a long time she waited for Eik to walk out of the store, but when the door finally opened, an older lady pulling her shopping cart emerged. Then the owner of the shop came out and set a plastic bucket of water in the snow by the wall. He petted the dog, then he said something and pointed to the bucket.
Damn, it was Charlie! Definitely. But there was no sign of Eik.
It took Louise two minutes to shut everything down in the office and slam the door behind her. She ran down the stairs through the rotunda, and a moment later was outside on the square.
The German shepherd began wagging his tail when she approached. She strode into the store, and after seeing there were no customers around, she asked, “Where’s Eik?”
The owner came out from behind the counter and shook his head. “Don’t know. He’s gone. Bought cigarettes and forgot the dog. I brought him inside, but he started growling every time a customer came in. It’s been almost two hours, though, and it’s cold out there.”
He shrugged his shoulders all the way up to his ears and looked at her as if resigned.
“Charlie’s been out on the street all this time?” she asked. “What did Eik say when he left? He couldn’t have just forgotten him!”
Once more the shop owner shrugged his shoulders. “He bought a pack of smokes, like always, and a new lighter. He paid and left. Haven’t seen him since!”
Louise called Eik’s cell phone, but he didn’t answer. When she tried her own home phone number, the answering machine switched on. She thought for a moment before calling Rønholt’s office. She didn’t like the idea of involving him further in their private life, but on the other hand, he must have sent Eik out somewhere and forgotten to tell her about it.
“I haven’t seen or heard from him since you left my office,” he said. He sounded preoccupied. “But he’s a big boy; usually he can take care of himself.”
She shouldn’t have called. She threw her phone down into her bag and unhooked Charlie’s leash. She was so infuriated that she decided to walk all the way home to Frederiksberg. Eik’s taking off and abandoning his dog on the street in this cold was one thing; making her look like a complete idiot was even worse.
The sixth-floor apartment was empty. Louise hadn’t gotten used to Jonas being at boarding school; the place was very quiet when he wasn’t home. She looked through the four rooms and saw that nobody had been there since they’d left that morning. She went downstairs and rang Melvin’s doorbell.
“We just got back from Frederiksberg Gardens,” her neighbor said. He’d been happy to take on the job of looking after Dina, now that Jonas was home only on weekends. Louise patted her yellow Lab and asked Melvin if he’d seen Eik.
“No, but I don’t see him forgetting Charlie.” Melvin had offered her a seat on his sofa, and now poured her a cup of coffee. “That dog is his one and only. Almost.” He winked at Louise.
She shook her head and stared into the bloodred poinsettia on the coffee table. No, it didn’t seem very probable. Unless she had irritated Eik more than he had let on. But she couldn’t involve her seventy-eight-year-old neighbor in that.
There was something comforting about sitting on Melvin’s plush sofa. The smell of his evening cigars hung in the curtains, reminding Louise of her deceased grandparents.
Melvin had become a part of the family after Jonas moved in with Louise, as a foster child at first, when he was twelve years old. Orphaned during the civil war that ravaged the former Yugoslavia, Jonas had been adopted by a Danish activist minister and his wife, who brought him home and loved him as their own. He was only four when his adoptive mother died, leaving the child to be raised by his devoted single father. Eight years later, Jonas also lost his beloved father, who was murdered by an East European Mafia faction.
Louise had known Melvin for several years, but only slightly, as a neighbor whose life didn’t intersect with her own. Jonas and Melvin had recognized each other at once and reconnected when they realized that Jonas’s father had presided over the funeral of Melvin’s late wife. They’d been living in Australia when she became ill. Her doctors botched her medications so badly that she suffered brain damage and lay in a coma. Thirteen years ago, Melvin had managed to bring her home to Denmark, where her final years were spent at a nursing home five minutes from his apartment. It had been four years since her passing.
“He’ll show up,” Louise said, after she drank her coffee. “If for no other reason, there’s a concert we’re going to tonight. Do you have any plans?” She wanted to make it all sound as casual as possible.
“Grete and I are going over to the Storm P. Museum for a lecture. It starts at six thirty, so I’m thinking we’ll grab a bite to eat before.”
Louise smiled. At first Melvin had called Grete Milling his friend, downplaying the relationship, but gradually it became easier for him to talk about her as a natural part of everything he did. Everyone was thrilled that the two seniors had found each other.
“I’d better get back upstairs,” she said. She carried her cup out to the kitchen. “I have to shower before I meet the others at Vega.”
The fact was, she didn’t at all feel like going to a concert. A prickly unease gnawed at her. Eik wasn’t the type to leave his dog out on the street, just because he was angry. Something was wrong. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t fight off her anxiety. On the contrary, it grew as she changed clothes, fed the dogs, and closed the living room door so they wouldn’t jump up on the sofa. Every time she called Eik’s phone, it switched to the voice mail.
Louise bicycled to Vega, and while pedaling down Enghavevej, she went through an entire spectrum of doubt, confusion, anxiety, and fear. She didn’t understand what could have happened. It wasn’t that they weren’t allowed to do anything on their own. As long as they let each other know. If she hadn’t looked out the window, she wouldn’t have noticed Charlie. And she probably would have taken the stairway past the magistrate court and gone out that exit. The dog would still have been standing in the snow.
Something was very wrong, she was sure of it. More so with every passing second.