43

Summer 2011

Carl looked at the two notes on the desk in front of him. They’d been there for a month and a half now, staring at him every time he’d tried to tidy up. Wasn’t it about time he chucked them out?

He tipped back on the rear legs of his chair and tried to picture the two women in his mind’s eye. Strange, how quickly faces from the past were erased.

The past. Had it really come to that? Had his passivity in the wake of Lisbeth’s phone call and the wreckage of his relationship to Mona, with whom he’d been together for a number of years, now been consigned to the file marked ‘The Past’? He wasn’t sure he approved of the idea.

He picked up the two notes and for a moment considered crumpling them up and lobbing them into the waste-paper basket with a well-aimed overarm toss.

It was sure as hell no easy decision.

‘It’s come, Carl,’ said Rose, suddenly materializing in front of him.

‘What’s come?’ He looked at her without much enthusiasm. It had been a rough week in which nothing had gone right. And now something had arrived that most probably wasn’t good.

‘The presumption-of-death verdict in the William Stark case. They’ve accepted the circumstantial evidence, so despite no body being found yet, they’ve decided to terminate Stark’s life on the basis of DNA samples.’

Carl nodded and put both slips of paper in his breast pocket. In a way, it was good news. At least the probate court could now begin to get the estate sorted.

This is great for Tilde and Malene, he thought, once he was alone again.

He took a look at TV2’s news channel where the reports on the tremendous monsoon-like downpour on this second day of July described a near-catastrophic scenario. Had it not been for the unfortunate fact that sewers everywhere were so hopelessly overburdened that at this moment shit was literally erupting from drains in hundreds of basements, including their own toilets at the end of the corridor, he would have been delighted by some of the consequences.

As if by an act of divine retribution, Pusher Street was completely flooded and laid to waste. The makeshift stalls were deserted, and not a single gram of hash was to be seen. Turnover must have dropped by millions of kroner in a matter of hours. Easy come, easy go. And the water had inundated Istedgade, too, closing down basement massage parlours and leaving the whores and pimps totally idle.

Sodom and Gomorrah had got what was coming to them.

‘Jesus, what a bloody pong down here,’ Laursen said as he poked his head into Carl’s office. ‘How about coming upstairs and getting the smell of fresh-baked bread in your nostrils instead? Not everyone has left yet. Hell of a cosy place for a birthday party when all you’ve got is a one-and-a-half-room flat.’

He chuckled and plonked his increasingly expansive backside onto the chair opposite Carl. ‘Anyway, listen. I haven’t had time to tell you this yet, what with that pork to roast and all,’ he said. ‘Word came in today about that unidentified body from the fire up in Rungsted. You think you’re ready for this?’

‘Go on.’

‘They found out who made the dentures Assad fished out of the mouth of the corpse.’

‘Yeah? Who was it, then?’

‘One Torben Jørgensen, a dental technician up in north Sjælland. They belonged to René E. Eriksen, just as you guys assumed.’

‘Course they did,’ Carl groused. ‘We said we recognized them, so they could have saved themselves the bother.’

‘Yes, possibly. The only thing is, the DNA analysis of bone marrow from the corpse shows that the bloke wearing the dentures wasn’t of Caucasian descent. Turns out he was Negroid.’

Carl frowned.

‘Assad and Rose! In here, please!’ he hollered.

Both he and Laursen were a bit shaken at the sight of Rose as she appeared in the doorway with the pinkest hair this side of a luxury retirement home in Florida.

‘Hey, Laursen, whassup?’ said Assad, still with his trousers rolled up above his knees after a go on the prayer mat.

‘The corpse with Eriksen’s teeth in its mouth was that of a black man,’ Carl stated. ‘How about that!’

Assad’s eyebrows did a little somersault. ‘What?’

‘The dentures were Eriksen’s,’ Carl went on. ‘Forensics located the mould at a dental technician’s up in north Sjælland.’

Assad flopped down on a chair.

‘But this means Eriksen has done a runner and got away with everything,’ he said dully.

Carl nodded. This conclusion had dawned on him, too. What a crock of shit.

‘I reckon we can now assume we know who killed Brage-Schmidt and our unidentified black man,’ he said. ‘And if he could do that, then most likely he’s also our perp in the murders of Teis Snap and his wife, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes,’ Assad added. ‘Not to mention all the others.’

Rose bobbed up her new hairdo. As if they hadn’t already noticed it.

‘Listen to you, talking out of a certain part of your posteriors. Can’t we agree that in reality we know fuck all? These are all just assumptions so that at least we can talk ourselves into believing we’ve got just a little bit of all this sorted. When it comes to assumptions, I couldn’t care less.’

Carl made a mental note to remind her of this last little statement when the time came. It would surely be only a question of days.

‘One more thing,’ said Laursen. ‘You probably already know, if you’ve checked your emails. They found Eriksen’s car. It’s standing, covered in dust, in a side street in Palermo.’

‘Palermo?’ Carl spluttered. ‘That’s bloody Sicily!’

Laursen nodded.

‘Yeah, looks like he just took off in his old car and managed to drive all the way through Europe without getting stopped.’

‘Hurrah for the Schengen open-border agreement,’ Rose grumbled.

‘Yeah, it’s a bit of a trek,’ said Carl. ‘But you’ve got to admit Palermo sounds like the perfect place for someone needing a new ID and maybe a new appearance.’

‘Interpol is already on the case, so I’ve heard,’ said Laursen.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ Carl replied with a sigh. ‘And Interpol covers a hundred and ninety countries, so there just might be a chance he’s decided to go somewhere else, don’t you think?’

Assad shook his head. ‘You never know, Carl. It’s not for sure.’

‘True, but as far as I can see we’re never going to find out where René E. Eriksen, or whatever he’s calling himself now, has gone into hiding. And with all that money he apparently took with him, I’d say we’re never going to find him. That’s been my experience in these kinds of situations. End of story.’

The windscreen wipers were going flat out as Carl approached the motorway. He’d already seen several vehicles abandoned in the deluge.

Only a lunatic would want to chance a thirty-kilometre trip in weather like this. If only he had somewhere to doss down until morning.

Then he remembered the notes in his pocket. If he turned left, it’d be to Lisbeth. If he took a right, he’d be headed for Mona.

He smiled fleetingly at the thought, then the smile was gone.

What the hell made him think that these two women, who more than likely already had a new rooster in the barnyard, would want anything to do with him?

And with that, he took the notes from his pocket, rolled down the side window and cast them to the wind. See if he cared!

After an hour and a quarter, a Venetian version of Rønneholtparken loomed in front of him.

Christ! he thought. There wouldn’t be many cars able to start in the morning without the help of a hair drier, his own included.

‘Is the basement OK?’ was the first thing he called out, as he stepped through the front door.

No answer. So most probably it was all a mess.

He glanced into the living room, finding the place unusually dark. Had they left Hardy alone with no lights on? What the hell were they playing at?

‘Hardy?’ he ventured quietly, so as not to give him a fright, and at the same moment all the lights went on.

‘Ta-daaah!’ howled Mika and Morten, and Carl nearly jumped out of his skin.

They stepped aside to reveal Hardy sitting upright in a colossal high-tech wheelchair equipped with all manner of joysticks and whatnots in front of his face.

‘This is it, Hardy. Show Carl what you can do!’ cried Morten.

Carl was still giddy with joy. The sight of Hardy propelling himself forward with a broad smile had reduced them all to tears.

The hugs and the heartfelt words of congratulation seemed like they would go on for ever. As of today, a new era had announced its arrival at Carl’s house. Nothing less could describe it. Carl laid his head back on his pillow and tried to fall asleep, but couldn’t. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Hardy’s happy face and the empty bed in the living room. He sighed at the thought of all the things they could do together now, if only he could live up to it.

After another half-hour spent musing about Hardy and the future, he reached out for the stack of junk mail he’d brought upstairs and tossed onto the duvet beside him.

A bit of consumer surfing and he’d be asleep in no time.

Much better than counting sheep, at any rate, he thought, sifting through the offers.

Then suddenly, in among the supermarket ads, there was a postcard.

Who in the world would ever send them a postcard? It had to be to Mika or Morten, surely. Maybe one of their friends who’d been at the party and just wanted to say thanks.

He looked at the name and saw it was his own. Only then did he notice that, besides the name and address, there was nothing written on the card. Instead there was a little snippet of a text stuck on with glue:

The special exhibition of African jewellery was quite remarkable. The selection of handmade rings, bracelets and necklaces …

That was all. The rest was snipped off.

A wry smile appeared on Carl’s lips.

‘Well, I’ll be …’ he said to himself, conjuring up the image of a boy with nut-brown skin.

He turned the card over and stared at the motif for a long time.

Aalborg Tower – more than just a view, read the caption.