The Absent One (45 page)

Kimmie blocked the dining-room door. ‘Oh, that’s kind of you, but not today.’ She put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and ushered her towards her coat.

When the woman left she didn’t say goodbye, but her eyebrows were raised.

Better get rid of the old dear
, Kimmie said to herself, vacillating between digging a grave in the garden and cutting up the body. If either she or Kassandra had owned a car, she knew a lake in northern Zealand that surely had room for another corpse.

Then she stopped, listened to the voices, and remembered what day it was.

Why go to all that trouble?
they asked.
Tomorrow is the day when everything comes together
.

She was just about to go upstairs when she heard glass shatter in ‘My Room’.

Seconds later she was standing in the living room, matter-of-factly ascertaining that if the housekeeper got her way, she, too, would be lying beside Kassandra in a few seconds with an equally astonished final expression on her face.

The iron bar the woman had smashed the door with whizzed past Kimmie’s head. ‘You killed her, you crazy person! You killed her!’ she screamed over and over, tears welling in her eyes.

How in the world could Kassandra, of all the rotten creatures on the planet, have commanded such devotion in a person? It seemed completely unfathomable.

Kimmie backed her way towards the fireplace and the vases.
You want to fight?
she thought.
Well, you’ve come to the right place
.

Violence and volition go hand in hand. Kimmie knew all about that. They were two of life’s elements that she’d mastered to perfection.

She grabbed an art deco brass figurine and weighed it in her hand. Properly thrown, its gracefully poised arms could pinion anything. A human cranium was no match.

So she aimed and threw, and then stared in shock as the woman knocked the statuette aside with the iron bar.

It planted itself deep in the wall and Kimmie retreated backwards to the door, hoping to make a dash upstairs to where her pistol was, safety latch off and ready. That
would have to be the fate of this proud fool who was challenging her.

But the woman didn’t follow her. Kimmie could hear crunching steps on the glass shards and moaning, nothing else.

Kimmie slinked back to the living-room door. Peering through the slightly open door, she saw the woman fall to her knees before Kassandra’s lifeless body.

‘What has that monster done?’ the woman whispered. She might even have been crying.

Kimmie frowned. During the entire time they’d carried out violent assaults on people, she’d never seen signs of grief. Horror and shock, yes, but this soft feeling called grief she only knew from herself.

Kimmie pushed the door further open to get a better view, and the woman’s head shot up as it creaked.

The next instant she charged her, the iron bar raised above her head. Kimmie slammed the door. Totally astonished, she ran up the stairs to get her pistol. She was going to put an end to this. Not kill her, just tie her up and neutralize her. No, she wouldn’t shoot her. She simply wouldn’t.

Just as Kimmie was running out of steps, the woman behind her screamed and howled and finally flung the iron bar at Kimmie’s legs, bringing her face down on to the landing.

It took only a second to get her bearings, but it was already too late. The stocky, young woman stood over her with the iron bar pressed against her throat.

‘Kassandra spoke of you often,’ she said. ‘ “My little beast”, she called you. Do you think I was pleased to see
you in the hall? That I thought your being here meant anything but trouble?’

She put her hand in the pocket of her smock and pulled out a beaten-up Nokia. ‘There’s a policeman named Carl Mørck. He’s looking for you, did you know that? I have his number right here, saved in my directory. He was so kind as to give me his card. Don’t you think we should give him the opportunity to come and talk to you?’

Kimmie shook her head. Tried to seem shocked. ‘But I’m not to blame for Kassandra’s death. She choked on her port while we were sitting there talking. It was a horrible accident.’

‘Really.’ The woman clearly didn’t believe her. Instead she shoved her foot brutally into Kimmie’s chest and pressed the end of the bar hard against Kimmie’s larynx as she searched for Carl Mørck’s number. She almost impaled Kimmie’s neck.

‘And I bet you did nothing to help her, did you, you slut?’ the woman continued. ‘I’m certain the police would like to hear what you’ve got to say. But don’t think it’ll help you. What you’ve done is written all over your face.’ She snorted. ‘ “Admitted to the hospital,” you said. You should have seen yourself when you said it.’

She found the number and Kimmie kicked, hitting her squarely in the groin. She kicked again, making the wild-eyed woman lose her grip on the bar and hunch forward as though her back had been broken.

Kimmie didn’t say a word as the mobile beeped its way through the digits. She just hacked her heel into the woman’s calf and slapped the phone from her hand so it smashed against the wall. Then she lurched back and
freed herself of the iron bar, which now lay slack in the woman’s hand. Finally Kimmie stood up and grabbed the bar.

It had taken less than five seconds to restore the balance.

Kimmie caught her breath for a moment as the woman tried to pull herself up, her face knotted in anger.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ Kimmie said. ‘I’m going to tie you to a chair, that’s all.’

But the woman shook her head and snuck a hand behind her until she got hold of the banister. Clearly she was trying to find something to push off from. Her eyes darted back and forth. She was far from defeated.

Then, with outstretched arms, she lunged for Kimmie’s throat, digging in her nails. Kimmie backed up against the stairway wall and brought one knee up as a wedge, giving her just enough leverage to shove the woman backwards until half of her body swayed over the banister, five yards above the hallway’s stone floor.

Kimmie screamed for her to stop resisting, but she wouldn’t, so Kimmie reared back and head-butted her. Everything went black for a moment before flashes of light exploded in her brain.

Then she opened her eyes and leaned over the banister.

The woman lay on the marble floor as if crucified, arms outstretched and legs crossed. Completely still and very, very dead.

For ten minutes she sat on the chair in the hall, observing the twisted, dead body. For the first time in her life she saw a victim for precisely what it was: a human being who
had possessed a will of its own and the right to live. It surprised her that she had never had this feeling before. She didn’t like it at all. The voices upbraided her for having thoughts like these.

Then the doorbell rang. She heard them talking. Two men who seemed impatient. They rattled the door and a moment later the telephone rang.

If they walk around the house they’ll see the smashed door. Get ready to run upstairs for the pistol
, she urged herself.
No, do it now.

She bounded up the stairs in just a few soundless steps, found the pistol and returned to the landing with the silencer aimed at the front door. If the men came in, they wouldn’t be leaving again.

But leave they did. Through the window on the landing she could just get a glimpse of them walking to their car.

A tall man with a long stride and a small, dark man shuffling along at his side.

The horrible conclusion to the previous evening – Mona Ibsen laughing uncontrollably at the shocked expression on Carl’s onion-smothered face – was still festering in him. It was as embarrassing as having the runs the first time you used a potential lover’s bathroom.

Oh God, how do I get beyond this?
he thought, lighting a morning cigarette.

Then he began to concentrate. Maybe today was the day he could give the prosecutors the final, decisive information they needed to issue an arrest order. The earring from Lindelse Cove, some of the other contents of the box – there was certainly enough to go on. If nothing else, there was the connection between Aalbæk and Pram, and therefore the rest of the gang. Carl didn’t care what grounds he used for getting them into the interrogation room. Once he had them there, he’d make one of them talk about what mattered.

What had begun as a double homicide investigation might well bring to light other crimes. Perhaps even murders.

All he needed was a direct confrontation with the gang members. Be able to ask them the questions that would make them panic, maybe even cause a rift in their friendship. And if he couldn’t do that with them in custody, it would have to happen on their own turf.

The hardest nut to crack was finding the weakest link. Whom should he focus his attack on first? Of course Bjarne Thøgersen was the most obvious choice, but years in prison had taught him how to keep his mouth shut. Besides, he had shielded himself by being behind bars. Thøgersen couldn’t be made to talk to Carl about something he had already been convicted of. If they wanted anything out of him, they would need airtight evidence of new crimes.

So no, he couldn’t be the first. Who then? Torsten Florin, Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen or Ditlev Pram? Which of the three would be easiest to get under the skin of?

To answer this question properly he would first have to have met each of them personally, but his intuition told him this wouldn’t be easy. Yesterday’s botched visit to Pram’s private hospital demonstrated as much. Because of course Pram had been aware of their presence from the very first moment they had shown up at the hospital. Maybe he had been close by, maybe not. Either way, he had known they were there.

And he had stayed away.

No, if Carl were to get one of these men to talk, he would have to take them by surprise. That was why he and Assad were getting such an early start that morning.

Torsten Florin would be the first, and that choice wasn’t entirely coincidental. In many ways he seemed literally the weakest, with his slender figure and effeminate profession. His press releases on fashion also gave the impression of there being something beneath the surface that was vulnerable. He seemed to stand out from the others.

In two minutes Carl would pick up Assad at the Triangle, and hopefully in half an hour they would be at Florin’s estate in Ejlstrup for a most inconvenient surprise visit.

‘I assembled all the information about the ones in the group,’ Assad said from the passenger seat. ‘Here’s Torsten Florin’s file then.’ He pulled a case file from his bag as they drove out of town on the Lyngby motorway.

‘His house I think looks like a fortress,’ Assad went on. ‘He has a super-enormous metal gate that blocks the road up to the estate. I’ve read that when he has parties, people’s cars are let in one at a time then. And that’s actually true.’

Carl turned his head to look at the colour printout Assad held up. It was difficult to get much from it since he also needed to keep his eye on the narrow road that wound through Gribskov.

‘Have a look at this, Carl. You can see really well everything in the aerial photograph. Here is Florin’s estate. Apart from the old building where he lives, and that wooden house there,’ he tapped a spot on the map, ‘everything was built in 1992, including this gigantic building and all the tiny houses behind it.’

It actually looked rather strange.

‘Are those houses all the way inside Gribskov? Did he get permission to build in the forest?’ Carl asked.

‘No, they’re not in the forest. Between Gribskov and his little patch of woods here there is a fire … a fire … ? What’s this kind of thing called, Carl?’

‘A firebreak?’

He felt Assad looking at him, sensed his puzzlement. ‘Well, in any case you can clearly see it in the aerial photo. Have a look. It’s a narrow, brown strip. And then he has put up a fence around his property – the lake and hills and all the rest.’

‘I wonder why he did that? Is he afraid of paparazzi or what?’

‘It has something to do with him being a hunter.’

‘Yes, of course. He doesn’t want the animals on his land to escape into the state forest. I know the type.’ Up in Vendsyssel where Carl was from, people made fun of folks who did that sort of thing. But in northern Zealand this was apparently not the case.

They had reached a point where the landscape opened up, first clearings in the forest and then far-reaching fields where pale brown wheat stubs still poked from the ground.

‘Can you see the Swiss chalet over there, Assad?’ He pointed at a low-lying house to their right, not waiting for Assad to respond. One couldn’t miss it, down there in the glacier-carved valley. ‘Behind it is Kagerup Station. One time we found a little girl there we thought was dead. She had hidden in a sawmill because she was afraid of the dog her father had brought home.’

Carl shook his head. But
was
that really the reason? Suddenly it sounded so wrong.

‘Turn here, Carl,’ Assad said. He pointed at a road sign for Mårum. ‘Up there at the tophill we need to turn right. There’s a couple of hundred yards from there to the gate. Do I call him up first then?’

Carl shook his head. No fucking way. Florin wasn’t
going to get the chance to vanish, just like Ditlev Pram did the day before.

It was correct that Torsten Florin had fenced in his property good and proper. The name
DUEHOLT
stood out in oversize, brass letters from a granite boulder next to the cast-iron gate that rose above the windbreak.

Carl leaned close to the intercom that was attached to a post at window height. ‘This is Deputy Detective Superintendent Mørck,’ he said. ‘I spoke to your solicitor, Bent Krum, yesterday. We would like to put a few questions to Torsten Florin. It should only take a minute.’

At least two minutes passed before the gate opened.

On the other side of the hedge the landscape spread out. To the right, lakes and rolling hills dotted a meadow that was surprisingly lush, given the time of year. Further down, scattered groves became forest, and in the distance, Gribskov’s enormous colonnade of century-old oak trees was visible, the crowns nearly leafless.