The Absent One (49 page)

‘Good shot, Ditlev,’ he heard Florin say, when Ditlev returned with his bloodied knife and the fox’s tail in his hand. Then Florin turned to the men behind him. ‘The hunt’s over, my friends. I’m sorry. Would you please make sure Saxenholdt gets to the hospital immediately? I’ll call the beaters over so they can carry him. See to it he’s vaccinated for rabies; you can never tell, can you? Keep your finger pressed down hard on the artery the whole time, OK? Otherwise you’ll lose him.’

He shouted something into the woods and a flock of black men appeared from the shadows. He sent four with the hunters and asked the last four to remain. Two of the men had slender hunting rifles just like Florin’s.

When the hunting party had disappeared with the whimpering man, the three old school chums and the four dark-skinned men gathered in a circle.

‘We don’t have a lot of time, understand?’ Florin said. ‘This policeman is relatively strong and fit; he’s not much older than we are. We mustn’t underestimate him.’

‘What do we do with him when we find him?’ asked Dybbøl Jensen.

‘You pretend he’s a fox.’

He listened for a long time until he was certain the men had spread out and were headed to the far end of the
woods. Which meant there was an open route back to the estate, provided the other black men didn’t return to join in the chase.

Run!
he told himself, and stood up, leaning his head back so that his relatively free eye could lead him through the thick underbrush.

Maybe there’s a knife in the menagerie I can slice the tape off with. Maybe Assad’s still alive. Maybe he’s alive
. Thoughts whirled through his head as the thicket yanked at his clothes and blood trickled from the wound in his shoulder.

He was cold now. His hands shook behind his back. Had he lost so much blood already that it was too late?

Then he heard several SUVs roar to life somewhere close by and zoom off. That meant he must be getting close.

Just as he realized this, a bolt whistled past his head, so close that he could almost feel it. It pounded into the tree trunk in front of him with such force that it would be impossible to pull out.

He twisted his body round, but saw nothing. Where were they? Then there was another shot that tore up the bark of a second tree.

Now the beaters’ calls suddenly grew clearer.
Run, run, run!
his brain screamed.
Don’t fall. Get behind a bush, then the next one, so you’ll be out of range. Isn’t there somewhere I can hide?

He knew they would catch him now. Knew that dying wasn’t going to be a simple matter. After all, this was how they got their kicks, the bastards.

His heart was pounding so hard in his chest that he could hear it plainly.

He leaped over a creek, his shoes almost getting stuck
in the mud. The soles grew heavy as lead, and his legs began giving out.
Just run and run
.

Then he detected a clearing off to the side. Probably where he and Assad had entered, since the creek was just behind him. So he needed to head to the right. Up and to the right. It couldn’t be far now.

The next shot was way off target and suddenly he found himself standing in the courtyard. Completely alone, heart hammering and with only ten yards to the hall’s broad entrance.

He’d made it halfway when the next bolt ploughed into the ground right next to him. It was no coincidence that it hadn’t struck him. It was only to let him know that if he didn’t stop running, another would follow.

All his defence mechanisms shut down. He stopped running and stood there staring at the ground, waiting for them to fall upon him. This lovely, cobblestoned courtyard would become his sacrificial altar.

He inhaled deeply and turned around slowly. It wasn’t just the three men and the four beaters standing there silently observing him. There was also a little crowd of dark-skinned children with curious eyes.

‘That’s good, right there. You can go now,’ Florin commanded. The black men left, shooing their children before them.

At last there was only Carl and the three men. They were sweaty and wore strange little smiles. The foxtail dangled from Ditlev Pram’s crossbow.

The hunt was over.

They prodded him forward as he stared at the floor. The light in the hall was glaring and he didn’t want to see Assad’s remains in any detail. He refused to be witness to what a hyena’s powerful jaws could do to a human body.

In fact, he didn’t want to see anything more of anything. They could do with him whatever they pleased. But he wasn’t going to watch as they did it.

Then he heard one of the men laugh. A laughter from deep within, which spread to the other two. An eerie, rolling chorus of merriment that made Carl close his eyes tight – as tight as the tape would allow.

How could a person laugh at another person’s misfortune and death? What had made these people so sick in the head?

Then he heard a voice spitting out curses in Arabic. Ugly, guttural sounds meant to provoke anger, but for a brief moment the direness of the situation was supplanted by an indescribable joy that made him raise his head.

Assad was alive.

At first he couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. He saw only the shiny steel bars and the scowling hyena. Then he craned his neck and saw Assad, who had wedged himself like an ape into the top of the cage, his eyes wild, bloody lacerations showing on his arms and face.

Only then did Carl notice how badly the hyena limped. As though its rear leg had been slashed with a single stroke. The animal whimpered with each weak step and the three men’s laughter gave way to silence.

‘Pig animals!’ came Assad’s disrespectful yell from above.

Carl almost smiled under the gaffer tape. Even this close to death, the man remained true to form.

‘You’ll fall down sooner or later. Next time the animal will know what you’re like,’ Florin hissed. Assad’s disfiguration of the zoo’s prize specimen had stung and enraged him. But the bastard was right. Assad couldn’t hang on for ever.

‘I don’t know,’ Pram said. ‘That orangutan up there seems pretty fearless. If he falls down on top of the animal with that great body of his, it won’t be good for it.’

‘Then fuck the hyena. It hasn’t accomplished what it was put on this earth to do, anyway,’ Florin said.

‘What are we going to do with these two men?’ The question came softly. An entirely different tone to the other’s. It was Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen again. He seemed less under the influence than before. More vulnerable. That’s how the come-down following a cocaine high often affected people.

Carl turned to face him. If he had been able to say anything, he would have said they should just let him and Assad go. That killing them would be meaningless and dangerous. Rose would send every department in the land into action when they didn’t show up the following day. The police would be all over Florin and his establishment, and they would find all the evidence they needed. Setting Carl and Assad free and then hauling their backsides over
to the other side of the globe to hide for all eternity was their only chance.

But Carl was unable to say anything. The tape was still stretched far too tightly across his mouth. Besides, they wouldn’t fall for it. Torsten Florin would use every available means to erase all traces of his involvement, even if he had to burn the whole fucking place down. Carl knew that now.

‘We’ll throw him in there with the other one. I don’t care what happens,’ Florin said calmly. ‘We’ll look in on them tonight, and if it’s not over we’ll let some other animals loose in the cage. We have enough to choose from.’

Carl started kicking and making noises. He wasn’t going to let them get close to him without putting up a fight. Not again.

‘What the hell are you doing, Mørck? Is something bothering you?’

Ditlev Pram was standing right beside him, avoiding his clumsy kicks. He raised his crossbow and aimed it directly at the eye Carl could see out of.

‘Stand still,’ he commanded.

Carl considered kicking again so that at least it would all be over with quickly. But he did nothing, and Pram reached out with his free hand, grabbed the tape covering his eyes and yanked.

It felt as though his eyelids had been ripped off. As if his eyes were suddenly hanging loose from their sockets. The light flooded into his head and blinded him an instant.

Then he saw them. All three of them. Their arms opened wide, as if for an embrace, their eyes telling him this would be his final struggle.

And in spite of the loss of blood and the weakness in his body, he kicked out at them and growled from behind the tape over his mouth that they were a bunch of cocksuckers who would get what they deserved.

In the midst of this, a shadow darted across the floor. Florin had noticed it, Carl could tell. Afterwards they heard a clattering further down the hall that was repeated again and again. Then cats began brushing past them and out towards the daylight. And the cats became raccoons and weasels, and birds that flapped their way up towards the aluminium braces under the glass ceiling.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Florin shouted, as Dybbøl Jensen’s eyes followed a potbellied pig’s short-legged race through the passageways and around the cages. Pram’s body language changed; his eyes sharpened as he carefully picked his crossbow up from the floor.

Carl stepped back. He noticed how the noise in the depths of the hall was growing more and more intense. How the sound of freed animals became louder and louder.

He heard Assad’s laughter at the top of the cage. Heard the three men’s curses and more pattering sounds and grunts and yelps and hissing and beating of wings.

But he didn’t hear the woman until she stepped forward.

She was suddenly right there, her jeans tucked into her socks and the pistol with its silencer raised in one hand, a hunk of frozen meat clutched awkwardly in the other.

There was something rather fine about her as she stood there with her bag slung over her shoulder. Something beautiful, actually. She wore a peaceful expression, and her eyes were shining.

Seeing her, the three men fell silent. They let the animals wander around the hall and paid them no attention. They seemed stunned. Not because of the pistol or the sight of the woman, but because of what the woman stood for. Their fear was palpable. Like that of the lynch victim in the clutches of the Klan. Like the atheist standing before the Inquisitor.

‘Hi,’ she said, nodding at each in turn. ‘Drop that thing, Ditlev.’ She waved at Pram’s crossbow and asked them to take a step back.

‘Kimmie …!’ Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen attempted. There was both affection and anxiety in how he pronounced her name. Maybe more affection than anxiety.

She smiled at a pair of agile otters as they sniffed one of the men’s legs before escaping to freedom.

‘Today’s the day we all get freed,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’

‘You there,’ she said, looking straight at Carl. ‘Kick that leather leash over to me.’ She showed him where it was, shoved halfway under the hyena’s cage.

‘Come here, little one,’ she whispered into the cage, where the injured animal was breathing heavily, not once letting the three men out of her sight. ‘Come and have a snack.’

She threw the meat into the cage and waited for the animal’s hunger to overcome its fear. When it approached, she picked the leash up from the floor and inserted it carefully between the bars, so that its noose encircled the slab of meat.

Confused by all the people and the empty silence they created, it took some time before the hyena gave in.

When it dropped its head to the meat she pulled the strap so the animal was caught in its noose. Ditlev Pram took off, running towards the door to the angry protests of the other two.

She raised her pistol and fired. Pram dropped heavily, his head banging against the stone floor. He groaned loudly. With some difficulty she tied the strap to the bars, and the animal twisted its head from side to side, trying to get free.

‘Get up, Ditlev,’ she said quietly, and when he couldn’t, she led the other two over to him and made them carry him back.

Carl had seen shots halt a fleeing man before, but nothing as clean and effective as the wound that had split Pram’s hip socket in two.

His face was white as a sheet, but he said nothing. It was as if she and the three men found themselves in the middle of a private ceremony that no one was permitted to leave. Something silent and unspoken, yet understood by all.

‘Open the cage, Torsten.’ She looked up at Assad, still hanging from the top. ‘You were the one who saw me at the central station. You can come down now.’

‘Allah be praised!’ he said, as he unhooked his feet from the bars. When he landed he could neither stand nor walk. Every part of his body was numb, and had been for some time.

‘Get him out, Torsten,’ she said, following his every movement until Assad lay outside the cage on the floor.

‘Now you three get in,’ she said quietly.

‘Oh God, no. Let me go,’ Ulrik whispered. ‘I never hurt you, Kimmie, don’t you remember?’

He tried to arouse pity by pulling a pathetic face, but she didn’t react.

‘Move,’ was all she said.

‘You might as well kill us,’ Florin said, as they heaved Ditlev Pram inside. ‘None of us will survive in prison.’

‘I know, Torsten. I hear you.’

Pram and Florin said nothing, but Dybbøl Jensen whined, ‘She’s going to kill us, don’t you get it?’

When the cage door slammed shut, she smiled, leaned back and threw the pistol as far behind her in the hall as she could.

It landed with a smack, metal against metal.

Carl looked down at Assad, who lay rubbing his legs, smiling. Except for the blood still dripping slowly from his hand, this was a truly welcome turn of events.

It was at this point that the three men began shouting at once.

‘You there, get her!’ one shouted to Assad.

‘Don’t trust her,’ Florin urged.

But the woman didn’t move an inch. Just stood observing them, as if an old film was playing that had long been forgotten but had now somewhat reluctantly resurfaced.