The Absent One (35 page)

Here Jeppesen’s nostrils flared as though he lacked oxygen.

‘Assaults?’ He stared into space and didn’t react when one of his colleagues poked her head in.

‘Are you in charge of the music, Klavs?’ she asked.

He glanced up as if in a trance and nodded absent-mindedly.

‘I was head over heels in love with Kimmie,’ he said, when he and Carl were alone again. ‘I wanted her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone. She was the perfect blend of devil and angel. So fine and young and gentle like a kitten, yet totally dominating.’

‘She was seventeen or eighteen when you began having
a relationship with her. And a pupil at the school, besides! That wasn’t exactly playing by the rules, now, was it?’

He looked at Carl without raising his head. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of,’ he said. ‘I just couldn’t help myself. I can still feel her skin today, do you understand? And it’s been twenty years.’

‘Yes, and it was also twenty years ago that she and some others were suspected of committing homicide. What do you think about that? Do you think they could have done it together?’

Jeppesen grimaced. ‘
Anyone
might be capable of doing something like that. Couldn’t you kill a person? Maybe you already have?’ He turned his head and lowered his voice. ‘There were a few episodes that made me wonder, both before and after my affair with Kimmie. In particular, there was a boy at the school I remember very well. A real arrogant little jerk, so maybe he simply got what he deserved. But the circumstances were strange. One day he suddenly wanted to leave the school. He’d fallen in the forest, he said, but I know what bruises look like after a beating.’

‘What does this have to do with the gang?’

‘I don’t know what it has to do with them, but I know that Kristian Wolf asked about the boy every single day after he’d left the school: how was he? Had we heard from him? Was he coming back?’

‘Couldn’t it have been genuine interest?’

He turned to Carl. This was a high-school teacher in whose competent hands decent people entrusted their children’s continued development. A person who’d been with his students for years. If he’d ever shown this same
expression to anyone at parents’ evenings they’d probably be concerned enough to take their kids out of school. No, thank God. It was rare to see a face so embittered by vengefulness, spite and a loathing of humanity.

‘Kristian Wolf showed no genuine interest in anyone but himself,’ he said, full of contempt. ‘Trust me, he was capable of anything. But he was terribly afraid of being confronted with his own deeds, I think. That’s why he wanted to be sure the boy was gone for good.’

‘Give me examples,’ Carl said.

‘He started the gang, I am sure of that. He was the activist type, burning with evil, and he quickly spread his poison. He was the one who ratted on Kimmie and me. It was thanks to him that I had to leave the school and she was expelled. He was the one who pushed her towards the boys he wanted to pick on. And when she snared them in her web, he pulled her away again. She was his female spider, and he was the one pulling the strings.

‘You’re no doubt aware that he’s dead? The result of a shooting accident.’

He nodded. ‘You probably think that makes me happy. Not at all. He got off too easily.’

There was laughter in the corridor, and he came to himself for a moment. Then the anger settled in his face again, yanking him back down. ‘They attacked the boy in the forest, so he had to go away. You can ask him yourself. Perhaps you know him? His name is Kyle Basset. He lives in Spain now. You can find him easily. He owns one of Spain’s largest contractors, KB Construcciones SA.’ Carl nodded as he jotted down the name. ‘And they killed Kåre Bruno. Trust me,’ he added.

‘The thought has crossed our minds, but why do
you
think that?’

‘Bruno sought me out when I was fired. We had been rivals, but now we were allies. Him and me against Wolf and the rest of them. He confided in me that he was afraid of Wolf. That they knew each from before. That Kristian lived near his grandparents and never missed an opportunity to threaten him.’

Jeppesen nodded to himself. ‘It’s not much, I know, but it’s enough. Wolf threatened Kåre Bruno, that’s how it was. And Bruno died.’

‘You sound as though you’re certain of these things. But the fact is you’d already broken up with Kimmie when Bruno died, and the Rørvig assaults occurred after you left.’

‘Yes. But before that I’d seen how the other pupils drew away when the gang strutted down the corridors. I saw what they did to people when they were together. Admittedly not to their classmates, since solidarity is the first thing one learns at that school, but to everyone else. And I just know they attacked the boy.’

‘How can you know?’

‘Kimmie spent the night with me a few times during school weekends. She slept badly, as if there was something inside her that wouldn’t let her alone. She called out his name in her sleep.’

‘Whose?’

‘The boy’s! Kyle’s!’

‘Did she seem shocked or tormented?’

He laughed a moment. It came from down where laughter is a defence and not an outstretched hand. ‘She
didn’t seem haunted, no. Not at all. That’s not how Kimmie was.’

Carl considered showing him the teddy bear, but was distracted by the coffee machine’s gurgling. If the coffee makers kept on like that until the dinner was over, all that would remain would be tar.

‘Maybe we could have a cup?’ he asked, without expecting an answer. A cup of mocha would hopefully make up for the hundred hours he hadn’t eaten properly.

Not for me
, Jeppesen gesticulated.

‘Was Kimmie evil?’ Carl asked, pouring his coffee and practically inhaling it.

He heard no answer.

When he turned round with the cup to his mouth, nostrils titillated by the aroma of a sun that had once shone on a Colombian coffee farmer’s fields, Klavs Jeppesen’s chair was empty.

The audience was over.

She’d walked round the lake from the planetarium to Vodroffsvej and back, taking ten different routes. Up and down the stairs and paths that connected the lake with Gammel Kongevej and Vodroffsvej. Back and forth without getting too close to the bus stop across from Teaterpassagen, where she imagined the men would wait.

Now and then she sat on the planetarium terrace, her back to the window and her eyes focused on the play of light in the lake fountain. Someone behind her marvelled at the sight, but Kimmie couldn’t have cared less. It had been years since she’d abandoned herself to such things. All she wanted to do was see the men who’d done the job on Tine. Get a sense of who her pursuers were, of who was working for the bastards.

Because she didn’t doubt for an instant that they’d return. That was what Tine had been afraid of, and no doubt she’d been right. If they wanted to get hold of Kimmie, they wouldn’t just give up.

And Tine had been the link. But now Tine was no more.

She’d got away swiftly when the grenades went off and the house blew up. A couple of children might have seen her racing past the swimming centre, but that was it. On the other side of the buildings down on Kvægtorvsgade she’d
shaken free of her coat and tossed it in her suitcase. Then she’d pulled on a suede jacket and covered her hair with a black scarf.

Ten minutes later she stood at Hotel Ansgar’s well-lit reception desk on Colbjørnsensgade, flashing the Portuguese passport she’d found a few years earlier in one of her stolen suitcases. It wasn’t a one hundred per cent likeness, but on the other hand it was six years old, and who didn’t change during that amount of time?

‘Do you speak English, Mrs Teixeira?’ the friendly porter asked. The rest was just a formality.

For about an hour she sat in the courtyard under the gas heaters with a couple of drinks. That way the hotel staff would get to know her.

Afterwards she slept for nearly twenty hours with her pistol under her pillow and images of a trembling Tine in her head.

It was from there that her world led her as she walked down to the planetarium and after eight hours of waiting finally found what she was looking for.

The man was thin, almost emaciated, and his focus shifted between Tine’s window on the fifth floor and the entrance to Teaterpassagen.

‘You’ll be waiting a long time, you shit,’ Kimmie mumbled, as she sat on the bench in front of the planetarium on Gammel Kongevej.

When it was approximately 11 p.m. the man was relieved of his watch. There was no doubt that the one replacing him had a lower rank. It was evident from the way he approached. Like a dog that was headed for its
food bowl, but first had to sniff around to see if it was welcome.

That was why he was the one who had to do the Saturday-night shift, and not the first man. And that was why Kimmie decided to follow the one who was leaving.

She tailed the thin man at a safe distance, and reached the bus at the same moment its doors were closing.

It was then that she saw how mashed up his face was. His lower lip was split, and he had a stitched-up gash above one eyebrow and bruises that ran along his hairline from ear to throat, as if he’d dyed his hair with henna and not rinsed it all off properly.

He was looking out of the window as she climbed aboard. Just sat scowling out across the pavement, hoping to spy his target in his last glimpse. Only when the bus reached Peter Bangsvej did he begin to relax.

He’s off duty now and not busy
, she thought,
with no one to come home to
. That was evident by his attitude. His indifference. Had someone been expecting him, a little girl or a puppy or a warm living room where he could hold his girlfriend’s hand and they could listen to each other’s sighs and laughter, then he would be breathing more deeply and freely. No, he couldn’t hide the knots in his soul and stomach. He had nothing to go home to. No reason to hurry.

As if she didn’t know what
that
was like.

He got off at the Damhus Inn and didn’t ask any questions about the evening’s entertainment. He was late, something he apparently already knew. Many of the patrons had already paired off and were on the way out to their one-night stands. So he hung up his coat and walked
into the spacious room, evidently without ambitions. And how could he have any, the way he looked? He ordered a pint and sat at the bar, glancing across the tables at the throng to see if there was a woman, any woman, who’d look his way.

She removed her headscarf and suede jacket and asked the cloakroom attendant to watch her handbag carefully. Then she glided into the room, her self-confident shoulders back and breasts softly signalling to anyone who could still focus. Some low-ranking, high-volume band on the stage accompanied the cautiously groping dancers. No one on the dance floor under the crystalline sky of glass tubes seemed to have found their special somebody.

She felt the pack of eyes fastened on her and the tension that had already begun to spread along the tables and barstools.

She wore less make-up than all the other women, she realized. Less make-up and less fat on her bones.

Does he recognize me?
she wondered, her eyes wandering slowly past imploring glances, all the way to the thin man. There he was, just like all the other men, coiled and ready to pounce at even the slightest signal. He put his elbow nonchalantly on the bar and lifted his head slightly. Professional eyes weighed whether she was waiting for someone or free prey.

When she was halfway past the tables she smiled at him, causing him to take a deep breath. He couldn’t believe it, but Christ, he would sure love to.

Not two minutes passed before she was out on the dance floor with the first sweaty, eager man, bouncing in the same steady rhythm as everyone else.

But the thin man had noticed her glance, and that she had made her choice. He straightened his back, adjusted his tie and tried as best he could to make his lean, beaten face seem relatively attractive in the smoke-coloured light.

He approached her in the middle of a dance, taking her by the arm. He clasped her back a bit clumsily and squeezed a little. His fingers weren’t practised, she could tell. His heart was hammering hard against her shoulder. He was an easy catch.

‘So this is my place,’ he said, nodding self-consciously towards his living room, which revealed a lacklustre, fifth-storey view of Rødovre’s S-station and lots of parking spots and streets.

He’d pointed at the nameplate in the lobby beside the lift’s lilac-coloured doors.
FINN AALBÆK
, it read. And then he’d declared that the building was safe, even though it would soon be torn down. He’d taken her hand and led her out on to the fifth-storey walkway as if he were a knight leading her safely across a seething river’s suspension bridge. He held her quite close, so his quarry wouldn’t be allowed to have second thoughts and bolt. Well assisted by anticipation and newly found self-confidence, his imagination already had him groping deep under the blankets, stiff and ready.

He told her she could go out on the balcony to see the view if she wished, and he cleared the coffee table, turned on the lava lamps, put on a CD and unscrewed the cap on the gin bottle.

It struck her that it’d been ten years since she’d been alone with a man behind closed doors.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked, running her hand inquiringly across his face.

He raised his wilted eyebrows, a gesture that was no doubt carefully practised before the mirror. He probably thought it was charming, but it wasn’t by a long shot.

‘Oh that! I ran into a couple of likely lads on my watch. They didn’t get out of the encounter in very good shape.’ He smiled crookedly. Even the smile was a cliché. He was simply lying.

‘What do you do, actually, Finn?’ she finally asked.

‘Me? I’m a private eye,’ he answered, in a way that made the word ‘private’ ooze with sleazy snooping and unseemly prying. It conjured up nothing exotic, mysterious or dangerous, as had doubtlessly been his intention.

She looked at the bottle he was waving about, and noticed her throat tightening.
Take it easy, Kimmie
, the voices whispered.
Don’t lose control
.