‘I like your apartment,’ he told her when she tired of talking. ‘It feels so, I don’t know, homely. But the thing is Mrs Andersen …’
‘Ingrid.’
‘Ingrid. The thing is, since my parents both passed away in the accident, I have had rather a lot of debt to settle and the proceeds from the house barely covers it, and this money is all I have left. But I really need somewhere to live, if only I could afford this place …’
‘Slow down, dear. Your parents were killed, you said?’
A few days later the estate agent called to inform Jens in a clipped voice that it would appear Mrs Andersen had chosen to accept his offer, though it was so far below market value as to be indecent.
On the day Jens moved in, he couldn’t stop laughing. He danced across the naked floorboards and opened the doors wide to all the rooms. When he had finished unpacking his meagre belongings, he sat for a long while on one of the windowsills and watched the sun set behind the roofs of the city.
Two months later, when he was demolishing the first of the apartment’s antique wooden panels, the memory of the happiness of that first day felt to Jens like a physical pain.
It had all started with the crying.
When he first heard it, in the middle of the night, it meant little more than a distant police siren, nothing to do with him. The crying, a persistent but remote wail, wove its way into his dreams as he went back to sleep.
The next morning, he would have forgotten all about it, had Mortensen not refused to come out from under his bed.
Then on another night it happened again, but this time it was much louder, an indignant, full-lung bawl of the kind that urges you to respond without delay. It was late and Jens was in the kitchen, frying an egg. He walked around, trying to locate the sound. It appeared to come from one of the bedrooms at the end of the long corridor that ran through the apartment like the backbone of a great whale, but when he turned on the light, the room was empty and silent.
Later he found Mortensen hiding under his bed again.
The crying came from an infant. It was a muffled sound, as if behind a wall or inside a box or under a pillow, and it always stopped when Jens felt he was getting near to locating it.
He racked his brain for clues. The first two floors of the building were occupied by a firm of solicitors. On the second floor was Miss Vagn, an old spinster who had owned her apartment for at least as long as Mrs Andersen. He lived on the third floor and the apartment above his, the last in the property, was empty. Its owners, a retired banker and his wife, lived most of the year in Geneva, which meant that at night, when the solicitors went home, only Miss Vagn and he remained.
Jens considered for a few days the possibility that the sound was being carried over on the wind from one of the neighbouring properties. One weekend, he went out in the rain and searched the entire street and its backyards for signs of prams, tricycles or anything that might belong to a family, but there was nothing of the kind. The only time Jens ever saw children, with their brightly coloured raincoats and loud, irrational manners, was when school excursions walked by on their way to watch the changing of the Queen’s guard. Occasionally, women or couples would pass by the building pushing prams, but never at night, never when the crying happened.
The crying burrowed under Jens’s skin till he could no longer function. All night he would lie awake waiting for it to begin, then furiously search the apartment. In the morning he would arrive at the tax office looking haggard, spending most of the day asleep at his desk or thinking about the crying. One day, his supervisor, a woman in her fifties whose only son had recently left home to go to university, came over and bent down low by his work station. She was so close, Jens could see the greasy fingermarks on her glasses and the blonde moustache on her upper lip.
‘Are you all right, Jens? You are looking very pale,’ she said in a barely audible voice.
‘Just a little tired, Tove,’ said Jens. His supervisor, her bosom bouncing under her knitted jumper, liked being called by her first name. ‘In fact, if you must know, they think I might have cancer,’ he added.
‘My God. What sort?’ said Tove, placing one hand on his shoulder. It felt heavy and damp through the fabric of his shirt.
‘They don’t know, yet. I’m having some tests, but it doesn’t look good,’ said Jens, shaking his head a little and staring at the pot plant on Tove’s desk. He had often felt like biting into its glossy, swollen leaves.
Tove wouldn’t hear of him staying on at work, but ordered him to go home and take it easy, which he tried his best to do.
However, he rested even less than before, as there was now no respite from the perpetual listening and waiting for the crying to begin. It was an instrument of torture, drilling its way into Jens’s brain and lodging itself there so that he could hear it even when the apartment was quiet.
Throughout the ordeal, Mortensen had stayed aloof and absent, keeping himself, so it seemed increasingly to Jens, deliberately scarce in the few days after each incident of the crying. Come to think of it, Jens had never seen Mortensen when the crying had actually occurred. This thought occupied him a great deal and, as the days went by, Jens started looking at Mortensen with suspicion. He took to bringing the cat to bed with him each night, holding the creature tight to his chest.
‘You stay right here, and you and I will be just fine,’ he would say.
But Mortensen would look away with his beautiful green eyes, as though embarrassed on Jens’s behalf. He had always been a particularly arrogant cat, only just tolerating Jens’s awkward affection. This, though part of the reason why he was so fond of Mortensen, drove Jens to a crazed distraction.
His attempt to keep the cat in sight at all times was unsuccessful. In the early hours Jens would drift off to sleep and by the time the crying started the cat had long since slunk away from his slackened grip.
One night, as Jens was woken up by the crying, the thought came to his delirious mind that the crying was no infant at all, but the mating call of a cat, a cat not unlike Mortensen. In fact, was this not the cry of Mortensen himself? Jens felt relief at this thought. He got up calmly and walked through the apartment, quickly finding Mortensen in the corner of one of the rooms. The cat had its back up, baring its teeth in a blood-chilling tiger growl. Jens grabbed it hard around the neck with both hands.
It was surprisingly effortless, like squeezing a wet sock, and it came with no satisfaction at all. When Mortensen’s body went limp, Jens knew, if only with one corner of his fevered mind, that there was no way the crying had come from the cat.
When Jens woke up the next day there was a message on the answering machine from Tove: if he needed to talk to someone, then he knew where to find her. After listening to the message he wrapped Mortensen’s body in old newspapers and a plastic bag and went down to the basement to place it in one of the dustbins. He took a shower, shaved off three weeks’ growth of beard and put on a fresh shirt. Then he walked down one flight of stairs, hesitating with his finger on the ivory bell. There was a sign on the door with a picture of an Alsatian and the words Beware of the dog.
Miss Vagn opened immediately, almost tripping over the threshold, as if she had been waiting just inside, hovering with her faced pressed to the spyhole.
Her eyes, grotesquely distorted by thick glasses, peered out at Jens sideways. Her hair, most likely a wig, judging by its faint synthetic sheen, was black, her face a pasty beige on which her none-too-accurately painted lips floated like a glob of strawberry jam.
Jens knew straight away that Ms Vagn was going to like him; women like her always did.
‘Jens Bruun,’ he said. ‘I live upstairs?’
‘Yes?’ She stared up at him trustingly. Ingrid must have told her about him buying the apartment.
‘The thing is, Miss Vagn. There’s this noise I’ve been hearing at night. A crying baby, and I wondered if it … I wondered if you might know something about it?’
‘A baby?’ Miss Vagn
shook her head. ‘There’s no baby here. I don’t know anything about a baby.’ Her voice was a little too loud, with the peculiar intonation of people in old films.
‘Are you sure? I tell you, Miss Vagn, that I most definitely have heard a baby crying somewhere in or near my apartment. And you have really heard nothing of the sort, and know nothing about it?’ he said.
‘I am sorry, no.’
On seeing him disappointed, Miss Vagn opened the door wider. Inside the apartment, an old carriage clock struck the quarter-hour.
‘Do come in and have a glass of port with me,’ she said.
‘What about the …?’ said Jens, gesturing at the sign with the picture of the Alsatian.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Died 1993.’
Jens was glad about that. Dogs, like small children, upset him with their overwhelming behaviour. Inside Miss Vagn’s apartment, as she retired to the kitchen, the first thing he noticed was that the place was identical to his own, which ought not to have surprised him, but did. Furthermore, it was a good deal more impressive, as Miss Vagn had no shortage of expensive things.
Miss Vagn returned with a bottle and two small glasses on a tray and beckoned him to take a seat in the sofa. It seemed odd, frankly suspicious, to Jens that she was not curious in the slightest about the crying.
‘Skål,’ she said, lifting her glass and knocking the contents back in one go. Jens noticed how the empty glass shook in her hand.
Strong and sweet, the port gave Jens the sort of nausea that spreads like an ache from the top of the head, but Miss Vagn filled his glass again before he could stop her. She was leaning towards him from her armchair next to the sofa, so close he could smell her perfume and the sickly brown powder that caked her face like dough. Her lips were parted a little, revealing her yellow teeth. Jens shuddered.
They might have been sitting like that for ages or merely a few seconds. Lack of sleep had turned Jens’s vision into a naked, flickering light bulb, intermittently illuminating Miss Vagn’s bottle-end glasses. Across the gap in their years he heard her loneliness and physical longing, like a calling out, like a crying, and the madness overtook him once again.
As he reached out for her throat she didn’t struggle; it was as if she welcomed his hands there, as if any touch was better than none, which infuriated him even more.
Strangling Miss Vagn was no harder than strangling Mortensen, nor did it bring more relief.
Jens considered her body for a while then decided to leave it. It was unlikely to be found, considering no visitors ever called anywhere on the upper floors. As he walked back up the stairs to his apartment, he thought, I have killed a cat and a human being for no reason at all.
That night, when the crying started up again, Jens himself cried with the bitterness of someone who can have no solace and no satisfaction. Into the crying he rolled all the unfairness of his life, and he and the ghostly baby wailed in unison till he did not know which sound came from the infant and which from himself.
It was the next day that he started on the wall panels in the smallest bedroom at the end of the corridor.
That morning Jens had woken with a new resolve. First he rang work, telling Tove that he’d been diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer. He was flying to the US for treatment that same afternoon and she should not expect him back at work for some considerable time. Then he went down to the basement and picked up an axe from the boiler room.
The crying began at twilight and Jens walked calmly through all the rooms, following the sound, which came – he was certain of it now − from behind the walls in the little room overlooking the back yard. As he cleaved and tore off the panels one by one until only the skeletal timbers remained, how good it felt finally to be doing something. And when he found there was nothing to see in the little room, he started on the next room and the one after that, growing more determined with each strike of the axe not to finish till everything had been torn down and exposed, if necessary to move through the whole building, never stopping till he had silenced the crying.
The Last Tenant
Jan Vettergren stopped typing, looked up from his laptop and sniffed the air. The smell was back, boiled cabbage and fish. This was what you got with old buildings, little quirks and peculiarities. Jan guessed the woodwork had somehow absorbed the odours of the meals that had been cooked there over the years. There were no private apartments in the neighbourhood any more, and no restaurants: nothing else to explain the smell.
He went back to work, trying to concentrate on the press release he was writing. The client was expecting it in the morning. He would have to stay till it was done, but his mind kept drifting back to what the place must have been like once. He loved the way the floorboards had been worn down in the middle of the stairs, the creaking doors, the panelled windows, bowing in their frames. And to think that it was all his.
He had thought it was a joke when they told him the price. It was all he could do to keep a straight face as he asked for a discount. The owner had given in surprisingly fast, letting Jan have the whole building for next to nothing.
People lacked imagination; that was why no one else wanted it. They couldn’t see past the tarnished walls, the graffiti and the windows on the ground floor, boarded up with perforated steel.
Jan had no problem with any of that. As soon as his fledgling PR agency had made enough money, he was going to fix up the other offices in the building and rent them out, make a fortune. In fact, he might give up PR altogether and branch off into property. Who knew how many buildings like this one were standing empty across central Copenhagen?
Jan reckoned the former owner would kick himself when he realised what he had thrown away.
They had chosen the best office for themselves, the fifth floor with the lovely original tiled stoves and the views over the red rooftops and golden church spires of old Copenhagen. One weekend, they had painted layer upon layer of pure white over the soiled wallpaper, and scrubbed and varnished the floors. The dark woods set off their modern furniture beautifully.
It was obvious no one had used the office for years. In what used to be the lounge, they had found a newspaper from 1989 tucked behind a telex machine, a beige monstrosity the size of a small fridge. On a desk, among faded carbon copies of final demands, a once-white telephone had aged to ivory, its receiver suspended in mid-air.
Strange that the previous tenants hadn’t bothered tidying up after themselves, or taken their office furniture away and sold it. Jan reckoned they must have had to close down in a hurry: bankruptcy, perhaps, or a court case.
There was no trace of the mess now. Just the little things that made Jan and his colleagues frown. Like the cooking smells. Or the sudden and inexplicable draughts. Or the fact that the white paint persisted in coming off the walls in long jagged flakes, revealing the grimy wallpaper beneath.
Quirks, that was all it was, idiosyncrasies, the sort of character people were willing to pay good money for. Jan had told the company accountant as much, but Margit was not convinced. She had worked up some crackpot theory that ‘something or someone’ was intent on expelling them. Like the Monday morning recently when they had come in to find that an unpleasant dark stain, removed from the reception floor on the Friday, had reappeared. Or when their newly mounted modern paintings had come off the walls during the night, each and every wire snapped.
None of the others had wanted to work alone in the office after that.
‘We’re not wanted here,’ Margit had said.
The thought of the melodramatic expression on her face when she said that made him laugh out loud, but his voice rang strangely in the empty room, and there was something else now, something that made him stop and listen. He closed his eyes, tried to filter out the hum from his laptop and the night buses spraying slush on the main road.
There was definitely something there, little regular creaks in the corridor. His mind raced through the options: one of his staff had come back for something, a cat had found
its way in, or the central heating was making the floorboards expand and crack.
‘Hello?’ he shouted. ‘Anyone there?’
Nothing.
There was another possibility, of course: squatters. It made sense, a property standing empty for so long in a prime neighbourhood. As he strained to hear, he made a mental note to call in a security firm in the morning.
The little creaks started up again, louder this time. They sounded a lot like footsteps now. He looked around for a weapon, picked up an umbrella and put it down again. Considered a cardboard tube holding proofs of new posters for Copenhagen’s City Bikes, but thought better of it. Finally, he settled on a magnum of champagne someone had brought to their launch party. He held it like a club.
The corridor was empty. Where the white paint had come off in scrolls, you could see pale ovals and rectangles on the old wallpaper, the shapes of pictures that had once hung there.
The meeting room was deserted and dark, the plasma screen for their video conferences still in its box and stacked against one wall. After the incident with the paintings, no one had felt much like trying to mount it. Jan told himself that once he had investigated the strange noise, he would unpack the screen and hang it, using the power drill and four-inch bolts he had brought from home.
In his partner’s office, there was still a sheet draped over the desk, though they had managed to clean up most of the mess. It was unfortunate what had happened to Kristoffer. They still had no idea how the screws holding the heavy ceiling lamp directly above his chair had managed to work themselves free from the plaster. Bad luck that he had been sitting there at the time.
Last Train to Helsingør Page 14