The Golden Horns

by John Burke

  Or today.

  He was conscious of Birgitte Holtesen beside him, her warm body pressed against him and her perfume reaching out for him.

  “You think you will like Copenhagen?” she murmured.

  He said that he thought he would like Copenhagen; but he made a few mental reservations.

  They drove swiftly into the pulsating heart of the city, its pace quickening as it awoke to the evening’s exuberance. Restaurants and theatres were bright. The cinemas sparkled their invitation, and outside one of them Inge was set down.

  “Don’t hurry back,” Birgitte urged, leaning out of the window.

  Eiler added an indistinguishable comment of his own.

  Inge smiled a rather remote, sad little smile. “Enjoy yourselves,” she said to Logan and Carol.

  “Mind you have a good time,” Birgitte went on. “We will not be late home—but there is no need for you to hurry.”

  The car slid off again, and stopped at last outside the gaudy main entrance to the glittering Tivoli pleasure gardens.

  In another few moments they were caught up in the surging crowds inside. The concert hall gleamed from behind the fountains; a band played a lilting waltz under the trees; and from a far corner the jarring discord of roundabouts and sideshows was added to the general clamour.

  Everyone in Tivoli was keyed-up. The place had that effect on anyone who set foot inside its gates.

  But there was a special quality about the tension that possessed Birgitte and Eiler. Logan had expected it to slacken when they were inside the concert hall itself, but it remained the same. Birgitte Holtesen, for all her supposed enthusiasm for the music they were to hear, was not really in a mood to listen.

  Her eyes were restless. She was simply waiting for the concert to end. And Eiler simply looked sullen, sitting with his fists tightly clenched, the knuckles white.

  The angular strangeness of the Shostakovitch concerto made things worse: it rasped on the nerves, set one’s teeth on edge.

  Logan glanced along the row of seats. At the end was a glass panel in the wall, through which could be seen the revolving roundabouts and, beyond them, the lights of the famous Tivoli restaurants.

  It was a perfect setting for enjoyment. But Birgitte and Eiler were not enjoying themselves.

  * * * * * * *

  Logan was glad when the programme finished in a roar of applause. Before the clapping had subsided, Birgitte was forcing herself out into the open air. When Logan and Carol joined her she glanced at her watch and then, briefly at Eiler.

  Logan began: “Well, this has been a delightful evening. Perhaps—”

  “Oh, it is not ended yet,” said Birgitte at once. “You must come home with us for a drink. We insist—don’t we, Eiler?”

  Eiler nodded, right on cue. “We insist.”

  Something was going to happen. Or, thought Logan, had happened. Something for which this peculiar pair needed a witness. Why else should they be so immediately anxious for Logan and Carol—whom, after all, they had only just met—to come home with them?

  “You will come,” said Birgitte, putting her arm through Logan’s as though they had known one another for years, “and have a—what do you call it—? A nightcap. Yes.”

  They emerged on to the neon-harsh turmoil of Vesterbrogade. Birgitte looked again at her watch, and then impatiently towards Raadhuspladsen.

  “Bentzon should have been here five minutes ago,” she snapped.

  As though answering the sound of her imperious voice, the car came swinging suddenly in, and the burly chauffeur got out. He was breathing hard.

  He said something in Danish. It must have been an apology, though nothing sounded very apologetic in that language. Birgitte nodded curtly, and then they were all getting once more into the car.

  “I hope,” said Logan lightly, “that Miss Nielsen enjoyed herself.”

  Eiler grunted. Birgitte swiftly said: “I’m sure she won’t have had such a delightful time as we have had.”

  They swung out again into the rush of traffic. Neon signs made a great blaze in the air above them. Then a narrow street engulfed the car, the traffic thinned, and the multi-coloured lights receded.

  The car moved fast, but not fast enough for Birgitte. She sat on the edge of the seat, straining forward. She seemed to be urging the car on.

  At last they were running smoothly beside a line of trees. The dark shadows of the park lay beyond, with a faint gleam reflecting from the water.

  Then Birgitte, in a shrill, unnatural tone, said:

  “Look—the lights are on. In the house.”

  Logan looked out as the car slowed. There was certainly a good pattern of light from the front windows of the Holtesen house.

  Eiler, in a voice that sounded as though he were saying something carefully rehearsed, growled: “We did not leave the lights on when we went out.”

  “Bentzon, did you come back and go into the front of the house?” demanded Birgitte.

  The chauffeur’s massive head wagged ponderously. “No, Fru Holtesen.”

  The car stopped. Birgitte got out quickly. Eiler was slower. Logan and Carol stood together. Carol’s hand touched Logan’s arm once, lightly, as though for reassurance.

  Then the door of the house opened, and light flooded out.

  Birgitte gasped.

  “Henning!”

  There was nothing faked about her surprise this time. Logan would have been willing to swear that this was not an act. She stared up incredulously.

  The man in the doorway came slowly down the three steps. He looked frail and wispy against the brightness behind him.

  When he spoke, there was a dry crackling edge to his voice—the whisper of dead leaves, the tiredness of age. Logan felt Carol shiver.

  The words were Danish, and meaningless, But at once Birgitte, her lower lip trembling, turned to Logan and said shakily:

  “There has been a burglary.”

  Then, oddly, she looked straight at her husband and said in a firmer tone:

  “We have been out all evening. Henning. We have been out with these friends of ours.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Indoors, Logan got a better picture of Henning Holtesen.

  He was so pale a man that one might have thought all the blood had been drained out of him. Only some strange, inhuman vitality kept him alive.

  And right at this moment, he looked like he was suffering from shock. His pale eyes were wide, his fingers gripped his knees as he sat opposite his wife and his head jutted forward like that of some scrawny, aged bird. “We thought you were in Kalunborg,” Birgitte was saying.

  “Yes, I know you did.” There was a strange tremor in his thin whisper.

  “What made you come home?”

  “I finished my business early, and I decided I would return.” Although he was ceremoniously using English out of politeness to their two guests he was addressing Birgitte, and only Birgitte. His eyes did not leave her face, “I heard somebody in the house. There was a man upstairs, trying to break into my rooms at the top of the house.”

  “But what could he have wanted?” said Birgitte, again unnaturally shrill.

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

  At last Henning Holtesen broke it.

  “Whatever it was,” he said softly, “he did not get it. I stopped him. He attacked me—knocked me down—but he was alarmed, and ran off.”

  Any other wife, thought Logan, would have been by her husband’s side, sympathising, worried about how he lad stood up to the shock. But Birgitte merely stared at him as though hypnotised.

  “Don’t you think you ought to call a doctor, sir?” suggested Logan.

  “I am well, thank you. I am not injured.”

  “But you may have sustained some bruises. Or shock. I’m sure you ought to have a sedative—”

  “Thank you.” Holtesen gravely inclined his head. “You are very thoughtful. I will certainly take a sedative later.”

  “And call the pol
ice?” said Logan. “The sooner they can examine the place, the better.”

  “I will call the police,” said Holtesen, “when you have gone. We do not want our guests inconvenienced by visits from the police. Particularly as you were not even here at the time, That is so, is it not?”

  “Of course,” said Logan.

  “We have been out all evening, Henning,” said Birgitte once more. She drove the point home, looking from Logan to Carol and then back to her husband. “Mr. Logan will tell you that we had dinner here and then went to Tivoli, and we’ve been there all the time—all of us.”

  Holtesen’s head seemed to crane even further forward. He said:

  “Where is Inge?”

  There were more explanations. It was as though Eiler and Birgitte were on trial.

  But they came out of it unscathed. Whatever it was that they had planned, at least their own alibi was perfect. Logan and Carol had been made very welcome indeed, and here they were as witnesses to the fact that Birgitte and Eiler had been far away from the house at the time of the attempted burglary.

  Yet why should such witnesses have been necessary? Why should Birgitte be suspected of implication in such a burglary—or why should she anticipate being suspected? What was the reason for the hostility, which so clearly existed between Holtesen and his beautiful, younger wife? What put that querulous. distrustful note into his dry quavering voice?

  Suddenly the door opened, and Inge came in. She went almost as pale as Henning Holtesen when she heard of the events of the evening.

  More explanations and disjointed remarks frothed up…and Logan noticed that during the course of them Eiler slipped from the room

  “I really think,” Logan said abruptly, “that Miss Dane and I ought to be leaving. You have enough to worry about—”

  “Mr. Logan,” cried Birgitte, turning to him with relief, “I am so sorry this should have happened. So sorry that on your first visit to us…”

  Henning Holtesen got up from his chair, shook hands, and opened the door.

  Beyond, in the hall, Logan caught a glimpse of Eiler at the telephone, repeating a number to the operator and looking irritably puzzled. Then he put the receiver down and turned.

  “You must come again,” said Holtessen, “at a quieter time.” He turned towards a bell push in the wall. “We will get Bentzon to run you back to your hotel.”

  “No, really—”

  “I will take you,” said Eiler unexpectedly. “There is no need to call Bentzon out again.”

  Holtesen stared at him for a moment. His mouth opened. Then he shrugged.

  There seemed to be no strength left in him. He had asked questions and got no answers. Now he was tired. He was not strong enough to argue. And what, after all, was there to argue about?

  Eiler drove badly. He slung the Opel about the streets, driving on his brakes, and whipped stubbornly across intersections. It was a good job that traffic was slackening at this hour of night.

  His goodnight was quick and off-handed. All he wanted was to drive off again.

  Logan, standing in the foyer of the hotel, said to Carol:

  “He was very anxious to come out.”

  “Very glad of the excuse to drive us back,” Carol agreed.

  “I wonder,” Logan mused, “what they were up to this evening? There’s quite a situation cooking up there. And I wonder where Eiler has gone to right at this moment?”

  * * * * * * *

  In the morning there was a copy of one of the main daily papers outside each room in the hotel. Logan tossed it on to the bed, and scanned the headlines while he was dressing.

  A few words made sense: even in a remote language like this one, his wide knowledge of other languages enabled him to find familiar constructions and words that echoed other, common European words.

  He whistled gently to himself as he took a tie from a drawer.

  Then he stopped whistling. He stood very still. His tie still dangling from his fingers, he stood and stared at the newspaper.

  In the centre of the page was a picture of a man. Logan had seen that face before: had seen it very recently.

  It was the ferrety, sly face of the man who had come out of the café ahead of Svend yesterday morning.

  And ‘dodt’ surely meant ‘dead’, or ‘died’…?

  Logan went thoughtfully down to breakfast and pushed the paper across to Carol as soon as she appeared, looking crisp and radiant.

  “Thank you,” she said, waving it away. “I’ve already studied the news in great detail. After ten minutes battling with the weather forecast, I gather that it is going to be varmt today.”

  Logan continued to hold his forefinger on the picture.

  “This man,” he said, “is the man who was with Eiler yesterday. I think the caption says that he was killed—or died.”

  Carol’s summer morning gaiety faded. Her expression sobered. “It looks,” she said, “as though things are warming up.”

  The waiter came quietly up beside the table. Logan ordered coffee and rolls for the two of them, and when the waiter had moved away he sat back in his chair with a bleak look in his eyes.

  He said: “Maybe I should have followed Eiler last night.”

  “It wouldn’t have been easy,” Carol pointed out, “to trail that Opel.”

  “But maybe I should have tried. Maybe I’d have saved a man’s life if I had.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean that Eiler was very anxious to get away from the house. He was glad of the excuse of bringing us back here. And when he had left us, he could easily have gone to see the man who had muffed the burglary—the man who was surprised by Henning Holtesen.”

  “But we don’t know that Eiler and Birgitte had a hand in that attempted’ burglary. It seems so absurd.”

  “Of course it seems absurd,” Logan growled. “But they were using us as an alibi. We both felt it. And you don’t want an alibi unless you’re up to no good.”

  “But even if the burglary was planned by the two of them,” Carol protested, “and even if it did go wrong, surely they wouldn’t murder the chap who was supposed to have done the job for them? It wasn’t his fault that Holtesen came back unexpectedly. It doesn’t add up.”

  “None of it adds up,” said Logan, “yet.”

  All through breakfast he stared silently at the picture. When they left the table and went towards the lift, he said:

  “You’re going to see Inge Nielsen this morning.” It was a statement rather than a question. “You got it fixed up all right?”

  Carol smiled wryly at his automatic confidence in her. “Yes, I fixed it all right. We’re bosom pals—all girls together.”

  “Pump her,” said Logan tersely. “Anything you can discover about the house, about her father, her aunt—and her aunt’s aged husband…. And why she looks unhappy. Why she’s scared. Why she follows her father round the streets. Anything.”

  They did not speak as the lift purred upwards, but on the landing Logan went on in an undertone:

  “I’m going to phone Martin Slade. He was due here last night at the hotel we fixed for him. I want him to lie low for a few days, until we need him. But he can translate that newspaper caption and ring me back. I want to be sure I’m not making a mistake about it.”

  Carol went into her room. Ten minutes later there was a tap on the door, and Logan entered.

  He still looked lean and bronzed, still like a holidaymaker. But there was a hardening in the lines around his mouth that did not belong to the carefree features of a holidaymaker.

  Carol said: “Slade got here all right?”

  “He got here,” said Logan harshly, “and he’s already seen the morning paper.”

  He paused.

  “That man…he was murdered?” said Carol.

  “He was murdered. The same way Clifford was murdered.”

  “Oh, no. Not....”

  “Ripped open,” said Logan. “The spreadeagle again. Ripped open, and dumped in the harb
our. Maybe it was hoped he’d be carried cut to sea. But he fouled the mooring lines of a yacht, and stayed on the surface.”

  “The spreadeagle,” murmured Carol, nauseated.

  Logan said: “A pretty custom, isn’t it? I’d like to meet the madman who practises it—and I intend to do so before I’m very much older.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Carol went out to keep her date with Inge Nielsen. Logan, from his hotel room, put through a call to London.

  While he was waiting, he jotted down notes on a sheet of paper—notes consisting of a list of names and some queried commodities. Drugs…currency…liquor…white slave traffic.

  He crossed out the latter.

  If Eiler Nielsen and his sister were trying to rob the man Birgitte had married, and wanted to get whatever the booty was out of the country….

  If Henning Holtesen was himself a dealer in something illicit…

  Logan dug out the notes Carol Dane had typed when Martin Slade first came to see them. Holtesen was a respected importer and exporter of skins and hides; but that sort of international trade would give him plenty of good contacts if he did happen to be mixed up in something else.

  If Inge Nielsen suspected her father of…well, of what?

  If. It was a very large word.

  The telephone rang. Logan reached for it.

  “Hello. Yes, I did. Yes, Mr. Marston. Right.” He waited for a second, and then a familiar voice crackled in the receiver, surprisingly close to him.

  “Hello, chief. Found any beautiful blondes?”

  “As you are very well aware,” replied Logan smoothly, “I brought one with me. And one’s enough for any man. Now listen, Harry. I want you to check some passenger lists for me. Flights from Copenhagen to London on…just a minute.” He checked dates in his diary, and then said: “Fourth of June onwards. But I think it would have to be the fourth for the Copenhagen-London journey, anyway.”

  “Urgent?” said Harry.

  “Very urgent. Use your well-known charm, and wheedle details out of the airport folk.”

  “What names do you want me to look out for?”

  “Nielsen,” said Logan. “Did a Eiler Nielsen travel on that flight? And if so, what date did he come back? The first part is more important, really, but as Nielsen isn’t an uncommon name in these parts it would provide a check if we knew he’d returned to Copenhagen almost immediately.”