by S. J. Gazan
“You looking for me? Are you debt collectors?”
“Is your name Lindberg?”
“It is. Karsten Lindberg. Something wrong?”
“We’re police officers,” Henrik said, showing him his badge.
“What’s happened?” the man asked. He put down his shopping and looked frightened.
“Nothing,” Søren replied gently. “It’s got nothing to do with you or any members of your family.”
Karsten Lindberg let out a sigh of relief. “Right, so what can I do for you?”
“You live here?”
“Yes, second floor apartment to the right. I’m renting it until next summer.”
“Dr. Tybjerg sublet it to you?”
“Yes,” the man replied, surprised.
“Do you know where Dr. Tybjerg lives while you rent his apartment?”
“Yes, I think so,” he said without delay. “More or less. Los Angeles. He’s a paleontologist or something like that, his subject is birds. He’s teaching at UCLA for two semesters.”
Søren tried his utmost to hide his astonishment. “How did you make contact with Dr. Tybjerg?”
“He put up an ad at the H. C. Ørsted Institute. I’m a biochemist. I was looking for a place to stay, and I happened to see his ad on the bulletin board. What’s this about?”
“We’re looking for Dr. Tybjerg,” Søren said. “Was it an unfurnished sublet?”
“No, it’s partly furnished. He removed all his personal belongings, but most of his furniture is still there. Suits me fine. It’s just a pit stop for me.”
“Do you have his address in California?”
“No, I have his e-mail address, but it’s a Danish university address. In fact, he was causing me a fair amount of hassle a few months ago. I started getting a lot of final demands addressed to him, and the electricity and the landline were cut off. I tried to get hold of Erik for two weeks, but no luck. In the end, I was really angry with him. At long last he got back to me. He said he had been away on a dig. The whole thing was stupid. We had agreed I would pay money into his account and he would pay the utilities, but once he had left, I didn’t hear from him. I presumed he had dealt with it. I certainly didn’t think he would just stop paying the bills. I got him to transfer the bills into my name, temporarily. It was much easier for both of us. He was free to look after his bones and excavations, and I could get the light back on in my fridge and my telephone working again. He asked me to put all the letters aside, and I have. To be honest, some of them look very serious, and I’ve e-mailed him about it but he hasn’t responded. What more can I do? I’m his tenant, not his mother. He had another letter from a debt collector recently,” he said and immediately looked shamefaced.
“I don’t really feel comfortable telling you all this. It’s his private business. But there you have it. Do you want his mail or not?”
“Yes, please,” Søren said quickly. What Karsten Lindberg was offering was technically illegal, but it would save Søren a lot of paperwork.
Søren went upstairs with him to get the letters. He carried one of Lindberg’s grocery bags.
“What a nice cop you are,” Lindberg said and smiled.
Tybjerg’s apartment was small and impersonal. Two rooms and a stall shower in the kitchen. The kitchen cabinets were worn, and the windows needed cleaning. Søren picked up fifteen letters from debt-collecting agencies and said good-bye. When he got back to the car, Henrik was reading a garden catalogue.
“I’m thinking I might get myself a tiller,” he said. “What do you think? Are you still a real man if you don’t have a tiller?”
“I don’t know about you,” Søren said. “But I’m doing fine without one.”
“Your garden looks like shit,” Henrik sparred. They drove for a while in silence, then he added. “There’s no way Tybjerg is in LA.”
“No,” Søren said. “But that’s what he told his tenant. I wonder why?”
They drove down Falkoner Allé in the direction of Vesterbro. Several times Søren prepared to say something, but Henrik leaned back against the headrest and looked as if he was snoozing. Søren drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and maneuvered the car effortlessly through the traffic. He felt totally isolated. They parked in Kongshøjgade and Henrik let Søren enter Johannes Trøjborg’s stairwell first. The stairs were worn in the middle; it had to be at least thirty years since they were last renovated. On each landing lay scrunched-up juice cartons, sweet wrappers, cans, and in one place a rubber strap that had once been pulled tightly around an addict’s arm. The light worked on the first floor, but from then up all the bulbs were out, and the two men could barely see where they were going. It stank of urine.
“Jesus Christ,” Henrik commented softly.
“Yes, lovely place, isn’t it.”
At last they reached Johannes’s front door. It was quiet. Suddenly Søren’s stomach lurched. Henrik stuck out his hand to ring the bell, but Søren grabbed his arm.
“Look,” he said, pointing. The door was closed, but not completely. A faint crack, almost invisible in the dark stairwell, had caught Søren’s eye.
“I’ve a bad feeling about this,” he said, taking a pencil from his breast pocket and pushing the door. It swung open. The silence was deadly.
“We’re going in,” Søren announced.
The apartment was, if possible, even darker than the stairwell. Søren and Henrik stopped inside a small hallway with a kitchen to the left and a living room to the right. They could see a window, closed curtains, a cast-iron sofa with deep cushions and fabric draped across it; in front of the window was a dining table with four chairs. Henrik went into the kitchen and turned on the light. The kitchen was cluttered and filthy. Empty soft drinks bottles, stale food in opened containers, and a greasy grill, which had been removed from the oven but had never made it to the sink. It stank, and Henrik opened the door under the sink, which brought an over-filled trash can into view. Søren took two pairs of rubber gloves and two pairs of shoe protectors from his inside pocket and handed one set to Henrik. He could see where this was going; he had been a police officer for far too long.
They checked the apartment carefully and discovered Johannes in the bedroom. It was a grotesque scene. In an abstract painting of blood, Johannes was lying in his bed, his comforter carefully tucked in, looking like he was asleep. The blood had come from a dark hole to the back of his head.
“Shit, Johannes,” Søren exclaimed. The two men were silent for a moment. The bedroom smelled stuffy.
“The time is ten eighteen,” Henrik said laconically, took his cell and called for backup. Soon they heard the sound of approaching sirens. Søren watched the body and, for once, he found it hard to suppress his feelings.
“Johannes is my best friend,” Anna had said.
The rest of the morning was pure routine. Bøje, the Deputy Medical Examiner, and the team from Forensics arrived simultaneously. Bøje quickly established that Johannes had been dead somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, which instantly filled Søren with guilt because it meant Johannes had been alive while they were looking for him. Why the hell hadn’t he just answered his cell! The bloody trail on the floor proved Johannes had been killed in the living room, and Bøje asked the crime scene technicians to look for the murder weapon, a hard, pointy object. It took the chief technician three minutes to locate it.
“Right there,” he said, waving his colleagues closer. They focused on one of the four decorative orbs on the corners of the cast-iron sofa.
“Blood, brain tissue, and hair,” the technician informed Søren, who was watching from the hallway to avoid trampling on potential evidence.
Bøje glanced at the finial from where he was in the bedroom doorway and announced, “Looks about right,” before resuming his work.
Søren and Henrik left the apartment and watched from the landing while the technicians identified evidence on the floor, the walls, and on fabric. Flashlight exploded from their cameras, and
Søren scratched his head. His job now was to canvas the immediate neighborhood with door-to-door interviews. The coroner’s assistant arrived with a body bag and removed Johannes’s body; Johannes’s bed sheets and his mattress were sealed and taken away. Bøje said good-bye and disappeared down the stairs. Just after 3 p.m. everything had been measured, photographed, and all the evidence collected. They had to wait for the autopsy, and it would be hours before they got any information. Søren would be none the wiser until tomorrow. He instructed five teams of two officers each to ring doorbells. When the apartment had been sealed, he plodded down the stairs. It was snowing lightly, but even so, a crowd had gathered outside the house, staring nosily at the stairwell and the red-and-white police tape flapping in the wind. Another four officers arrived—Søren waved them over and briefed them in the shelter of the stairwell. When they had been given their orders, Henrik joined Søren. Søren was freezing and couldn’t feel his wool socks, in fact, he couldn’t even feel his feet.
“We had better tell his parents,” Søren sighed.
“I’ve taken care of that,” Henrik said, patting his shoulder. “I sent Mads and Özlem.”
Søren was grateful, and he listened to Henrik while he tried to memorize the faces of the spectators. The group was starting to break up, he thought, people were getting cold. Two elderly ladies, with granny trolleys and berets, were shifting from foot to foot next to three young men in neon pink quilted jackets and backpacks and a young woman with a child in a stroller. A younger guy was talking into his mobile, his cheeks were flushed and, to the far left, were a couple of women in their forties with two teenage children.
At the far end of the group was Anna.
She had put up her hood and her body language told Søren she had just joined the onlookers and was trying to push her way to the front. Henrik was about to say something, but he made no sound, and he tried to catch Søren’s eye. A frightened Anna looked at the building, the police cars, and the cordon and, for a fraction of a second, she looked straight at Søren. Then she turned around. Søren set off after her. Brusquely, he pushed Henrik aside, skidded across the pavement, got caught up in the tape, pushed the young guys out of the way, finally got free of the crowd, and ran out into the road. The street corner was 150 feet from the stairwell, and Anna had already turned it and was long gone. He was certain it had been her. Her eyes, her mouth, the hood covering her hair. He turned into Enghavevej. Traffic was heavy and slow, and he stopped. A bus started to pull out, the driver beeping his horn at the cars who refused to let him out. Søren ran to the bus and tried peering inside, but the windows were steamed up. He banged on the side while he ran alongside it. He punched the tires, which began rolling, hammered on the door, and finally made eye contact with the driver.
“Get lost,” mouthed the driver. “Catch the next one.”
Søren fumbled for his badge, but the traffic eased and the bus accelerated, leaving Søren behind, cold and troubled.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Henrik shouted, when Søren returned to Kongshøjgade. He sent Søren a furious look.
“I thought I saw someone,” Søren said, avoiding Henrik’s eyes.
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t… him.”
Henrik narrowed his eyes. “Since when do you chase suspects on your own?”
“Since today,” Søren said, wearily. “I’m sorry. I can’t make head nor tail of this case.”
Henrik was visibly annoyed.
“Søren,” he said. “Every police officer has to accept that not every case will be closed. So far, you have solved every case you’ve ever been given. You may have to accept this could be your first unsolved case. It won’t kill you, nor will you be demoted to pounding the pavement, will you? Besides, it’s not over yet. We’ve only just started! You and I will wait like good little boys for Bøje’s report and then we’ll come up with a battle plan, okay? Let’s call it a day. I’ll wrap things up here and catch a ride back with Mads. You go home. I’ll write the preliminary report.”
Søren nodded and got into his car. He sat there for a while, trying to calm down.
Søren drove down Falkoner Allé toward Nørrebro with a renewed sense of purpose. After crossing Ågade, he turned right and parked behind Anna’s block. He walked around to the front door and rang the bell. For a long time. No reply. He rang the next-door neighbor. Time passed, then he heard an elderly voice.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Snedker?” Søren said, reading the name next to the bell. “I’m a police officer. Please will you let me in?”
He heard a noise and thought she was opening the door, but she appeared to have had second thoughts because she replied: “And why would I believe you?”
Søren was taken aback. “Er, no why would you?” he said. Now what? The intercom hissed again.
“If you’re the chap who has been waiting for Anna,” the old voice snapped, “then I suggest you run back home to your mommy. We’re not interested in whatever garbage you’re peddling, or whatever it is you want. Be off with you.” She hung up and Søren was left standing there. He took a few steps back and looked up at the building. On the fourth floor, opposite where Anna’s apartment had to be located, he saw an old lady in the window. She was watching him and when he looked back at her, she waved. He pressed the bell again.
“I’ve never seen you before,” the old lady said when she answered. “And don’t think I’m stupid enough to let in a stranger just because he claims to be a police officer.”
“Mrs. Snedker,” Søren said with all the authority he could muster, “I’m going to give you a telephone number and you’ll call directory enquiries and find out whose it is. You’ll be told that it’s the duty officer at Bellahøj police station. Then you wait two minutes before you call the duty officer and ask him if he thinks it’s a good idea to let in a man who calls himself Søren Marhauge who claims to be a policeman, and if he says yes, you let me in, all right? I’ll call them right now and give them my location. Do you follow?”
“Do you think I was born yesterday?” she said cheekily. “I promise you, sir, that I wasn’t. I was born long before you were even a twinkle in your mother’s eye.”
Søren smiled. “Right, we have a deal, then.”
She hung up. Søren called the duty officer and four minutes later, he had a call back to say his identity had been confirmed. A Maggie Snedker, born February 26, 1919, had just called. She had been highly suspicious, but they had reached an agreement in the end. The duty officer sounded amused. The intercom crackled and Søren was buzzed into the stairwell.
Mrs. Snedker was waiting on the landing. Her arms were folded across her chest and she looked fierce, but Søren detected an element of teasing in the corner of her eyes.
“You’re a long way up, Mrs. Snedker,” he panted, holding out his badge.
“You’re right. The air up here is too thin for weaklings like you.” She scrutinized his badge. “What do you want?”
“I urgently need to get ahold of your neighbor, Anna Bella Nor, and she won’t open her door or answer her telephone.”
“Now why wouldn’t Anna open her door to a nice cop such as yourself?” the old lady asked. She was elegantly dressed and had long red nails. He couldn’t believe she was over eighty. Her hair was thick, curly, and very soft, and Søren wondered if it might be a wig. Elvira’s hair had turned silky and fine when she reached her early sixties, and she had had it cut quite short.
“What’s this about?” Mrs. Snedker asked. “That poor girl has suffered enough. First there’s that cad who abandons her and the baby. I’ve no time for him. Lily hadn’t even turned one. What a charlatan. Anna’s a good girl, she really is. But she’s unhappy. And when you’re very sad, you put on a brave face. She doesn’t fool me, though. So, what do you want?” The old lady’s eyes were as piercing as a nail gun.
“I’m afraid I can’t go into details, but it’s nothing very serious,” he assured her.
“You wouldn’t have a spare key?” he tried.
“Of course I have, but I’m certainly not giving it to you.” Mrs. Snedker gave him a stern look; she measured him from head to foot, and he had a strong suspicion she was checking him out.
“Why don’t you join me for a drop of something?” she offered, looking at her watch. “It’s four o’clock and Anna is probably picking up her little munchkin from nursery school, such a cute girl. Can you believe it? Imagine deserting a little thing like that? Anna may not be the easiest woman in the world to live with, but then again, no one ever said living together was meant to be easy, eh? And what about the child? It’s been nearly two years since she last saw her father.” Mrs. Snedker leaned forward as she whispered the last sentence. Søren picked up the scent of a dusty, heavy perfume. Mrs. Snedker turned resolutely on her heel and disappeared inside her apartment.
“Er…” Søren began, but she ignored him. He followed her into a dark, rustic-style hallway and into her living room, the likes of which he had never seen. The floor was covered with thick-piled rugs, and there was no space left on the walls. Pictures in heavy gilded frames, plates and photographs, and on the end wall, broken only by the balcony door, there were books from floor to ceiling. A gramophone, which had to be at least fifty years old, sat in between the books. Mrs. Snedker was standing by a low drinks table, pouring a rust-colored liquid into two glasses.
“Ah, there you are.” She sounded delighted.
“I don’t drink while I’m on duty,” Søren said, not very convincingly.
“Nonsense,” she said.
Søren studied an old gun mounted on the wall. The metal was freshly polished and the woodwork was in good condition, but the weapon looked hundreds of years old.
“It used to belong to Count Griffenfeld,” Mrs. Snedker explained. She had followed his eyes. “Stunning example, isn’t it? Right, down the hatch.” She handed him a glass, knocked back her drink and frowned when Søren swallowed only half of his. She went to the window and looked out.