by David Hewson
‘Which one?’
He looked for a second, no more.
‘The white is nice.’
Sucked on his cigarette, stared at the desk.
‘The white?’
‘The white,’ he said again.
Rama, the teacher they saw earlier in the week, was halfway through the list. Same questions. Same uninformative answers. The man was thirty-five. Had worked at the school for seven years.
They asked everyone: what did you make of Nanna?
‘Outgoing, happy, clever . . .’ Rama said.
Meyer rolled one of his pills onto the table, stared at it.
‘You two had a good relationship?’ Lund asked.
‘Definitely. She was a very clever girl. Hard-working. Mature.’
‘Did you see her outside school?’
‘No. I don’t socialize with pupils. I’m too busy.’
Meyer glugged down his tablet, lobbed the empty water bottle into a waste bin.
‘My wife’s pregnant,’ Rama added. ‘Almost due. She works here too. Part-time now. Finishing up.’
‘That’s nice,’ Lund said.
Meyer broke in, asked, ‘Did you see Nanna at the party?’
‘No. I did the first shift. I left at eight.’
Lund said, ‘That’s all, thanks. Can you send in the next person?’
She laughed.
‘I sound like a teacher.’
Meyer stared at the empty yellow skins on the table.
‘Did you eat my bananas?’ he demanded.
‘One.’
He got up, went to the window cursing, lit a cigarette.
The teacher still sat there.
‘There’s one thing a while back. A few months ago Nanna wrote an essay. For a mock exam.’
Lund waited.
‘She wrote a short story.’
‘Why’s this important?’ Lund asked.
‘Maybe it isn’t.’ Rama looked at her. ‘It was about a secret affair. Between a married man and a young girl. It was very . . .’
The teacher was searching for the right word.
‘It was very explicit. She wrote it as a piece of fiction. It bothered me.’
Meyer came back to the table, looked at him, asked, ‘Why?’
‘I read a lot of essays. It sounded to me as if she was talking about herself. Talking about something she’d done.’
‘Explicit?’ Lund asked.
‘They had meetings. They had sex.’
‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’
He squirmed.
‘I don’t know if it’s important or not.’
‘We need to read it,’ Meyer said.
‘It should be in the storeroom with the others. It was a mock exam. We keep them.’
They waited.
‘I can help you look if you like,’ Rama said.
The officer from the education department returned with a pile of blue folders underneath his arm. Skovgaard thanked him. Smiled.
‘What do they say?’
‘Model school. Private. Not cheap.’ He flicked through some folders. ‘The teachers seem well qualified and enthusiastic. The grades are good.’
She stared at the pile of documents.
‘No complaints?’
‘Nothing I can see. But I don’t know what you’re looking for.’ He waited for a response. ‘If I did—’
‘It’s just routine. We want to know everything’s in order.’
Olav Christensen seemed pliable, willing to help, even though she’d leaned on him earlier.
‘Everything to do with Troels is usually in order,’ he said. ‘I wish . . .’ he nodded back towards Poul Bremer’s office, ‘it was the same everywhere. Maybe soon.’
She wondered why he’d suddenly turned helpful. Held up a folder. Said thanks.
Ninety minutes Lund and Meyer spent going through the filing cabinets. The teacher had to leave them to take a class. Then Rektor Koch walked in, scowled at Meyer’s cigarette, said, ‘Have you found it yet?’
‘It’s not here,’ he said.
‘It has to be here,’ Koch insisted.
‘It’s . . . not . . . here. We’ve been through everything.’
Lund brought over a file box.
‘This was open when we came to it.’
Koch checked the names on the label, people who’d used it and when.
‘One of our teachers is a linguist. He’s writing a paper on trends in language. Word usage. I gave him permission to go through anything he needed.’
‘Name?’ Meyer demanded.
There was a pause, an uneasy look on the woman’s face.
‘Henning Kofoed. I find it hard to believe he wouldn’t put it back. He’s usually very meticulous. A highly intelligent . . .’
‘Why haven’t we spoken to him?’ Lund broke in.
‘He wasn’t one of Nanna’s teachers. He only works in the mornings. He’s . . .’
Lund picked up her phone, her notepad and her bag.
‘We need his address,’ she said.
Hard wood and wicker seats. Candles. Gold crosses. Dim lights. A crucifix.
Pernille and Theis Birk Larsen sat next to each other in silence. She clutched the white dress. Freshly washed, freshly pressed, it smelled of flowers and summer.
On the leaded windows above them the winter rain hammered in a constant rattle.
After a while a man emerged. Black suit, white beard, a kindly face, a fixed professional smile. He took the dress, complimented them on the choice. Said, ‘Ten minutes.’ Then left.
It seemed much longer. They moved from seat to seat, stared at the walls. He took out his black woollen hat, turned it in his fingers. She saw, and tried not to watch.
Then the undertaker returned. The door was half open. A pale gentle light beyond. He beckoned them through.
Afterwards, in the red van driving slowly on the shining city road, Pernille said, ‘She looked beautiful.’
Theis Birk Larsen stared through the windscreen, out into the grey rain.
Her hand strayed out, touched the bristle of his sideburn, the rough familiar warmth of his cheek.
He smiled.
‘We’ve got to pick up the Thermos flasks,’ she said. ‘We can borrow two from Lotte.’
He tapped at a light on the dashboard.
‘I need some screen wash.’
A small filling station. Cars and vans. Men and women. The ordinary life, the mundane passage, the daily routine. All this swam around them as if nothing had happened. Nothing changed or broken or lost.
He didn’t reach for the pump. Didn’t do anything except march into the shop, race to the toilet.
There, in this anonymous place, door locked, in his black coat and woollen cap, Theis Birk Larsen crouched over the basin, sobbing, shaking, bawling like a child.
Twenty minutes she waited. No one approached. No one spoke. Then he came out pink-eyed, red-cheeked. Scraps of paper towel clung to his stubble where he’d wiped his face. Tears still lurked, grief still lingered.
In his hands was a small plastic bottle. Blue.
‘Here,’ he said and placed the screen wash in her lap.
Henning Kofoed’s home was a one-room flat behind the station. As squalid a bachelor place as Lund had ever seen. Books were thrown everywhere, food rotted on unwashed plates in the kitchen. Kofoed was a shifty-looking forty-year-old with a straggly brown beard and unkempt hair. He sucked on a foul-smelling pipe and regarded them with suspicion the moment they arrived.
‘Why should I have this paper?’
‘Because you took it,’ Meyer said. ‘For your . . . What is it? Linguistic study. That’s about how people talk, right?’
‘In a very crude fashion . . .’
‘In a very crude fashion let me say this . . . Find the fucking paper, Henning.’
‘I probably misplaced it. I’m sorry.’
There was a computer in the bedroom. Meyer went through and started nosing around. Kofoed follo
wed getting edgier by the minute.
‘Did you read what Nanna wrote?’ Meyer asked.
‘I . . . I . . . read lots of things.’
‘Simple question. You don’t need a degree in linguistics to comprehend it. Did you read Nanna’s story?’
Silence.
‘I specialize in language. I look at words. Not the sentence so much. Did you know the word ciabatta never existed . . .?’
Meyer clutched his fists together and swore.
‘Forget about ciabatta, will you? Find us the damned essay.’
‘OK, OK, OK.’
He meandered into the adjoining room, started sifting through a jumble of files and papers scattered everywhere. The place looked like a record office that had been hit by a bomb.
Meyer glanced at Lund, smiled, pointed to the floor.
‘Did you throw it away?’
‘I’d never do that.’
He bent down over a set of collapsed drawers. Retrieved a plastic document folder.
‘Ah! I knew I had it.’
He handed it over.
‘Sorry. I’ll show you out.’
Kofoed walked to the door, opened it. Lund stood where she was.
‘I think we need to talk,’ she said.
‘About what?’
Meyer held up one of the magazines he found on the floor beneath the computer.
Hot Teenagers.
‘About young girls.’
The teacher sat on the computer chair in the bedroom watching Meyer sift through the magazines, flick open the photos.
He was sweating a lot and Lund had taken away his pipe.
‘Where were you on Friday?’ she asked.
‘At a conference in the city. About the language of youth.’
‘When did it end?’
‘Ten p.m.’
‘And then?’
‘I came home.’
Meyer leaned on the door frame, alternately scowling at the magazines and then Kofoed.
‘Are there any witnesses?’
‘No. I live alone. I work mostly.’
‘When you’re not playing with yourself,’ Meyer grunted. ‘Or looking at your girls.’
The teacher bristled.
‘I don’t like your tone.’
Meyer shook his head.
‘You don’t like my tone? I could arrest you for this.’
‘Those magazines aren’t illegal. I bought them here. Anyone can.’
‘You don’t mind if we take your computer then. You’ve got a portable hard drive down there too. What fun and games will we find on there?’
Kofoed went quiet. Went back to sweating.
‘Oh, Henning.’ Meyer came and sat in front of him. ‘Do you have any idea how guys like you get treated in prison?’
‘I haven’t done anything. I wasn’t the one they pointed the finger at . . .’
‘I’m pointing the finger!’
‘Meyer!’ Lund looked at the shaking teacher. ‘What do you mean, Henning? Who got the finger pointed at him?’
Silence.
‘We’re trying to help,’ she said. ‘If someone was under suspicion we need to know.’
‘It wasn’t me—’
‘So you keep telling us. Who was it?’
Scared man. But he didn’t want to say it.
‘I can’t remember—’
‘I’m taking the computer,’ Meyer said. ‘You’re going to jail. No job. No teaching. No chance to get close to the girls in the corridor—’
‘It’s not like that! It wasn’t me. The girl retracted everything . . .’ He was close to weeping. ‘He was cleared. He’s a nice guy.’
Meyer picked up a magazine, waved it in his face.
‘Who?’
‘Rama,’ Kofoed said.
He looked ashamed of himself. More ashamed than when Meyer pulled out the porn.
‘The girl made it up. He’s a nice man. Kind to everyone.’
‘Just like you,’ Meyer said and threw the mag in his face.
Pernille sat at the table trying to smile for the teacher, Rama. The handsome, polite one from the school. He’d brought flowers, photos, messages from the shrine. Took the chair opposite looking serious and sorrowful.
‘They’re a bit wilted. I’m sorry.’
She took them, knowing they’d go in the bin the moment he left. And that Rama understood this too.
‘Some of Nanna’s class would like to come to the funeral. If that’s OK.’
‘That’s fine.’
Rama smiled a brief, melancholy smile.
‘You can come too. Please.’
He seemed surprised. Did they think she wouldn’t want a foreigner?
‘Thank you. We’ll all be there. I won’t keep you any longer—’
‘Don’t go.’
He wanted to, she thought. But Pernille was past worrying about what others wanted any more.
‘Can you tell me something about her?’
‘Like what?’
‘Something she did.’
He thought about the question.
‘Philosophy. Nanna always loved that. She was really into Aristotle.’
‘Who?’
‘He was Greek. She was in our drama group.’
‘Acting?’
She never mentioned this. Not once.
‘I told them what Aristotle said about acting. She was very interested in that. She thought our plays should last from dawn till dusk. Just like the ancient Greeks.’
‘She was a schoolgirl,’ Pernille said, cross suddenly. ‘She had a life. Here. A real one. It wasn’t a dream. She didn’t need to make something up.’
A mistake. He looked embarrassed.
‘I think it was a joke.’ Checked his watch. ‘I’m sorry. I have to go. I work at a youth club. There’s an appointment. I can’t miss it.’
Pernille looked into his calm, dark face. Liked this man. Looked at the table. Ran her fingers across the dimpled lacquered surface, stared at the photos and the faces.
‘We made this together. Planed the timber. Glued it. Stuck the photos.’
The wood felt smooth now and worn. It wasn’t always. There were splinters. Tears sometimes.
‘You’re alone,’ the teacher said. ‘Is that—?’
‘Theis is downstairs. In the office. Doing . . .’
It was dark in there when she answered the bell. Not a single light.
Doing what?
Smoking. Hugging a bottle of beer. Weeping.
‘Paperwork,’ she said.
It wasn’t paperwork.
Birk Larsen sat still and silent in the dark office. The door opened. Vagn Skærbæk walked in, turned on the dim light by the notice-board. Keys in his hand. Checked the line of hooks on the wall. Found the right place. Kept things in order.
Didn’t see the man in the black jacket hunched over the desk, cigarette in hand, bottle in fist until Birk Larsen grunted something wordless.
‘Shit! You scared me.’
The figure didn’t move.
‘Are you OK, Theis?’
Turned on the main light. Walked forward, looked.
‘I’ll go and get Pernille.’
A strong hand reached out and held him.
Birk Larsen’s eyes were pink and watery.
Drunk.
He said, ‘A week ago I had a daughter. She walked out of here. Went to a party.’
‘Theis . . .’
‘I saw her again today.’ The eyes beneath the black hat closed, tears squeezed between the lids. ‘It wasn’t really her. It was like something . . . Something . . .’
‘I’m going to get Pernille. You don’t drink any more either.’
‘No!’
His voice was loud and fierce. Vagn Skærbæk knew not to ignore it.
‘Theis. I got this friend Jannik. He heard something.’
Skærbæk hesitated. Felt Birk Larsen’s eyes on him.
‘Heard what?’
‘Maybe nothing.’
&nbs
p; Birk Larsen waited.
‘Jannik’s wife works at the school. He said the police came back again.’ Hands fidgeting with the silver chain. ‘They started questioning the staff. All Nanna’s teachers.’
Another cigarette. Another pull at the beer. He gazed at Vagn Skærbæk.
‘Maybe she knows more than he told me.’ Skærbæk licked his lips. ‘The police are useless shits. If they weren’t you and me—’
‘Don’t talk of that,’ Birk Larsen snarled. ‘Those days are gone.’
‘So you don’t want me to talk to Jannik’s wife?’
Birk Larsen sat on the hard seat, staring into space.
‘Theis . . .’
‘You do that.’
Elections played on ideas. Themes. Icons. Brands. So Troels Hartmann found himself that night putting on tennis shoes then walking in his office suit, out to the sports hall, Rie Skovgaard by his side.
Basketball was a young sport. He was the young candidate. A photo opportunity. A chance to shake hands.
‘Frederiksholm’s a model school,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing on any of the teachers. I’ve been through every file. Lund’s got them. We’re in the clear.’
The smell of sweat, the sound of a ball bouncing on wood.
‘You’ve got a photo shoot. Then we meet some of the role models. We get youth, we get recreation, we get community. One strike, three hits.’
Hartmann took off his jacket, pulled his shirt out of his trousers, rolled up his sleeves.
‘When do the civil servants go home?’
‘Concentrate on why we’re here. These people are important for us.’
They walked into the hall. Figures playing. Black and white. Moving quickly, noisily.
‘Morten told me he noticed a couple of civil servants working late. Why would they do that?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘He says we need to watch them.’
‘Morten’s paid to run your campaign. Not offer you advice like that.’
‘What if Bremer’s got someone inside? Causing mischief? Leaking emails. Getting hold of my diary.’
‘Leave me to worry about that. You’re the candidate. The public face. I can handle the rest.’
Hartmann didn’t move.
‘I went out of my way to fix this opportunity,’ Rie Skovgaard added. ‘We’ve got every media outlet that matters out there. Try to smile for them, will you?’
Onto the floor. Strong handshakes. Friendly greetings. One by one Hartmann talked to them, Iranian and Chinese, Syrian and Iraqi. Danish now, working for his integration programme. Unpaid role models for the communities around them.