Disgrace

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  A couple of the girls among the flock of students looked at them indignantly. Lowlife! Tossers! their faces seemed to say through arrogant masks.

  Then the man lashed out at Assad, and Assad struck back with an incredibly precise and devastating blow that stopped the man in his tracks. For a moment he stood wobbling, as the schoolteachers discussed whether or not to get involved.

  But Assad didn’t care. He grabbed the man roughly and clutched him tight, until he began shouting again.

  Then, as the school group angled away from the scene, Assad caught sight of Carl, and his reaction was instantaneous. He shoved the man away and gave him a hand gesture that invited him to fuck off. Before the man reached the stairway to the train platform, Carl managed to get a glance at him. At his razor-sharp sideburns and glistening hair. He was a handsome guy with a hateful gaze. Not the kind of man one wished to see again.

  ‘What just happened?’ Carl asked.

  Assad shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Carl. He’s just some idiot.’

  Assad’s eyes roamed all over. Towards the police station behind Carl, towards the schoolchildren, towards Carl, and beyond. This was a completely different Assad to the one who made mint tea in the basement. A man with a score to settle.

  ‘You’ll tell me what that was all about when you’re ready, OK?’

  ‘It was nothing. Just a neighbour of mine.’ Then he smiled. Not convincingly, but almost. ‘You got my message then? You know your mobile is completely dead, right?’

  Carl nodded. ‘How do you know it was Kimmie you saw?’

  ‘A junkie prostitute called out her name.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘I don’t know. She managed to get away in a taxi.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Assad. You followed her, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. My taxi was right behind hers, but when we reached Gasværksvej, her taxi had stopped just around the corner. She was already gone then. I was just a second too late, and she was gone.’

  Success and failure, all at once.

  ‘Her taxi driver said that she’d given him five hundred kroner. She’d just hopped in the back seat, shouting, “Drive to Gasværksvej! Fast. The money’s all yours.” ’

  Five hundred kroner for five hundred yards. That’s desperation.

  ‘I searched for her, of course. Went in all the shops to hear if they’d seen anything. Rang doorbells.’

  ‘Did you get the taxi driver’s number?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bring him in for questioning. There’s something fishy about this.’

  Assad nodded. ‘I know who the junkie prostitute is. I have her address.’ He handed him a note. ‘I got it from this police station ten minutes ago. Her name is Tine Karlsen. She has a bedsit down on Gammel Kongevej.’

  ‘Well done, Assad. But how did you get the information from the officers? Who did you say you were?’

  ‘I showed them my ID from headquarters.’

  ‘That doesn’t allow you to get that kind of information, Assad. You’re a civil employee.’

  ‘Well, I got it anyway. But it would be good then if I got a badge now that you’re sending me out so much, Carl.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Assad, but I can’t do that.’ He shook his head. ‘You said they knew her at the station. Has she been arrested?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Many times. They are rather tired of her. She usually goes around begging for money near the train station’s main entrance.’

  Carl looked up at the yellow building buttressed against Teaterpassagen. Lots of sets of rooms on the lower four floors, attic rooms at the top. It wasn’t difficult to guess where Tine Karlsen lived.

  The door to the fifth floor was opened by a gruff-looking man in a threadbare blue dressing gown. ‘Tine Karlsen, you say? Follow me.’ He led Carl past the stairwell and into a corridor with four or five doors. He pointed at one as he clawed his grey beard. ‘We don’t like having the police running around up here,’ he said. ‘What did she do?’

  Carl squinted, drawing one of his acerbic smiles from his goody bag. The man earned wads of cash on these small, crappy rooms. So he could bloody well treat his tenants properly.

  ‘She’s an important witness in a renowned case. I request that you give her the support she needs. Do you understand?’

  The man let go of his beard. Did he understand? He had absolutely no idea what Carl was talking about. But it didn’t matter – so long as it worked.

  She didn’t open her door until he’d pounded on it for what seemed an eternity. Her face was extraordinarily ravaged.

  Inside the room he was met with a pungent, nasty odour, the smell a pet’s cage exudes when it isn’t cleaned often enough. Carl remembered all too well that phase of his stepson’s life – when his hamsters mated day and night on his desk. In no time the number had multiplied fourfold, and that trend would have continued if the boy hadn’t lost interest and the animals hadn’t begun eating each other. In the months before Carl donated the rest of the critters to a day-care centre, the stink was a permanent fixture of the home atmosphere.

  ‘You’ve got a rat, I see,’ he said, bending towards the little monster.

  ‘His name’s Lasso and he’s completely tame. Would you like me to take it out so you can hold it?’

  He tried to smile. Hold it? A mini-pig with a hairless tail? He’d sooner eat its fodder.

  It was at that point Carl decided to show her his police badge.

  She glanced disinterestedly at it and wobbled over to the table. With an experienced hand, she pushed a syringe and some tinfoil fairly discreetly under a magazine. Heroin, if he were to venture a guess.

  ‘I understand you know Kimmie?’

  Had she been arrested with a needle in her veins or shoplifting or jerking off a customer on the street she wouldn’t have batted an eye. But that question made her jump.

  Carl moved to the dormer window and looked out over the soon-to-be barren trees that ringed St Jørgen’s Lake. Hell of a nice view this junkie had.

  ‘Is she one of your best friends, Tine? I’ve heard you two are close.’

  He leaned right up against the window and gazed down at the footpath alongside the water. Had the girl been normal, she might be jogging around the lake a few times a week like the ones doing so now.

  His eyes scanned the bus stop on Gammel Kongevej, where a man in a light-coloured coat stood staring up at the building. Carl had seen the guy from time to time during his many years on the force. Finn Aalbæk. A gaunt ghost of a man who used to camp at Antonigade Police Station so his little detective agency could sponge bits of information from Carl and his colleagues. It had been at least five years since Carl had last seen him, and he was still just as ugly.

  ‘Do you know the man in the light-coloured coat down there?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen him before?’

  She stepped to the window, sighed deeply and tried to focus on the man. ‘I’ve seen someone in the same coat in the central station. But he’s too damn far away for me to really see him.’

  He saw her enormous pupils. Even if the man stood right in her face she would hardly have recognized him.

  ‘And the man you saw at the train station. Who’s he?’

  She moved away from the window and bumped into the table, so he had to grab her. ‘I’m not sure I want to talk to you,’ she sniffled. ‘What has Kimmie done?’

  He escorted her to the settle bed and eased her on to the thin mattress.

  Let’s try another angle, Carl thought, glancing round. The room was ten square yards and seemed as devoid of personality as possible. Apart from the rat cage and clothes piled in the corners, there were very few objects in the apartment. A few sticky magazines on the table. Stacks of beer-reeking plastic shopping bags. The bed and its coarse, wool blanket. A sink and an old refrigerator, on top of which was a grimy soap dish, a well-used towel, a tipped-over bottle of shampoo and a small collection of hairpins. There was nothing on the walls and nothing on the windowsill.

&
nbsp; He looked down at her. ‘You’re growing your hair long, right? I think it’ll look good on you.’

  Instinctively she reached for her neck. So he was right. That was what the hairpins were for.

  ‘You also look nice with shoulder-length hair, but I think long hair will look very good on you. You have fine hair, Tine.’

  She didn’t smile, but behind those eyes of hers she was jubilant. For a brief instant.

  ‘I’d like to hold your rat, but I’ve become allergic to rodents and the like. I’m very sorry about that, in fact. I can’t even hold our little kitty any more.’

  Now he had her.

  ‘I love that rat. It’s name is Lasso.’ She smiled with what had once been a row of white teeth. ‘Sometimes I call it Kimmie, but I haven’t told her that. It’s because of the rat I’m called Rat-Tine. It’s just so cute, don’t you think? Especially when you know you’ve got your nickname from it.’

  Carl tried to agree.

  ‘Kimmie hasn’t done anything, Tine,’ he said. ‘We’re looking for her because there’s someone who misses her.’

  She bit the inside of her cheek. ‘I don’t know where she lives. But tell me your name. If I see her I’ll pass it on.’

  He nodded. Years of fighting the authorities had taught her the art of caution. Completely wasted on junk and yet still on her guard. Quite impressive, and at least as irritating. It would certainly not help the case if she told Kimmie too much. Then they ran the risk of Kimmie disappearing for good. Eleven years’ experience and Assad’s hunting her had demonstrated that she was capable of it.

  ‘OK, I need to be honest with you, Tine. Kimmie’s father is seriously ill, and if she hears that the police are searching for her, then her father will never see her again, and that would be a terrible shame. Can’t you just tell her to call this number? Don’t mention the illness or the police. Just have her call.’

  He wrote his mobile number on his pad and gave her the page. He’d have to make sure to charge the battery.

  ‘And if she asks who you are?’

  ‘Then just tell her you don’t know, but that I said it was something that would make her happy.’

  Tine’s eyelids closed slowly. Her hands lay relaxed on her thin knees.

  ‘Did you hear that, Tine?’

  She nodded with her eyes closed. ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad to hear it. I’ll be going now. I know there’s someone looking for Kimmie at the central train station. Do you know who?’

  She looked at him without raising her head. ‘Just someone asking whether I knew Kimmie. He probably wanted her to contact her father, too, right?’

  Down on Gammel Kongevej he grabbed hold of Aalbæk from behind. ‘An old offender, out getting some sun,’ he said, resting a heavy fist on his shoulder. ‘What are you doing here, old boy?’ he went on. ‘Long time no see, eh?’

  Aalbæk’s eyes were bright – but not with the joy of recognition.

  ‘I’m waiting for the bus,’ he said, turning his head away.

  ‘OK.’ Carl looked at him. Strange response. Why did he lie? Why not just say: ‘I’m on an assignment. I’m shadowing someone.’ It was his job, after all, and they both knew it. He hadn’t been accused of anything. He didn’t need to reveal whom he was working for.

  No, but now he had revealed himself. No doubt about it. Aalbæk was certainly aware that it was Carl’s path he was crossing.

  ‘Waiting for the bus,’ the man had said. What an idiot.

  ‘You really get around in your job, don’t you? You didn’t by any chance take a trip to Allerød yesterday and mess up one of my photographs? What do you say, Aalbæk? Did you?’

  Aalbæk turned round calmly to face Carl. He was the type of person who you could kick and punch without getting a reaction. Carl knew a guy born with underdeveloped frontal lobes who was simply unable to become angry. If the brain had a similar area that controlled emotion and stress, in Aalbæk’s case it had been replaced with an echoing vacuum.

  Carl tried again. Why the hell not?

  ‘What are you doing here? Can’t you tell me that, Aalbæk? Shouldn’t you be up at my place in Allerød instead, drawing swastikas on my bedposts? Because there’s a connection between what we’re both working on right now, isn’t there, Aalbæk?’

  His facial expression didn’t exactly suggest a desire to oblige. ‘You’re still a sarky old git, eh, Mørck? I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Why are you standing here, staring up at the fifth floor? It wouldn’t happen to be because you hope Kimmie Lassen drops by to say hi to Tine Karlsen, would it? You’re the one asking round the central train station for her, aren’t you?’ He got in Aalbæk’s face. ‘Today you connected Tine Karlsen up there with Kimmie, didn’t you?’

  The thin man’s jaw muscles worked under the skin. ‘I don’t know who or what you’re blathering on about, Mørck. I’m here because a father and mother wish to know what their son is doing with the Moonies on the second floor.’

  Carl nodded, recalling how slick Aalbæk was. Of course he was able to fabricate a cover story when he needed one.

  ‘I think it might be nice to see your business receipts from this last period of time. I wonder if one of your employers is interested in finding this Kimmie? I think so. I’m just not completely sure why. Will you tell me that voluntarily, or do I need to fetch those receipts myself?’

  ‘You can fetch whatever the hell you like. Just remember a warrant.’

  ‘Aalbæk, old boy.’ He thumped him so hard on the back that his shoulder blades collided. ‘Will you tell your employer that the more they harass me privately, the more I will go after them. Is that understood?’

  Aalbæk was trying not to gasp for air, but when Carl was out of sight, he surely would. ‘I’ve understood enough to know that you’re losing it, Mørck. Leave me alone.’

  Carl nodded. That was the disadvantage of being the head of the country’s unquestionably tiniest investigative unit. If he had a few more men, he’d put a couple of his best magnets on Finn Aalbæk. He had a strong hunch it would pay to tail this stick figure, but who would do it? Rose?

  ‘You’ll hear from us,’ Carl said, heading off down Vodroffsvej. Then, when he was out of sight, he ran as fast as he could down the cross street and back around the Codan Building, ending up on Gammel Kongevej again, near Værnedamsvej. In a few breathless leaps he was on the other side of the street in time to see Aalbæk standing beside the lake, talking into his mobile.

  Maybe he was hard to ruffle, but he certainly didn’t look happy.

  18

  During the time Ulrik worked as a stock market analyst he had made many investors richer than anyone else in his line of business, and the key words were ‘information, information, information’. In this field, wealth was created neither through coincidence nor luck. Certainly not luck.

  Nobody in the business had as many contacts, and there wasn’t a single media conglomerate where he didn’t know someone. He was confident and careful, and he scrutinized the publicly traded companies thoroughly and by every imaginable means before he estimated the profitability of their stocks. Sometimes he was so thorough, in fact, that businesses asked him to forget what he’d learned. And his acquaintances with people who were caught in a bind, or who knew someone who knew someone who needed help getting out of an ugly situation, spread like ripples in the water until they eventually covered the entire ocean upon which society’s largest platforms floated.

  In some less advanced countries this would have made Ulrik an extremely dangerous man who for many would have been a much better ally with his throat slashed – but not here. In tiny Denmark the system was so ingenious that if you knew some dirt about somebody, they also knew something just as bad about you. If it wasn’t hushed up the one person’s offence quickly infected the other’s. A strange, practical principle which meant that no one would say anything about anyone else, not even if they were caught with their hands in the
biscuit tin.

  Because nobody wanted to spend six years in prison for insider trading. And nobody wanted to saw off the branch they were sitting on.

  Up in his slowly growing money tree, Ulrik spun a spider web that in polite circles was called a ‘network’ – this wonderful, paradoxical word that functioned as intended only if the net filtered out more people than it caught.

  And Ulrik made exceptionally good catches in his network. The kinds of people others read about. Respected people. The crème de la crème. All of them people who’d risen from their origins and were now soaring towards a stratum where one needn’t share the sunlight with riff-raff.

  These were the people he hunted with. The ones he walked arm in arm with at the Freemason’s lodge. The ones who understood the importance of sticking with their own kind.

  Ulrik was thus a vital cog in the boarding-school gang’s wheel. He was the gregarious one everyone knew, and behind him stood his childhood pals, Ditlev Pram and Torsten Florin. It was a strong, albeit oddly matched, triumvirate, one that was invited to everything worth being invited to.

  This afternoon they had begun their high jinks at a reception in a downtown gallery that had connections to both the theatre scene and the royal family. Afterwards they’d wound up at a lavish soirée in the company of parade uniforms, medals and knightly orders. The event featured well-prepared speeches written by underlings who had not been invited, while a string ensemble tried to draw those present into Brahms’ world, and the champagne and self-praise flowed generously.

  ‘Is it true what I’m hearing, Ulrik?’ the cabinet minister at his side asked, his alcohol-dulled eyes trying to measure the distance to his glass. ‘Is it really true that Torsten killed a couple of horses with a crossbow on a hunt this summer? Just like that, in an open field?’ He tried again to pour a few drops in his much-too-tall glass.