The Tenant

by Katrine Engberg

  There was probably no point in guessing.

  “Copenhagen!” she shouted, grabbing her jacket as she headed toward the door. “I’ll be darned if they’re not in Copenhagen right now! Staying at the Hotel Phoenix. Let’s head over, Jeppe! I’ll just call the front desk to hear if they’re in their room. Otherwise, I’ve got the father’s cell phone number.”

  She was out the door before Jeppe managed to even say a word.

  * * *

  BREDGADE, THAT SWANKIEST of Copenhagen’s broad boulevards, was humming with lazy midday traffic. Anette parked the car round the corner and they walked through the drizzling rain to the hotel. A group of Japanese tourists had armed themselves with umbrellas and, bizarrely, the women were wearing white gloves, hearkening back to the happy electric boogie days of the 1980s. Of course, the Japanese tourists could be on their way to a dance battle, but she doubted it. Jeppe opened the gold-trimmed glass door of Hotel Phoenix, and they walked in.

  The lobby looked like an inside-out meringue, crystal chandeliers dripping with diamond droplets and heavy brocade curtains framing the windows. Anette hated decadent decor like this and eyed a fountain in the middle of the white marble floor distastefully.

  She felt tense and reticent, and a bit distracted. Svend and she had decided long ago not to have children, even though everyone around them was reproducing like there was no tomorrow. They referred to their three border collies as their boys and didn’t feel like they were missing out on anything. But she still knew there was no greater pain in life than the loss of a child, and here she was on her way to inflict on somebody precisely that pain.

  The staff had, at her request, asked Mr. and Mrs. Stender to remain in their room without explaining any further. Anette and Jeppe headed up to the second floor, found room 202, and knocked. A second later, a petite, elegant woman with short gray hair opened the door. She nodded somberly to them. The worried wrinkle in her forehead looked like a Hindu caste mark over her mother-of-pearl eyeglasses. She pulled back into the hotel room so Jeppe and Anette could enter.

  Christian Stender sat in an upholstered silk armchair holding his head in his hands. He had unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt so a tuft of graying chest hair and the top of a considerable potbelly were just visible. A couple of well-worn leather shoes in need of polishing sat next to his chair, signaling an owner who valued comfort over style. He raised his head and, on seeing his guests, looked down again. His face was covered in beads of sweat, his eyes small and red-rimmed. This man was either petrified or suffering from serious gastritis.

  “Christian started feeling unwell when the receptionist called to say the police wanted to talk to us,” Mrs. Stender explained, twisting her hands in a caricatured gesture of concern. “He’s convinced something has happened to Julie. My… uh, stepdaughter. She hasn’t been answering her phone. I’ve tried to reassure him, but he won’t listen. This is about the burglary at the company, right? Not about Julie?”

  Anette and Jeppe exchanged a look, neither of them particularly eager to confirm the worst. She nodded to him, thankful for their division of labor, then slid to the wall from where she could observe both parents’ faces.

  “Unfortunately,” Jeppe said, “we’re not here to talk about a burglary.” He cleared his throat, his voice unexpectedly nervous. “I’m sorry. We have bad news. We’ve come about Julie.”

  Christian Stender looked up from his armchair with pupils as small as a heroin addict’s. Everything about him froze in anticipation. Anette tried to analyze his expression for hidden signs but saw only the terror of a parent confronted with his worst fear.

  Jeppe continued hesitantly. “I’m very sorry to have to inform you that—”

  He didn’t get any further before Christian Stender started bellowing like a madman. He collapsed, fell out of the silk chair, and ended up half kneeling as he screamed. His face was contorted; his hair lay like a thin veil over his shiny scalp. He looked like an opera singer performing his big scene of torment and despair.

  Anette noted these factors, just as calmly as if she were watching amateur theater. Her empathy meter didn’t budge. What the heck was wrong with her? Or with him?

  “We found the deceased body of a young woman in Julie and Caroline’s apartment,” Jeppe continued hesitantly between the father’s cries. “I am sorry to inform you that it is Julie. We still need to complete… some investigations before the identification is official, but we do not feel there is any doubt.”

  He sought Anette’s eyes, and they nodded to each other. No need to mention the autopsy or the dental check yet.

  “It pains me terribly—” Jeppe started but got stuck.

  Christian Stender had curled up on the floor. His wife stood behind a chair, staring at him as she picked at the edge of the upholstery.

  “Could we have a moment alone?” Ulla Stender asked slowly but with unexpected authority. “I realize we’ll probably need to come to the police station or whatever, but would you please give us a moment to compose ourselves? Alone?”

  “We’ll wait in the lobby,” Anette said as Jeppe went for the door. “Just take your time.”

  They walked into the hall together, eager to get out of the stuffy room and away from its intense emotion. None of their condolences seemed adequate, so they didn’t say anything more. Anette closed the door behind them. The last thing she saw before the door clicked shut was the woman approaching her husband, her arms outstretched.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Would you like me to press a button for you? Which floor?”

  The bald woman with the IV pole flashed a friendly smile, her finger hovering in the air in front of the elevator’s many buttons.

  “Fourteen,” Esther said, returning the smile. “Thank you so much.”

  The doors slid shut. She racked her brains for something to say—maybe just a comment about the weather—but then she didn’t know when the woman had last been outside. So she kept quiet, spitting discreetly onto her fingertips instead, trying to rub off the last of the fingerprint ink with a rolled-up tissue from her pocket. The crime scene technician had explained how Denmark was one of the few countries in the world that still used ink instead of the modern scanning system the rest of the planet had long since adopted. Even countries like the Central African Republic were ahead of Denmark, he explained as he rolled her fingers over inkpad and paper. Odd guy. She had scrubbed her hands with a nail brush right after, but the ink remained.

  At first glance the cardiac intensive care ward at Denmark’s national hospital didn’t look like the most uplifting place, even if the omnipresent suffering had been somewhat camouflaged with a motley assortment of posters across the walls. People always use the happiest colors in places where all hope is lost. There was even an ad hanging next to the elevator for a concert by the former chief of police, promising eight pieces from the Danish folk songbook with piano accompaniment.

  Are patients’ moods really lifted by sentimental entertainment no healthy person would tolerate for five minutes? Esther thought as she entered Ward 3-14-2.

  She found the right patient room and paused at its open door. The first of the two beds inside was empty, but Gregers Hermansen lay in the other, his face turned to the window.

  “Hi, Gregers,” Esther said after a hesitant knock.

  Without turning around, his shoulders began to shake from sobbing. Like a child who has been holding on to the pain until his mother finally arrives to tend to his grazed elbow and the tears have an audience. Esther remained in the doorway, fighting the impulse to run from the somber, sad hospital room. Collected herself and walked to his side.

  “It’s just me,” she said.

  Gregers let his tears flow freely. She took his hand and stood there quietly until he calmed down.

  Poor old friend, she thought, overcome with sympathy for this man she had known for twenty years and yet hardly knew at all. They had never really become friends, although they had lived under the same roof for
so long. At that moment it seemed like such a waste.

  Esther pulled up a chair, unbuttoned her jacket, and then took hold of Gregers’s hand again. She wanted to say something comforting, but everything sounded wrong. So instead she just sat and listened to the crying, feeling inadequate and out of sorts. She needed a vacation and a glass of red wine. Needed to calm her mind. To not be thinking a thousand thoughts, which all led to shortcuts. To not remember when—seemingly a thousand years ago—she had been the one lying sobbing in a hospital bed. She hadn’t had anyone to hold her hand then.

  She realized she was squeezing his frail palm too tightly and loosened her grip, patting the hand awkwardly. His tears slowly abated.

  “Who—” he began, faltering, in the voice of a man who lived alone. Esther leaned in closer and concentrated on hearing him.

  “Who. Is. She?” he got out. He was so hoarse that at first she didn’t understand what he was asking. He cleared his throat impatiently and pointed to the plastic pitcher of water. She poured some into a used cup and let him drink, refilled it, and waited until he was ready.

  “I fell on a… body,” he stuttered. “There was blood on the walls. The police wouldn’t tell me anything.” Gregers looked sunken, decrepit—she suddenly realized she thought of him as old and herself as… something else.

  “I don’t know who she was, Gregers,” she said. “The police still aren’t ready to disclose anything.”

  “Was she dead? When I… found her. Was she dead?”

  Of course, she thought. That’s what he’s afraid of! He’s worried he could have saved her. Hadn’t the police looked after him at all?

  “Gregers, listen up now,” Esther said authoritatively. “She had been dead for a long time by the time you got there. There wasn’t anything you could have done, do you hear?” She actually didn’t know when the girl had died, and she didn’t know any of the specific details. But she saw no reason to not reassure him any way she could.

  Without warning, she had a sinking feeling in her gut, fast like a falling ton of bricks. The hangover haze she had been walking around in the whole day suddenly lifted as focus was shifted off herself. A murder in my building, she thought. Oh, how terrible! Far too terrible to wrap one’s head around. Her throat tightened. Had it really happened? And why?

  “Why?” Gregers asked with pleading eyes, unaware that his thoughts echoed hers.

  Esther felt a sharp pang of guilt but pushed it aside.

  It must be a coincidence. A sick, long-shot coincidence.

  Her father calls every other day. Sometimes she answers, today she lets it ring; she just can’t face dealing with him. She misses her mother, whose illness and death have left her in a state of permanent longing. A longing to be seen and loved for what she really is, a longing for once again hearing her mother’s reassurances. You will always be my Star Child, her mother had said, and I shall always help you carry life’s burdens. Now she carries the weight by herself. Her father can’t help with that. He still thinks she’s his innocent little girl.

  She sets her towel and books into her bike basket and rides across the Knippelsbro bridge. The streets are deserted in the midday heat. She stows her bike at a rack on the flat stretch of road that leads to the airport, Amager Strandvej, locks it, and walks to the beach, her basket scratching her bare thighs. Takes a selfie on the wooden bridge and posts the shot to Instagram.

  The beach is full of half-naked bodies in half-melted positions. She finds a corner for her things and slowly undresses, aware of every set of eyes taking in her striptease. She draws it out, until she’s standing there in her bikini and sunglasses. She stretches and squints at all the people through her dark lenses.

  A bald guy stops in his tracks, letting his ice cream melt over his fingers as he devours her with his eyes. Dirty old man. She looks toward the horizon, distant and unattainable, and bends down to her basket with her legs straight to retrieve her sunscreen. Applies it slowly and thoroughly for the many gazes glued on her.

  But there is one set of eyes she doesn’t see. A set of eyes hidden behind sunglasses, watching her body as if it belonged to him. As if her skin were a canvas. If she’ll only reconsider what she’s doing, she still has time to prevent it.

  But she doesn’t.

  CHAPTER 6

  The bunker-like interrogation room six was certainly no junior suite, but even so, Jeppe felt more comfortable in this official setting than he had in the gloomy room at the Hotel Phoenix.

  The detectives had arrived at headquarters with the Stenders a half hour ago, and now Christian Stender sat holding his wife’s hand, rocking mindlessly in his chair and chanting quietly to himself. Anette was leaning against the wall in her usual Philip Marlowe style, only moving to step aside for an officer who brought sweet tea in two white plastic cups.

  Jeppe nodded gravely to the couple to show that they had to proceed with the horrible subject.

  “I understand that this must come as a terrible shock to you,” he began, making eye contact with Ulla Stender, who blinked back at him a couple of times. “Unfortunately, we need to inform you of some circumstances and also ask you a few questions, even though it’s difficult.”

  She nodded hesitantly.

  “We have made what we consider to be a one hundred percent positive identification, so you won’t need to physically identify the actual… body. You’re welcome to see her one last time. However, I would advise against it. She won’t look like her usual self, the way you know her.”

  Ulla Stender flinched at those uncomfortable words; Christian Stender sat frozen.

  “Next, I need to ask how you feel about an autopsy,” Jeppe continued. “Do you have any objections?”

  Ulla sneaked a glance at her husband and then shook her head. Asking was mostly a formality—the body would be autopsied, even if they said no.

  “Thank you,” Jeppe said. “We also need to ask you if you know the whereabouts of Julie’s roommate, Caroline Boutrup. Given the nature of the case, it’s urgent that we locate her.”

  The grieving father closed his eyes and continued his internal dialogue. Chatting with the divine, Jeppe supposed. His wife replied.

  “Julie doesn’t tell us much, but I know from Caroline’s parents that she was going canoeing with a girlfriend this week. In Sweden somewhere.”

  Jeppe slid a notepad across the table to her.

  “Would you write the names of any friends, classmates, or other contacts Julie had both here in Copenhagen and back home in Sørvad. We’ll need to talk to everyone she knew.”

  Ulla Stender thought for a moment and wrote down a few names.

  “We also need to ask you where you both were yesterday evening. It’s purely routine. We ask everyone this whenever they have anything to do with a case.”

  “Last night, overnight?” Ulla Stender asked, briefly glancing up from the notepad before continuing to write. “Well, we were asleep at the hotel. We arrived Tuesday—was that really only yesterday?—and met Julie for coffee in the afternoon at a café close to the hotel. Christian had important meetings scheduled for today and tomorrow, but they’ve been canceled, of course.”

  “You didn’t run out to grab a drink or anything?”

  “No, we had gotten up early and were exhausted, so we just took a little walk in the Nyhavn neighborhood and then went back to the hotel. Had room service for dinner in front of the TV. I think we were in bed by eleven.”

  “How did Julie seem when you saw her?”

  “Well, she seemed like herself. Happy and content. Told us about the degree program she was about to start. She was on her phone for most of the hour we spent together, you know how it is nowadays.”

  “I understand how hard it must be to discuss this now, but we need to know as much as possible about Julie. Can you tell us a little about her?” Jeppe asked gently. “What was she like? What did she enjoy doing? That kind of thing.”

  Ulla Stender glanced at her husband, whose eyes were still closed
.

  “Well, Julie’s a sweet girl,” she said tentatively. “Normal, you know, happy… young. She liked going to concerts, loved the theater.” Mrs. Stender searched for the words she wanted but couldn’t muster more worth sharing.

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt her?”

  She shook her head, offended.

  “How about someone who might have wanted to hurt either of you? Hurt you through Julie?”

  She shook her head again.

  Jeppe looked down at the table to give her a moment to blow her nose.

  “Christian has had some friction with partners and customers, but never anything that couldn’t be solved with a game of golf. And I can’t believe anyone would have thought to harm Julie for something like that. I mean, that’s crazy!”

  “How long have you actually known Julie?” Anette asked, breaking a pause from where she stood against the wall. “When were you and Christian married?”

  Jeppe’s eyebrows signaled to Anette that she shouldn’t interrupt, but she didn’t take notice.

  “In March 2004,” Ulla Stender replied, her eyes wandering uneasily. “Julie sang for us. ‘Fly on the Wings of Love.’ She was only nine years old! Everyone was tremendously impressed.”

  Christian Stender whimpered and covered his eyes with his hands. His wife continued unsteadily.

  “Julie was only an infant when I was hired by Christian’s company, and I’ve known the family all those years. After Julie’s mother… passed away—she had cancer—he and I grew closer. And, well, then we got married. I hope by now Julie sees me as her mother. Or saw me…” Ulla Stender had beads of sweat on her upper lip and was fiddling with her necklace.

  “When did Julie’s mother die?” Anette asked, not yet ready to let Ulla Stender off the hook.

  “Irene died in 2003,” Ulla replied, “but by then she had been sick for a long time. Christian was completely worn out from being at the hospital. It was a terrible time.”