The Tenant

by Katrine Engberg

  Falck pointed to Jeppe and addressed the crew. “My colleague here needs to join the others upstairs.”

  One of the black-clad men nodded to Jeppe and walked onto the stage. He hesitantly followed. The legendary Old Stage was associated with so much awe and reverence that he had to actively push it aside in order to walk on it in his dirty police shoes. This was where he had seen Jerome Robbins and Bournonville, fallen in love with great actresses, and pictured his own future. Here he had applauded Johannes when he won his first Reumert Prize and told himself that there was a difference between If only it were me! and If only it weren’t you!

  “Jacket off!” one of the techs behind him yelled.

  Jeppe turned and discovered that the guy was yelling at him. He glanced at his escort, who just shook his head and continued across the stage floor, past the wings and through a black iron door that led to a bright corridor.

  “What was that all about?”

  “Old superstition. It’s considered bad luck to cross the Old Stage with your coat on. You also shouldn’t whistle. But we can’t really incur any more bad luck than we’ve already had. Come on, we’re going up here.”

  The guard opened another door into a stairway and walked ahead up to the fourth floor, past the sewing machines in the costume department and into a high-ceilinged rehearsal room, where the entire wall was one big mirror. Jeppe was about to ask what they were doing in here when the guard strode over to the mirror and pushed it. A door sprang open and the guard disappeared through the mirror with a quick backward glance to make sure he was still following.

  Through the looking glass, Jeppe thought. Where everything is reversed.

  He went through the mirror and out onto a steep back staircase that didn’t appear to be included in the standard cleaning schedule. The guard climbed two steps at a time, and Jeppe followed suit with his hand on the rickety railing. At the top of the stairs the guard opened a door to a dusty attic with old wooden floors and round windows that glowed blue from the dwindling light over the city.

  “Welcome to the Crown Attic.” The guard flung out his arms in a gesture of welcome, which hardly suited the situation, and then disappeared back down the stairs again. Jeppe grabbed a pair of blue shoe slipcovers from a box by the door as he glanced around. The attic was enormous and mostly empty, apart from a bit of junk here and there. A stack of old touring suitcases was piled up into a random leather formation, benches were covered with wood shavings, ladders were lying around, and empty soda cans indicated that people still occasionally passed through.

  The corners of the room faded into a darkness that reinforced the sense of abandoned space, but columns of light from powerful work lamps cut through the twilight. Crime scene technicians were taping off areas and marking locations to be investigated. Their voices sounded loud over the noise of a generator supplying power for the light. Jeppe moved toward the center of the room, where a large grayish metal box filled the space from floor to ceiling. Two fire doors in the box stood open, so one could see a big hole in the floor. The hole was four meters in diameter and surrounded by a low railing. Light streamed up from below, hitting the faces of his colleagues standing around the crater.

  Anette’s blond ponytail lit up in the dark. She spotted him and gestured for him to come closer. Jeppe went over to stand beside her, carefully peering over the railing. Below him, a vertical drop down to the audience seats revealed itself. And in the middle of that drop hung the Old Stage’s gigantic crystal chandelier. Jeppe felt his body being sucked over the edge and down into the depths, where a sea of red plush lay like a big, soft mouth. What a nice flight it would be. He instinctively pulled back, picturing all too vividly the chandelier falling and crashing down on the innocent audience below. Surely a play had once been written about that.

  On top of the chandelier, a few meters below them, lay a lifeless body. A work lamp was aimed at the figure, and its light caught the many glossy surfaces of the crystals sending disco-ball flashes up into the faces of the intently focused police officers. Kristoffer Gravgaard’s torso was bare and limp, caught in a hoop of shimmering glass. There was no doubt that he was very, very dead. On his skinny chest, just above the heart, the word SIGH had been tattooed in tall, narrow letters. Jeppe squinted and tried to focus. If the tattoo was meant to express Kristoffer’s outlook on life, there was a tragic irony to the fact that it had ended here in the Royal Danish Theatre’s chandelier.

  Nyboe stood on the opposite side of the crater, discussing with Clausen how they were going to get the body out of the chandelier and whether there was any way to examine the body before moving it.

  Jeppe took hold of Anette’s arm and dragged her to one of the round windows so they could speak privately.

  “So do we believe that a crime has been committed? Or did he go up on the roof in the middle of his shift, take off his shirt, and throw himself into the chandelier?”

  Anette shrugged. “Nyboe actually seems to think it could have been suicide. At any rate he won’t rule it out until the body’s been autopsied.”

  Nyboe’s intuition didn’t convince Jeppe. “Would a five-meter jump down into a chandelier even kill a person?”

  “Combine it with an overdose of something and then, yeah.”

  “What about timing?”

  Anette pulled her notepad out of her pocket and shined her flashlight on it as she tried to flip pages with one hand.

  “Kristoffer was scheduled to show up at six o’clock this evening, and there’s no reason to believe that he did anything other than that. The guard doesn’t remember the time, but his boss saw Kristoffer getting coffee in the cafeteria at six fifteen. After that, no more sightings, but his colleagues say that he did pick up the dancers’ tights and costumes from the laundry. They didn’t realize he was missing until his dancers needed their costumes and they weren’t yet laid out in the dressing rooms. That was around seven thirty, at the first bell.” She put on her teaching hat and explained, “At the Royal Theatre they ring the bell for the audience and the performers three times before a show, a half hour before the start, then fifteen minutes and ultimately five minutes before the show starts.”

  “Yes, I’m well aware,” Jeppe said. “Everyone knows that.”

  Anette continued, unperturbed. “People were puzzled that he was gone, but when he didn’t answer his phone, they needed to look after his dancers. All of a sudden they were super busy getting them ready for the show. Everyone was pissed that he had just walked off without saying anything.”

  “When did you discover that something was wrong?”

  “We arrived at eight thirty, and he was missing then. Larsen and Falck went to his apartment and broke the door open, but of course he wasn’t there. Meanwhile the rest of us were searching the theater. I thought he was hiding from us. We were actually about to give up when one of the ushers came out and said that there was something in the chandelier. An audience member up in the second balcony had spotted him and notified the staff. At first, they thought it was a joke. Larsen ran up with one of the guards to look and we canceled the show in the middle of the second act. That was at nine fifteen p.m.”

  Anette turned off her flashlight, put her notepad back in her pocket, and started walking back over to the chandelier. Jeppe remained where he was.

  “If we had brought him in for questioning, the way you wanted to…”

  Anette turned around, standing in the flare from the work lights.

  “Yeah, then he might still be alive.”

  * * *

  ANETTE STOOD LOOKING at him for a moment. Then she walked back to him and gently touched his shoulder.

  “It’s not your fault that he’s dead, and you know it.”

  Jeppe nodded, touched by his partner’s unexpected solicitude. Anette could be annoying as hell, but when everything was said and done, she was all right.

  He looked around.

  “Tell me, how did the killer get away? He didn’t wade out through the front do
or with all the theatergoers, did he?”

  “The guards showed us how you can exit the theater via something called the rope attic. That’s where the stage crew changes scenography during the show by pulling the ropes.” Anette pointed to the farthest dark corner.

  “You can run via a walkway toward the ballet school and then out from there. Something suggests that could be the way he—or she—got out. If there even was a killer to begin with, that is. Kristoffer’s key card is missing, so someone could have taken that to open the doors along the way. It’s just a regular card with a magnetic strip, no code, so it would have been easy-peasy to get out.”

  Hectic voices, along with clinking and creaking, sounded from their colleagues by the hole. The chandelier with Kristoffer’s body was being raised. Jeppe and Anette walked over to watch.

  “In the old days, the chandelier was raised every night after the show began,” Anette explained. “Now it’s only raised or lowered for cleaning or maintenance. Takes four hours to lower it all the way to the floor, it moves so slowly. You know, so the prisms don’t get tangled up.” She noticed his puzzled gaze. “The guard told us on our way up the stairs. Exciting, huh?”

  As if this night weren’t exciting enough already.

  Jeppe looked down at the chandelier and asked, “What I want to know is, how did he get down there? It must be five meters. Was he lowered down or thrown?”

  “There’s no sign that he was lowered. Of course, a possible murderer could have hoisted the body down, but that would have been a bigger production. He was almost certainly thrown. But Nyboe will be able to tell us once he’s had a closer look at the body.”

  “But wouldn’t the chandelier crash down from the weight of a man’s body falling five meters onto it?” Jeppe looked down at the crystals slowly moving up toward them and again felt himself cringing.

  “The support may look thin, but it has to be quite strong. The chandelier weighs almost a ton. Plus, it’s not like Kristoffer was the heaviest potato in the bag.”

  Jeppe’s knees started to buckle, and he leaned back away from the opening.

  “If he was thrown, it must have made a tremendous crash. Why didn’t anyone hear?”

  “Larsen is questioning the stagehands. Let’s hope we’ll learn more from that.”

  As the body approached, the people standing around the crater grew quiet. Nyboe stood wearing white, almost a head taller than Bovin, who had joined the group. The only sound apart from the hum of the winch was the flash of the police photographer. The sight of the pale, black-haired boy surrounded by thousands of prisms was almost annoyingly dramatic. It couldn’t have been any more staged.

  This is what he wants, Jeppe thought. This is a performance, an installation, in our honor.

  When the chandelier reached its highest position, the hoist mechanism stopped and there was total silence in the circle. Kristoffer’s eyes were locked in a look to the side, as if his final act had been to check for ghosts in the corners.

  “All right, folks.” Nyboe broke the silence. “The show’s over. Let’s get him looked at and then over to the cool room so we can all go home and get to bed.”

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 10

  CHAPTER 18

  After a night of falling and blood and side-cast eyes, Jeppe woke up dazed on his sofa on Friday morning. Racing thoughts hit him immediately. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that it wasn’t light out yet, so he closed his eyes and tried to force his brain to relax. The rough seam of a sofa cushion was cutting into the skin of his shoulder.

  Why had Kristoffer Gravgaard been killed less than two days after Julie Stender? His handprint was in the apartment. How was he mixed up with the murder? Jeppe breathed calmly in through his nose and out his mouth, trying to clear the thoughts. What did Julie Stender’s abortion have to do with her death? Was her teacher involved, and if so, how?

  He rolled onto his stomach and tried again. Stole a peek at his watch—still too early to get up—and spotted the picture of Therese that she had generously left behind when she walked off with everything else. He had been on the verge of throwing it away thousands of times but couldn’t make himself do it. They were his memories, too, his life. The picture was from a trip to Tivoli amusement park they had taken after yet another failed fertility treatment. They had bickered most of the time, Therese staring longingly at all the happy kids in the park, and Jeppe feeling guilty over the disappointing quality of his sperm, an unfairness that also infuriated him.

  But the picture was cute. She was looking right at the lens, squinting in the sun, with a sad smile that still tugged at his heartstrings. When you love someone, the callousness moves from your heart to the palms of your hands. That’s what his mother would always say when she caressed his cheek with her rough fingers.

  Jeppe got up. His watch read 5:12 a.m., but since he couldn’t sleep he might as well get going. He felt as if a merger of fifty incompatible companies had taken place in his body overnight. A cold shower helped a little, and by the time he sat down at the kitchen island with a strong pot of coffee, he was relatively ready to face the day. He took out his notes and flipped through them aimlessly.

  Even during the cursory preliminary examination of the body in the theater last night, Nyboe had reluctantly admitted that Kristoffer couldn’t have killed himself. That pretty much acquitted him of Julie’s murder. But then why had he left a big, fat handprint with traces of latex gloves on Julie’s doorframe? And why had he been murdered two hours after the handprint was identified? Kristoffer must have known something.

  Jeppe drained his coffee cup and felt the bitter grounds get stuck in his teeth. When you can’t find a pattern, you have to focus on the few similarities you can find. At the moment the link between Julie’s and Kristoffer’s murders was Esther de Laurenti. She had written the script for a murder performed in her own building, and she had no alibi for the night of the killing. Could she have teamed up with some strong man? But then again, why would she?

  * * *

  THE MOOD AT the morning meeting was tense. Extra staff had been called in, and the personnel room was filled to the breaking point. Thomas Larsen sat by himself, Falck leaned tiredly against the wall, and Saidani sat absorbed in her phone. Only Anette appeared to be in good shape. She was wearing an orange-striped sweatshirt and gulped her coffee with a contented smile. She and Svend probably had a wonderful morning, Jeppe thought bitterly. Just as he sat down to start the briefing, the superintendent slipped in and stood just inside the door. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t need to, either. Everyone knew what her presence meant. She came to emphasize to the whole team just how urgent the situation was.

  Jeppe rapped on the table with his knuckles.

  “Good morning, everyone,” he began. “As you know, last night we lost our main suspect, Kristoffer Gravgaard. He was found in the chandelier at the Royal Theatre during the second act of the ballet Napoli. Nyboe will start the autopsy at nine, and Larsen, I’d like you to be there and report back to me.”

  Jeppe looked at Thomas Larsen, who was slouched back in his seat, his face showing no sign of emotion. Jeppe had been right that Kristoffer was not their perpetrator, but if he had given in sooner, the young man might still be alive. They both knew it. Everyone knew it.

  “Let’s hear what you got out of the theater staff last night,” Jeppe admonished.

  Larsen sat up slowly, like a sullen teenager who’s been told off.

  “Kristoffer came to work,” he began, “said hello to the cook in the cafeteria at six fifteen and picked up the laundry from the laundry room. But he never got started laying out the costumes in the dancers’ changing room, so his work must have been interrupted soon after that. No one saw him again until he was discovered in the chandelier.”

  “How did he wind up there without anyone hearing or seeing something?” Jeppe resisted the urge to hurry Larsen along, even though the detective paused to stretch languidly before he replied.

  “No
rmal procedure is to clean the stage floor between seven and seven thirty, in other words right before the doors are opened to the audience. A relatively loud machine is used to clean the floor, so while that’s going on, the crew usually heads to the cafeteria to eat dinner or have a cup of coffee. The dancers are warming up, and the orchestra members haven’t started tuning their instruments yet. In other words, the only person in the whole theater room at that time yesterday was the stagehand cleaning the floor, and he was wearing ear protection.”

  “That gives our perpetrator about an hour to lure Kristoffer up to the attic, kill him, and throw him into the chandelier. Plausible. Do we know how he got away?”

  Saidani took over, brushing a few escaped curls behind her ear as she did so. The motion made Jeppe smile.

  “The Royal Theatre uses an electronic key-card system, which stores information for forty-eight hours. We can see that Kristoffer let himself into the laundry room at six twenty-two p.m. and back out again at six twenty-five p.m.” Saidani had to push her unruly curls back again. “The next and final activity is via the fire escape on Heibergsgade at eight forty-seven p.m. As we assumed, our perpetrator seems to have run off via Stærekassen and let himself out using Kristoffer’s key card.”

  “You must mean seven forty-seven,” Jeppe objected.

  “No.” Saidani looked at him for a long moment. “The key card was last used at the fire exit at eight forty-seven p.m.”

  “More than an hour after Kristoffer was pushed into the chandelier? What the hell was he doing that whole time?”

  “He was watching.” Anette drank the last of her coffee, wiping the corners of her mouth discreetly with thumb and index finger. “I would hazard that he was sitting in the attic above the chandelier, looking down into the theater to enjoy his work. I can just imagine how tickled he was, taking in a whole audience with a dead body over their heads. Then during intermission, when the stagehands had left the Rope Attic to go on a break, he calmly and quietly traipsed through it and out via the walkway. Bam!”