The Tenant

by Katrine Engberg

  “Is that what you’ve achieved?” Anette was not impressed. “We established that long ago. I thought we were here to talk profiles and identify our murderer?!”

  She pulled a chair around to the end of the desk and collapsed into it noisily.

  “We haven’t cracked the code in the five minutes we’ve had to talk,” Mosbæk retorted dryly. “But that’s obviously about to change now that you’re here.”

  “Exactly. That’s what I’m saying!” She couldn’t help but smile wryly. The psychologist wasn’t so bad after all.

  Mosbæk wiggled his brows cheerfully and led the conversation back on track.

  “Let’s just hold the profiles for a minute and work backward instead. Who do you have in sight?”

  “Nyboe and Clausen very much agree that we’re looking at a male killer,” Jeppe replied, giving her a tired look as if she had behaved ungraciously. “The men in Julie’s life naturally include her father, Christian Stender, who actually happened to be in Copenhagen when the murder occurred. But according to his wife, Stender was in their hotel room the whole night. That is backed up by both front desk and room service, who delivered food and wine to the room at eight thirty p.m.”

  Anette protested, “He could still have done it. We can’t be sure he didn’t leave the hotel over the course of the evening.”

  “The motive being?” Jeppe scowled at her. It was unbelievable how short his fuse was these days. “Why would a man who loves his daughter more than anything in the world torture and brutally murder her?”

  “Knock it off! I don’t know yet. Isn’t that why we’re sitting here with Mosbæk?” She gave him a sour look.

  Mosbæk held both hands up like a divorce mediator. “Okay, I get it, the father can’t be ruled out. Let’s let that sit. Who else are you looking at?”

  “Daniel. An old friend of Julie’s from Sørvad and her roommate’s boyfriend.” Jeppe hardly opened his mouth as he spoke. He looked tired. Tired and grumpy. Anette was reaching her limit with this ill temper of his. “Again, no motive. Plus he was at the Student Café while the murder was being committed and so has a solid alibi.”

  “Who else?” Mosbæk clicked his pen impatiently.

  “Erik Kingo had access to the manuscript.” Jeppe rubbed his eyes as he spoke.

  “Kingo? The author?” Mosbæk sounded impressed.

  “The very same. But aside from being associated with Esther de Laurenti and attending a dinner party where Julie was a server, we can’t tie him to either Julie or Kristoffer.”

  “Maybe because we don’t know enough about him yet,” Anette interjected.

  “The man has a solid alibi for Tuesday, so he’s not under consideration as the killer.” Jeppe gave the desk a gentle slap to put the kibosh on any further comments from her. She crossed her arms over her chest. Being muzzled was not her favorite thing.

  Mosbæk formed a point in his beard with one hand and rested the other on his stomach in a classic pose of contemplation.

  “In any case, what’s crucial here is to tie the main motive with the crime and ask who could have been the target of the killer’s revenge. The obvious answer would be Julie Stender. Did any of the men mentioned feel the need to take revenge on her?”

  “I can’t really imagine anyone needing to revenge himself on such a young woman.” Anette raised her chin in defiance of Jeppe’s glare. She refused to shut up. “Aside from Kristoffer the only person we know she’s hurt is the school teacher she had an affair with, Hjalti Patursson. Apparently he was crushed by the breakup and the abortion. But then he would have had more reason to retaliate against Christian Stender. Besides, he’s dead.”

  “Maybe”—Mosbæk looked from the one to the other, in an attempt to gather the troops—“that’s exactly the direction we should be looking in. What if someone wanted to get even with Christian Stender by killing the apple of his eye? Is that plausible?”

  “Right now it’s probably the best we’ve got.” Anette tentatively tilted her head to the left, until her neck made a loud popping sound. “I just talked to the chief of police in Tórshavn, the capital of the Faeroe Islands. He clearly remembered Hjalti Patursson’s fall from the Sumba cliffs in August of last year. The police had to close the case as a suicide because they didn’t have anything else to go on, but the chief wasn’t convinced. He thought there were things that didn’t line up with suicide.”

  That got Jeppe’s attention. “Like what?”

  “No suicide note, first of all. According to his mother, Hjalti wasn’t depressed anymore. To the contrary, he was absorbed with a project and engaged in some kind of important correspondence. The chief couldn’t remember what it had been about. But the mother categorically denied that her son would have taken his own life. Plus, he had just set up for a picnic.”

  “A picnic?”

  Anette could hear the piqued interest in her partner’s voice. She smiled at him.

  “Before he jumped. It’s pretty freaking weird to lay out a nice lunch, take your boots off and then jump into the ocean!”

  “Have you gotten hold of the mother?” Jeppe asked, sitting up in his chair.

  “She’s an elderly lady who doesn’t have a phone or internet service. I don’t know if she even speaks Danish. Everything seems pretty old-school up there in the Faeroe Islands. The police, for instance, suggested that I send them a fax!”

  Jeppe nodded.

  “You’ve got to stick with this,” he said, pointing his finger at her. “Go see the superintendent about a plane ticket. You can fly out tomorrow morning and return in the afternoon. We’ll just have to get by without you for the day.”

  She gave him the thumbs-up. It was nice to see a spark of life in his eyes again. Mosbæk nodded appreciatively, as if his primary goal in being here was to get the two detectives to make peace with each other.

  A knock on the door interrupted the harmony. Falck stuck his head in.

  “Excuse me, but NCTC found something in Kristoffer’s apartment. A pink blouse hidden in the bottom of a closet. Bloody. Possibly what the perpetrator used to stuff in Julie Stender’s mouth. They’re examining it now and will bring it by later in the afternoon.”

  The office fell quiet. All the newfound energy almost palpably seeped out of the place, like the air from a punctured beach ball.

  “Okay. Thanks, Falck.”

  They sat in silence for a long moment after Falck had gone. Anette didn’t know what to say. This business of being sent back to square one was beginning to wear them all out.

  Jeppe got up and walked over to the board with the pictures of suspects.

  “We have a problem,” he announced.

  “Yeah, that much is clear,” she confirmed, shaking her head. “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “The clues we found at the crime scenes point in a thousand different directions. The wrong directions. It’s like being on the wrong side of the mirror.”

  Mosbæk knit his brows, puzzled, and looked from the one to the other.

  Jeppe turned and spoke directly to Anette. A hint of color had returned to his cheeks. “If the clues aren’t real, then they were planted, and if they were planted, then we’re dealing with a killer of the mischievous kind.”

  “And,” she answered, maintaining eye contact, “we’re dealing with a killer who gains access to the crime scene and moves the tape dispenser used to kill Julie Stender up to Esther de Laurenti’s desk.”

  Once more the office fell quiet aside from a slight rustle made by Mosbæk, uneasily flipping through his papers.

  “That takes some real guts,” Jeppe said. “Not to mention arrogance. He’s not afraid of us, Anette. Not the least bit afraid.”

  She nodded. Finally, they were on the same wavelength.

  They walked Mosbæk down the staircase and let him out the door onto Otto Mønsteds Gade. In the late-afternoon sun, his beard glowed red like a Viking’s. After they shook hands, he cleared his throat.

  “By the way,
the killer used the expression nightmare factory in his online text. Does that mean anything to you guys?”

  “Not anything specific, no,” Anette said.

  “It might mean a number of things,” Mosbæk said, smacking his lips pensively, “but I have come across the expression in one specific context before. Children who grow up in orphanages and institutions sometimes refer to those homes as a nightmare factory.”

  “A killer who’s grown up in an orphanage?” Anette couldn’t help curling her lip at the word.

  “Maybe.”

  “An orphan, who grows up to become a knife murderer? Tell me, are we in the middle of some fucking crime novel, or what?”

  “I don’t know, Werner. Is that what we are?”

  CHAPTER 22

  Gallery Kingo was so understated that Jeppe walked past it twice before discovering it, hidden behind an anonymous glass facade. Inside, white walls shone bare in the afternoon sun and the place appeared empty. He checked his notes. Bredgade 19, he was in the right place. The car was parked illegally in front of a shop with Danish design classics. There had to be some small perks to police work.

  When Erik Kingo had finally answered his phone, he explained that he was on his way to the gallery to supervise a coming exhibit. If Jeppe wanted to spend more of the taxpayers’ money talking to him he would have to drag his precious self down to Bredgade. Anette had to prepare for her trip to the Faeroe Islands the next day, so Jeppe was standing in front of the immaculately clean windows by himself. Getting his chic on, as his deceased father always used to say whenever they were in this posh area around Kongens Nytorv.

  The door opened without triggering any audible bell. Jeppe walked into the empty room, uncomfortably aware of the sound of his own footsteps. Why does silence instinctively make us tiptoe?

  The large space was divided into two stories, which continued around whitewashed corners, down stairs, and off into twilight. Jeppe perked up his ears and walked toward a distant murmur of voices coming from a lower level, past a collection of flat wooden cases, and down a staircase. The steps ended in a room from which bright light was streaming. The voices grew louder with every step.

  In a simply furnished basement office, Erik Kingo was standing with a younger man looking at two framed pictures leaned against the desk. Both men were dressed in skintight black denim—a surprise to Jeppe, considering Kingo’s age. The young man looked at Jeppe distractedly.

  “Is that the police officer?”

  Clearly he was asking Kingo, not himself. Kingo tore his eyes away from the pictures.

  “Ah, hi. We’re just sorting some new Raben Davidsen monotypes that we’re going to hang. Come take a look.”

  Jeppe walked over and directed his attention to the pictures. Renaissance faces against a dark background. He didn’t know how to comment, so he just looked at the pictures quietly for a suitable number of seconds.

  “Could we speak privately?” Jeppe’s voice echoed in the basement.

  “Munir, go fetch us some coffee, please. Then the policeman can ask his private questions while you’re gone.” Kingo spoke with a certain slowness, not outright hostility, just a sign that he was preoccupied with something more important than Jeppe.

  The assistant grabbed his jacket and headed out of the room with a look of annoyance, signaling that the interruption was not only unwelcome but unacceptable. When the sound of his footsteps had faded away, Kingo took a seat behind the desk and Jeppe pulled out his notebook.

  “Shortly before midnight last night, some text was added to your writing group’s folder. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Oh, the writers’ group again. I should never have joined it, I knew it was going to be a hassle.” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “And no, I don’t know anything about any text being added. As I said, I don’t go online when I’m at the cabin, working. Honestly, given the murder case, I’m surprised that there’s any activity.”

  “We’re surprised as well. Especially because the person who posted the new material was logged in as you.”

  Erik Kingo got up and started searching for something on a shelf behind him, but Jeppe saw the glimpse of shock in his eyes. When he turned around with a pair of glasses in his hand he looked calm and indifferent again.

  “Ah, there they were! I can hardly see the darn screen without them. But there must be some kind of mistake. I didn’t log on at all last night. You’re welcome to check if that’s…” He put on his glasses and shook the mouse back and forth to wake up the computer on his desk.

  “Thank you, that would be good. The login was made with your username and password, but from a different IP address than yours. We’re looking into that, of course. Could anyone know your username and access code? I understood that you were very careful with the security for the group?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, adjusting his glasses and glancing at the screen. “I definitely didn’t give it out to just anyone. Neither my agent nor my editors know it. My personal assistant, of course, does closely follow all my papers and emails.”

  “The one who just went to get coffee?”

  “Munir, yes. But he just started with me recently, so I can’t see—”

  “That’s fine.” Jeppe raised his hand to stop him. “I’ll wait and ask when he comes back.”

  “Okay. Now let me see… There it is, the text.” He read for a moment. “Well, yes. I can certainly understand why you want to know where that came from.”

  Kingo’s eyes looked small behind his glasses. Jeppe watched him as he read on. He looked dissatisfied, maybe from being disturbed by the police, maybe from something graver than that. He hit the keys aggressively and Jeppe noticed the ring, gleaming in the bright light of the office.

  “Lodge brother?”

  Kingo gave him a puzzled look.

  “The ring,” Jeppe explained. “I’ve seen it before. What does it mean?”

  Kingo took off the glasses and threw them casually on the table.

  “We’re a group of friends who all wear it. I suppose you could call it a kind of lodge, if you want, although it doesn’t have anything to do with the Freemasons or that sort of nonsense.”

  “Is Christian Stender a member of that lodge? I understand that you two know each other.” Jeppe tried to interpret Kingo’s expression. At the moment he actually looked as if he were enjoying himself.

  “And a handful of other influential men, yes.”

  “Why haven’t you told us that you two knew each other?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  Now he was really smiling. Jeppe swallowed his mounting annoyance and returned the smile icily.

  “You don’t think it’s relevant information that you and the victim’s father are friends?”

  He folded his hands over his stomach in a gesture so relaxed as to be provocative.

  “It has to be up to you,” Kingo began, “to decide which information is relevant to your investigation. The rest of us can’t really be expected to keep track of that.”

  “Perhaps you also knew the victim better than you’ve previously let on? Your good friend’s daughter?”

  “Well, I suppose that depends on what you mean by knew,” Kingo said, shrugging his shoulders. “I mean, I’ve met her a few times.”

  “And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning to us, either?” Jeppe glanced down at his notes and saw that he had written LIAR? at the bottom of the page.

  “I can’t see how it matters that I know the Stender family. A terrible murder has been committed, and as far as I know, the job of the police is to find suspects and check their alibis. You’ve checked mine and found it to be watertight.” He rubbed his ring as he spoke. It looked like a habit. “Beyond that, my private connections are surely irrelevant to the case, unless they can lead to new suspects. And surely the fact that I’ve met Stender’s daughter a handful of times at various get-togethers can’t do that?”

  “You must have spoken with her at Esther de Laur
enti’s dinner last spring?”

  “As I said, I was too busy having real conversations that night to talk to the staff. But I did say hello to her, as I told you the last time—”

  “No, you didn’t.” Jeppe met Kingo’s dark stare. “Is there any other unimportant information about the deceased and her family that you’re withholding? If so, I think we ought to take a trip down to the station and get that all squared away via formal questioning.”

  Erik Kingo threw his head back and laughed out loud.

  “Oh, I do so love talks like this,” he said. “A straight-up pissing contest to mark out territory. Undiluted testosterone!”

  The breathless assistant trampled down the stairs with two steaming coffees, sloshing ominously. Kingo rose.

  “Now, Munir and I need to get back to preparing for this exhibit. We’re actually rather busy. You’ll have to let me know if I need to come into the station so you can rifle through my memory. As long as it can wait a couple of hours so we can get this exhibition sorted first. You wanted to ask Munir something, didn’t you? I’ll make a call to London while you do. Thanks for stopping by.”

  Kingo disappeared around the corner into what must have been an adjacent room that wasn’t visible from the office itself. Jeppe felt like slapping handcuffs on the man and tossing him into custody right away, if for no other reason than obstructing justice with his arrogance. Instead, he questioned Munir, who responded peevishly and with his arms crossed that he didn’t know anything about any writing club and had no knowledge whatsoever about usernames or passwords of any kind.

  Yet another dead end. Jeppe left the gallery with a hollow feeling of discouragement. Before he started the car, he checked his phone and saw that Johannes had written again.

  Assuming you’re coming! It’s at 7:00 p.m. J

  He had forgotten to back out of the birthday party. Now he was forced to go; if he was to avoid falling out with Johannes, who did not look favorably on being stood up, Jeppe had no other choice than to iron a shirt and stick a smile on his face.