The past. Had it really come to that? Had his passivity in the wake of Lisbeth’s phone call and the wreckage of his relationship to Mona, with whom he’d been together for a number of years, now been consigned to the file marked THE PAST? He wasn’t sure he approved of the idea.
He picked up the two notes and for a moment considered crumpling them up and lobbing them into the waste-paper basket with a well-aimed overhand toss.
It was sure as hell no easy decision.
“It’s come, Carl,” said Rose, suddenly materializing in front of him.
“What’s come?” He looked at her without much enthusiasm. It had been a rough week in which nothing had gone right. And now something had arrived that most probably wasn’t good.
“The presumption-of-death verdict in the William Stark case. They’ve accepted the circumstantial evidence, so despite no body being found yet, they’ve decided to terminate Stark’s life on the basis of DNA samples.”
Carl nodded and put both slips of paper in his breast pocket. In a way, it was good news. At least the probate court could now begin to get the estate sorted.
This is great for Tilde and Malene, he thought, once he was alone again.
He took a look at TV2’s news channel where the reports on the tremendous monsoon-like downpour on this second day of July described a near-catastrophic scenario. Had it not been for the unfortunate fact that sewers everywhere were so hopelessly overburdened that at this moment shit was literally erupting from drains in hundreds of basements, including their own toilets at the end of the corridor, he would have been delighted by some of the consequences.
As if by an act of divine retribution, Pusher Street was completely flooded and laid to waste. The makeshift stalls were deserted, and not a single gram of hash was to be seen. Turnover must have dropped by millions of kroner in a matter of hours. Easy come, easy go. And the water had inundated Istedgade, too, closing down basement massage parlors and leaving the whores and pimps totally idle.
Sodom and Gomorrah had got what was coming to them.
“Jesus, what a stench down here,” Laursen said as he poked his head into Carl’s office. “How about coming upstairs and getting the smell of fresh-baked bread in your nostrils instead? Not everyone has left yet. Hell of a cozy place for a birthday party when all you’ve got is a one-and-a-half-room apartment.”
He chuckled and plonked his increasingly expansive backside onto the chair opposite Carl. “Anyway, listen. I haven’t had time to tell you this yet, what with that pork to roast and all,” he said. “Word came in today about that unidentified body from the fire up in Rungsted. You think you’re ready for this?”
“Go on.”
“They found out who made the dentures Assad fished out of the mouth of the corpse.”
“Yeah? Who was it, then?”
“One Torben Jørgensen, a dental technician up in north Zealand. They belonged to René E. Eriksen, just as you guys assumed.”
“Course they did,” Carl groused. “We said we recognized them, so they could have saved themselves the bother.”
“Yes, possibly. The only thing is, the DNA analysis of bone marrow from the corpse shows that the bloke wearing the dentures wasn’t of Caucasian descent. Turns out he was Negroid.”
Carl frowned.
“Assad and Rose! In here, please!” he hollered.
Both he and Laursen were a bit shaken at the sight of Rose as she appeared in the doorway with the pinkest hair this side of a luxury retirement home in Florida.
“Hey, Laursen, whassup?” said Assad, still with his trousers rolled up above his knees after a go on the prayer mat.
“The corpse with Eriksen’s teeth in its mouth was that of a black man,” Carl stated. “How about that!”
Assad’s eyebrows did a little somersault. “What?”
“The dentures were Eriksen’s,” Carl went on. “Forensics located the mold at a dental technician’s up in north Zealand.”
Assad flopped down on a chair.
“But this means Eriksen ran off and got away with everything,” he said dully.
Carl nodded. This conclusion had dawned on him, too. What a crock of shit.
“I reckon we can now assume we know who killed Brage-Schmidt and our unidentified black man,” he said. “And if he could do that, then most likely he’s also our perp in the murders of Teis Snap and his wife, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes,” Assad added. “Not to mention all the others.”
Rose bobbed up her new hairdo. As if they hadn’t already noticed it.
“Listen to you, talking out of a certain part of your posteriors. Can’t we agree that in reality we know fuck all? These are all just assumptions so that at least we can talk ourselves into believing we’ve got just a little bit of all this sorted. When it comes to assumptions, I couldn’t care less.”
Carl made a mental note to remind her of this last little statement when the time came. It would surely be only a question of days.
“One more thing,” said Laursen. “You probably already know, if you’ve checked your emails. They found Eriksen’s car. It’s standing, covered in dust, in a side street in Palermo.”
“Palermo?” Carl spluttered. “That’s effing Sicily!”
Laursen nodded.
“Yeah, looks like he just took off in his old car and managed to drive all the way through Europe without getting stopped.”
“Hurrah for the Schengen open-border agreement,” Rose grumbled.
“Yeah, it’s a bit of a trek,” said Carl. “But you’ve got to admit Palermo sounds like the perfect place for someone needing a new ID and maybe a new appearance.”
“Interpol is already on the case, so I’ve heard,” said Laursen.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Carl replied with a sigh. “And Interpol covers a hundred and ninety countries, so there just might be a chance he’s decided to go somewhere else, don’t you think?”
Assad shook his head. “You never know, Carl. It’s not for sure.”
“True, but as far as I can see we’re never going to find out where René E. Eriksen, or whatever he’s calling himself now, has gone into hiding. And with all that money he apparently took with him, I’d say we’re never going to find him. That’s been my experience in these kinds of situations. End of story.”
–
The windshield wipers were going flat out as Carl approached the motorway. He’d already seen several vehicles abandoned in the deluge.
Only a lunatic would want to chance a thirty-kilometer trip in weather like this. If only he had somewhere to crash until morning.
Then he remembered the notes in his pocket. If he turned left, it’d be to Lisbeth. If he took a right, he’d be headed for Mona.
He smiled fleetingly at the thought, then the smile was gone.
What the hell made him think that these two women, who more than likely already had a new rooster in the barnyard, would want anything to do with him?
And with that, he took the notes from his pocket, rolled down the side window and cast them to the wind. See if he cared!
After an hour and a quarter, a Venetian version of Rønneholtparken loomed in front of him.
Christ! he thought. There wouldn’t be many cars able to start in the morning without the help of a hair drier, his own included.
“Is the basement OK?” was the first thing he called out, as he stepped through the front door.
No answer. So most probably it was all a mess.
He glanced into the living room, finding the place unusually dark. Had they left Hardy alone with no lights on? What the hell were they playing at?
“Hardy?” he ventured quietly, so as not to give him a fright, and at the same moment all the lights went on.
“Ta-daaah!” howled Mika and Morten, and Carl nearly jumped out of his skin.
They stepped aside to reveal Hardy sitting upright in a colossal high-tech wheelchair equipped with all manner of joysticks and whatnots in front of his face.