“Anyway, I was going to ask you the same thing, Hardy. What’s up with you? Something’s happened, I can tell.”
Hardy smiled. “OK. Well, in that case maybe you can also make a swift assessment and tell me what you reckon, Mr. Detective, though it may not be that obvious at the moment. Let’s just call it a party game, shall we?”
Carl took a sip of his wine and scrutinized Hardy’s long frame. Six feet, nine and half inches of ill fate under a duvet cover as white as only a home-health-care nurse could procure. The shape of his immobile size 141/2 feet and bony legs that had once been so muscular. A torso that in days gone by could press anyone resisting arrest into submission. Arms as thin as spaghetti that were once more than a match for the flailing haymakers of weekend drunks. Yes, this was but the shadow of a whole person lying before him. The lines of his face, etched by endless days and nights of grief and worry, were ample evidence.
“Have you had your hair cut?” he asked idiotically. He couldn’t see anything at all out of the ordinary.
A cry of hilarity went up from the kitchen. Morten never missed a thing.
“Mika!” shouted Morten. “Come upstairs a minute and give our detective here a clue, would you?”
Ten seconds later and Mika was up the stairs from the basement.
He was decently dressed this evening. There were days, even when the frost lay thick on the bike shed outside, when Morten’s muscle-bound physiotherapist had no qualms about going around in outfits more appropriate to a gay beach in San Francisco. Unlike Morten, he had the body for ridiculously tight trousers and T-shirts, but still. If any of Carl’s colleagues or his soon-to-be boss, Lars Bjørn, happened to stop by unannounced they’d never be able to look Carl in the eye again.
Mika nodded briefly to Carl. “OK, Hardy. Let’s show Carl how far we’ve gotten.”
He pushed Carl gently aside, then pressed a pair of fingers into Hardy’s shoulder muscle. “Concentrate now, Hardy. Concentrate on the pressure I’m exerting and focus. Come on!”
Hardy’s lips curled, his gaze seemed to turn inward, as though he were in pain. His nostrils flared. And thus he lay for a minute, perhaps two, before a smile appeared.
“It’s coming now,” he said, his voice stifled.
Carl’s eyes darted over the figure of his friend. What the hell was he supposed to be seeing?
“Blind as a bat,” said Morten.
“Who? Me?”
And then he realized what they were talking about.
It was as if a light breeze ruffled the cover of the bed, about halfway down. Carl looked back over his shoulder, but the patio door and the kitchen window were both shut, so it couldn’t be a draught. He reached out and pulled the cover aside and understood immediately what it was they were all so eager to show him.
Inevitably, his astonishment was accompanied by a mournful flight back in time to the moment when Anker was killed and Hardy was hit by the bullet that paralyzed him. The moment when he felt Hardy’s towering frame come tumbling down on top of him. Then to the days of Hardy begging to be liberated from the torment his life had become. And finally back to the present, where Hardy’s left thumb was moving, if only slightly. Four years of Carl’s despair and shame tossed away by the flutter of a couple of finger joints.
If he had not felt so oppressed and annoyed by the day’s events he could have burst into tears of joy. Instead, he merely sat there as though turned to stone, trying to comprehend the significance of these almost imperceptible body movements. They were like beeps from a display measuring a heart rate. Tiny movements that represented the difference between life and death.
“Look, Carl,” said Hardy softly, accompanying each movement with a sound.
“Dit, dit, dit, dah, dah, dah, dit, dit, dit,” he said.
Fucking hell, this was amazing. Carl pressed his lips tight. If he didn’t hold back he was going to start crying like mad. But he simply didn’t have the energy at the moment. He swallowed a couple of times until the lump in his throat receded.
The two men looked at each other for a while, both clearly emotional. Neither of them had ever believed things would progress this far.
Carl collected himself.
“Hardy, for Chrissake. You Morsed the SOS signal with your finger. You did, didn’t you? You Morsed, you big daft bugger!”
Hardy nodded, his chin colliding with his chest, exalted as a boy who had just overcome his reluctance and yanked out a loose baby tooth.
“It’s the only Morse code I know, Carl. If I could…” He pressed his lips together and stared up at the ceiling. This was a momentous occasion for him. “… I would have Morsed a great… hurrah!”
Carl reached out and ran his hand gently over his friend’s forehead. “This is the best news of the day. Of the year, for that matter,” he said. “You’ve got your thumb back, Hardy. Just what you wanted.”
Mika gave a grunt of satisfaction. “There’ll be more fingers yet, just you wait and see, Carl. Hardy’s so good to work with, there’s none better.”
With that he planted a kiss on Morten’s lips and disappeared off to the bathroom.
“What happened, actually?” Carl asked.
“I can feel things if I try hard enough.” Hardy closed his eyes. There was so much he had to think about now. “Mika has made me able to sense that my body isn’t completely dead, Carl. If I work at it hard enough, I might learn to use a computer again. Maybe move a joystick with my finger. Perhaps even operate an electric wheelchair without needing helpers around me.”
Carl smiled cautiously. It all sounded so promising and yet a little too improbable.
“What’s this on the floor?” came Morten’s inquisitive voice from the kitchen. “A silk pouch! Is this yours, Carl?”
He turned to his boyfriend, who was nonchalantly doing up his trousers. “Have you seen this, Mika? I do believe romance is in the air in our humble abode.” They gazed lovingly at each other and hugged with less inhibition than was warranted.
“Can we have a look?” they asked in unison, looking like they weren’t going to wait for an answer.
Carl got to his feet and prized the pouch carefully from his lodger’s peach-soft hand.
“You lot keep your mouths shut about this if Mona calls, yeah?” he said.
“Oooh, a surprise! A super-lovely romantic surprise! And you’re quite sure she hasn’t caught on?”
Morten had become ecstatic. Inside, he was most likely already thinking about the get-up he could wear that would best match the bride.
“Absolutely positively not.” Carl smiled. Their enthusiasm was catching.
“Hey-ay, Mona! Ooo-ooo, Mona! Tell you, Mona, what I wanna do…!” they inevitably began singing. In falsetto.
They didn’t need to be that enthusiastic.
Dinnertime was all about Hardy. Only a single sour note served to dampen the euphoria.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Morten, his face a perspiring moon lit up by smiles, announced that from now on he and Mika would be pooling their resources. Morten’s Playmobil collection had been packed away for online auction and, as everyone could see, Mika had already moved in. Carl considered wearily that by rights such vital matters might be discussed beforehand, but what good would it do to mention it now? Aside from the fact that Jesper now preferred crashing at his girlfriend’s to sleeping at home, the domestic population had thereby gone up by twenty-five percent. And now Mika was sorting out his and Morten’s wardrobes in the basement, so their acute shortage of space could be ameliorated by donations to the town’s Red Cross shops.
No doubt he’d be keeping his pink sweater.
–
Rose was in a phase of hers that involved dressing from head to toe in black, albeit with the exception of an off-yellow scarf. For a time, the department would be treated to knee-length, black laced boots, tight cut-off pants, angular black eyebrows, and more metal stuck in her ears than there was in a medium-sized office stapler. It might have been all right for a punk gig back in the seventies, but it wasn’t exactly the most appropriate outfit when knocking on doors in a murder investigation.