Now you’ve got to find a place in the city to hide out where they won’t find you, and where you can keep an eye on them all, he told himself. Once he had found the place he would have to wait and see what happened before trying to retrieve his money from Kaj and Eivind.
Reaching the junction of Jagtvej and Åboulevard, he paused to consider his options, none of which were without peril. The issue was where he could best keep an eye on them in relative safety. Østerbro or the city center?
He stood for a moment straddling the bike and then made his decision. At four o’clock Miryam and the others would be picked up by the van at Rådhuspladsen. If he kept his distance he would be able to see who had been sent out to steal and who’d been sent out searching for him.
At Rådhuspladsen he looked around the square for a place to leave the unlocked bike without the risk of someone taking off with it. It was a tall order, considering this was perhaps the busiest place in all of Denmark.
And then, right next to the Tivoli Gardens, an enormous renovation project loomed up in front of him. He had seen it countless times before without ever properly having registered what it was.
Not until now.
His housing problem was solved.
18
Carl had been feeling lousy all weekend. Mika and Morten had thrown a party Saturday evening, partly to celebrate their publicly confirmed cohabitation, partly to blow a portion of the outrageous sum of money Morten’s Playmobil collection had fetched on eBay.
“He got sixty-two grand!” Jesper had exclaimed at least a dozen times, while they busied themselves putting little umbrellas into cocktail glasses. He was already wondering if he could make an earner out of his retired Action Men in the attic.
Sixty-two grand. Christ on a bike!
It was for this reason that the wine and beer, not to mention the contents of a large number of glitzy-looking bottles of spirits, flowed more copiously than Carl could remember ever having occurred at his end of Rønneholtparken. By ten o’clock the neighbors from number 56 were definitively down for the count, and the only ones besides Carl who kept afloat until after midnight were Morten and Mika and a pair of their rat-arsed, dance-crazed gay friends.
Finally, when Carl was dragged to his feet to dance for the umpteenth time by a forty-year-old bloke in tight trousers and a leather hat coquettishly angled on his head, he staggered resolutely past a ruddy-faced, heavily sleeping Hardy and made for his bed.
The host couple were engaged in a slow and intimate dance at the foot of the stairs.
“Damn shame about Mona,” Mika slurred, giving him a pat on the shoulder.
“Yeah,” Morten added. “We’re gonna miss her.”
How many times had he ever even seen her? Twice?
Were they expecting him to thank them for cheering him up?
–
He awoke on Sunday with a taste in his mouth like dead rodent. His head was ablaze with both a hangover and qualms of conscience, but worse than that was a more than latent feeling of being at odds with himself.
“Goddammit, you’re not going to lie here feeling sorry for yourself, Carl Mørck,” he growled to himself, though to little avail. The more his head pounded, the more certain he became that people such as Lars Bjørn and especially Mona Ibsen had to be direct descendants of Tycho Brahe or others who always brought only bad luck.
A couple of hours passed during which he lay packed inside his duvet, shivering and sweating in turn, now full of wrath, now meek as a mouse.
You’re not going to get over this until you speak to her, he told himself over and over again. But his mobile remained untouched as those downstairs began to stir, then spill outdoors into the blessings of the month of May.
And then he fell asleep again, staying in his bed until another Monday morning threatened.
–
“Assad,” he yelled. “Get in here a minute, will you?”
No reaction.
Was he splayed out on that prayer mat again with his head turned to Mecca? Carl looked at his watch. No, he couldn’t be, not yet.
“ASSAD!” he tried again, at full volume.
“He’s not come back yet. Don’t you listen to anything, or has that hangover of yours made you deaf?”
Carl looked up at Rose, who stood in the doorway scratching the last of the peeling skin off her nose. “Back? From where?”
“Stark’s bank.”
“What the hell’s he doing there?”
“He’s been in touch with the probate court, too, and the tax authorities.”
Why the hell couldn’t she ever just answer a question? Was it a rule now that he had to drag every little piece of information out of her?
“What are you two up to this time? You’re hiding something from me, Rose, I can tell.”
She gave a shrug. “I’ve been on the phone with Malene Kristoffersen. As luck would have it, she and her daughter just got home from a vacation in Turkey a couple of days ago.”
“OK. Can you get her in here, do you think?”
“I reckon so. Sometime tomorrow, maybe.”
Carl shook his head. “Hallelujah. Not exactly keen, then, or what?”
“Sure she is. She could have been here in a couple of hours, but Tilde’s at the hospital all day for a check-up, so I thought we should give them a bit of breathing space till tomorrow.”
“All right, then. But what’s it got to do with what you and Assad are up to?”
“You’ll find out when he gets back.”
He turned up five minutes later, his hair looking like an explosion in a mattress factory, a sure indicator of his level of activity.
“Carl,” he began, breathlessly. “After Rose and I spoke to Stark’s girlfriend, she and I both felt something was not quite right.”
Really? Why wasn’t Carl surprised?
“Rose said Stark had helped her daughter, Tilde, with some very expensive treatment over the course of about five years before he disappeared. In fact, he spent a lot more money on it than he had.”
“But there was Stark’s inheritance, remember?”
“Yes, Carl. But that was not until 2008, the year he went missing. This was a hundred years before, as far back as 2003. At the bank we could see he spent nearly two million kroner more than he had saved up. At first I thought he must have borrowed the money and paid back the loan with the money he inherited, but not so.”
His curly-haired assistant’s eyes narrowed the way they did only when a new meaty case tickled his fancy. Carl gave a sigh. What a way to start the week.
“OK, so tell me about Tilde’s treatment and this money, Rose.”
She unfurled her tightly folded arms, the prelude to what was bound to be a longer briefing than necessary.
“Tilde suffers from a nasty inflammatory disease of the bowel called Crohn’s disease. It means her intestines are in a chronic state of infection. Malene explained to me that William Stark took an enormous interest in her illness and spent loads of money on alternative treatment when the usual methods like surgical removal of infected sections of the bowel or cortisone treatments didn’t have the intended effect.”
“Thanks, but you’re avoiding the question, Rose. Where does the two million enter into it, and how? It’s a lot of money, I’d say, even for medical treatment.”
“Malene told me Stark was obsessed with finding the ultimate treatment for the disease, even though it can’t be cured. Tilde’s been treated at private clinics in Copenhagen and in Jacksonville, Florida. On top of that she’s had homeopathy in Germany and acupuncture in China. He even paid to have her infected by living parasites from the intestines of pigs. Everything imaginable to the tune of two million kroner, according to Malene’s estimate, over the five or six years they were together before Stark went missing.”
“Two million. If she’s telling the truth, which we don’t know.”