“Hello, anyone home?” he shouted up at the windows, at least expecting some half-deaf maid to pop her head out, but there was no reaction.
“I’m wondering about those windows,” he said to Assad a few minutes later. “Are you any good at climbing?”
Assad hitched up his trousers. “The only difference between me and a monkey is the banana,” he replied, followed by a hearty laugh.
Carl wasn’t sure he got it.
As it turned out, the job was not without difficulty. “I don’t think it can take my weight,” Assad said, testing the trellis halfway up the wall. It looked like he was having a vertigo attack, the way he was clinging to the ivy.
“Come on, Assad. You’ve only got another meter to go. You don’t want me to climb up there, do you?”
There was a splutter of complaints that might have been interpreted as a “yes,” but then his voice became serious.
“It’s a good thing we googled Teis Snap, Carl, so we know what he looks like,” he called down, clinging to the window frame.
“Why’s that?”
“Because then I can say with certainty that he is the one lying here, stone dead. I suppose one can assume the lady on the bed is his wife.”
37
He stood in between the trees of the windbreak, from where he had a view of most of the estate without being seen himself. The sight that met his eyes was disconcerting indeed.
He had prepared himself for a confrontation with Snap over the Curaçao stocks and had expected it might become violent, which was why he carried a medium-duty hammer in the near-bottomless depths of his coat pocket. It was poorly suited to knocking in nails, but eminently effective against the skimpy armor of a man such as Snap.
“If they can attack me physically, then I can strike back,” René had reasoned, before noticing the sweep of flashing blue lights against the whitewashed wings of the house.
The courtyard in front of the house was a bustle of activity. There were maybe ten vehicles in all, among them two ambulances. It was the ambulances he watched with particular attention, and twice the paramedics carried shrouded bodies from the house. He almost dared not consider whether it was Teis and Lisa on those stretchers, but who else could it be? No one else lived there.
There were also a lot of men milling about, most of them presumably local police, but also some who were not. Police technicians in white smocks, their superiors in plain clothes, and worst of all, Carl Mørck and his Arab assistant. So they were that close to them now. How fortunate that the fool Mørck had brought with him the day before had come back and unwittingly let him know how interested they were. Otherwise, he probably would not have got away in time.
René looked out over the lawn with sheets of paper everywhere. It was a disheartening sight. One sheet with writing on it was caught in the poplar a couple of meters above his head. Typewritten, with a signature at the bottom. How terrible to think that Lisa might have been writing those very words when it happened.
When it happened. He tried to comprehend the true weight of those three words.
Rather, when what happened? Who had done it, and why? Was it the same people who had attacked him and his wife?
He had more or less decided the incident was Snap’s doing, but now he no longer felt so sure.
But who, then?
He had never met Brage-Schmidt, but according to rumor, it was no coincidence the man had amassed a fortune, that he was incredibly dynamic and efficient in all he did. Dynamic and efficient. Again, attributes that could be interpreted in so many different ways.
René closed his eyes and ran the situation through in his mind. Brage-Schmidt was a young man no longer, so obviously he had hired someone to do this, if indeed he was behind it. But what was his motive? Was it the same as what had brought René himself to Karrebæksminde?
He gazed across at the array of people and ambulances that were silently departing toward town. Two minutes ago he had been prepared to stay put until everyone had gone, but now, where he had begun to think more rationally, he realized there was no need.
It was about money. Lots of money. And this was almost definitely no exception.
The figures still milling in the front of the house now spread out in all directions. A couple of officers were slowly coming his way, apparently combing the lawn and surrounding areas. They’re probably looking for footprints, he thought, as he looked back over his shoulder to see his own deep imprints in the earth.
He knew it was lucky he hadn’t got there first, for otherwise he would have left traces all round the house. He retreated warily back along the line of trees and down to the main road, where his car was discreetly parked.
When finally he opened the door and got inside, he felt certain. The bodies on the stretchers had been those of Teis and Lisa, and they had been murdered. Brage-Schmidt had played a crucial role throughout their scam, and René was convinced he still did. Greed knew no bounds. Not in his own case either. If Brage-Schmidt had had these people killed in order to grab the Curaçao stocks, then they almost certainly were in his possession now.
In any case, he was willing to drive the hundred kilometers north to find out.
–
Wrought-iron lanterns, a fountain with no water, rustic latticework in front of all windows. This was how the former consulate for a number of Central African states looked. Grandiloquent and ugly.
René locked the car and buttoned his coat. Of course he could put an old man like Brage-Schmidt in his place, and if not, the hammer lay ready in his pocket. Now it was his turn to demonstrate that he was dynamic and efficient.
The door knocker was stiff on its hinges. He probably doesn’t get that many visitors, he mused, knocking once more and noting that with lights on in so many windows somebody had to be home.
His eyes found a gate in the wooden fence that surrounded the garden with its tall fir trees. Perhaps he could go through there and catch a glimpse into some of the rooms. Then he’d know better whether Brage-Schmidt was home alone.
As a boy he would on rare occasion pluck up the courage to sneak into his neighbors’ gardens on Twelfth Night and blacken their windows with a sooted cork, but that was many years ago. And qualified jurists who had made a career in the civil service did not count the furtive sneaking about in which he now engaged as being among their greatest skills. For that reason, he felt awkward and clumsy as he sprang from shrub to shrub, eyes fixed on the light from the windows that flooded out into the garden.
That must be the living room, he thought, as he tiptoed forward.
It was a room that more than anything reminded him of the myth of Ernest Hemingway, or perhaps just a poor B-movie. Never had he seen as many hunting trophies in one place. Buffalo and antelope, beasts of prey and animals he had rarely even seen pictures of, all mounted in neat rows, glass eyes and glossy pelts side by side with the weapons to which they had succumbed.
He felt disgust as he crept closer. Now he could hear a man’s voice. It had to be Brage-Schmidt’s, with his characteristic compressed rasping voice brusquely barking out sentences that lacked either warmth or patience.
“If you saw him in Østerbro today, heading out of town in a taxi,” the hoarse voice said, “then I suggest you think hard about where he might be now. And when you’ve found out, let me know. If you can’t get hold of me, make sure the Africans are fully informed.”
There was a pause in the conversation. René moved forward. He had not seen Brage-Schmidt before, so his plans might have to change if it turned out the man’s physique still fit the chauvinistic image he’d striven to cultivate with his hideous display of slaughtered animals.