Last Train to Helsingør

by Heidi Amsinck

  She gave back the ID card and noticed that Torben Larsen hadn’t yet picked any chanterelles but instead filled two tiny specimen containers with moss and sand.

  ‘Perhaps it’s easier if you look at the map,’ he said, handing her the clipboard. ‘It’s local people like you who make all the difference. No amount of years in a laboratory could replace what you know.’

  Gudrun thought of what the vicar had said earlier. Was this the sort of stranger he had had in mind?

  ‘Are you fond of chanterelles?’ she managed to stutter.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘My parents used to take me hunting for them. That’s what kicked all this off.’

  ‘All this?’ said Gudrun.

  ‘I’m trying to pinpoint the conditions in which chanterelles thrive. The exact type of soil they need, the required species of surrounding vegetation and so on. The more sites like this that I am able to study, the more I will know.’

  She squinted at him. Torben Larsen had his back to the sunlight. It made his protruding ears look a luminous red, almost transparent.

  ‘You used the word “exact”,’ she said. ‘Of course, you must already know that there is no such thing as exact when it comes to chanterelles. They are free-spirited little things.’

  ‘Fantastic.’ He rushed over to the rucksack and retrieved a notebook. ‘The way you just put that.’ He repeated it to himself as he wrote: ‘Free-spirited little things.’

  Gudrun meanwhile looked at the map, easily picking out the main road and the neat grid of tracks on either side of it. Torben Larsen came back and passed her the pencil. ‘You can outline the patches with this, if you like.’

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘No maps. Nothing must ever be committed to paper.’

  ‘Right you are,’ Torben Larsen said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘Good point, um …’

  ‘Gudrun Holm.’

  ‘Good point, Mrs Holm. You never know what hands such information might fall into.’

  She looked up at him. ‘Precisely, and it’s Miss Holm,’ she said, before making a momentous decision.

  She took a deep breath. ‘But I could point them out to you, if you like?’

  For a moment, she considered confiding in him that she was dying, but something stopped her, something that had been niggling away at the back of her mind, a question.

  ‘Before I do,’ she said. ‘Tell me, why do you need to know so much?’

  Torben Larsen looked sheepish and excited at the same time. He lowered his voice. ‘I wasn’t going to say anything, but I think I can trust you. One secret deserves another, right?’

  ‘Trust me with what?’ Gudrun said, narrowing her eyes.

  He held up his thumb and index finger, a centimetre apart. ‘I’m about this close to a huge breakthrough, Miss Holm, something that has eluded scientists for years.’

  He bent down and carefully picked a chanterelle.

  ‘Soon,’ he said. ‘Beauties like this will be cultivated in greenhouses and polytunnels all over the world, thanks to what I’ve discovered.’

  The clipboard became butter in Gudrun’s hands, sliding out of her grip and landing on a heap of pinecones. Her nausea returned. She waved her hands helplessly in front of her chest.

  ‘They will be on the menu of every restaurant and on everybody’s lips. They will conquer the world,’ Torben Larsen said, blind to her distress.

  Gudrun found her voice. It was whinging and weak. ‘But it’s impossible,’ she said. ‘People have tried, of course, but chanterelles are too fussy. It will never take off.’

  ‘Oh yes it will. I’m almost certain I have found a way to mimic the symbiotic relationship between these fungi and tree roots under laboratory conditions,’ Torben Larsen said, his eyes shining with a strange, brilliant light.

  He slapped Gudrun’s back, almost causing her to fall forward. She gasped for air, hands on her knees, swallowing bile.

  ‘I’m talking about mass production, Miss Holm, a brand new reliable food source. You will not need to pick these mushrooms ever again. You will be able to buy them in your local supermarket – fresh, tinned, frozen, freeze-dried, you name it. Isn’t it great?’

  He laughed, mistaking her horror for amazement, her disgust for mock disbelief.

  ‘Stop,’ she said, pressing her hands to her ears. ‘In God’s name, stop.’

  She looked wildly around the clearing. It had started to spin before her eyes, like a gold and green wheel. But Torben Larsen kept on laughing as though he had said the funniest thing.

  His mouth was full of dark fillings, she saw now, and his nails were bitten right down to the peeling, bleeding skin. There were nicotine stains on the fingers of his right hand.

  Her beautiful chanterelles. Torben Larsen would take them and rob them of their rarity, the very thing that made them special. The secret of the Holms would be of less consequence than a gull’s feather in a North Sea storm.

  A purple dusk fell over her eyes. She gripped the mushroom knife in her pocket so tightly that it felt as though her veins would burst.

  ‘You stupid, stupid man!’ she screamed.

  Torben Larsen fell heavily, still with a self-congratulatory smile on his lips. He clutched his anorak and looked down in surprise at the beetroot stain spreading across his chest. Then his eyes rolled back, starting unseeingly at the summer sky, while a bluebottle crawled across his face.

  Gudrun pulled back the knife. There was a lot of blood. She wiped her boots on the bracken and buried her jumper in the sodden ground with Torben Larsen’s rucksack and papers. Nature would take care of his body. Not many people crossed the woods at Østvig, and by the time he was found, if ever, she would be long dead herself.

  It was only when she neared the house that her legs began to tremble on the bike. The sun beat down on the tarmac and pearls of sweat ran down the back of her neck. It was windier now and the sea was up, getting noisier as she shortened the distance between herself and the beach.

  When she got home, she would have a bath, then get under the cool covers of her bed, close her eyes and never rise again.

  ‘But what about the chanterelles?’ a little voice inside her insisted. ‘What will it all have been for, if you don’t tell anyone about them now?’

  The local boy from earlier was back, poking the lyme grass with a stick as though trying to spike fish. She slowed down and looked at him more closely. There was something singular and wilful about him, something that reminded Gudrun of herself. Again, the vicar’s words came back to her.

  She stopped and got off the bike.

  ‘You there,’ she cooed to him.

  The boy looked up, his concentrated expression contorting into one of terror and alarm. He threw down his stick and hunched his shoulders.

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said, wheeling the bike over to where he stood. ‘I won’t shout at you this time.’

  The boy looked unconvinced. He was trembling, his dirty little hands balled into fists, his wide eyes fixed on a streak of blood on her thigh.

  ‘It’s nothing. I scratched myself on a branch. But listen to this,’ she said. ‘There is something I want to tell you, a secret.’

  The boy looked at her warily, but she could tell that he was interested. No child had ever been born who didn’t like a secret.

  ‘It’s a good secret,’ she said. ‘The sort that people would do anything to steal from you, but you won’t let them. You will defend this secret with your life, even kill for it if you have to.’

  ‘Come,’ she said and made him sit down with her on a large white boulder by the side of the road. It was smooth and warm. She felt a great sense of peace spreading through her body.

  ‘Now,’ she said, very quietly, though only the crickets and adders and skylarks were around to hear them.

  ‘Do you know what a chanterelle is?’

  The Light from Dead Stars

  The man lay on his back, his slippered feet resting casually on the threshold. One hand clutched
a pipe, the other the evening paper. Were it not for his vacant eyes and the dark mess on his chest, you would almost think him napping.

  Gently, Viggo Jensen unpinned the crime scene photograph, leaving a pale rectangle on the wall. He placed the photograph on top of the papers he had already stowed in the cardboard box with his chipped coffee mug and spare tie. Then he switched off the anglepoise lamp and walked over to the window.

  He teased open the blinds with two fingers and looked outside. She was still there, the woman on the opposite street corner, wrapped in a thick coat and headscarf. Since five at least she had been standing there, well back from the light, stamping her feet and hugging herself against the cold.

  From the way she kept looking across at the main entrance, Viggo supposed she was waiting for some arrested man to be released. No matter, it was not a night to be standing on pavements. It was the last week of January and Copenhagen was freezing.

  Viggo wondered if he would ever stop doing this: noticing people out of place, the seemingly insignificant details that were invisible to others. It was an occupational hazard, he supposed, like a window cleaner condemned forever to seeing the stains on the glass and not the view beyond it.

  Leif Heinemann had been shot on a winter’s night, mowed down on his front doorstep. Because he was a middle-aged bachelor with no living relatives, no one complained when the police eventually had to abandon the case.

  Yet, to Viggo’s mind, the moment captured in the photograph had never passed. Heinemann was still lying on the parquet floor, his unseeing eyes pointed at the ceiling, the pipe warm in his hand.

  Viggo had asked everyone to stand back, to give him space. If you looked closely enough at the scene of a murder, the motive announced itself. But this was different. No sign of a struggle or vengeful anger, just a single bullet to the heart.

  Why? What had Heinemann done? This ordinary man who kept to himself and never hurt a fly? For twenty-eight years, Viggo had tried to answer that question. Some would say that it had obsessed him, to the point at which he was neglecting his other cases. It had not exactly furthered his career.

  A cleaning woman opened the door to his office, startled at the sight of him in the dark. She lingered for a moment, as if waiting for him to make his excuses and leave.

  ‘I’m not done yet,’ he snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, can’t you see?’

  When she had left, he rubbed his face hard, tried to force Heinemann from his mind. After all, he was done, completely. He had turned every stone, looked at the case from every angle and found nothing.

  He opened the blinds again. The woman had gone; the street was empty. It was almost nine o’clock, and his farewell reception had finished hours ago. He had listened patiently to the speeches, and taken receipt of a silver bowl inscribed with his name and dates of service. There was nothing left to do.

  Heinemann had not been robbed, nor was there any evidence of him owing money. On the contrary, for a civil servant on a modest income, he had a healthy bank balance.

  On the day of the murder, he had left work at five and walked home as usual, a stroll of some forty minutes through city streets. After a frugal supper of fried herring and boiled potatoes, he had settled down with his coffee and the paper. At ten past eight, a neighbour had heard the shot and rushed out to find him already dead.

  Heinemann’s apartment was unremarkable. Except, in the lounge, they had found a good telescope, the kind fit for an amateur astronomer, along with several books on stars and planets. It was an obvious hobby for an unmarried man with hours to while away. Still, the thought of Heinemann sitting behind that telescope night after night, a lonely eye pointed at an unresponsive universe, made Viggo infinitely sad.

  Reluctantly, he picked up his cardboard box and looked one last time around the office that was no longer his. They had taken away his coat stand, his battered filing cabinets and the old armchair he had brought in from home. A woman detective with spiky blonde hair had been in to measure up for her own furniture. She rode a motorbike to work and looked at Viggo as though she found him amusing.

  The corridor was quiet, save for the ever-present sound of two-fingered typing from distant offices. The paperwork had got worse in Viggo’s time. It had got so you couldn’t sharpen a pencil without filling in a form.

  By the stairwell, he found the cleaning woman mopping the linoleum floor with long, even strokes. She didn’t look up. Viggo envied her: to take a dirty floor and make it clean, knowing that your job was done. Police work was far less rewarding. In Viggo’s experience, 95 per cent of it was pointless, made up of tasks that later turned out to have been completely unnecessary.

  His mobile rang, making him jump. Still the cleaning woman did not look up.

  ‘Detective Inspector Jensen,’ he said.

  It was Birgit from the switchboard, only a year away from retirement herself. He was fond of Birgit, her cheerful voice on the other end of the phone. Once, at a staff Christmas party, the two of them had messed around, and she had wanted to take it further, but that was years ago now.

  ‘Still with us?’ she said.

  ‘Barely.’

  ‘Good. A woman called, a Gertrud Gunnersen, said she wanted to make a statement.’

  ‘What sort of statement?’

  ‘She refused to say, except that it was very important.’

  The name didn’t mean anything to Viggo. ‘Tell her to come in.’

  ‘I did, but apparently, there’s something she needs to show you. And she did ask for you personally. It’s out at Frederiksberg. To be honest, I am little curious to find out what it’s all about.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up,’ said Viggo. ‘It’s most likely nothing.’

  He jotted down the address, secretly pleased not to have to go straight home to his empty apartment. With years of doing nothing ahead of him, he could spare another hour.

  *

  There was no outward sign of an incident at the five-storey apartment block where Gertrud Gunnersen lived. Both the street and the stairwell were deserted. With a sinking heart, Viggo began to suspect that she was one of the deranged people who confessed to crimes that had never happened.

  But the woman was surprisingly normal, leaving him with even less of a clue as to why she had asked for him. Around sixty, she was trim and well dressed, with reading glasses hanging from a string of beads around her neck. Her apartment was tidy and smelled vaguely of perfume. Geranium, Viggo thought.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she said, as he set down his cardboard box in the hall. ‘I was just about to have some coffee. Join me?’

  While she busied herself in the kitchen, Viggo looked out of the living-room window. He knew this part of Frederiksberg well. In fact, it was only a handful of streets away that Heinemann had been shot all those years ago.

  From where he was standing, Viggo could see several apartment blocks with brightly lit windows. Above the roof line, the sky was full of stars. He remembered reading that some of them were long dead, only so far away that their light had taken tens of thousands of years to reach earth. To look at the stars was to look into the past.

  Gertrud Gunnersen startled him, appearing suddenly at his side. ‘You were lost in thought,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, taking a seat in the sofa. ‘I was just thinking that January is a good month for looking at the stars.’

  She smiled knowingly. ‘You can speak plainly here, inspector. You were thinking of the man who was shot dead in this neighbourhood many years ago, whose killer was never found. Am I right?’

  Viggo almost spilt his coffee. ‘You knew Leif Heinemann?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘He was a total stranger to me, but I gather that the case was a personal disappointment for you. I’m sorry about that.’

  She pointed to a newspaper clipping on the coffee table. Viggo recognised it immediately. It was an article from a few days before, announcing his imminent retirement from the police force. He squirmed
, recalling its unflattering contents. The journalist had dwelt on his connection to the Heinemann case and called it his one ‘notable failure’.

  Gertrud Gunnersen pointed to the article. ‘It says today is your last day, so I waited for you outside the police yard. When it got late, I thought I had missed you, so I went home and called instead.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Viggo. ‘It was you.’

  ‘You saw me?’ She laughed. ‘I thought I was being discreet.’

  Perhaps Gertrud Gunnersen was mad after all. She had read about him in the paper. Was that why she had asked to see him? Was she simply angling for a little company and attention?

  ‘Never mind about all that,’ he said, trying not to sound too unkind. The coffee, at least, was good and hot. ‘I am here now. I believe you wanted to make a statement?’

  ‘That is correct. But first, I need to tell you a story. I think you will want to hear it,’ she said, carefully refilling both their cups.

  Viggo felt a sting of unease at the way she held his gaze. Gertrud Gunnersen seemed completely calm, too calm for a mere lonely woman.

  ‘When I was younger …’ she began. ‘When my husband was still alive, I taught the piano here in the apartment.’

  She paused and looked at him, as if considering how best to proceed. ‘Are you married, inspector?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you may be able to imagine that after a while the physical side of marriage can become, how shall I put it … predictable.’

  Viggo felt his cheeks turn a deep puce. He held up his hands to stop her, but she carried on.

  ‘Well, one of my pupils was a young man, very young, inspector. Handsome. Attentive. He came for his lessons when my husband was a work.’

  ‘Now look—’ Viggo said.

  ‘The first letter I received was a shock. Not the money, you understand, but the idea that someone would … I suspected my pupil, of course, but he was engaged to be married and had just as much to lose as I did.’