Last Train to Helsingør
Page 15
Jan looked inside the galley kitchen where they kept their Italian coffee machine and the microwave and their personal mugs, all eight of them lined up on the counter. Jan doubted Kristoffer would have much use of his now.
The kitchen was cold, though the window was closed. The smell of cabbage and fish was stronger here. Perhaps there was something rotten in the bin? He was about to open the lid and have a look inside when he was startled by the lift starting up, pulling noisily on its cables in the shaft on the other side of the wall.
He was the only one who used the ancient contraption. The others were put off by its narrow dimensions and the way it sometimes ran by itself or stalled on their floor, endlessly opening and closing the doors on the empty car. The date of the last service was 16 October 1991, according to the signed engineer’s report fixed to the wall inside.
Jan went out on the landing and looked at the old-fashioned half-moon display above the lift. The car had descended all the way to the cellar. He reached out for the call button, but changed his mind and turned towards the stairs, lest he gave himself away to the intruder.
The stairwell was shabby and poorly lit with a faint, bittersweet smell of Bakelite and cigars. Light rectangles on the linoleum showed where there had once been doormats at the entrance to each apartment. Signs announced the names of businesses long gone: an independent record label, a reflexologist, a temping agency. One door was blackened by soot, and another had been gutted by what looked like an axe, leaving the wood in long, jagged splinters.
Jan bent down and looked through the gap. On the hallway floor inside lay a pile of unopened mail. The envelopes looked green and fuzzy, as though made from felt or some organic material. He recoiled as he realised they were covered in mould. A trail of dark stains led off into the murky depths of the apartment.
He continued down the stairs, almost stumbling in fright when his phone went off in his pocket. It was Margit.
‘What is it?’ he snapped, annoyed with himself for being so jittery.
‘Where are you?’
‘At work, someone has to be.’
‘If I were you, I’d leave at once,’ she said. ‘I’ve done some research. There was this tenant once, back when they turned the block into offices. They say that he refused to leave.’
‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Jan said. ‘I’m not listening.’
He walked over to the window. Across the snow-speckled courtyard he could see the larger and more imposing office building that fronted the road. It had been refurbished a few years ago, the old features ripped out and replaced by New York loft-style bricks and beams. The open-plan floors were lit up, showing row upon row of white desks and chairs.
It was strange to think that where suited advertising executives now spent their days sipping cappuccinos, hundreds of men, women and children had once lived together, crammed into tiny apartments, with a shared outside privy. Must have been freezing in winter, Jan thought.
Margit was still talking when he put the phone back to his ear: ‘Kristoffer may never be able to return to work. It took them the best part of a day to remove the shards of glass from his scalp and face.’
Jan had heard enough. ‘Margit, if you want to keep working for me, I suggest you forget this superstitious nonsense. I’m hanging up now.’
‘Wait, where are you exactly? What’s that echo?’ he heard Margit say before he ended the call and continued down the stairs.
Nothing happened when he flicked the light switch to the cellar. He hesitated on the steps, weary of the dark. Years ago, people would have done their laundry down there in great steaming vats, pegging their sheets on lines strung across the courtyard. There was a smell of wet cement. Somewhere in the darkness below, a tap was dripping.
He held up his phone and descended the steps very slowly, struggling to see in the foggy blue light from the display. Towards the back of the cellar, there was a row of lock-up storage rooms, one for each of the twelve apartments. He pointed the light through the grilles, saw a rusty bicycle, stacks of wooden crates, an old pram.
His grip tightened around the neck of the champagne bottle as he reached the lock-up belonging to their office. Slowly he lifted his phone and shone the light inside. Nothing, just stacks of old newspapers, discarded lamp-shades, a mattress and bits of worn carpet.
It took a while for his heartbeat to return to normal. Then he got angry. Someone had deliberately sent him on a wild goose chase to the cellar. He had thought himself on an intruder’s tail, when all along they had only wanted him out of the way so they could clear out the office computers and TV screens.
He raced up the stairs two steps at a time, but he was too late, someone had been in his office already. The papers on his desk had been knocked to the floor and were fluttering all over the place.
‘Show yourself, whoever you are!’ he shouted.
One of the windows had been opened, filling the room with icy, wet air. The pane kept slamming back against the frame, like someone knocking urgently on a door. Jan remembered that there was a narrow ledge outside the window, big enough to hold a man. He pretended to leave the room, deliberately making a loud noise as he did so and switching off the light.
‘Don’t make me come and find you,’ he shouted down the hall.
Then he tiptoed back into the room, the bottle of champagne raised high above his head. No one was going to put Jan Vettergren off; no one was going to stop him from doing exactly as he pleased with a property that was his by rights.
Perplexingly, the ledge was empty. At least he thought it was. He had to climb out of the window completely before he could be certain.
The bottle fell first. There was a long silence before it smashed on the cobbles in the yard far below. With an instinctive reaction, Jan leant forward to catch it, his hand grabbing fistfuls of air.
There was a brief moment before he lost his fight against the greater force pushing him forward, a split second in which he saw exactly what would happen: they would find him on the cobbles in the morning, surrounded by glass from the broken champagne bottle. It would look like an accident, like high jinks gone disastrously wrong.
No one would listen to Margit, a middle-aged bean counter with an overactive imagination. With neither Kristoffer nor himself around to run things, the lawyers would wind up the PR company and, eventually, the property would change hands again, as yet another buyer with a keen eye for a bargain succumbed to its charms: Unique historic property in the heart of Copenhagen, bags of potential, a diamond in the rough.
At the time it had not seemed important, but Jan recalled now how vigorously the previous owner had shaken his hand, how quickly he had headed for the door.
As the ground rushed towards him, he could hear the window high above slamming and opening, slamming and opening, like cruel, slow-handed applause.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jeremy Osborne and Sweet Talk Productions without whom many of these stories would not have come into being. Last Train to Helsingør, The Music Box, The Chanterelles of Østvig, The Light from Dead Stars, Conning Mrs Vinterberg, The Bird in the Cage, The Climbing Rose, The Wailing Girl, Room Service, The Suitcase, The Tallboy, Detained and The Last Tenant were previously produced by Sweet Talk for BBC Radio 4, and The Crying was first printed by Mslexia. Thanks to Sarah and Kate Beal at Muswell Press for giving this collection life, and to Kate Quarry for her astute editing. Thanks also to Helen Pike, William Weinstein and Jeff Walkden for being my first readers, and to Frederik and Jules for making it all worthwhile. Finally, thanks to my late grandmothers in and around whose homes in Copenhagen I spent long school holidays lost in my imagination. While some locations in these stories may be real, all characters and events are entirely fictional, and any mistakes my own.
About the Author
Heidi Amsinck, a writer and journalist born in Copenhagen, spent many years covering Britain for the Danish press, including a spell as London Correspondent for the broadsheet daily Jyllands-Posten.
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She has written numerous short stories for radio, including the three-story sets Danish Noir, Copenhagen Confidential and Copenhagen Curios, all produced by Sweet Talk for BBC Radio 4.
A graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, Heidi lives in Surrey. She was previously shortlisted for the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Last Train to Helsingør is her first published collection of stories.
Copyright
First published by Muswell Press in 2018
Copyright © Heidi Amsinck 2018
Heidi Amsinck asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work.
Typeset by M Rules
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
eISBN 9780995482258
Muswell Press
London
N6 5HQ
www.muswell-press.co.uk
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior written consent of the Publisher. No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher, by the Author, or by the employer of the Author.