“Nope. I assume he’s stuck his tail between his legs, seeing as how he packed his job in all of a sudden.”
Assad cut in: “Excuse me, madam. But do you not care?”
She smiled. “He’s my husband, and the father of my children.”
“So you don’t, then?”
She seemed astonished by his reasoning but smiled again, nevertheless. She’d probably been good-looking once, Carl thought, but it was a lot of gold teeth and upper-lip hair growth ago.
“Do you know if your husband might have had problems, something weighing him down?” he asked.
“I suppose he must have, otherwise he wouldn’t have been hanging around the airport at the crack of dawn, frothing at the mouth and waiting for Teis Snap.”
“Uhh, Teis Snap?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Yes, Teis Snap. Haven’t you read about him in the gossip magazines?” She laughed. “Never mind. He and my husband are old schoolmates. Though ‘mates’ might be pushing it a bit, considering the nonsense he’s been putting in René’s head.”
“What nonsense?”
“Stock trading. René had a lot of shares in Teis Snap’s bank, Karrebæk Bank. Tell me, haven’t you checked up on him? What kind of policemen are you?”
Carl looked at Assad, who shrugged.
“What kind of money are we talking about?” Assad asked.
“I’ve no idea. He was discreet about it, I’ll give him that. He was on the bank’s board of directors as well.”
“Might he have gone to see his friend, this . . . what was his name, now?” Assad flicked back through his notepad. “This Schnapps guy.”
“Snap. Teis Snap. I really wouldn’t know. He’s more likely gone to a hotel, the louse. And as far as I’m concerned, the creep can stay there.”
Creep? Was this her take on “to love and to honor, for better or worse”?
Carl’s mobile thrummed in his pocket. If it was Mona, everything else was on hold.
He glanced at the display but didn’t recognize the number. Was she calling from work, maybe?
“Helloski, Monsignor!” said the voice.
Who the hell was that?
“Gordon T. Taylor here. I’ve checked up on René E. Eriksen like you asked me to. There’s a lot of stuff about his education and career, but what struck me as interesting was that he recently sold off his shares in Karrebæk Bank for ten million kroner and that he’s a member of the board, besides. Kind of strange, wouldn’t you say?”
Christ on a bike. Ten million.
“Tell me something I don’t know, Gordon,” Carl teased, and hung up. That’d give him something to think about.
He turned to Eriksen’s wife, but then his phone rang again.
“For fuck’s sake, Gordon,” he snarled. “It can’t be that hard to grasp, surely? When I hang up the phone, it means we’re finished talking.”
“Carl?” came the sound of a woman’s voice. “Is that you? It’s Lisbeth.”
The furrows in his brow relocated immediately to his hairline. Lisbeth! He hadn’t given her a thought.
“Oh, sorry, Lisbeth. Thought you were someone else. Listen, I’m in the middle of an interview. Can we talk a little later on today?”
“Of course. Sorry if I’ve caught you at the wrong time.” She sounded disappointed. Maybe she had reason to be.
He said good-bye and promised to call back as soon as he had time. Somehow, it seemed neither true nor false. Just odd.
“Sorry about that,” he said, turning back to René E. Eriksen’s wife. “What I was about to say before was that your husband recently sold shares to the tune of ten million kroner in the bank whose board he happened to be on. Did you know about that?”
She asked him to repeat the sum.
And there she stood, wide-eyed, looking like her entire life was up for revision.
—
“Karrebæk Bank, Bente Mønsted. How can I help you?”
Carl nodded to Assad, who sat listening in. The GPS they’d had put in the service vehicle along with a wireless phone and all manner of electronics was nothing if not practical. He felt like a millionaire.
“I’d like to speak to your boss, Manager Snap. Could you put me through, please?”
“I’m sorry, whom am I speaking with?”
“Detective Inspector Carl Mørck, Department Q, Copenhagen police.”
“I see.” There was a pause. “I’m afraid I have to say Mr. Snap hasn’t been in today.”
“Is he off sick?”
“To be honest, I’m not quite sure. He’s just come back from a vacation in the Caribbean, but nobody’s seen him at the office yet. I know he met with our brokers in Copenhagen yesterday, but we haven’t been informed as to his schedule for today, and he hasn’t answered our calls. He’s still jet-lagged, I imagine.”
“I see. Maybe it’ll help his jet lag if I call him instead. I seem to have a magic touch when it comes to getting folks to answer their phone. Can you give me his home number?”
“I don’t think I’m authorized to give it out over the phone.”
“In that case, I’ll call the Næstved police and ask them to stop by in five minutes. It’ll look great, a couple of burly lads in full uniform turning up at the manager’s secretary’s office, don’t you think? But if that’s the way you want to do it, it’s fine by me. They can give me the number over the phone. But thanks for your help.”
“Well, if it’s really necessary, and it sounds like it is, then I suppose I can.”
Assad gave him a thumbs-up. It worked almost every time.
Twenty seconds later it was Assad’s turn to call, but this time Carl’s magic touch didn’t work. No reply.
“Check his address, Assad,” Carl instructed. “We’ll drive down there. There’s something fishy about this, if you ask me.”
“Fishy?”
“Yeah, something that doesn’t add up. We’ve got Eriksen vanishing all of a sudden. We’ve got him and Snap on the board of directors together. Eriksen’s just sold off a whole barrowload of stock, and now we’ve got Snap, who might or might not be off sick. Some funny coincidences, I’d say. It wouldn’t surprise me if the two of them were planning on meeting up somewhere.”
“Karrebæksminde is all the way down around Næstved, Carl.”
“Yeah, but we don’t care, do we? The day’s still young.”
—
“This is like half a sheikhdom,” Assad commented, staring out over the fields around the tree-lined gravel driveway leading up to Snap’s country home.
“I probably should have been a bank manager,” he added a minute later, before pressing the doorbell.
They stood and twiddled their thumbs for a minute or two at the heavy main door, until eventually Assad tried the handle. Naturally, the door was locked.
“Check the outbuildings and the garage over there, Assad, and I’ll take a walk around the house.”
Carl noted down the registration numbers of the three cars parked in front of the house, then went back to his vehicle and ran a check. All three belonged to Karrebæk Bank. Did anyone say perks?
He walked through a small apple orchard, the trees all stunningly in blossom, before coming out on the rear side of the house where there were neatly staggered terraces leading up to the house and wide-open windows upstairs.
He looked around the neatly cultivated surroundings, puzzled by all the sheets of paper that littered the garden. Probably they’d been left on a windowsill and had blown out of one of the open windows. Whatever the reason, they were now scattered all over the place and also hung in the many fruit trees and the tall poplars further back in the windbreak facing northwest.
He picked up a sheet off the terrace. The paper was rather coarse, probably handmade. He sniffed at it. Notepaper belonging to a woman, defin
itely. Now she’d need to stock up anew.
“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.
“No, I don’t know where your people are, that’s your job, not mine,” the voice continued. “That’s the way it is, Zola. Do your job, or else get the fuck out.”
It
was clear to René now that this was a one-way conversation. The man was probably on the phone.
He listened closer and followed the sound to a patio door that stood ajar a few meters away. Here was a way into the house. What luck.
A few more steps and he was there. What a brilliant surprise it would be. Finally the two of them would meet. Finally they could settle the account that had been years in the making.
He gripped the hammer, stepped up to the door, and found himself staring into the eyes of a black man with a mobile phone to his ear. He was quite young and possessed a voice that was one hundred percent Brage-Schmidt’s.
A second passed before the man hung up and put the phone in his pocket. He seemed calm, far less surprised than René.
“Come inside,” he said in a completely other voice. “You must be René Eriksen. Welcome.”
René frowned and accepted the invitation, his grip tightening around the shaft of the hammer in his pocket.
“Yes, and you? Who are you? And why were you impersonating Brage-Schmidt?”
The man smiled and sat down. Perhaps he was trying to instill in him the same kind of confidence as an executive offering a cup of coffee to an underling before giving him the sack. It wasn’t reassuring.
“It’s a long story. Won’t you sit down?”
“I prefer to stand. Where is Brage-Schmidt?”
“In the drawing room next door. He’s taking a nap at the moment, so you’ll have to wait a bit until I wake him.”
“And while he’s asleep, you look after the business, I suppose.”
The man spread out his hands. That’s how it appeared.
“So you’re who we’ve been holding conference calls with on the phone the past couple of years?”
Again, the extended black hands with their white palms.
“Every time?”
“Conceivably. Mr. Brage-Schmidt has had a lot of business to attend to lately.”
René looked around the room. Behind the African, double-barreled shotguns and slender rifles hung from the wall, and above them, hunting bows and quivers of arrows. Mounted vertically next to them were two needle-sharp spears with broad, double-edged heads. On the floor beside a low elephant-foot table stood a crock made from the hollowed-out foot of a rhinoceros, full of what looked like an assortment of cudgels. To the other side was a vitrine containing knives for almost every conceivable purpose.
The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel Page 43
