One May Smile

by Penny Freedman

  This is not strictly true, of course – the being happy bit. I’m very happy to have Freda in my life but I do balk at the idea of grandmother being my primary descriptor. You see it in newspaper reports, don’t you? Grandmother on Drugs Charge. As though being a grandmother is supposed to disqualify you from being anything else – criminal or otherwise. But the real point is, if I’m honest, that whenever I mention that I have a granddaughter, I do expect people to gasp in disbelief and cry, But you can’t be old enough. It is disappointing how rarely this happens.

  Mortensen steps in smoothly to reclaim the interrogation and takes me back to where we were before Ingrid stuck her podgy nose in. ‘So you say none of your company can have damaged the car yesterday afternoon and yet, I have to repeat, somebody did damage it. So then I would have to think that Conrad Wagner had some enemy here in Elsinore, who is not a member of your company?’

  He turns this into a question so I feel I have to offer an answer, though I really don’t have one. ‘It seems unlikely, I know,’ I say reluctantly. ‘I don’t suppose he knew anyone here – why would he? Though –’ I remember suddenly the way Conrad came across the courtyard, crowing, the day he got the car. He looked at James and said, I got it from Karin’s brother, didn’t he? I remember I thought Karin might be the woman I saw James talking to in the car park the day we arrived, but then everything got dramatic and I haven’t thought about it since. ‘– well,’ I end lamely, ‘I think he may have known the man he hired the car from.’

  ‘Really?’ He looks genuinely surprised.

  ‘At least, he seemed to know his sister.’

  He makes a note, then sits looking at me in silence. It seems to be my turn so I ask a question I wanted to ask earlier but I got sidetracked.

  ‘If the gatekeeper was so interested in what was going on in the car park, didn’t he see anyone near the car that afternoon?’

  ‘Unfortunately, he finished his shift at one o’clock. The man who replaced him was not so interested in the car park.’

  He is looking at me again, as though assessing me. It’s becoming more like a job interview than a police interrogation.

  ‘I have asked everyone this,’ he says, ‘but I suspect that politics are not of much interest to these young people just now. What is your opinion about this new Harmony Party in the UK?’

  This was the last question I expected.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  He spreads his hands in an expansive gesture. ‘I am trying to view the whole picture.’

  ‘And that includes the political activities of James Asquith’s father?’

  ‘Certainly.’ He leans back smiling, waiting.

  ‘Right. Well, my opinion of the Harmony Party. You know what sort of party it is, do you?’

  ‘I know absolutely nothing. Until this morning I had not heard of it.’

  ‘Have you heard of the Respect Party?’

  ‘Respect? No.’

  ‘Right. Well, briefly, Respect is a new party, set up to appeal to disaffected Labour – left wing – voters, especially Muslims because it has an anti-racism stance and it opposed the Iraq war. It’s had quite a lot of success in areas with a large Muslim population but its founder is a very dodgy character and many people can’t stand him and there have been ructions in the party. I’m telling you this because I think Harmony is a sort of response to Respect. Sir Bruce Asquith, James’s father, was a diplomat. He had postings all over, I think, but he was an expert on the Middle East. He speaks Arabic and has written books about the area.’

  ‘And his son also studies Arabic and is preparing a thesis on a great work of Arabic literature?’

  ‘I believe so, yes. Well, his father’s aim in setting up this Harmony Party seems to be to get people in the UK to embrace Arabic culture as it was in its golden age, when the Arab world was an intellectual centre for science, medicine, philosophy and so on, and Europe was still in the Dark Ages. He wants to reclaim Islamic culture from the angry men with beards and set it alongside the Judaeo-Christian as a third strand in our cultural heritage.’

  ‘And who will vote for this party?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t. I’m in favour of a party that looks forward rather than back. It’s a general rule that the further back you look, the worse things are for women. But then Muslim women turned out in droves to vote for Respect, so who knows? But actually, there is a target electorate. Sir Bruce, I suspect, is pretty naïve about the realities of politics but he’s got people around him who see a burgeoning Muslim middle class – small business owners, entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors et cetera – who are natural Conservative voters economically but who see the Conservatives as exclusive and racist. They’re the target. But small parties don’t actually get anywhere in the UK, of course, because we don’t have PR.’

  ‘So, you would say this is not a serious party?’

  ‘I think it’s a bit of a vanity exercise. People like setting up small parties because they get attention. They get to go on TV.’

  ‘Who would be financing such a party?’

  ‘If I’m cynical, I’d say the Iranian government – through clever back channels, obviously – but I expect it’s just Muslim millionaires.’

  He takes a card out of his pocket. ‘Well, that is most interesting. Thank you for your help, Virginia,’ he says.

  ‘Gina,’ I say. ‘I’m called Gina.’

  ‘Gina. I’m afraid we shall have to take your passport from you, Gina, as we’re taking everyone’s, but in exchange here is my card. If you think of anything else to tell me, anything at all, please call.’

  Annie rushes off as soon as I reappear in the waiting room, so I shall have to postpone shouting at her till later. I give a half-hearted tidy to the Lego, gather up Freda and head out in search of lunch. Freda is droopy and fretful with boredom, and she is probably hungry too. I’m certainly starving. Breakfast got aborted this morning and it has been a stressful few hours. I’m so hungry, in fact, that instead of going looking for an attractive café, I stop at an odoriferous stall in the pedestrian precinct and ask, ‘How about a hot dog, Freda?’

  Her face breaks into a beaming smile. ‘With runny ketchup?’ she asks.

  ‘Certainly,’ I say, eyeing the list of condiments on the stall. Ketchup is the same in Danish, as you might expect since it’s an Indian word to start with, but some of the other delights on offer are mysterious. What is sennep? Or løg? I see that you can order med det hele and, assuming that this means with everything, I decide to go for broke myself, while sticking to ketchup for Freda. We sit down on a bench and my pungent bundle, oozing mustard, ketchup and some rather dubious dried onion flakes, has to be set aside because Freda needs all my attention. Hot dogs, I see now, are not designed for three-year-old mouths, and while she struggles determinedly to sink her pearly little teeth into it, the ketchup is dribbling all over her pretty pink t-shirt.

  I am useless at this. I sit dabbing ineffectually with a tissue and crying, ‘Oh do try not to tip it, Freda.’ We are rescued by Clare and Emma, who appear from the direction of the market with bags of vegetables and take things in hand. ‘Budge along, Gina,’ Clare says, and sits beside Freda, taking the hot dog and – why didn’t I think of this? – taking it apart and feeding it to her bit by bit. Emma, meanwhile, has produced a pack of wet wipes from her bag, with which everyone’s hands get cleaned and the worst of the ketchup bloodstains are removed from the t-shirt. I take a few bites of my hot dog, which is getting cool and is really not very nice.

  They are truly wonderful girls, these two. Before the possibility has even formed in my mind, let alone been phrased as a request, Emma says, ‘Ray’s given us the keys of the van. We’re going to the supermarket for the rest of the stuff. Do you want to come, Freda?’

  Does she want to come? Of course she does. Do I want a couple of hours to myself? Of course I do. Showering blessings on them, I watch them depart, swinging Freda between them. Then I consider what I’m going to do. I walk to the end
of the precinct, to where the buses go from, thinking that I will just go back to the villa, but I see, when I get there, that buses run to the hospital from here too, and this confirms my niggling feeling that somebody really ought to go and see Jon. I guess Zada might do it – for the drama of it as much as anything else – but she will be stuck at the police station for a while yet, until officers Mortensen and Larsen work their way down to ‘P’, and I’m afraid no-one else will think of it. So, since there is a bus standing there at the stop, I hop onto it, giving the driver a hundred-kronor note for my fare, which he doesn’t like.

  On the bus, the woman sitting next to me scowls at the remains of my hot dog in its stained and greasy wrappings, gurgles something incomprehensible and points to a notice at the front of the bus which I take to be a series of prohibitions: Rygning forbudt

  Mad og drikke forbudt

  Henkastning af affald forbudt

  One of these – mad og drikke, I assume – forbids me to bring my undesirable lunch with me. I get up and drop it in the bin, where it will, no doubt, stink the bus out for the rest of the day.

  I’m quite interested in all this forbidding that is going on. We in the UK, aren’t often forbidden, are we? The most direct prohibitions we get are of the no smoking variety (and I’m told that when you get off the ferry on the Isle of Mull, you are greeted by no sign of welcome but by a notice bearing a large NO, followed by no fewer than twenty-one forbidden activities). More usually, though, we are told that activities are not permitted, or, more politely, that we are requested to/not to. Sometimes we may even be entreated, as in Please do not walk on the grass, or – a bit over the top, this – thanked, as in Thank you for not smoking. Forbidden we are not. Is that because we Brits are particularly averse to being ordered about or simply because we have a greater variety of linguistic strategies available to us? Years ago, when I was a teenager, I went to Switzerland on a school skiing trip. I was hopeless at the skiing – timid and reckless by turns – but I enjoyed the après-ski, and my friend Jessica and I acquired boyfriends of a sort, with whom we wandered the streets of Grindelwald hand in hand. If we ever attempted a snog, however, we would find a finger wagged at us by some Swiss hausfrau with the admonition, Verboten auf der strasse! We thought this was hilarious and wonderfully Germanic. Verboten auf der strasse was our catch phrase for the whole of the following term.

  (The following year, we went on a cultural trip to Italy and, on a day excursion to Venice, I was bought a very expensive cup of coffee in Piazza San Marco by a charming young Italian, who kissed me on departure without raising any public protest. Calvinism has a lot to answer for.)

  This train of thought keeps me happily engaged until we reach the hospital. If the police station was surprisingly old-fashioned, the hospital is all one might expect of Scandinavian design – its exterior white, spacious and gleaming and its interior cool, dim and hushed. I find a loo first of all and attempt to remove the remaining ketchup stains from my face and hands. My clothes, I’m afraid, are beyond help. I find a reception desk, give Jon’s name and am given directions to his ward which, though given in impeccable English, sound impossibly complicated. I am rescued by a woman also making enquiries at the desk, who says she is going in that direction and leads me a good part of the way.

  Jon is in a room on his own – are they all single bed wards here? The door is ajar and I can see him propped up in bed with one leg suspended in a sort of cradle. As I push the door open, I realise that there is someone else here too, sitting by the bed. She turns, looking murderous. She is Annie. Filled with confusion, I start to back out, apologising. ‘Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to barge in. Just wanted to know you were all right. I’ll just…’ I’m back outside again when he calls out, ‘Don’t go, Gina. It’s kind of you to come. There’s another chair here. Come and join us.’ What a nice, civilised chap he is. I re-enter cautiously, my eyes on Annie. She, I can see, is swallowing her rage. Jon is a person around whom people like to behave well, I’ve noticed. Was that what Zada liked? Or didn’t like?

  He looks pretty battered, with a black eye and a nasty graze down one side of his face. It is his left leg that rests in the cradle and there is bandaging round his left wrist. I start with the usual enquiries about injuries and pain and he plays it all down in a blasé, medical kind of way. Then I edge onto more tricky territory. ‘Sorry if you’ve covered this already,’ I say, glancing at Annie, ‘but have the police been to see you?’

  ‘Oh yes. First thing this morning, while I was still dopey. I’ve just been telling Marianne, I thought they’d come to charge me with dangerous driving but I found they were treating me like a victim.’

  ‘Did they tell you about the car’s brakes?’

  ‘They were pretty cagey, but Marianne told me. It’s hard to take in, frankly. So it looks as though someone was out to get Conrad?’

  ‘And you’re in the happy position of being the only one of us who isn’t a suspect,’ Annie says, reclaiming the conversation from me. ‘So what did they ask you about?’

  ‘A bit about the accident itself. Why was I driving? Did I notice anything wrong with the car? What did I remember about the crash itself? That sort of thing.’

  ‘And do you remember it?’

  ‘I do, unfortunately. I imagine I’ll be getting flashbacks for some time to come. I did think the braking was soft, but I’ve never driven anything other than my parents’ cars so I didn’t have much to compare it with. I wasn’t worried, I was just aware of it. Then I got onto the dual carriageway and I started to pull out to overtake a transporter but I realised there was something coming up fast on the outside so I pulled back in and braked and – nothing. I remember standing on the brake, trying not to panic, and then I don’t remember the next bit. Bang on the head. Shock. Whatever.’

  Annie reaches out a hand to touch his. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean to make you tell it all over again.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Won’t be the last time, I expect. After that, though, the policemen’s questions got very odd. They’ve got hold of the idea that I must be a friend of Conrad’s – because I was driving him in his car, I suppose. Anyway, they kept asking me questions about him I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know him. Different college, different subject. And this is the first OUDS thing I’ve done. I’ve only done college stuff before.’

  ‘I knew him a bit,’ Annie says. ‘What did they want to know?’

  ‘Mainly to do with his father. I knew he was a Hollywood producer, of course, but they were interested in his political activities. He’s a major donor to the Organisation of Zionist Americans, or something of the sort, apparently.’

  ‘The Zionist Organisation of America,’ I chip in.

  ‘Exactly. And he’s had death threats from Islamic extremists, it seems.’

  ‘And they think Conrad was a victim of Islamic extremists?’

  ‘It’s a line of inquiry, they told me. They wanted to know if Conrad ever talked of getting threats.’

  ‘Not that I ever heard,’ Annie says. ‘And I’m sure we’d have heard if there was anything to tell. Conrad wasn’t one to miss out on being centre stage in a bit of drama. Attention-seeking doesn’t begin to cover it.’

  ‘Nil nisi bonum, Annie,’ I murmur, and she has the grace to blush.

  ‘So,’ I say, ‘it’s possible the police are dreaming up a global conspiracy theory to explain Conrad’s death. Do you remember the names of the officers who questioned you?’

  ‘No. I was pretty dopey at that point.’

  ‘A tall, skinny guy in charge? Receding hair?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anders Mortensen. I got the other end of this story. He wanted to know about Sir Bruce Asquith and the Harmony Party.’

  ‘Which is pro-Islam, isn’t it?’ Annie asks.

  ‘It is,’ Jon replies, ‘and I begin to see where this might be going. Can it possibly be that they are thinking of fitting James up as an Islamic terrorist assassin?’

  �
��When in fact, the most likely explanation for the failed brakes is incompetence at the garage or random vandalism.’

  Jon leans back against his pillows and closes his eyes. ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or weep,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, both,’ I say. ‘It’s nearly always a matter of both, I find.’

  9

  AND MORE FOUR

  Where be your gibes now? 5.1

  I don’t stay long, since Annie is clearly in occupation, but by the time I get outside I find a thunderstorm is well under way, rain falling in huge drops from a hot, heavy sky. I cram in with others under a shelter at the bus stop but my t-shirt is already soaked and my hair plastered to my head. It is not yet half past four on a July afternoon but the light is livid and, as I watch the rain bouncing off the road surface, I comfort myself with the reflection that this is, at least, the setting I expect for a Danish murder inquiry. Based on my assiduous viewing of The Killing, I believe that all police work in Denmark happens in the rain at night and by torchlight.

  It’s a long and tedious journey home with a change of bus back at Axeltorv, but it is enlivened when I turn my phone on. I do it in order to send a reassuring text to Ellie, since I know Annie’s propensity to catastrophise and I worry about the tone of the emails she may be sending her. I find that I have a text message and that the sender is David. I have been determined not to contact him ever since he declared an email blackout and I feel so smug about his cracking first that I consider ignoring the message in case he thinks I’ve been checking my phone obsessively, waiting for his call. I see that the message was sent this morning, though, so I’ve made my point without even deciding to make it. I open the message to find that I have been sent a picture of people lying on a beach. I squint hard at it to see if any one of those people is David, but I can’t spot him. I scrabble about in the virtual recesses of my phone to see if I have missed some accompanying text but find nothing. So, the picture is the message: here is Brighton beach. Does this mean, I am here on the beach just like you advised or does it mean This is the beach – does it look any fun to you? Apology or sneer? I’ve never been good at the visual – I’m illiterate with cartoons. I need words, as David well knows. He is deliberately putting me at a disadvantage. I decide to play safe. I press my phone against the bus window to take a picture of the streaming road through rain-battered glass and send it without a message. Let him work it out. Wish you were here? You think you’ve got problems? Or just Piss off?