Disgrace

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Carl glanced at them disinterestedly. Now that the case had been taken from him, what did he care about the clippings? In reality he should be asking her to pack away the whole mess and find some guileless soul to assemble her bloody tables in exchange for a kind word and a pat on the cheek.

  Then he picked up the copies of the articles.

  One of them dated back to around Kimmie’s childhood. Her Life had drawn a portrait of the Lassen family, and the title read: ‘No Success without the Security of Home’. It was a paean to Willy K. Lassen’s beautiful wife, Kassandra Lassen, but the photograph showed something else. The father in a grey suit with tapered legs and the stepmother in bold colours and severe late-seventies make-up. Well-groomed people in their mid-thirties. Self-confident, with stern faces. That little Kirsten-Marie stood clamped between them didn’t seem to register for them in the slightest. But it clearly affected Kimmie. With her large, frightened eyes, she was a girl who was simply there in body, not in spirit.

  Then, in the Gossip photograph seventeen years later, she had a totally different look.

  It was from January 1996, the same year as she disappeared. It was taken somewhere along the ‘death route’ of downtown Copenhagen bars. Probably outside the Electric Corner, but it could also be Café Sommersko or maybe even Café Victor. This was a Kimmie in good spirits. Tight jeans, feather boa around her neck and pissed to the gills. Showing a lot of cleavage in spite of the snow on the pavement. Her face was frozen in a rapturous roar, surrounded by high-society types, among them Kristian Wolf and Ditlev Pram, all wearing enormous overcoats. The caption was gracious: ‘The jet set pulls out the stops. Twelfth Night party gets its own queen. Has Kristian Wolf, 29, Denmark’s most eligible bachelor, finally found a life companion?’

  ‘They were awfully nice at Gossip,’ Rose added. ‘Maybe they’ll find more clippings for us.’

  He gave a quick nod. If she believed those vultures at Gossip were nice, then she was incredibly naive. ‘You’ll have the desks in the corridor assembled in the next few days, OK, Rose? Whatever you find for me regarding this case, you’ll put out there and I’ll bring it in here myself when I need it. You understand?’

  Judging by her facial expression, she didn’t.

  ‘What happened up in Jacobsen’s office, boss?’ came Assad’s voice at the door.

  ‘What happened? Well, I’m suspended. But they want me to stay down here. So if you two want to talk to me about anything involving this case, write it on a note and put it on the table just outside the door. You can’t talk to me about it, because they’ll just send me home. And, Assad, help Rose get those ridiculous tables assembled.’ He pointed into the corridor. ‘And keep your ears open: if I want to say anything to you about the case or give you orders, I’ll write it down on one of these.’ He motioned to his sheets of ledger paper. ‘I’m only allowed to administrate when I’m here, just so you know.’

  ‘Crappy arrangement,’ Assad said. A more grandiose way to express it would be hard to find.

  ‘And on top of it all, I’ve got to go to therapy. So perhaps I’m not going to be in the office the whole time. Let’s see which idiots they stick me with this time.’

  ‘Yes, let’s see,’ a voice in the corridor said unexpectedly.

  He had misgivings as he turned towards the door.

  Of course it was Mona Ibsen. Always on the scene when the bullfrog croaked. Just as he was standing there with his trousers as far down as they could go.

  ‘We’ll be going through a longer course of treatment this time, Carl,’ she said, squeezing her way past Assad.

  She held out her hand to him. It was warm and hard to let go of.

  Smooth, and without a wedding ring.

  20

  As they’d agreed, she found Tine’s note behind the car-rental company’s drab sign on Skelbækgade. It was right on top of the black panel’s bottom screw, and moisture had already made the letters bleed together.

  It had been difficult for the unschooled girl to find enough room to fit all the big, block letters on the little slip of paper, but Kimmie was used to deciphering people’s scribbles.

  HI. THE POLICE CAME BY MY PLACE YESTERDAY – CARL MØRKE HE WAS CALLED – ALSO ANUTHER DOWN ON THE STREET WHO’S LOOKIN FOR YOU – THE ONE FROM THE CENTRAL STATION. DON’T KNOW WHO HE IS – BE CAREFULL – SEE YOU ON THE BENCH. T. K.

  She read the note several times, halting each time she reached the letter ‘K’, like a freight train at a railroad crossing barrier. The letter was frozen on to her retina. Etched into it. Where did the ‘K’ come from?

  The policeman’s name was Carl. Carl with a ‘C’. That was a better letter. Better than ‘K’, even though it sounded the same. Him, she wasn’t afraid of.

  She leaned against the wine-red Nissan that had been parked under the sign for ages. Tine’s words injected her with an overwhelming weariness. Like there were devils whirling around inside, sucking the life out of her.

  I won’t leave my house, she thought. They’re not gonna get me.

  But how could she know it wouldn’t happen anyway? Apparently Tine had spoken with people who were looking for her. People were asking Tine things. Things that only Tine knew about Kimmie. Lots of different things. So she was no longer just Rat-Tine, a danger to herself. She was now also a danger to Kimmie.

  She mustn’t speak to anyone, she thought. When I give her the thousand kroner I’ll have to tell her so she understands it.

  Turning round instinctively, she caught sight of the pale blue nylon vest of the bloke distributing free newspapers.

  Did someone put him up to keeping an eye on me? she wondered. Was it possible? They knew where Tine lived now. Presumably they also knew she and Tine were in contact. Who’s to say that Tine hadn’t been followed all the way to the rent-a-car sign when she placed the note? What would have stopped the people who followed Tine from reading the note?

  She tried to gain control of her thoughts. Wouldn’t they have removed it? Of course they would have. And yet: would they?

  She glanced again at the newspaper guy. Why wouldn’t the dark-skinned man trying to make a living from his thankless job delivering piles of newspapers to busy, pampered people welcome the opportunity to make a few extra pennies? After all, he would just have to watch her go down Ingerslevsgade and along the railway tracks. If he moved a little closer to the stairwell down to Dybbølsbro Station, it would be easy. There wasn’t a better lookout spot. Standing that high up, the man would be able to see exactly where she was going and where she ended up. At most it was only five hundred yards down to her iron gate and the little house. At most.

  She chewed her upper lip, cinching her wool coat tighter.

  Then she went over to him. ‘Here,’ she said, handing him fifteen thousand-krone notes. ‘You can go home now, right?’

  Only early sound movies showed black men with wide eyes so large and white as this man’s now. As if the bony hand giving him money were no less than the materialization of a dream. The deposit on a flat of his own. Or a small shop. His ticket home. To a life among other black men under the burning sun.

  ‘Today’s Wednesday. How about calling your employer and telling him you won’t be coming back till next month? Do you catch my drift?’

  Fog was settling over the city and Enghave Park, enshrouding her like an alcoholic haze. Her surroundings were disappearing in a white cloak. The tall windows of Kongens Brewery went first, then the blocks before it, the gazebo at one end of the park, and finally the fountain. Damp air with the scent of autumn.

  ‘Those men must die,’ said the voices in her head.

  That morning she’d opened one of the hollow spaces in the wall and removed the hand grenades. She had studied the devilish devices and seen everything so clearly. They would die individually. One at a time, so fear and remorse would have time to devastate each of those remaining.

  She laughed to herself, shoving her ice-cold hands deep in her coat pockets. They were already afraid
of her, that had been proven. And now the bastards would do anything to find her. And they were getting closer. Cost what it may. Being the cowards they were.

  Then she stopped laughing. She hadn’t thought through the last part.

  They were cowards. That was a fact. And cowardly people didn’t wait. They ran for their lives while there was still time.

  ‘I’ll have to take them all at once,’ she said aloud. ‘I’ll have to find a way, otherwise they’ll disappear.’ She knew she could, but the voices inside her demanded something else. They were stubborn, they were. It was enough to make a person crazy.

  She rose from the park bench and kicked at the seagulls gathered round her.

  Which way to go?

  Mille, little Mille, flowed her inner mantra incessantly. This was a bad day. There was too much to consider.

  She looked down, saw how the fog put moist droplets on her shoes and thought once again of the letters at the end of Tine’s note. ‘T. K.’ Where did the ‘K’ come from?

  They were coming up to the break prior to fifth-form exams. Not long after Kimmie had cut Kåre Bruno loose and let him sink, crushed by the lecture she had given him on how mediocre he was, both in terms of intelligence and personality.

  It was during the following days that Kristian began to tease her.

  ‘You don’t have the guts, Kimmie,’ he whispered each day during morning assembly.

  And each day he would nudge her and clap her on the shoulder as the rest of the gang formed a ring round her. ‘You wouldn’t dare, Kimmie!’

  But Kimmie did dare, and they knew it. They watched her movements closely. Cultivated her zeal during class. Her legs sprawled between rows of chairs, her dress inching up. Dimples on display as she sashayed up to the teacher’s desk. The see-through blouses and the bedroom voice. Two weeks went by before she awakened desire in the only teacher at the school whom practically everyone liked. Wakened it so emphatically that a person had to laugh.

  He was the most recent addition to the faculty. Baby-faced, yet a real man. The year’s highest final exam scores in Danish at the University of Copenhagen, so the story went. But he was not the archetypal boarding-school teacher, not at all. He expounded on society beyond the school grounds in nuanced terms. The texts he had them read ranged widely.

  Kimmie went to him to ask if he would tutor her for exams. Before the end of the first session he was a lost cause, martyred by the sight of the curves her thin cotton dress so generously revealed.

  His name was Klavs with a ‘v’, a name he was at pains to explain as the result of his father’s poor judgement and overblown interest in the world of Walt Disney.

  None dared to call him Klavs Krikke, the Danish version of Horace Horsecollar from Donald Duck, but she managed to bring out his inner steed anyway. After three sessions, he no longer kept a record of tuition hours. He received her in his flat, already half undressed and with the radiators at full blast. Captured her with uncontrollable kisses, restless hands against her bare skin. Lit by a tireless lust that burned his brain empty, he was indifferent to pricked-up ears and envious glances. To rules and regulations.

  She was going to tell the headmaster that he’d forced her, curious to see where it would lead. See if she could regain control of the situation.

  But it didn’t work.

  The headmaster called them to his office at the same time. Let them sit silently and uncomfortably next to each other in the waiting room with the secretary as their chaperone.

  And after that day, Klavs and Kimmie never spoke again.

  What happened to him afterwards was none of her concern.

  The headmaster told Kimmie to pack her things, the bus to Copenhagen was leaving in half an hour. She needn’t bother wearing her school uniform. In fact, he asked her not to. From now on she could consider herself expelled.

  Kimmie studied the headmaster’s flushed cheeks for some time before meeting his eyes.

  ‘It’s possible that you ...’ she paused a moment, stretching out the unforgivable insult of using the familiar form to address him ‘... that you don’t believe he forced me. But can you be certain that tomorrow’s tabloids will see it the same way? Can you imagine the scandal? “Teacher rapes pupil at ...” Can you see it?’

  She would stay quiet on one simple condition. Yes, she would go. Simply pack her things and leave the school immediately. She didn’t care, as long as the school didn’t notify her parents. That was her condition.

  He protested, saying it was improper for the school to receive money for a service it didn’t provide, so Kimmie disrespectfully tore the corner from a page of the nearest book on the headmaster’s desk and jotted something down.

  ‘Here is my bank account number,’ she said. ‘You just transfer the money into my account.’

  He sighed regretfully. With that slip of paper, decades of authority vanished.

  Raising her eyes in the fog, she felt a calm wash over her. Over at the playground, children’s voices shrieked light-heartedly, prodding her.

  In the entire playground there were only two small children and their nanny. The children were bumbling about, playing tag between autumn-silenced jungle gyms.

  She approached them through the mist and silently observed the girl, who held something in her hand that the boy wanted.

  She’d once had a little girl like that.

  She felt how the nanny was watching her. How her warning bells had rung the instant Kimmie emerged from the bushes in filthy clothes, her morning hair wild.

  ‘I didn’t look this way yesterday,’ she shouted to the nanny, ‘you shoulda seen me.’

  If she’d been wearing the get-up she had on at the central station, things would have been different. Everything would have been different. Maybe the nanny would’ve even talked to her.

  Listened to her.

  But the nanny didn’t listen. She sprang forward, resolutely blocking Kimmie’s path to the children, her arms outstretched. She called for the children to come to her this instant, but they didn’t want to. Didn’t the woman know that little trolls like these didn’t always listen? It amused Kimmie.

  So she thrust out her chin and laughed in the nanny’s face.

  ‘Come here!’ the nanny screamed at the kids hysterically, glaring at Kimmie as if she were pure filth.

  Which is why Kimmie stepped forward and punched her. She wasn’t going to let this person make her out to be some kind of monster.

  The nanny lay on the ground yelling at Kimmie that she bloody well better not hit her, that she would bloody well fix her good and proper. She knew plenty of people who could.

  Then Kimmie kicked her in the side. Once, and then again, so she fell silent.

  ‘Come over here, little girl, and show me what you have in your hand,’ she lured. ‘Is that a little stick you have there?’

  But the children were frozen in place. Standing with their fingers held out stiffly, howling for the nanny to come.

  Kimmie moved closer. She was such a cute little girl, even though she was crying. And she had such long, pretty hair. Brown hair, just as little Mille had had.

  ‘Come here, my dear, show me what you’ve got in your hand,’ she said again, approaching cautiously.

  She heard a hissing from behind, and though she whirled around, she couldn’t ward off the hard, desperate blow to her neck.

  She fell face first into the gravel and felt her abdomen slam against a rock that marked a fork in the path.

  Meanwhile, the nanny flew silently around her and grabbed the children, one in each arm. A real Vesterbro hussy. Tight jeans and greasy hair.

  Kimmie raised her head and watched as the two screaming children’s faces in the woman’s arms disappeared behind the bushes and further into the open.

  She’d once had a little girl like that. Who now lay in a coffin at home under the bed. Waiting patiently.

  Soon they would be reunited.

  21

  ‘This time I’d like for us to ta
lk completely openly to each other,’ Mona Ibsen said. ‘Last time we didn’t make it as far as we should have, did we?’

  Carl surveyed her world, the posters of beautiful nature scenes, palms, mountains and the like. Bright, sun-splashed colours. Two chairs made of precious wood, wispy plants. Such astonishing tidiness. There were no accidental elements here. No small thingamajigs to distract. And still, lying on the sofa with his mind opening up, there was this enormous distraction that made him able to think only about tearing the woman’s clothes off.

  ‘I will try,’ he said. He would do everything she asked of him. He wasn’t that busy.

  ‘You assaulted a man yesterday. Can you explain why?’

  He protested, as was to be expected. Proclaimed his innocence. Still, she looked at him as if he were lying.

  ‘We probably won’t get anywhere unless we go backwards a little in the sequence of events. It may make you uncomfortable, but it’s what we need to do.’

  ‘Shoot,’ he said, eyes squinting just enough so he could watch what her breathing did to her breasts.

  ‘You were involved in a shooting in Amager in January. We discussed it before. Do you remember the exact date?’

  ‘It was the 26th of January.’

  She nodded as if it were an especially good date. ‘You managed to get off relatively unharmed, but one of your colleagues, Anker, died, and another is currently lying paralysed in the hospital. How are you coping with all this now, Carl, eight months later?’

  He stared at the ceiling. How was he coping? He really had no idea. It just never should have happened.

  ‘Of course I’m sorry it happened.’ He pictured Hardy at the spinal clinic. Sad, silent eyes. Two hundred and sixty-four pounds of dead weight.

  ‘Does it upset you?’

  ‘Yeah, a little.’ He tried to smile, but she was looking down at her papers.

  ‘Hardy told me he suspects that whoever shot the three of you had been waiting for you in Amager. Did he tell you that?’