Текст книги "Disgrace"

Автор книги: Jussi Adler-Olsen

Соавторы: Jussi Adler-Olsen
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

21

‘This time I’d like for us to talk 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?’

Carl confirmed that he had.

‘Did he also tell you that he thinks it was either you or Anker who alerted them?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

Now she was sizing him up. In his mind, her eyes flashed with eroticism. Carl wondered if she was aware of this, and how wildly distracting it was.

‘Maybe he’s right,’ he replied.

‘Of course it wasn’t you, I can see that by looking at you. Am I right?’

If it had been him, could she expect any response other than a denial? How dumb did she think people were? How well did she think she could read a face?

‘No, it wasn’t me. Of course not.’

‘But if it was Anker, then something must’ve gone horribly wrong in his life, wouldn’t you say?’

I may have the hots for you, Carl thought, but if I’m going to continue with this, ask me some proper questions, damn it.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, hearing his own voice like a whisper. ‘Hardy and I will have to consider that possibility. Once I’m through being the victim of a little, snot-nosed private detective’s lies, and once the powers that be stop putting obstacles in my path, we’ll see what we can find out.’

‘At police headquarters they call it the “nail-gun case” because of the murder weapon. The victim was shot in the head, was he not? It looked like an execution.’

‘Possibly. Given the situation, I didn’t manage to see much. I’ve not been involved in the case since. It also had an offshoot, but you probably already know that. Two young men were killed in Sorø the same way. It is believed that the perpetrators are one and the same.’

She nodded. Of course she knew. ‘The case plagues you, doesn’t it, Carl?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say it plagues me.’

‘What plagues you then, Carl?’

He clutched the side of the leather sofa. Now was his chance. ‘What plagues me is how every time I try to invite you out, you say no. That plagues me, damn it.’

He left Mona Ibsen’s office feeling buoyant. Granted, she had reprimanded him and then forced him to run the gauntlet of a series of questions oozing with doubts and accusations. Many times he’d had the desire to spring angrily from the sofa and demand that she believe him. But Carl stayed put and answered politely, and the end result was that she – without affection but with a harried smile – agreed they could go out to dinner when she was finished with him as a client.

Maybe she thought that making this vague promise protected her. That he would forever live with the suspicion that his treatment had not been completed. But Carl knew better. He would have that promise realized.

He glanced down Jægersborg Allé and through Charlottenlund’s mangled city centre. All it took was a five-minute walk to the S-train and a half-hour ride later he’d again find himself passively sitting in his adjustable office chair in his corner of the basement. Not exactly the best setting for his newly won optimism.

He needed something to happen, and at headquarters there was simply nada.

When he reached the start of Lindegårdsvej, he looked up the street. He was well aware that at the opposite end the city name changed to Ordrup, and that it would make sense to take that walk now.

He punched in Assad’s number on his mobile and glanced automatically at the battery’s power level. He’d just charged it, and yet it was already half-dead. Irritating.

Assad sounded surprised. Were they allowed to talk?

‘Rubbish, Assad. We just shouldn’t parade it around that we’re still in business. Listen, could you do a little research and find people we can speak with at the boarding school? There’s an old yearbook in the big folder. In it you can see who was in their class. Either that, or find one of the teachers who was there during the years 1985 to 1987.’

‘I’ve already checked it out,’ he said. Hell, of course he had. ‘I have a few names then, but will go further, boss.’

‘Good. Transfer me to Rose, would you?’

A minute passed, then he heard her breathless voice. ‘Yes!’ There was not a hint of him being addressed as ‘boss’ in her rhetoric.

‘You’re putting tables together, I gather?’

‘Yes!’ If such a short word could express frustration, accusation, iciness and tremendous annoyance at being interrupted in the midst of more important objectives, then Rose Knudsen really had the touch.

‘I need Kimmie Lassen’s stepmother’s address. I know you gave me a note, but I don’t have it with me. Just give me the address, OK? Don’t ask me lots of questions, please!’

He was standing right outside Danske Bank, where well-preserved men and women patiently waited in long queues. Just as they did in working-class suburbs like Brøndby and Tåstrup on paydays like today, but that made more sense. Why in the world would people with deep pockets like those who lived in Charlottenlund queue up in front of a bank? Didn’t they have people to pay their bills for them? Didn’t they use Internet banking? Or was there something he didn’t know about wealthy people’s habits? Perhaps they purchased stocks with all their payday pocket change, just as the vagrants in Vesterbro bought fags and beer?

Well, everyone does what they can with what they’ve got, he thought. He glanced over at the chemist shop’s facade and noticed Bent Krum’s sign in the window of the building: BARRISTER WITH AUDIENCE BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT. This right to higher audience might definitely come in handy with clients such as Pram, Dybbøl Jensen and Florin.

He sighed.

To walk past Krum’s office would be like ignoring every temptation in the Bible. It was almost as though he could hear the Devil laughing. If he rang the doorbell, walked up and interviewed Bent Krum, not ten minutes would pass before he would have the police chief on the line, and that would mean the end of Department Q and Carl Mørck.

He stood a moment trying to decide between involuntary retirement and postponement of the confrontation until a better occasion presented itself.

It would be best to just walk on by, he thought, but his finger had a will of its own and pressed the doorbell in as far as it could go. He’d be damned if anyone was going to stop his investigation. Bent Krum was going to end up in the hot seat. Better sooner than later.

He shook his head and took his finger off the doorbell. He was right where he’d been a thousand times before: once more the curse of his youth had caught up with him. If anyone was going to decide anything, it was going to be him, and only him, damn it.

A gruff, female voice curtly announced that he would have to wait a moment, which he did until he heard footfalls on the stairs and a woman came into view behind the glass door. Fashionably dressed, with a designer shawl around her shoulders and a rustic fur coat just like the one Vigga had ogled in front of Birger Christensen’s on Strøget for at least four-fifths of their life together. As if it would ever have looked as good on Vigga. If she had bought it, by now it most likely would’ve suffered the sad fate of being cut to shreds so that one of her wild artist lovers could have a little drapery for his outlandish paintings.

The woman opened the door and gave him a blinding white smile, which couldn’t have been obtained without money.

‘I’m terribly sorry, but I’m on my way out the door. My husband isn’t here on Thursdays. Maybe you can set up an appointment another day.’

‘No, I …’ he reached instinctively for the police badge in his pocket and found only bits of lint. He would have said that he was in the midst of an investigation. Something along the lines that her husband only had to answer a few routine questions, and might he not return in an hour or two if that was suitable, and it wouldn’t take long. But he said something else.

‘Is your husband at the golf course, ma’am?’

She looked at him with incomprehension. ‘As far as I know, my husband doesn’t play golf.’

‘OK.’ He inhaled. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, ma’am, but you and I are both being deceived. Your husband and my wife are having an affair, unfortunately. And now I would like to know where I stand.’ He tried to seem forlorn as he noticed how painfully he’d blindsided the blameless woman.

‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’ Carefully he touched her arm. ‘That was truly wrong of me, I apologize again.’

Then he withdrew to the pavement and joined the flow of people heading towards Ordrup, a little shocked at how he’d been infected by Assad’s impulsiveness. He’d said it had been ‘wrong’ of him. That was putting it mildly, to put it mildly.

She lived across from the church on Kirkevej. Three carports, two stair turrets, one brick groundskeeper’s cottage, hundreds of yards of newly plastered garden walls and five to six thousand square feet of mansion, with more brass on the doors than on the entire Danish royal yacht. Modest and humble would be a thoroughly miserable description.

He was pleased to see shadows moving around behind the windows on the ground floor. So there was a chance.

The housekeeper looked worn out, but agreed to bring Kassandra Lassen to the door, as far as that was possible.

The expression ‘bring to the door’ would prove to be more apt than he could have predicted.

A loud stream of protest from inside was interrupted with the exclamation, ‘A young man, you say?’

She was the very incarnation of a high-society shrew who’d seen better days and better men. A far cry from the well-polished, slender woman in the Her Life article. A lot can change in nearly thirty years, that was for sure. She was wearing a kimono that hung so loosely that her satin underwear became an integral part of her overall presentation. Sweeping gestures with long fingernails gesticulated at him. She had immediately perceived that he was a real hunk of a man – something she had apparently not outgrown.

‘Do come in,’ she greeted. Her boozy breath was day-old, but of quality origin. Malt whisky, Carl guessed. The air was so thick with it, an expert would probably be able to determine the vintage.

She led him by the arm, or rather, directed the way while clinging to him, until they reached the area of the first floor that, lowering her voice, she called, ‘My Room’.

He was offered a seat in an armchair nestled next to hers, directly facing her heavy eyelids and even heavier breasts. It was a memorable scene.

Here, too, her friendliness – or interest, one could say – lasted only until he explained the purpose of his visit.

‘So you wish to know about Kimmie?’ She laid her hand on her breast, which was meant to indicate that either he left or she’d leave her senses.

Then his country-boy self took over.

‘I’m here because I’ve heard that this establishment is the epitome of good manners,’ he tried. ‘That a person can expect to be treated well here, regardless of the reason for the visit.’ It had no effect.

He picked up the carafe and filled her glass with whisky. Maybe that would thaw her out.

‘Is that chit even alive?’ she asked, devoid of empathy.

‘Yes, she lives on the streets of Copenhagen. I have a picture of her. Do you wish to see it?’

She closed her eyes and looked away, as if he’d shoved dog poop under her nose. Good grief, she obviously could really do without this.

‘Can you tell me what you and your husband at the time thought when you heard what Kimmie and her friends were suspected of back in 1987?’

Once again she lifted her hand to her chest. This time, apparently, to gather her thoughts. Then her facial expression changed and she avoided his eye. Common sense and whisky were joining forces. ‘Do you know what, my dear, we really weren’t very involved in all that. We travelled a bit, you see.’ Suddenly she turned her head back towards him. It took her a moment to regain her equilibrium. ‘As they say, travel is the elixir of life. And my husband and I made so many wonderful friends. The world is a lovely place, wouldn’t you agree, Mr … ?’

‘Mørck. Carl Mørck.’ He nodded. To find the likes of such a callous being one would have to turn to Grimm’s fairy tales. ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right.’ She didn’t need to know that, apart from a bus trip to the Costa Brava – where Vigga frequented the local artists while Carl lay frying on a beach with a bunch of retirees – he’d never ventured further than around six hundred miles from Copenhagen.

‘Do you think there is any real substance in the suspicion being laid on Kimmie?’

The corners of her mouth drooped. An attempt to appear concerned, he supposed. ‘Do you know what? Kimmie was a wicked girl. She wasn’t averse to hitting people. Yes, even as a little girl. If she didn’t get her way, her arms would flail like drumsticks. Like this.’ She tried to illustrate as the malt juices sloshed everywhere.

What normal child didn’t do that? Carl thought. Especially with a mother and father like hers.

‘I see. Was she also like that when she was older?’

‘Ha! She was nasty. Called me the worst names. You can’t imagine.’

Actually he could.

‘And she was loose.’

‘Loose? How so?’

She rubbed the fine, blue veins on the back of her hand. Only now did he see how arthritis had dug itself into her wrist. He glanced again at her nearly empty glass. Pain relief has many faces, he thought.

‘After she came home from Switzerland, she dragged just about anybody home with her and … yes, I’ll be blunt … fucked them like an animal with her door open – while I was up and about in the house.’ She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t at all easy being alone, Mr Mørck.’ She looked at him earnestly. ‘By that time Willy, Kimmie’s father, had already packed his bags and left.’ She took a sip from her glass. ‘As if I wanted to hold on to him. That ridiculous …’

Then she turned to him again with a red-wine-stained set of teeth. ‘Are you alone in this life, Mr Mørck?’ Her shoulder twist and obvious invitation were straight out of a lady’s romantic novel.

‘Yes. I am,’ he said, and accepted the challenge. Stared right at her and held her gaze until she slowly arched her brows and took another sip. Her short, blinking eyelashes were all that peered over the rim of the glass. It had been a long time since a man had looked at her that way.

‘Did you know Kimmie had been pregnant?’

She took a deep breath and for a moment seemed far away, but with pensiveness etched across her forehead. As though it were the word ‘pregnant’ more than the memory of a profoundly failed human relationship that caused her pain. As far as Carl was aware, she herself had never managed to give life.

‘Yes,’ she said with a cold glare, ‘I did. The tart. How would that surprise anyone?’

‘What happened then?’

‘She wanted money, of course.’

‘Did she get it?’

‘Not from me!’ She dropped the flirtation and replaced it with profound disgust. ‘But her father gave her ten thousand kroner and asked her to stop contacting him.’

‘And you? Did you hear from her?’

She shook her head. The eyes said it was just as well.

‘Who was the father of the child? Do you know?’

‘Oh, I suppose it was that little nobody who burned down his father’s lumber yard.’

‘Bjarne Thøgersen, you mean? The one who was convicted of the murders?’

‘Probably. I really don’t remember his name any more.’

‘I see!’ He was certain she was lying. Whisky or not, a person didn’t just forget something like that. ‘Kimmie lived here for a while. You say it wasn’t easy for you?’

She gazed at him in disbelief. ‘I hope you don’t think I put up with that meat market for very long. No, during that time I preferred living on the coast.’

‘The coast?’

‘Costa del Sol, you know. Fuengirola. Lovely roof terrace right above the promenade. Delightful place. Do you know Fuengirola, Mr Mørck?’

He nodded. No doubt she went there on account of her arthritis, but otherwise it was where the maladjusted semi-wealthy with skeletons in their closet went. If she had said Marbella, he would have better understood. She must have been able to afford it.

‘Is there still anything of Kimmie’s left in the house?’ he asked.

At that moment something inside her fell apart. She simply sat there, silently emptying her glass at her own leisurely pace, and when it was empty, so, too, was her head.

‘I think Kassandra needs to rest now,’ said the housekeeper, who’d been hovering in the background.

Carl held up his hand to cut her off. He’d begun to grow suspicious.

‘May I see Kimmie’s room, Mrs Lassen? I understand that it was left exactly as it had been.’

It was a wild shot from the hip. The kind of question an experienced policeman has lying in the box labelled ‘Worth a try’. A question that was always introduced with the phrase: ‘I understand that …’

In a tight spot it was always a good way to begin.

The housekeeper got two minutes to lay the queen of the house in her gilded bed, then Carl started looking around. Kimmie’s childhood home or not, it wasn’t fit for raising children. Not a single corner to play in. There were too many knick-knacks, too many Japanese and Chinese vases. If a person happened to wave his arms, he risked a seven-digit insurance claim. It had a very uncomfortable atmosphere, which Carl was certain hadn’t changed over the years. A children’s prison, that’s how he saw it.

‘Yes,’ the housekeeper said on their way up to the third floor. ‘Of course Kassandra just lives here; the house actually belongs to the daughter. So everything on this floor is exactly how it was when she lived here.’

So Kassandra Lassen lived in this house at Kimmie’s mercy. If Kimmie rejoined society, Kassandra’s refuge here would probably be a thing of the past. What a switch of fates. The rich woman lived on the streets and the poor woman enjoyed the high life. That was the reason Kassandra Lassen stayed in Fuengirola and not Marbella. It wasn’t of her own free will.

‘It’s a mess, I should warn you,’ the housekeeper said, opening the door. ‘We choose to keep it this way. That way the daughter won’t be able to return and accuse Kassandra of prying, and I think that’s a smart move.’

He nodded from the end of the red-carpeted hallway. Where did one find such blindly loyal servants these days? She didn’t even speak with an accent.

‘Did you know Kimmie?’

‘God, no. Do I look as though I could have been here since 1995?’ She laughed heartily.

But in fact she did.

It was practically a separate flat. He had expected a few rooms, but not this veritable facsimile of a loft apartment in Paris’s Latin Quarter. There was even a French balcony. The small-paned bay windows set into the sloping walls were filthy, but otherwise quite charming. If the housekeeper thought this place was a mess, she would collapse if she saw Jesper’s room.

Dirty clothes were scattered about the floor, but other than that, nothing. Not even a piece of paper on the desk or anything in front of the television on the coffee table to suggest that a young woman had once lived here.

‘You can have a look around, but I would actually like to see your police badge first, Mr Mørck. That’s standard procedure, is it not?’ asked the housekeeper.

He nodded and fished around in all his pockets. What a meddlesome little busybody. At last he found a tattered business card that had been in his pocket for a hundred years. ‘I’m sorry, but my badge is back at headquarters. My apologies. You see, I’m the head of the department, so I don’t leave the office that often. But here, please, my card. So you can see who I am.’

She read the number and the address and felt the card, as if she were an expert in forgeries. ‘Just a moment,’ she said and lifted the receiver of a Bang & Olufsen telephone on the desk.

She introduced herself as Charlotte Nielsen and asked if anyone knew of a deputy detective superintendent by the name of Carl Mørck. Then she shuffled her feet for a moment as the call was transferred.

She inquired again, and then asked for a description of what this Mørck looked like.

She laughed briefly, scrutinizing him, then hung up with a smile on her lips.

What the hell was so funny? he wondered. Ten to one she’d talked to Rose.

She didn’t elaborate on the reason for her chuckle, but exited the room and left him alone with all his unanswered questions in a young girl’s abandoned flat that seemingly had nothing to tell.

He inspected everything a number of times, and just as many times the housekeeper appeared in the doorway. She had taken on the role of guard, and she believed she could do that best by watching him as one eyes a hungry mosquito sitting on one’s hand. But nothing bit her. Carl had neither made a mess nor put anything in his pocket.

Apparently Kimmie had been in a rush to leave. She had vacated the flat in a fast, yet thorough, fashion. Things she didn’t want others to see had no doubt been deposited in the rubbish bins by the house’s cobblestone driveway, which he could see from the balcony.

The same was true of her clothes. There were small piles on the chair beside her bed, but no underwear. Shoes were scattered about in the corners of the room, but no dirty socks. She had considered what was OK to leave behind, and what was too intimate. And that was precisely what characterized the search: nothing intimate remained.

Even decorations on the walls, which normally could give an indication of attitude or taste, were missing. There was no toothbrush in the small marble bathroom. No tampons in the chest or cotton swabs in the wastebasket next to the toilet. Not the slightest trace of anything in the toilet bowl or the sink.

Kimmie had left the place so clinically devoid of personality that all he could tell was that it had once been occupied by a female. But she could just as well have been a spinster in the Salvation Army as a hip, upper-class girl from the expensive end of the postal codes.

He gently lifted the bed sheets and tried sniffing out her scent. He raised her blotting pad to see if she’d forgotten a little note beneath it. He fished around the bottom of the empty wastebasket, looked in the back of the kitchen drawers, put his head in the hollow space under the sloping roof. Nothing.

‘It’ll be dark soon,’ said Charlotte, the housekeeper, implying that he should consider finding another place to play police officer.

‘Is there an attic or anything else above here?’ he asked hopefully. ‘A hatch or some stairs I can’t see from here?’

‘No, there’s just this.’

Carl looked up. OK, so an attic above the flat didn’t exist.

‘I’ll just make one more pass,’ he said.

He lifted all the rugs and searched for loose floorboards. Gently removed the spice posters in the kitchen to see if they covered up a hollow space. Knocked on the furniture and on the bottoms of the wardrobe and kitchen cupboards. There was simply nothing there.

He shook his head, reprimanding himself. Why would there be anything?

He closed the door of the flat behind him and remained on the landing a moment, partly to see if anything out there was of interest, and when there wasn’t, partly to drive away the irritating feeling that he had in fact overlooked something.

Then his mobile rang, and he snapped back to reality.

‘It’s Marcus,’ came the voice. ‘Why aren’t you in your office, Carl? And why does it look the way it does down there? The corridor is overflowing with pieces of I don’t know how many tables, and your office is covered with yellow sticky-notes. Where are you, Carl? Have you forgotten that you have visitors from Norway tomorrow?’

‘Shit!’ he said a little too loudly. Yes, he’d happily forgotten all about it.

‘OK?’ came from the other end of the line. He knew the homicide chief’s OK’s. They weren’t the kind of thing a person went looking for.

‘I’m on my way to headquarters now.’ He looked at the clock; it was already past four.

‘Now?! No, don’t you worry about anything at all.’ He didn’t sound as though it were up for discussion. He sounded angry. ‘I’ll take care of the visit you have tomorrow, and they won’t be coming down to that mess of yours.’

‘What time did you say they’re coming?’

‘They’re coming at 10 a.m., but you can save yourself the trouble, Carl. I’m taking over, and you’ll make yourself available for questions, if we want your commentary.’

Carl stared at his mobile for a moment after Marcus Jacobsen hung up. Right up until that second those dried-cod sheiks could have kissed him in a particular place, but now his attitude had changed completely. If the homicide chief wanted to take over, then Carl damned sure wouldn’t let him.

He cursed a few times and glanced out of the skylight that topped off the impressive stairwell. The sun was still out and beamed through the glass panes. Even though it was knocking-off time, he didn’t have any desire to go home.

His head was in no way ready to make the trip up Hestestien, along the fields and home to Morten’s culinary concoctions.

He noticed the shadows falling sharply through the window, and he felt his forehead forming a frown.

In houses of this vintage, the window frames in rooms with slanting roofs were usually set twelve inches into the wall. But here they were set in much deeper, by almost another ten inches. That meant, if he should venture a guess, that the house had been given additional insulation at a later date.

He craned his neck and discovered a slim crack in the transition from the ceiling above the stairwell to the sloping wall. His eyes followed the crack all the way round the landing and ended where he started. Yes, the sloping walls had settled a tad; the house hadn’t been born with such well-insulated walls, that much was clear. There were at least six inches of extra insulation, finished off with gypsum plasterboard. It had been smoothed out with putty and painted quite nicely, but it was common knowledge that after a certain amount of time cracks were inevitable.

He turned around, opened the door to the flat again, went directly to the outer wall and scanned all the sloping surfaces. Here, too, cracks had appeared in the join along the ceiling, but otherwise there was nothing remarkable.

The hollow space was there, somewhere, but apparently it wasn’t possible to hide anything inside it. Not from the inside anyway.

He repeated the words to himself. ‘Not from the inside anyway!’ He saw the balcony door. He grabbed the handle, pushed the door open and stepped outside, where the slanted roof tiles formed a picturesque background.

‘Remember, it was a long time ago,’ he whispered to himself and let his eyes roam from one row of tiles to the next. He was on the north side of the house; moss had collected all the rainwater’s nutrients and now covered most of the roof like stage scenery. He turned towards the tiles on the other side of the balcony door and recognized the irregularity immediately.

The roof tiles were positioned evenly and firmly, and here, too, there was moss everywhere. The difference, however, was that one of the tiles right at the spot where the top row connected to the apex was slightly staggered from the others. The roof was constructed with pantiles, the kind of tiles that overlap one another, where each one has a small knob on the underside to prevent it from falling off the wooden crossbeams. But this particular tile was about to slide: almost as if the knob had been hacked off, it lay loosely on the beam between the other tiles.

When he lifted it, it loosened without any difficulty.

Carl took a deep drag of the chill September air.

A rare feeling of standing before the brink of something exceptional spread through his body. Kind of like what Howard Carter must have felt when he made the small hole in the grave-chamber door and suddenly found himself in Tutankhamun’s tomb. Because lying before Carl in a hollow of insulation material under the tiles was a shoebox-sized, unpainted metal box wrapped in transparent plastic.

Suddenly his heart started pounding furiously. Then he called out to the housekeeper.

‘Do you see that box?’

She came in and bent reluctantly to peer under the tiles. ‘There’s a box. What is it?’

‘I don’t know, but you’re my witness that I found it there.’

She looked at him sullenly. ‘OK, I do have eyes in my head, if that’s what you’re asking?’

He held his mobile towards the hollow space and snapped a few images. Then he showed them to her.

‘Do we agree that it was this hollow space I’ve just photographed?’