Текст книги "Disgrace"

Автор книги: Jussi Adler-Olsen

Соавторы: Jussi Adler-Olsen
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

7

The light over the rail tracks appeared grey in the mist. On the opposite side, beyond the spider web of overhead wires, the yellow postal vans had been active for hours. People were on their way to work, and the S-trains that made Kimmie’s home shake were brimming with passengers.

It could be the start of an average day, but inside her the demons were on the loose. They were like feverish hallucinations: ominous, ungovernable and unwanted.

For a moment she sank to her knees and prayed for the voices to stay quiet, but the higher powers had the day off, as usual. So she took a long swig from the whisky she kept next to her makeshift bed.

When half the bottle had burned its way through her body, she decided to leave the suitcase behind. She had enough to carry. The hatred, the loathing, the anger.

First in line was Torsten Florin. That’s how it’d been since Kristian Wolf’s death.

This was a thought she’d had frequently.

She had seen Torsten’s fox-face in a celebrity news magazine, proudly posing in front of his newly renovated and award-winning glass palace of a fashion house at Indiakaj in the old free port. That is where she would confront him with reality.

She eased out of the ramshackle bed, her lower back throbbing, and sniffed her armpits. The smell wasn’t pungent yet, so her bath in DGI City’s municipal swimming centre could wait.

She rubbed her knees, ran her hand under the bed, pulled out the little chest and opened the lid.

‘Did you sleep well, my little darling?’ Kimmie asked, stroking the minute head with her finger.

Every day she thought, The hair is so soft and the eyelashes are so long. Then she smiled warmly at her dear little one, closed the lid carefully and put the chest back. As always, it was the best moment of the day.

She riffled through the pile of clothes to find the warmest pair of tights. The mildew growing up under the tarpaper was a warning. This autumn the weather was unpredictable.

When she was done, she carefully opened the door of her brick house and stared directly out at the rail tracks. Less than two yards separated her and the S-trains, which whipped past at practically all hours of the day.

No one saw her.

So she slipped out, locking the door and buttoning her coat. She walked the twenty steps round the steel-grey transformer that the railway engineers rarely checked, along the asphalt path to a wrought-iron gate that exited on to Ingerslevsgade, and unlocked it.

Back when she could reach the railway building only by walking on the rubble alongside the fence all the way from Dybbølsbro Station – and doing it at night because she’d have been caught otherwise – it had been her greatest dream to have the key to this gate. Three or four hours of sleep were all she could get before having to vacate the little round house. If she were spotted even once, she knew they would throw her out and make sure she didn’t come back. So the night became her companion until the morning she discovered the LØGSTRUP FENCE sign on the gate.

She called the factory and introduced herself as Lily Carstensen, the Danish State Railway’s supplies manager, and arranged to meet the locksmith at the gate. For the occasion she wore a newly pressed blue trouser suit and could have passed for middle management in the state bureaucracy. She had two copies of the keys made and got a bill – which she paid in cash – and now she could come and go as she pleased. If she took precautions, and the demons left her alone, everything would be OK.

On the bus to Østerport she was mumbling to herself and people were staring. Stop it, Kimmie, she told herself. But her mouth wouldn’t obey.

Sometimes she listened to herself as if she were someone else talking, and that’s how it was on this day. She smiled at a little girl, and the girl returned the kindness by making a face at her.

So it must be especially bad.

With ten thousand eyes drilling into her, she got off a few stops early. That was the last time she would take the bus, she promised herself. People were simply too close. The S-train was better.

‘Much better,’ she said aloud, as she made her way along Store Kongensgade. There were almost no people on the street. Almost no cars. Almost no voices in the back of her head.

Kimmie reached the building at Indiakaj straight after the lunch hour. At Brand Nation she discovered the yawningly empty parking spot that, according to an enamel sign, belonged to Torsten Florin.

She opened her handbag and glanced inside. She had stolen the handbag in the foyer of the Palace Cinema from a girl who’d been preoccupied with herself and her reflection in the mirror.

According to her health insurance card, the bimbo’s name was Lise-Maja Petterson. Probably another victim of numerology, she thought, pushing the hand grenade aside and pulling out one of Lise-Maja’s insanely tasty Peter Jackson fags. ‘Smoking Causes Heart Disease’ the packet read.

Lighting up, she laughed aloud, then inhaled deeply into her lungs. She had been smoking ever since she’d been kicked out of boarding school and her heart still beat just fine. It wouldn’t be a heart attack that would do her in, she knew that much.

After a couple of hours she’d emptied the pack, smudging the butts all over the flagstones. Then she grabbed one of the young women sashaying in and out of Brand Nation’s glass doors.

‘Do you know when Torsten Florin will be back?’ she asked, and was answered with silence and a disapproving glare.

‘Do you?’ she said more emphatically, tugging at the girl’s arm.

‘Let go!’ the girl shouted, twisting Kimmie’s arm round with both hands.

Kimmie narrowed her eyes. She hated it when people touched her, hated it when they wouldn’t answer and hated their stares. In one fluid movement, she swung her free arm until it struck the girl’s cheekbone.

The girl dropped like a rag doll. It was a good feeling, and yet it also wasn’t. Kimmie knew this wasn’t how people were supposed to act.

‘Tell me,’ she said, leaning over the shocked woman. ‘Do you know when Torsten Florin’s coming back?’

When the woman stuttered no for the third time, Kimmie turned on her heels, fully aware she couldn’t return for a while.

She ran into Rat-Tine on the crumbling concrete corner outside of Jacob’s Full House on Skelbækgade. She was standing underneath the proprietor’s sign that read THE SEASON’S MUSHROOMS, with her plastic bag and her make-up long since smeared. The first johns she blew in the alleys had been rewarded with sharply drawn eye make-up and rouged cheeks, but the remaining customers would have to settle for less. Her lipstick was now blotched and it was clear she’d removed semen from her face with her sleeves. Tine’s customers didn’t use condoms. It had been years since she’d been in a position to demand that. Years since she’d been in a position to demand anything at all.

‘Hi, Kimmie! Hi, sweetie! Fucking great to see you,’ she snuffled, wobbling towards Kimmie on legs as thin as a crane fly’s. ‘I’ve been looking for you, sweetie,’ she said, waving her freshly lit fag. ‘Did you know that people are asking about you down at the central station?’

She seized Kimmie by the arm and escorted her to the benches across the street at Café Yrsa.

‘Where have you been? I’ve missed you so fucking much,’ Tine said, fishing a couple of beers from her plastic bag.

As Tine opened the bottles, Kimmie glanced towards the Fisketorv Shopping Centre.

‘Who asked about me?’ she said, pushing the bottle back to Tine. Beer was the drink of the proletariat. She’d learned that growing up.

‘Oh, just some blokes.’ Tine set the extra bottle under the bench. She was happy sitting there, Kimmie knew, in that spot where she felt most at home; beer in one hand, money in her pocket and yellowed fingers pinching a fresh cigarette.

‘Tell me everything, Tine.’

‘Oh, Kimmie, I don’t remember so well, you know. It’s the junk, innit? Then it doesn’t work so good in here.’ She patted her head. ‘But I didn’t say anything. Just told ’em I didn’t know a fucking thing about who you were.’ She smiled, shaking her head. ‘They showed me a picture of you, Kimmie. My God, but you were fine in those days, Kimmie, love.’ She took a long drag on her fag. ‘I was nice-looking, too, once, I was. Someone told me that once. His name was …’ She stared into space. That was also gone.

Kimmie nodded. ‘Was there more than one who asked for me?’

Tine nodded and took another gulp. ‘There were two, but not at the same time. One of them came at night, just before the station closed. So maybe it was around four in the morning. Could that be right, Kimmie?’

Kimmie shrugged. Now that she knew there were two, it didn’t really matter.

‘How much?’ The question came from a man standing right in front of Kimmie, but she didn’t react. This was Tine’s business.

‘How much for a blow job?’ he repeated.

She felt Tine’s elbow in her side. ‘He’s asking you, Kimmie,’ she said, gone from the world. She’d already earned all she needed for the day.

Kimmie raised her head and saw an ordinary-looking man with his hands in his coat pocket, wearing a pathetic expression on his face.

‘Sod off,’ she said, giving him a murderous glare. ‘Sod off before I smack you.’

He stepped back and straightened up, then smiled crookedly, as if the threat alone were satisfaction enough.

‘Five hundred. Five hundred if you wash your mouth first. I won’t have any of your slime on my cock, you hear?’

He pulled money from his pocket and flashed the bills, and the voices in Kimmie’s head grew louder. Come on, whispered one. He’s asking for it, sounded the rest. She grabbed the bottle under the bench and put it to her mouth as the man tried to stare her down.

When she threw her head back and spat in his eyes, he lurched backwards, shock etched into his face. He glanced down at his coat, furious, and levelled his gaze at her again. She knew he was dangerous now. There was no shortage of assaults on Skelbækgade. The Tamil handing out free newspapers up at the next corner was unlikely to intervene.

So she got to her feet and smashed the bottle down on the man’s skull. Shards of glass slid across the street to a buckled post box. A delta of blood spread from his ear and dripped down the collar of his coat. As the man stared at the jagged bottle aimed at him, his mind was no doubt racing. How would he explain this to his wife, his children, his colleagues? He began running towards the central station, presumably aware that he’d need a doctor’s attention and a new coat in order to return to normal.

‘I’ve seen that cocksucker before,’ Tine snuffled at Kimmie’s side, as she stared at the beer stain spreading on the pavement. ‘Bloody hell, Kimmie. Now I need to go to Aldi for another one, don’t I? Poor fucking beer. Why did that idiot have to come wading by when we’re sitting here, having a good time?’

Kimmie relaxed her gaze and her grip on the bottleneck as the man disappeared down the street. Then she stuck her fingers in her trousers, fished out a chamois-leather neck purse and opened it. The newspaper clippings were very new. On occasion she exchanged them with fresh ones so that she could stay updated on how the others looked. She unfolded the clippings and held them in front of Tine’s face.

‘Was this guy one of the men asking about me?’ She put her finger on the press photo. At the bottom it read: ‘Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen, director of the stock market research firm UDJ, rejects partnership with conservative think tank.’

Ulrik had gradually become a big man, in both the physical and figurative meaning of the word.

Tine studied the clipping through a blue-white cloud of cigarette smoke and shook her head. ‘They weren’t that fat.’

‘How about this one?’ It was from a women’s magazine she’d found in a rubbish bin on Øster Farimagsgade. With his long hair and shiny skin, Torsten Florin came across as a queer, but he wasn’t. She could confirm that.

‘I’ve seen that one before, on TV-Denmark or something. He does something in fashion, right?’

‘Was it him, Tine?’

Tine giggled as if it were a game. So it wasn’t Torsten, either.

When she’d also rejected the Ditlev Pram clipping, Kimmie packed them all up and stuffed them back in her trousers. ‘What did the men say about me?’

‘They just said they were looking for you, sweetie.’

‘If we went down there to find them someday, would you recognize them?’

She shrugged. ‘They’re not there every day, Kimmie.’

Kimmie gnawed at her lip. She had to be careful now. They were getting close. ‘You tell me if you see them again, got it? Pay close attention to what they look like. Write it down so you can remember.’ She rested her hand on Tine’s knee, which protruded like the edge of a knife under her threadbare jeans. ‘If you have information, stick it under the yellow sign over there.’ She pointed at the sign that read CAR RENTAL – DISCOUNT.

Tine coughed and nodded simultaneously.

‘Every time you give me solid information I’ll give you a thousand kroner for your rat. What do you say to that, Tine? You can get it a new cage. You still have it up in your bedsit, don’t you?

She stood for five minutes by the parking sign in front of the landmark C. E. Bast Tallow Refinery until she was certain that Tine wasn’t watching her.

No one knew where she lived, and she wanted to keep it that way.

Crossing the street, angling towards the wrought-iron door, she felt a headache emerging along with a prickling sensation under her skin. Anger and frustration at the same time. The demons inside her hated it.

Sitting on her narrow bed, holding the bottle of whisky and peering through the small room’s faint light, a sense of calm washed over her. This was her real world. Where she felt safe, where she could find everything she needed. The chest containing her most precious treasure lay under the bench, the poster depicting children playing tacked on the inside of the door, the photograph of the little girl, the newspapers she’d attached to the wall for insulation. The stack of clothes, the piss bucket on the floor, the pile of newspapers in the back, two battery-driven mini-fluorescent tubes and a pair of extra shoes on the shelf. She could do whatever she pleased with all this, and if she wanted something new, she had plenty of money.

When the whisky began to take effect, she laughed and inspected the nooks behind the three loose bricks in the wall. She checked these spaces nearly every time she returned to her house, starting with the one containing her credit cards and last ATM receipts, then moving on to the one where she kept the cash.

Each day she tallied up how much was left. For eleven years she’d lived on the street, and there were still 1,344,000 kroner left. If she continued as before, she would never use it up. Her daily needs, including her clothes, were met more or less through her thievery. She didn’t eat much, and thanks to the so-called health-conscious government, alcohol cost next to nothing. A person could now drink himself to death at half-price. What a terrific society Denmark had become. She snorted, removed the hand grenade from her bag and set it in the third nook with the others. Then she replaced the brick so carefully that it was nearly impossible to see the cracks.

Her anxiety came without warning this time, which was unusual. Normally, internal images alerted her. Hands poised to strike, sometimes blood and mutilated bodies. Other times she caught fleeting glimpses of carefree moments from long, long ago. Promises whispered that were later broken. This time, however, the voices failed to notify her.

She began to shake. Cramps in her pelvis squeezed her insides. Like tears, nausea was an unavoidable side effect. Previously she’d tried drowning her emotional distress with alcohol, but it only made her pain worse.

At moments like these she just had to wait for the hours to pass, until darkness returned.

When her head was clear, she would get up and go to Dybbølsbro Station. She would take the lift down to Platform 3 and wait at the far end until one of the trains rushed by. She’d stand on the edge, stretch out her arms, and shout: ‘You won’t get away with this, you bastards.’

After that she would let the voices decide.

8

Carl had hardly settled in his office before the clear-plastic folder resting squarely on his desk caught his eye.

What the hell, he thought, and called for Assad.

When Assad was at the door, Carl pointed at the folder. ‘Do you know where that came from?’ Assad shook his head. ‘Don’t touch it, OK? There may be fingerprints.’

They stared at the topmost sheet. ‘Boarding-School Gang Attacks’, read the heading in laser print.

Underneath was a list of violent crimes with times, places and names of victims. The attacks seemed to have been committed over a long period of time – all the way up to 1992. A young man on a beach near Nyborg. Twin brothers on a football pitch in broad daylight. A husband and wife on the island of Langeland. There were at least twenty recorded attacks. It wasn’t unusual for pupils to be in school until they were twenty back in the eighties, Carl thought, but the later attacks must’ve been carried out after they’d graduated.

‘We’ve got to find out who’s putting these files here, Assad. Call the crime-scene techs. If someone here at the station is doing this, then matching fingerprints will be an easy matter.’

‘They didn’t take my fingerprints.’ Assad seemed almost disappointed.

Carl shook his head. Why hadn’t they done that? Yet another irregularity in a veritable catalogue of irregularities connected to Assad’s hiring.

‘Find us the Rørvig victims’ mother’s address, Assad. She’s moved several times over the last few years, and apparently doesn’t reside at the address listed in Tisvilde’s Civil Registration System. So be a little creative, Assad, OK? Call her old neighbours. The telephone numbers are right there. Perhaps they know something.’ He pointed at a mess of notes he’d just pulled from his pocket. Then he got a notebook and wrote a to-do list.

He had the distinct sense that a new case was unfolding.

‘Honestly, Carl, don’t waste your time on a case that has already led to a conviction.’ Homicide Chief Marcus Jacobsen was shaking his head as he pawed through the notes on his desk. In just eight days there were four new, gruesome cases. In addition to that, there were three requests for leave of absence and two officers had called in sick, one of which was probably out for good. Carl was well aware what the homicide chief was thinking: who could he transfer, and from which case? But that was his problem, thank God.

‘Focus on your visitors from Norway instead, Carl. Everyone up there has heard about what you did in the Merete Lynggaard case, and they want to know how you structure and prioritize your assignments. I think they have a bunch of old cases they’d like to put a lid on. Concentrate on cleaning up your office and instructing them on solid Danish police work. If you do that, they’ll have something to take with them when they go to the minister’s later in the day.’

Carl let his head slump. Would his visitors be going to a coffee klatsch afterwards with the country’s blow-hard justice minister and gossiping about his department? That was certainly not encouraging.

‘I need to know who is tossing cases on my desk, Marcus. Then we’ll see what happens.’

‘Fine, Carl. You make your own decisions. But if you take up the Rørvig case, we’ll stay completely out of it. We don’t have even one man-hour to squander.’

‘Just relax,’ Carl said, rising to his feet.

Marcus leaned towards the intercom. ‘Lis, come here a moment, will you? I can’t find my calendar.’

Carl’s eyes roamed to the floor. There lay the homicide chief’s calendar. More than likely it had fallen off the desk.

With the tip of his toe he gave it a nudge so that it disappeared under the desk’s drawer unit. Maybe his meeting with the Norwegians would vanish the same way.

He glanced at Lis affectionately as she eased past him. He preferred the pre-metamorphosis version of her, but hey, Lis was Lis.

From over by her desk, Rose Knudsen and her dimples, deep as the Mariana Trench, seemed to be saying, I’m looking forward to joining you down in Department Q.

He didn’t return the show of dimples, but then again, he didn’t have any.

Down in the basement Assad was ready, afternoon prayers completed. He wore an oversized windbreaker and held a small leather briefcase under his arm.

‘The mother of the murdered siblings lives with an old friend in Roskilde,’ he said, adding that they could get there in less than half an hour if they stepped on the gas. ‘But they’ve also called from Hornbæk, Carl. It wasn’t such good news.’

Carl pictured Hardy. Eighty-one inches of lame flesh, face turned towards the Sound, watching the pleasure boatmen sailing for the final time that season.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked. He felt awful. It had now been more than a month since he’d last visited his old colleague.

‘They say he cries so very often,’ Assad replied. ‘Even though they give him a lot of pills and all, he still cries.’

It was a completely ordinary detached house at the end of Fasanvej. The names Jens-Arnold and Yvette Larsen were etched on to the brass plate, and below that a small cardboard sign in block letters: MARTHA JØRGENSEN.

A woman fragile as fairy dust and quite a few years beyond the age of retirement greeted them at the door. She was the kind of attractive old woman who brought a slight smile to Carl’s lips.

‘Yes, Martha lives with me. She has since my husband died. She’s not feeling so well today, I should say,’ she whispered in the corridor. ‘The doctor says it’s progressing rapidly now.’

They heard her friend coughing before they stepped into the conservatory. She sat staring at them with deep-set eyes. There was a variety of pill bottles in front of her. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, flicking ash from her cigarillo with a trembling hand.

Assad made himself comfortable in a chair covered with faded wool blankets and wilted leaves from the potted plants on the windowsill. Without hesitation, he reached out and took Martha Jørgensen’s hand. ‘Let me tell you, Martha. The way you are feeling right now, I have also seen my mother go through that. And it was not much fun.’

Carl’s mother would have withdrawn her hand, but not Martha Jørgensen. How did Assad know to do that? Carl thought, as he considered what role he would play in this production.

‘We have time for a cup of tea before the home help arrives,’ Yvette Larsen said, smiling insistently, and afterwards Martha wept softly as Assad explained why they had come.

They drank tea and ate cake before she gathered her wits to speak.

‘My husband was a policeman,’ she finally said.

‘Yes, we know that, Mrs Jørgensen.’ It was the first time Carl spoke to her.

‘One of his old colleagues gave me copies of the case file.’

‘I see. Was it Klaes Thomasen?’

‘No, not him.’ She wheezed, and with a deep drag on her cigarillo quelled a coughing fit. ‘It was someone else. Arne he was called. But he’s dead now. He gathered everything in a folder.’

‘May we have a look at it, Mrs Jørgensen?’

She raised a nearly transparent hand to her head, her lips trembling. ‘I’m afraid not. I don’t have it any longer.’ Her eyes narrowed. Apparently she had a headache. ‘I don’t know who I loaned it to last. Quite a few people have had a glimpse at that folder.’

‘Is this it?’ Carl handed her the pale green folder.

She shook her head. ‘No. It was grey, and it was much bigger. It was impossible to hold in one hand.’

‘Are there other materials? Anything you can let us have?’

She glanced at her friend. ‘Can we tell them, Yvette?’

‘I don’t really know, Martha. Do you think we should?’

The ailing woman fixed her deep-set blue eyes on a double portrait on the windowsill, resting between a rusty watering can and a tiny sandstone figure of St Francis of Assisi. ‘Look at them, Yvette. What did they ever do?’ Her eyes grew moist. ‘My little ones. Can’t we do it for them?’

Yvette placed a box of After Eight mints on the table. ‘I suppose we can,’ she sighed, and moved towards the corner where old, crumpled-up Christmas paper and recyclable, corrugated cardboard boxes were stacked: a mausoleum to old age and those days when scarcity was an everyday word.

‘Here,’ she said, pulling out a Peter Hahn box, stuffed to the brim.

‘Over the past ten years Martha and I have added newspaper clippings to the files. After my husband died, it was just the two of us, you see.’

Assad accepted the box and opened it.

‘They’re about unresolved assault cases,’ Yvette went on. ‘And the pheasant killers.’

‘The pheasant killers?’ Carl said.

‘Yes, what else would you call people like that?’ Yvette rummaged around a bit in the box to find an example.

Yes, pheasant killers did seem a fitting description. Standing together in a large PR photo from one of the weeklies were a couple of members of the royal family, some bourgeois riff-raff and Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen, Ditlev Pram and Torsten Florin – each holding a broken-open shotgun, with one foot triumphantly planted before scores of dead pheasants and partridges.

‘Oy,’ Assad exclaimed. There wasn’t much more to say on the matter.

They noticed something stirring in Martha Jørgensen, but couldn’t tell where her agitation was leading.

‘I won’t stand for it!’ she suddenly cried out. ‘They must be got rid of, every single one of them. They beat my children to death and killed my husband. To hell with them, I say.’

She tried to get up, but instead fell forward under her own weight, crashing forehead first against the edge of the table. It seemed almost as though she hadn’t noticed.

‘They, too, must die,’ she hissed, with her cheek on the tablecloth. Then she proceeded to lash out with her arms, knocking over the teacups.

‘Calm down, Martha,’ Yvette said, ushering the gasping woman back to her stack of pillows.

When Martha got her breathing under control and once again sat passively puffing on her cigarillo, Yvette led them into the dining room next door. She apologized for her friend’s behaviour, explaining that the tumour in her brain was now so large that it was hard to know how she would react. She hadn’t always been that way.

As if they deserved an apology.

‘A man came to visit and told Martha he’d known Lisbet well.’ Yvette raised her almost non-existent eyebrow a smidgen. ‘Lisbet was Martha’s daughter, and the boy was called Søren. You know that, right?’ Assad and Carl nodded. ‘Maybe Lisbet’s friend still has the file, I don’t know.’ She gazed towards the conservatory. ‘Apparently he expressly promised Martha he’d bring it back someday.’ She looked at them so sadly, one felt the urge to give her a hug. ‘He probably won’t be able to do so before it’s too late.’

‘This man who took the case file, can you remember his name, Yvette?’ Assad asked.

‘I’m afraid not. I wasn’t there when she gave it to him, and her memory isn’t what it used to be.’ She patted the side of her head. ‘The tumour, you know.’

‘Do you know if he was a policeman?’ Carl added.

‘I don’t think so, but maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Why didn’t he take this with him then?’ Assad asked, referring to the Peter Hahn box under his arm.

‘Oh, that. It was just something Martha wanted to do. Someone has already confessed to the murders, haven’t they? I helped her collect newspapers clippings because it was good for her. The man who borrowed the case file probably didn’t believe they were especially important. And they most likely aren’t.’

They asked about the key to Martha’s summer cottage, which Yvette told them about, and made inquiries about the days around the time of the murders. But Yvette had nothing else to add. As she explained, it had happened twenty years ago. And besides, it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone wanted to remember.

When the home help arrived, they said goodbye.

Hardy kept a photograph of his son on his bedside table, the only hint that this prostrate figure with matted, greasy hair and tubes in his urinary tract had once had a life other than that which the respirator, the permanently turned-on television and the busy nurses provided for him.

‘Took your bloody time to get your arse here,’ he said, eyes fixed on an imaginary point a thousand yards above the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries in Hornbæk. A place with a 360-degree view, and from which a person could fall so hard and far that he’d never wake up again.

Carl racked his brain for a good excuse, but gave up. Instead he picked up the framed photo, saying, ‘I hear Mads has begun studying at the university.’

‘Who told you that? Are you banging my wife?’ he said, without even blinking.

‘No, Hardy. Why the hell would you say such a thing? I know because … because, oh, I don’t fucking remember who at headquarters told me.’

‘Where’s your little Syrian? Have they thrown him back into the sand dunes?’

Carl knew Hardy. This was just small talk.

‘Tell me what’s on your mind, Hardy. I’m here now, OK?’ He breathed deeply. ‘In the future I’ll visit you more often, old boy. I’ve been on holiday, I’m sure you understand.’

‘Do you see the shears on the table?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘They’re always there. They use them to cut the gauze. And the tape that secures my probes and syringes. They look sharp, don’t you think?’

Carl looked at them. ‘Sure, Hardy.’

‘Couldn’t you take them and stab me in my carotid artery, Carl? It’d make me very happy.’ He laughed briefly, then stopped suddenly. ‘My arm is twitching, Carl, right below my shoulder muscle, I think.’

Carl frowned. So Hardy felt some twitching, the poor man. If only it were so. ‘Do you want me to scratch it for you, Hardy?’ Pulling the blanket a bit to the side, he considered whether he should yank the shirt down or scratch over it.

‘Damn it, you dumb bastard. Listen to what I’m saying. It’s twitching. Can you see it?’

Carl moved the shirt. Hardy had always made it a point to look attractive. Well groomed and tanned. Now, apart from delicate, pale blue veins, his skin was white as a maggot’s.

Carl touched Hardy’s arm. There wasn’t a muscle left; it felt like tenderized hung beef. And he didn’t notice any twitching.