“What are you doing here?”
The man’s voice was angry and tense, in a stressed-out way that might also be covering a certain amount of fear.
When Skou-Larsen turned around, he spotted a well-dressed older gentleman—well, twenty years younger than you are, he corrected himself—clutching a length of copper piping in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.
“Everything’s under control, Mr. Hosseini,” Jansen said quickly. “My firm is responsible for the ceilings in the entrance hall. Preben Jansen. We’ve met.”
“And him?” The suspicion had not completely left the man, but his grip on the pipe relaxed somewhat.
“This is Mr. Skou-Larsen, from the city,” Jansen said, conveniently forgetting to mention that Skou-Larsen’s tenure in that role had ceased a number of years ago. “We’re just taking a look around.”
The man set down the copper pipe and held out his hand.
“Forgive me,” he said, formally. “But the site is closed now, and we’ve had our fair share of vandalism and the like.… It puts one on one’s guard.”
“Of course,” Skou-Larsen said, clasping the outstretched hand.
“Mahmoud Hosseini. I’m the chairman of the organizing committee.”
“Jørgen Skou-Larsen,” said Skou-Larsen, and then added, because it had to be said: “You are building a beautiful place, Mr. Hosseini.”
Back home the coffee still sat untouched and a sugar-drunk housefly was crawling around on the marble cake. Helle wasn’t home. He didn’t know if he should take that as a good sign. It was hard for her to go out alone, even in the middle of the day when her anxiety was at its lowest ebb. On the other hand, it probably meant she was still mad at him about that business with the coffee. He started clearing the table, and while he was rinsing the Arabia cups before loading them into the dishwasher—she always insisted on that, as if they needed to avoid sullying the inside of the dishwasher—she came slowly up the garden path with her old Raleigh bicycle. He could just make out a grocery bag in the bike’s basket.
“Where have you been?” he asked when she walked in the front door.
“Out buying slug bait,” she said grumpily, setting a five-kilo package of Ferramol on the kitchen counter. “You keep promising, but you never actually manage to get anything done, do you?”
Károly Gábor spoke excellent, but slow, English, and that gave Søren’s brain time to leave its vegetative state and come up to speed. Horváth. That was the name of the Hungarian student, the one the NBH had hauled in for questioning. He fished around in his bag, flipping through the case folders he had brought home, and found his Hungary notes. Yep. Sándor Horváth.
“Where is he?” he asked.
“Germany. His phone was activated near Dresden yesterday and again this morning in the Potsdam area.”
Søren knew that the NBH had let the young man keep his phone so they could keep track of his whereabouts if he should happen to use it again. Which he obviously had. Not exactly a hardened, professional operative, this Horváth.
Dresden and then Potsdam.
“You think he’s on his way to Denmark?”
“Could be.”
Søren looked at the sickly house plant in the pot on his kitchen windowsill without actually seeing it. Gábor had caught him right in the middle of his muesli, with a shoe on one foot and just a sock on the other. After having worked eleven days straight, he had treated himself to a calm, quiet morning and hadn’t actually been planning on going in until around noon. That might have to change now.
He thanked Gábor for the message and called Mikael Nielsen, who was keeping tabs on the surveillance of Khalid Hosseini.
“Where is he now?” Søren asked.
It took just a second too long before Mikael answered.
“Um. He’s actually sitting in Bellahøj police station.”
“He’s what? What’s he doing there?”
“He was arrested an hour ago. For assaulting and threatening an officer on duty.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently he got into an argument with one of our surveillance people. I was just about to call you. Bellahøj wants to know what they should do with him.”
KHALID HOSSEINI SAT low in the chair, with his jeans-clad legs stretched out in front of him and his hands buried in the pockets of a black bomber jacket. When he saw Søren, he leapt up like a spring being released.
“I knew it was your lot,” he hissed. “This is fucking harassment, that’s what it is. I bet it’s not even legal!”
“As far as I’ve gathered,” Søren said, “you attacked a police officer, who is now receiving treatment at the ER.”
“No!” The denial came instantly and with the force of conviction. “It’s a fucking lie, man. I didn’t even touch that guy. You should be asking him why he ran over my little brother in his fucking car!”
What? There hadn’t been anything about a traffic incident in the reports Søren had received from Bellahøj’s uniformed officers. According to them, they had gone to Mjølnerparken in response to a distress call from the officer tailing Hosseini and had found the officer holed up in his patrol car, bleeding from a laceration over one ear and surrounded by a crowd of enraged residents who were rocking the car, hitting its roof, and screaming insults in a mixture of Danish, Arabic, and Urdu. The shocked police officer had been taken to the emergency room at Bispebjerg Hospital for treatment for the cut and a possible concussion. There had been no mention of a younger brother.
Søren put a neutral look on his face and hoped his surprise wasn’t visible.
“What I would really like to hear now.…” he said, sitting down on one of the desk chairs, “… is your side of the story. What happened out there?”
His neutrality actually had a soothing effect. Khalid flopped back down in the chair again and stared at him with obvious, but controlled, aggression.
“Like you give a crap,” he said. “This is a set-up. Don’t you think I’ve figured that out? Now you’ve finally got the towelhead where you want him, right? Well, what the hell do I care? Go ahead—lock me up. No fucking cop has a right to run over my little brother!”
Søren said nothing. He just waited. He avoided Khalid’s aggressive stare, studying the domestic clutter on the borrowed desk instead, the stack of folders and loose papers, a mouse pad with the AGF soccer team’s logo and the slogan, “Stay loyal!”—the desk’s usual occupant must be from Aarhus—and a picture of a remarkably beautiful, blonde girl fondly embracing a golden retriever.
“I didn’t touch him,” Khalid finally said in a different voice. Higher, more childlike. Plaintive. “Or, well, okay, I pushed him, but what would you have done? Kasim was sitting on the pavement sobbing. He was just trying to give me my phone, for fuck’s sake. He ran after me because I forgot it, and then that fucking idiot ran him down.”
He was starting to get angry again in order to keep up his courage. Because underneath the aggression and attitude, Khalid was scared now, Søren guessed. He was nineteen years old, and this was the first time he had been arrested.
“Then what happened?” Søren asked, still completely neutral.
“Then the police came and dragged me in here.”
Something was obviously missing from that chain of events, Søren thought. But right now he sorely needed to hear what the wounded officer had to say. Khalid wasn’t going anywhere.
“I DIDN’T HIT the kid!” the police officer insisted. He was twenty-six years old, new to the surveillance unit, and his name was Markus Eberhart. He had a shaved spot on one side of his head that made his otherwise stylish haircut look sadly asymmetrical. They had managed to fix up the scalp wound with just skin glue and butterfly bandages, and according to Bispebjerg Hospital, his pupils were normally responsive and he had displayed the ability to orient himself with regard to time, place, and personal particulars. In other words, things weren’t so bad.