“She’s heavier than she looks, the old bag,” his stepson offered, raising a freshly opened carton of juice to his lips. The day Jesper would discover how to pour the stuff into a glass was something not even Nostradamus would hazard a guess at.
“Yeah, sorry, Carl,” said Morten. “She couldn’t find her key, you see, and you’d already crashed, so I reckoned…”
Definitely the last time anyone catches me at one of Morten’s barbecues, Carl promised himself, and cast a glance into the front room where Hardy’s bed was.
Since his former colleague had been moved in a fortnight ago, all semblance of domestic familiarity had gone down the drain. Not because the elevation bed occupied a quarter of the floor space and blocked the view of the garden. Not because IV bags dangling from stands or filled urine bags made Carl queasy in any way. And not even because Hardy’s utterly paralyzed body emitted an unceasing flow of foul-smelling gases. What changed everything was the guilty conscience all this gave rise to. Because Carl himself possessed full control of his limbs and could chug around on them whenever it suited him. And moreover, he felt he had to compensate for it all the time. To be there for Hardy. To do good for this helpless man.
“No need to have a cow about it,” Hardy had said a couple of months back, preempting Carl as they discussed the pros and cons of moving him away from the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries at Hornbæk. “A week can go by here without me seeing you. I reckon I can do without your tender loving care a few hours at a time if I move in with you, don’t you?”
The thing was, though, that Hardy could be peacefully asleep, like now, and yet still be so present. In Carl’s mind. In the planning of his day. In all the words that had to be weighed before being uttered. It was tiring, a bind. And a home wasn’t meant to fatigue.
Then there was the practical side of things. Laundry, changing the sheets, manhandling Hardy’s enormous frame, shopping, liasing with nurses and authorities, cooking. So what if Morten did take care of all that? What about the rest of it?
“Sleep well, old mate?” he ventured as he approached the bed.
His former colleague opened his eyes and forced a smile. “That’s it then, eh, Carl? Leave of absence over and back to the treadmill. A fortnight gone in a flash. Didn’t half go quick. Morten and I will do all right. Just say hello to the crew for me, eh?”
Carl nodded. Who would want to be Hardy? If only he could change places with someone for a day.
Apart from the usual lot at the duty desk, Carl didn’t meet a soul on his way in. Police Headquarters felt like it had been wiped out, the colonnade winter gray and discouraging.
“What the hell’s going on?” he called out as he entered the basement corridor.
He’d been expecting a raucous welcome, or at least the stench of Assad’s peppermint goo or Rose’s whistled versions of the great classics, but the place was dead. Had they abandoned ship during the fortnight’s leave he’d taken to get Hardy moved in?
He stepped into Assad’s cubbyhole and glanced around in bewilderment. No photos of aging aunts, no prayer mat, no boxes of sickly sweet cakes. Even the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling were switched off.
He crossed the corridor and turned on the light in his own office. The familiar surroundings in which he had solved three cases and given up on two. The place the smoking ban had yet to reach, and where all the old files that made up Department Q’s domain had lain safe and sound on his desk in three neatly ordered piles, according to Carl’s own infallible system.
He stopped dead at the sight of a wholly unrecognizable, gleaming desk. Not a speck of dust. Not a scrap of paper. Not a single closely written sheet of A4 on which he might rest his weary feet and thereafter dispatch into the wastepaper basket. No files. Everything was gone.
“ROSE!” he yelled at the top of his voice.
And his voice echoed through the corridors in vain.
He was little boy lost. Last man standing. A rooster with nowhere to roost. The king who would give his kingdom for a horse.
He reached for the phone and pressed the number for Lis on the third floor, Homicide Division.
Twenty-five seconds passed before anyone answered.
“Department A, secretary speaking,” the voice said. It was Ms. Sørensen, the most indisputably hostile of all Carl’s colleagues. Ilse the She-Wolf in person.
“Ms. Sørensen,” he ventured, gentle as a purring cat. “This is Carl Mørck. I’m sitting here all forlorn in the basement. What’s going on? Would you happen to know where Assad and Rose are?”
Less than a millisecond passed before she hung up. The cow.
He stood up and headed for Rose’s domain a little farther down the corridor. Maybe the mystery of the missing files would be solved there. It was a perfectly reasonable thought, destroyed when he discovered to his horror that on the corridor wall between Assad’s and Rose’s offices someone had fixed at least ten pieces of chipboard and plastered them with the contents of the missing files.
A folding ladder of shiny yellow larch indicated where the last of the cases had been put up. It was one they’d had to shelve. Their second unsolved case in a row.
Carl took a step back to get the full picture of this paper pandemonium. What on earth were all his files doing on the wall? Had Rose and Assad become completely unhinged all of a sudden? Maybe that was why they’d vanished, bloody imbeciles.
They hadn’t the guts to stick around.
Upstairs on the third floor it was the same story. The place was deserted. Even Ms. Sørensen’s chair behind the counter yawned empty. He checked the offices of the homicide chief as well as his deputy. He wandered into the lunchroom, then the briefing room. It was like the place had been evacuated.
What the fuck was going on? Had there been a bomb scare? Or had the police reform finally got to the point where the staff had been kicked out into the street so all the buildings could be sold off? Had the new, so-called justice minister had a fit? When would the news channel be turning up?
He scratched the back of his neck, then picked up a phone and called the duty desk.
“Carl Mørck here. Where the hell is everyone?”
“Most of them are gathered in the Remembrance Yard.”
The Remembrance Yard? What the hell for? September the nineteenth was six months away yet.
“In remembrance of what? As far as I’m aware, the anniversary of the internment of Danish police officers by the German occupying forces isn’t even remotely around the corner. What are they doing?”
“The commissioner wanted to speak to a couple of departments about adjustments following the reform. Sorry about that, Carl. We thought you knew.”
“But I just spoke to Ms. Sørensen.”
“Most likely she’s had all calls sent on to her mobile. I’m sure that’ll be the explanation.”
Carl shook his head. They were stark raving mad. All of them. By the time he reached the Remembrance Yard, the Justice Ministry would probably have changed everything around again.
He stared through the door at the chief’s soft, enticing armchair. That was one place, at least, where a man could close his eyes without an audience.
Ten minutes later, he woke up with the deputy chief’s paw on his shoulder and Assad’s cheerful, round eyes peering point-blank into his face.
Peace over.
“Come on, Assad,” he said, extracting himself from the chair. “You and I are going downstairs to pull all those sheets of paper off the wall sharpish, you understand? And where’s Rose?”
Assad shook his head. “We cannot, Carl.”
Carl stood up and tucked his shirt into his trousers. What the hell was the man on about? Of course they could. Wasn’t he supposed to be the boss around here?