To be fair, Carl’s story wasn’t entirely true. The police station in Karlshamn had been equipped with an entry phone. The sign next to it read: Press B and state business. Carl had done so tentatively, only to find himself up against incomprehensible gobbledygook when the duty officer answered. The crackling voice had then spoken some Swedish variant of English that Carl likewise failed to decipher.
So then he’d buggered off.
He gave his corpulent lodger a pat on the back. “Thanks, Morten. I’ll take over for a minute, if that’s OK. Would you mind getting some coffee on the go in the meantime? Only not too strong.”
His gaze followed Morten’s waddling bulk as it disappeared into the kitchen. Had the man been living on a diet of cream cheese these past weeks? He looked like a pair of tractor tires.
Then he turned to Hardy. “You’re looking a bit down in the dumps today. What’s up?”
“Morten’s killing me, bit by bit,” Hardy whispered, catching his breath. “He force-feeds me all day long like there’s nothing else to do. Fatty food that goes right through me. I don’t know why he bothers. He’s the one who has to wipe my arse. Can’t you ask him to give it a rest? Just once in a while?” He shook his head as Carl raised the next spoonful to his mouth.
“And then there’s his jabbering all day long. Driving me up the wall, he is. All sorts of shite about Paris Hilton and the Law of Succession and pension payouts. What do I care? One long blather, from one subject to the next.”
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
Hardy closed his eyes. OK, so he’d tried already. Morten wasn’t the kind for making U-turns.
Carl nodded. “Of course. I’ll have a word with him, Hardy. How are you doing, anyway, apart from that?” It was a cautiously posed question. Well inside the minefield.
“I’ve got phantom pain.”
Carl saw Hardy’s Adam’s apple struggling to let him swallow.
“Do you want some water?” He took a bottle from the holder by the bed and put the straw to Hardy’s lips. If Hardy and Morten were going to have a falling-out, who would be left to do all this?
“Phantom pain, you say? Where?” he asked.
“Behind my knees, I think. It’s so hard to tell. All I know is it hurts, like someone hitting me with a wire brush.”
“Do you want an injection?”
He nodded. Morten could take care of that shortly.
“What about the feeling in your finger and shoulder? Can you still move your wrist?”
Hardy’s mouth drooped. Enough said.
“Talking of Karlshamn,” Carl went on, “didn’t you once work with them on some case or other?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I need a police artist to do a likeness of a killer. I’ve got a witness in Blekinge who can give a description.”
“So?”
“Well, I need to get it done pretty sharpish, and the Swedish plod seem to be just as good as we are at shutting up shop when it comes to local stations. Like I said, I stood outside this great big yellow building on Erik Dahlbergsvägen in Karlshamn at seven o’clock this morning, staring at a sign that said Closed Saturday and Sunday. Open weekdays 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. And that was that. On a Saturday!”
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
“You could ask your mate in Karlshamn if he could do Department Q in Copenhagen a favor.”
“What’s to say he’s still in Karlshamn? It’s been six years, at least.”
“You’re right, he’s probably moved on by now. Still, if you give me his name, I’ll do a search for him on the Internet. If we’re lucky, he’ll still be on the force. Bit of an apple-polisher, wasn’t he, if I remember right? All you’d have to do is ask him to get on the blower and call a police artist. It won’t be more trouble than that. Wouldn’t you do the same for him if he were to ask?”
Hardy’s eyelids were heavy, not a good sign. “It’ll be expensive on a weekend,” he said after a while. “Assuming there’s a police artist anywhere near your witness, and that he or she might be interested.”
Carl looked at the cup of coffee Morten put down for him on the bedside table. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought it was residue from a can of motor oil concentrated into something blacker.
“It’s a good thing you’re back, Carl,” said Morten. “So I can get going.”
“Get going? Where to?”
“The funeral procession for Mustafa Hsownay. It starts at two o’clock from Nørreport Station.”
Carl nodded. Mustafa Hsownay, another innocent victim of the war between the bikers and the immigrant gangs for control of the hash market.
Morten raised his arm and waved a little flag that looked like Iraq’s. Wherever could he have got it from?
“I went to school with someone from the Mjølnerparken development where Mustafa was shot.”
Others might perhaps have hesitated to share such a flimsy claim to solidarity.
But Morten was in a league of his own.
They lay almost side by side. Carl on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table, Hardy in his hospital bed with his long, lame body turned onto its side. His eyes had been closed since Carl switched on the television, and the bitter twist of his mouth seemed now to have smoothed.
They were like an elderly couple finally succumbing to the indispensable company of news programs and powdered presenters. Dozing off in front of the box on a Saturday evening. If they were only holding hands, the picture would be complete.
Carl forced open his eyelids and noted that the news program that suddenly flickered in front of him was the last of the day.
Time to get Hardy ready for the night and get some proper shut-eye.
He stared at the screen, at Mustafa Hsownay’s funeral procession moving quietly along Nørrebrogade in a dignified and orderly manner. The cameras showed thousands of silent faces lining the street and pink tulips thrown to the hearse from windows above. Immigrants of all kinds, and just as many native Danes. Many clasping hands.
The cauldron that was Copenhagen had gone off the boil for a moment. The gang war was not the people’s war.
Carl nodded to himself. It was commendable of Morten to have taken part. Not many people from Allerød would have been there. He wasn’t, either, for that matter.
“Look, there’s Assad,” Hardy said quietly.
Carl turned his head. Had he been awake all this time?
“Where?” He glanced back at the screen just in time to see Assad’s round face pop up amid the throng.
Unlike everyone else there, his eyes seemed to be fixed not on the hearse but on the mourners in the procession. His head moved almost imperceptibly from side to side like a predator following its prey through undergrowth. He was concentrating. And then the producer cut away.
“What the…?” Carl muttered to himself.
“He looked like one of them from intelligence,” Hardy snorted.
Carl woke up in his bed at about three o’clock, his heart pounding and his duvet weighing two hundred kilos. He wasn’t feeling well. It was like a sudden fever. Like a horde of viruses had assaulted him and shut down his sympathetic nervous system.
He gasped for air and clutched at his chest. Why am I panicking? he asked himself, and felt in need of a hand to hold.
He opened his eyes in the darkness.
This has happened before, he thought, instantly recalling his previous collapse and feeling the sweat that made his T-shirt cling to his skin.
After he and Anker and Hardy got shot out in Amager, it had lain dormant inside him, ticking away like a time bomb.