The Absent One Read Online Free PDF Page B

hunters were in the vicinity.’
    ‘Bollocks. It was murder.’
    ‘You base that theory on, well, what?’ Assad leaned across the coffee table and snatched a biscuit, eyes focused on Thomasen.
    The man shrugged. Copper’s intuition. What would Assad know about that, he was probably thinking.
    ‘Well,’ Assad went on, ‘do you have anything for us to look at around the Rørvig murders? Something we maybe can’t find other places?’
    Klaes Thomasen pushed the plate of biscuits towards Assad. ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘Who might have something then?’ Assad pushed the plate back. ‘Who can help us move along here? If we don’t find out, the case will end up back in the pile.’
    A surprisingly independent observation.
    ‘I’d get hold of Henning’s wife, Martha Jørgensen. She pestered the investigators for months after the murders and her husband’s suicide. Yes, try Martha.’

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