twenty minutes.
“Should we call down there first then, Carl?” Assad handed him the phone number.
He gave his helper a blank look. So it wasn’t always pearls of wisdom that fell from the man’s lips. “That’s a great idea, Assad, if we want to find an empty house.”
Originally it must have been an ordinary farm with a farmhouse, pigsty, and barn arranged around a cobblestone courtyard. The house was so close to the road that they could look right into the rooms. Behind the whitewashed buildings were three or four larger ones. A couple of them had presumably never been put to use. This seemed in any case true of a building thirty to forty feet high, with gaping holes where the windows should have been set in. It was incomprehensible that the authorities had ever allowed something like that to be built. It completely ruined the view down to the fields, where yellow carpets of rapeseed gave way to meadows so green that the color couldn’t possibly be reproduced in any painting.
Carl scanned the landscape but didn’t see a soul. Not near any of the buildings either. The farmyard seemed just as neglected as everything else. The whitewash on the house was flaking off. Piled up by the road, a little farther to the east, were heaps of junk and building debris. Aside from the dandelions and flowering fruit trees that towered over the corrugated Eternit roof, the whole place looked terribly bleak.
“There is no car in the courtyard, Carl,” said Assad. “Maybe it was a long time ago when somebody lived here.”
Carl clenched his teeth, trying to fend off his disappointment. His gut told him that Lars Henrik Jensen wasn’t here. Damn it. Damn it to hell.
“Let’s go in and look around, Assad,” he said as he parked the car fifty yards farther along the road.
They set off in silence. Through the hedge they reached the back of the house and a garden where fruit bushes and ground-elder were fighting for space. The bay windows of the house were gray with dirt and age. Everything seemed dead.
“Look at this,” whispered Assad, pressing his nose against one of the windowpanes.
Carl leaned in to look. The inside of the house seemed abandoned too. It was almost like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, except there were no banners or thorn bushes. Dust covered the tables, the books, and newspapers, and all sorts of papers. In one corner cardboard boxes were piled up that had never been unpacked, and there were carpets that were still rolled up.
Here was a family whose life had been interrupted during a happier time.
“I think they were in the process of moving in when the accident happened, Assad. That’s what the man at Riso said too.”
“Yes, but look over there in the back then.”
Assad pointed at a doorway on the other side of the room. Light was streaming in, and the floor behind was polished and shiny.
“You’re right,” Carl said. “It looks different.”
They made their way through an herb garden where the bumblebees buzzed around flowering chives and reached the other side of the house, down in one corner of the courtyard.
Carl moved close to the windows, which were fastened shut. Through the first panes he was able to get a glimpse of a room with bare walls and a couple of chairs. He pressed his forehead against the window and saw the room take shape. There was no doubt it was in use. A couple of shirts lay on the floor. The blankets on the box mattress had been pushed aside, and on top of them lay a pair of pajamas, a kind that he was certain he’d seen in a department store catalogue not long ago.
He concentrated on controlling his breathing and instinctively placed his hand on his belt, where he’d worn his service weapon for years. But it was months since he’d carried a gun.
“Someone slept in that bed recently,” he said quietly to Assad, who was looking through the windows a little farther away.
“Somebody was also here,” said Assad.
Carl went over and looked inside. Assad was right. The kitchen was neat and clean. Through a door in the wall directly across from them, they could see the dusty living room that they had looked into from the other side. It was like a mausoleum. A sacred place, not to be disturbed.
But the kitchen had definitely been in use quite recently.
“A deep freezer, coffee on the table, an electric kettle. There are also a couple of full bottles of cola over there in the corner,” said Carl.
He turned toward the pigsty and the other buildings behind it. They could continue their search without getting a court order, but they’d have to suffer the consequences afterward if it proved to be fruitless since they couldn’t very well claim that the opportunity would be lost if they searched the house at some other time. Actually, they could wait until morning. Yes, it might even be better to come back the next day. Maybe someone would be home by then.
He nodded. It was probably best to wait and follow proper legal procedures. He took a deep breath. In reality, he didn’t feel like doing either.
As Carl stood there thinking, Assad suddenly took off. For a man with such a compact, heavy body, he was surprisingly nimble. He crossed the yard in a couple of bounds and then went out into the road to wave down a farmer who was driving his tractor.
Carl went over to join them.
“Yes,” he heard the farmer say as he approached, the tractor idling. “The mother and son still live there. It’s a bit odd, but apparently she’s set up home in that building over there.” He pointed to the last of the adjacent buildings. “I think they must be in. At least, I saw her outside this morning.”
Carl showed the man his police badge, which prompted the farmer to turn off the tractor.
“What about the son?” said Carl. “Is his name Lars Henrik Jensen?”
The farmer squinted one eye to think. “Nay, I don’t think that’s his name. He’s a real strange, tall one. What the devil is his name?”
“So it’s not Lars Henrik?”
“No, that’s not it.”
See-saws and merry-go-rounds. Back and forth and up and down. Carl had been through this roller-coaster ride, countless times before. And he was sick and tired of it, among other things.
“You say they live in that building over there?” Carl pointed.
The farmer nodded, launching a blob of snot over the hood of his brand-new Ferguson tractor.
“How do they make a living?” asked Carl, gesturing at the open countryside.
“I don’t know. I lease a few acres from them. Kristoffersen, over there, leases some too. They’ve got some fallow land that’s subsidized, and she must also have a small pension. And a couple of times a week a van arrives from somewhere, bringing plastic items for them to clean, I think. It also brings them food. I think the woman and her son manage somehow.” He laughed. “This is farm country, you know. Out here we usually have everything we need.”
“An official van from the municipality?”
“No, it sure isn’t. It’s from some shipping company or something like that. It’s got a sign on the side that you sometimes see on ships on TV, but I don’t know where it’s from. All that stuff with oceans and seas has never interested me.”
After the farmer chugged off toward the windmill, Carl and Assad studied the buildings beyond the pigsty. Strange that they hadn’t noticed them from the road, because they were quite large. It was probably because the hedges had been planted so close together and had already sprouted leaves, thanks to the warm weather.
In addition to the three buildings surrounding the courtyard and the unfinished structure, there were three low buildings located close together next to a level area covered with gravel. Presumably at one time the plan had been to lay asphalt over there. By now weeds had sprung up everywhere, and the only gap in the greenery was a wide path connecting all the buildings.
Assad pointed at the narrow wheel tracks on the path. Carl had already noticed them. The width of a bicycle wheel, but parallel. Most likely from a wheelchair.
Carl’s cell phone rang, shrill and loud, just as they were approaching the building that the farmer had pointed
