Jesper looked as if he were ready to hurl a hand grenade at his stepfather. Even Carl could see that the question was rather ill-timed.
He nodded apologetically to the girl. “I know it sounds strange, but I need them for my investigation.” He turned to look at Jesper, who was glaring at him. “Do you still have those plastic figures, Jesper? I’d be happy to pay you for them.”
“Get the hell out of here, Carl. Go downstairs and see Morten. Maybe you can buy some from him. But you’ll need a fat checkbook for that.”
Carl frowned. What did a fat checkbook have to do with it?
It might have been a year and a half since Carl had last knocked on the door to Morten’s apartment. Even though his lodger moved about upstairs like one of the family, his life in the basement had always been sacrosanct. After all, he was paying his part of the rent, which made all the difference, so Carl didn’t really want to know anything about Morten or his habits that might damage the man’s standing. And that was why he stayed away.
But his worries turned out to be groundless, because Morten’s place was unusually boring. If you disregarded a couple of very broad-shouldered guys and some girls with big tits on posters that were at least three feet high, his basement apartment could have been any senior citizen’s home on Prins Valdemars Alle.
When Carl asked him about Jesper’s Playmobil toys, Morten led the way to the sauna. All the houses in Ronneholt Park were originally equipped with a sauna, but in ninety-nine percent of the cases they had either been torn down or now functioned as a storage room for all sorts of junk and debris.
“Go ahead and have a look,” said Morten, proudly throwing open the sauna door to reveal a room filled from floor to ceiling with shelves bulging with the type of toys that flea markets couldn’t even give away a few years back. Kinder Egg figures,
“See, here are two original figures from the series at the toy trade show in Nurnberg in 1974,” said Morten. He proudly picked up two small figurines wearing helmets.
“Number 3219 with the pickax and number 3220 with the traffic cop’s signs intact,” he went on. “Isn’t it insane?”
Carl nodded. He couldn’t have thought of a better word.
“I’m only missing number 3218, and then I’ll have the complete set of workmen. I got box 3201 and 3203 from Jesper. Look, aren’t they fantastic? It’s hard to believe that Jesper ever played with them.”
Carl shook his head. He had definitely thrown away his money on Muscleman Max, or whatever the hell the figure was called; that much was very clear.
“And he only charged me a couple of thousand. That was so nice of him.”
Carl stared at the shelves. If it were up to him, he would have hurled a few well-chosen remarks at both Morten and Jesper, about how he used to get two kroner an hour for spreading manure, back when the price of a hot dog with two pieces of bread rose to one krone and eighty ore.
“Could I borrow a few of them until tomorrow? Preferably those over there,” he said, pointing to a little family with a dog and lots of other stuff.
Morten Holland looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Are you crazy, Carl? That’s box 3965 from the year 2000. I’ve got the whole set with the house and balcony and everything.” He pointed at the top shelf.
He was right about that. There stood the house in all its plastic glory.
“Do you have any others I could borrow? Just until tomorrow night?”
Morten had a strangely stunned look on his face.
Carl probably would have got the same reaction if he’d asked permission to kick him hard in the nuts.
29
It was going to be a busy Friday. Assad had a morning appointment at the offices of the Immigration Service, which was the new name the government had assigned to its old system of sorting out aliens, the Immigration Administration, in order to put a nice face on the situation. In the meantime, Carl would be running all over town taking care of business.
The previous evening he had slipped the little Playmobil family out of Morten’s treasure chamber while his lodger was on duty at the video shop. Right now, the toys were lying on the seat next to him, giving him cold and reproachful looks as he headed into the wilds of northern Zealand.
The house in Sk?vinge, where the driver Dennis Knudsen had been found after suffocating on his own vomit, was like all the other houses on the road. None of them had even a trace of beauty, yet in their slovenly, workmanlike way, they seemed oddly harmonious with their worn terraces and breeze-block construction. In terms of durable material, the Eternit roofing appeared to match the ready-to-discard, lusterless windows.
Carl had expected a solid-looking construction worker to open the door, or at least the female equivalent. Instead, he found himself facing a woman in her late thirties with such an indeterminate and delicate appearance that it was impossible to determine whether she frequented the corridors of management or worked for an escort service in expensive hotel bars.
Yes, he was welcome to come in; and no, unfortunately both of her parents were dead.
She introduced herself as Camilla and led the way to a living room where traditional Christmas plates, skinny, triangular Amager shelves, and knotted rya rugs made up a significant part of the scenery.
“How old were your parents when they died?” asked Carl, trying to ignore the rest of the hideous decor.
She sensed what he was thinking. Everything in the house was from a past era.
“My mother inherited the place from my grandmother, so it’s mostly her things in the house,” she said. It was obvious that this was not how her own residence would look. “I inherited everything and just got divorced, so I’m going to fix the place up, if I can find the right builder to do the job. So you’re lucky to find me here.”
Carl picked up a framed photograph from the best piece of furniture in the room, a bureau in walnut veneer. It was a picture of the whole family: Camilla, Dennis, and their parents. It had to be at least ten years old, and the parents were beaming like suns in front of a silver wedding anniversary banner. It said: “Congratulations on 25 Years, Grete and Henning.” Camilla was wearing tight jeans that left nothing to the imagination, and Dennis had on a black leather vest and a baseball cap with the logo for Castrol Oil. So all in all it was banners and smiles and happy days in Sk?vinge.
On the mantelpiece stood a few more photographs. Carl asked who everyone was, and from what she said, he got the feeling that the family hadn’t had a large circle of friends.
“Dennis was crazy about anything that drove fast,” said Camilla, taking him to the room that had once belonged to Dennis Knudsen.
A couple of lava lamps and a pair of massive speakers were to be expected, but otherwise the room was very different from the rest of the house. The furniture was made of light wood and it all matched. The wardrobe was new and filled with nice clothes on hangers. The walls were covered with a sea of certificates, all neatly framed, and above them, on birchwood shelves up near the ceiling, stood all the trophies that Dennis had won over the years. By Carl’s rough estimate there were at least a hundred, maybe more. It was pretty overwhelming.
“As you can see,” she said, “Dennis won every competition he entered. Motorcycle speedways, stock-car races, tractor pulls, rallies, and all classes of motor racing. He was a natural talent. Good at almost everything that interested him, even writing and math, and all sorts of other things. It was very sad that he died.” She nodded, her eyes welling up. “His death took the life out my father and mother. He was such a good son and little brother. He really was.”
Carl gave her a sympathetic look, but he was puzzled. Could this really be the same Dennis Knudsen that Lis had described to Assad?
“I’m glad you’re going to look into the circumstances of his death,” Camilla said. “I just wish you’d done it while my parents were still alive.”
