25



They’d looked everywhere, Morten said, when he stood outside the terraced house with flushed cheeks that showed clear evidence of tears. Hardy had driven off in his electric wheelchair while Morten had been inside checking the weather forecast, and now he’d been out wearing only a shirt in the pouring rain ever since.

In spite of his confusion, nerves, and chattering teeth, he just about managed to tell them where he and Mika had looked. “We’ve been everywhere within a kilometer and a half of the house, Carl. He’s just disappeared.”

“What about the cell? He can activate it, right?” asked Assad.

“He hasn’t got it with him. We always go out together, so mine was enough,” answered Morten.

“Is he in the Kvickly supermarket or maybe at Expert Radio? He’s always listening to music, so maybe he’s out looking for something new.”

“He’s got an iPod, Carl. He uses Spotify. I pop the headphones in for him, and then he can easily while away a couple of hours before he asks me to take them out again.”

Carl nodded. Spotify? He’d heard the name before but had no idea what it was.

“What about the wheelchair battery?” asked Assad.

“It’s enormous,” answered Morten. “He can get right out to Frederikssund and back on a single charge.” He began to snivel again just at the thought.

“I was thinking more about the rain.”

“It doesn’t matter, Assad, a battery like that is well protected,” answered Carl. He turned to Morten. “It’s been more than three hours, and the wheelchair has a cruising speed of twelve-point-five kilometers an hour. He could be thirty-five kilometers away. Have you called his ex-wife?”

“You don’t think he’s driven all the way into Copenhagen?” Now his whole body was shaking.

“Go in and ring; we just need to check. And ring Hillerød Hospital, too. Ask if he’s been brought in.”

Never before had Rønneholtparken witnessed so many fine small steps run so quickly. Morten was gone before the sentence was even finished.

They decided to do a circle of the neighborhood; maybe someone had seen him. Maybe he’d said something to someone.

“We need to split up, Assad. I’ll take the car and . . .”

“What about me?”

“You can take that, but you’d better put a raincoat on. There’s one in the trunk. I can’t believe how bloody cold this spring has turned.”

He pointed to Jesper’s moped. A well-oiled example of fifty cubics, which Jesper hadn’t ridden since he’d left home.

Assad gave a short contorted smile.


* * *

Since the public care system had been set in motion, and day-to-day life in Rønneholtparken home had been turned upside down, Carl hadn’t had the same long talks with Hardy as before. Morten was his day-to-day caretaker, Morten’s partner Mika was Hardy’s mental coach and physiotherapist, municipal home caretakers covered relief, and the wheelchair enabled him to get out. So Carl was suddenly on the sideline, and that’s where he was standing now, wondering if it’d been in Hardy’s best interest.

As the window wipers went back and forth, he asked himself where the old boy might have got to, as the glories of Allerød sped past.

Hardy had his thumb and a little movement in his wrist and neck, and with these extremely limited tools, a different life and an immense freedom compared to the years of bed rest he had left behind. In the beginning, he’d been totally ecstatic about his newly won movement opportunities, but lately he’d developed a greater and greater understanding of their limitations.

“Before, I felt sorry for myself, but I also felt I was something special, because I endured my life. Now I just feel like a deadweight for those I’m closest to,” he’d said, explaining that he was well aware how heavy the work with him was, and how little he could give back.

But while he’d spoken of suicide when he was at the back pain clinic every time Carl had visited him, he hadn’t mentioned it since he’d moved into Carl’s living room. The question was, whether those thoughts had begun to haunt him again.

“Have you seen a man in an electric wheelchair go past in the rain?” he shouted once in a while out of the window. People had an ability to look amazingly indifferent.

He stopped in the parking lot at the bottom of Tokkekøbvej and looked at the area of woodland with a worried expression. All things considered, they were on an impossible mission. People did disappear if they didn’t want to be found, and is that what Hardy wanted?

He called Morten’s number.

“What about you, anything new?”

He heard a snivel through the receiver. “He isn’t at any of the places I’ve called. Mika’s asked the police to send out a search party. They wouldn’t normally do it so soon, but when they heard it was a colleague who’d been paralyzed in service, they made an exception.”

“Good. Say thanks to Mika.”

He closed his eyes and tried to recall something or other that might give him a clue about where Hardy might have gone. He simply had no idea.

There came a humming sound from his cell, and Carl lunged for it. It was Assad.

“Yeah!” he shouted. “Have you found him?”

“No, not quite.”

“What do you mean?”

“Up where the town hall used to be, I met a cyclist who’d seen a wheelchair on Nymøllevej out toward Lynge. So I stepped on it.”

“Why didn’t you call me straightaway?”

“Well, that’s it. I’ve been pulled over by the police. They’re standing here next to me on Rådhusvej, claiming that I was doing a hundred and fifteen on the cycle path. Will you come out here?”


* * *

It took a while for Carl to convince his colleagues to release Assad. Actually, it was totally without precedent for the two uniformed men to see a moped, which had a limit of forty kilometers an hour, get up to those speeds. And there were no mitigating circumstances however you looked at it, as they said. The result would be legal action and that would undoubtedly have consequences for Assad’s driver’s license, said one of the officers.

Carl considered the consequences. Assad was about to lose his driver’s license! He could’ve almost been grateful.

“Who owns the moped?” asked the officer.

“It’s mine,” said Assad courageously.

Jesper didn’t deserve it.

“We’ve just had a call radioed in,” his colleague said from the patrol car. “The man you’re looking for, Hardy Henningsen, has been located by a couple of employees at Lynge Drive-in Cinema. Go straight on past the gravel pit and over the highway, and you’ll find your friend in the cinema parking lot sitting in his wheelchair looking at a white screen.”

They let Assad go, but confiscated the moped. And even though Carl was impressed with his stepson’s technical talent and knowledge when it came to tuning a vehicle, it was only fair that he should pay for his illegal activities.

Then one of the officers tapped Carl’s shoulder. “Here,” he said, slamming a couple of bits of paper in his hand. Carl looked at him. It was the ticket with Assad’s name on it. “We know Hardy Henningsen’s case, so the man looking for him shouldn’t pay for it. But don’t tell him straightaway. Let him sweat a bit.” Then he put a finger up to his cap to say good-bye.

It took less than five minutes to get there.

A drive-in cinema without cars, and especially in the pouring rain, is an extremely dismal sight. This was Europe’s largest outdoor cinema, and in front of the enormous screen, Hardy’s wheelchair and the figure in it appeared immeasurably small.

Despite the blanket they’d thrown over him, it was a long time since Carl had seen a living being so drenched.

“What’s going on, Hardy?” was the first thing Carl could think of to say.

Hardy’s eyes didn’t lose focus at all, but the mouth shushed them. So they stood there a further five minutes and stared at him before Hardy finally turned his head around saying: “Oh, so here you are!”

They got him home with disability transport and rubbed him so that his pale skin glowed copper red.

“What happened there, Hardy? You need to tell us.”

“I’ve decided to live my life again, as much as I can.”

“Okay, I’m not sure exactly what you’re thinking about now. But if you continue in the way you did today, it’ll be a short-lived affair.”

“Yes, don’t ever do that again, Hardy,” Morten agreed. A stout being like him wasn’t cut out for that kind of excitement.

Hardy tried to smile. “Thank you. But you interrupted me reliving a film I saw out there thirty years ago with my Minna. I sat imagining that I was holding her hand like I did back then. Do you understand?”

“I do,” said Assad, more subdued than usual.

“You’re saying that you saw a film that wasn’t on and held a woman’s hand who wasn’t there and who is living a different life now. That’s a dangerous path, Hardy.”

He banged his head against the neck rest on the wheelchair a couple of times. A bad habit he’d adopted after he started sitting up. “Easy to say, Carl. But what would you rather have me do? Just wait for death? I’ve got nothing to do.” He turned his eyes to one side. “When I was lying over there on the bunk, at least I had your cases to speculate about. You never tell me anything anymore.”


* * *

An hour and a half after the sun had set behind the heavy, grey, overcast sky, Assad and Carl had remedied what Carl had neglected. And when they turned the light on in the living room, it was possible to see clearly what effect the review of the Alberte Goldschmid case had had on their disabled friend. As always, his body was like a pillar of salt in the wheelchair, but his eyes were present and more than ready to overlook all his limitations.

“So this June Habersaat, now Kofoed, is perhaps your key to getting a name and a description of your prime suspect, or maybe even more than that?”

“Maybe, yes. Rose thinks so anyway.”

“Yes, and me, too,” Assad said, nodding.

“But she wouldn’t talk with you, so she isn’t likely to next time either.”

“Rose thinks we can threaten her but I don’t think so.”

“And now you’ve more or less reached a stumbling block in the story.” He smiled. “What is it they say when a story’s reached a deadlock? You just need to introduce a unicorn, and then things take off again. Or a flying elephant, for want of something better.”

Assad nodded. “Where I come from, we say that if you can’t do anything else, then you have to ride your camel in the fifth way.”

At that, Carl lost the thread for a moment. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear an explanation of either the first four or the fifth.

“Something to do with at the front, in the middle, at the back, or on the humps,” said Hardy. “I’ve heard it.”

Assad nodded. “And the fifth is with your foot firmly in its backside. Makes the animal run like crazy.”

Carl was somewhere else altogether. “Say again what it was June Habersaat reeled off out on the road in Aakirkeby, Assad.”

He flicked through his notebook. “I didn’t manage to get it written down straightaway, but something along these lines: Wish I had a river that I could skate away on. But it don’t snow here, it stays pretty and green.” He looked up at Hardy with a puzzled expression. “Does that sound right?”

Hardy’s face twitched. “Just about,” he said. “It’s Joni Mitchell.”

Carl gaped. “You know it?”

“Can you come and help me, Mika?” said Hardy.

Morten reluctantly let go of his muscular partner. Everyone was together, so the large ex-mama of the house was happy again.

“What was the title, Hardy?” asked Mika.

“The song’s called ‘River.’ You can find it on the playlist on the iPod. Put it in the docking station so everyone can hear.”

Carl googled it while Mika scrolled through the playlists with thousands of songs.

“I’ve got it,” said Mika after scrolling for a moment. “Joni Mitchell, ‘River,’ 1970.”

“Yes, that’s the one,” said Hardy. “It starts a bit strange.”

A few seconds passed and then came the first few bars of “Jingle Bells,” a bit jazzy, a bit discordant, but “Jingle Bells” all the same.

Carl and Assad listened intensely. When they came to the right part of the lyrics, Assad thrust his thumb in the air.

Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on . . .

It was sung by a crisp voice to a melancholy piano accompaniment. A whole four minutes on longing and loss.

Carl nodded to himself. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that Hardy knew that song.

“Try and find one of those websites that analyzes songs, Carl. There are loads of forums that do,” said Hardy.

Carl typed in the title and looked down over the page of links. The fifth one was a hit.

He read out what was written.

“Joni Mitchell is Canadian but moved to California to be a hippie and follow her musical career. The song ‘River’ is about spending Christmas far from home in a strange place with strange traditions—without snow or ice-skating. To put it briefly, the song is about a desire to put the present behind you and return to more simple and innocent days.”

They looked at each other, until Hardy broke the silence.

“She sings beautifully, and it expresses a lot. It hits me right in the heart when I hear it, you’ll understand. I just don’t know what it means in this situation. I don’t know this June Habersaat. What had you just spoken about when she quoted it?”

Carl pushed his lip forward. How on earth should he be able to remember that?

“She’d just said to me that I didn’t know her dreams or how much she’d fought to fulfill them,” said Assad. “When she said that, it was easy to understand why she’d recite something like this.”

It went silent again. None of them knew what they should make of it. It would’ve been a different story if Rose had been there.

“Would anyone like some soup?” Morten sang from somewhere in the region of the kitchen. It brought Carl to.

“If you think carefully about it, June Habersaat probably hasn’t seen so many of her dreams fulfilled in life.”

“Not many, no. But, then, who has?” asked Hardy. “But the affair with that young man, don’t you think that was one of them?”

“Probably, yes. But it just doesn’t add up for me that she’d suddenly blurt out those lyrics. I don’t think June Habersaat is the Joni Mitchell–listening type.”

“There was nothing but easy-listening music on her shelves,” added Assad. “Absolute Hits one to a thousand, stuff like that.”

“‘River’ is a very poetical, ethereal, and ambiguous song,” said Hardy. “If she isn’t the sort who normally listens to that type of music, then no doubt there’s someone else who put it in her head. Is it possible she learned the song from that man? He was also in search of bygone days, wasn’t he? Occult sites from the Bronze Age, sunstones, round churches and Knights Templar, long hair and hippie dancing years too late.”

“And if that’s the case, what would you use it for?”

“I’d try to ride the camel with the foot in number five,” said Hardy.

Assad gave him a thumbs-up. If it was something to do with camels, he was with you all the way.


* * *

Five minutes later three men were sitting around Hardy’s wheelchair in anticipation. Morten’s soup would have to wait.

“Dial June Habersaat’s number, Mika,” said Hardy. No sooner said than done. “Are you ready with the iPod?”

He nodded.

Mika pressed the call button and held the cell five centimeters from Hardy’s ear.

“June Kofoed,” answered a voice. Then Mika pressed PLAY on the iPod and Joni Mitchell’s voice filled the room again.

Ever so slowly, Mika moved the cell toward Hardy’s mouth.

For a moment, the paralyzed man sat there without blinking, eyes unfocused. Now he was a policeman on the job, deep in concentration; a man who knew when the timing was right, the tone just so, and the voice suitably anonymous.

“June” was all he said, while the music played in the background.

There was a pause that might’ve caused others to give up, but Hardy still didn’t blink.

There came a sound from the other end, and Hardy’s eyes jumped up.

“Yes,” he said, nothing else.

And again, sounds from the other end.

“Okay, I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know. How are you?” he asked.

A few further sentences were exchanged, and then he cricked his neck slightly. “She interrupted,” he said. “She was on to me in the end, that or she just didn’t want to talk to the guy.”

“Out with it,” said Carl impatiently. “Let’s hear everything that was said, and as precisely as possible. Take notes, Assad.”

“I just said her name: June. And she replied: Is that you, Frank? And I replied Yes. Then she began to breathe deeply. It was very odd because I thought she was moved to be talking to him but what she said next was strangely harsh: A strange way to contact me after seventeen years. I never imagined I’d be hearing from you again. Maybe you’ve heard that Bjarke’s dead? He took his own life, is that why you’re calling? I replied that I was sorry to hear that and said I didn’t know about her son. Then I asked how she was but she replied with a question about where I was. I asked where she thought I was, and then she replied: You’re playing the miracle man, aren’t you? Then I think I messed up, but you heard that, when I asked her what she thought I was called these days. It was very clumsy.”

“She just hung up?”

“Yes. But now we know that the person called himself Frank, that he was Danish, and that he hasn’t had contact with her for years.”

“But the question remains whether it’s the same man we’re looking for,” Carl said thoughtfully. “Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that she mixed them up when I called to question her about the man with the VW Kombi.”

“It’s him, Carl, I’m sure,” said Assad. “He bolted from the island after what happened to Alberte. It’s the same person that Habersaat was looking for, and who went to bed with both his wife and Alberte, and probably lots more besides. Kristoffer hit the nail on the head when he called him a Don Juan.”

“And June just called him a miracle man, which also fits in with our man. Good, let’s go a little further with this assumption.”

Carl googled once more.

“He was called Frank. How many people do you think there are called Frank in the kingdom of Denmark who are also around forty-five years old?”

“I don’t know very many,” answered Assad. Not an especially relevant observation in statistical terms.

“No, me neither. But right now there’s a total of eleven thousand three hundred and nineteen registered with that name in Denmark. According to the Statistics Denmark database, there are approximately five hundred who’ve been given the name since 1987, so it isn’t very popular anymore. We don’t know the exact age of the person we’re looking for, but if we say, for example, that back then he was somewhere between midtwenties and early thirties, we wouldn’t be totally off. And then comes the next question: How popular was that name in the period 1968 to 1973? We can’t just guess our way to the answer, so you’ll have to get in touch with Statistics Denmark, Assad. But I think it must be in the thousands. So what do we do if that’s the case? We can’t seek them all out and cross-examine them, can we?”

It was a rhetorical question but Hardy apparently didn’t agree.

“We’ll just have to roll up our sleeves. Well, I mean you’ll all have to. I assume that I can be spared the cross-examinations,” he said, smiling.

Carl returned a surly smile, but despite everything this was quite positive. They had a name. And Hardy was back on track.

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