‘You’re coming here?’

‘Why not? The doc seems to think I should be well enough to leave by tomorrow. Besides, they know there’s nothing they can do for me. I’m a model of mobility for someone thirty years older and I’m back elocuting like a BBC announcer. I’ll get Bernie to order Vicky home and then I’ll train it to Copenhagen. Oh, and I’ll ask Kjeldsen to recommend a translator. We need to make up for lost time.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be taking it easy?’ Marty’s buoyant tone was beginning to worry Eusden. He sounded positively exuberant, like a man given a second chance – or a last one.

‘Don’t worry about me, Richard. I’ll be fine.’

But Eusden was worried. And not just about Marty. The thrill of the chase was wearing thin. Every step they took to uncover Clem’s secret past seemed to leave them just as far from doing so as they had always been. He could not justify extending his absence from the office beyond a week, even to humour a dying friend. Despite Marty’s disdain of his Civil Service career, there actually were working commitments he had to honour. It was already Thursday and he could not devote more than another couple of days to Marty’s escapade. An end, of some kind, was fast approaching.

Until the next day, however, there was nothing for Eusden to do but wait. He struck out into the Copenhagen dusk on foot, hoping to walk off his fretfulness. He had to maintain a stiff pace just to stay warm. His route took him through the palace square, where Holly had hooted with laughter when he was bawled out by one of the guards for trespassing over the chain round the statue of yet another Danish king on horseback (Frederick V, this time), and out along Amaliegade to the waterside park where the Little Mermaid was to be found, perched on her rock. The fountain at the entrance to the park, where they had lazed in the sun, was frozen solid and the moat round the old citadel further in was iced over. Flecks of snow were drifting down from a darkening sky. It was cold enough to deter all but the hardiest.

A couple of joggers were nonetheless doing circuits of the citadel’s protective earth rampart. Eusden set out to walk a circuit himself before returning to the city centre. As he progressed, he noticed another man walking behind him, keeping pace with him more or less exactly. Casting his mind back, he realized he had seen the same man loitering in the palace square while he had read the plaque on the plinth supporting Frederick V’s statue. He was a stockily built fellow of thirty-five or so, dressed in jeans, leather jacket and woolly hat. Eusden told himself the idea that he was being followed was absurd, but when he stopped to gaze out over the harbour, so did his shadow. When he moved, the shadow also moved.

Disquieted but still keen to believe it amounted to nothing, Eusden cut short his circuit and hurried back out of the park. On his way in he had spotted a ferry heading across the harbour from a nearby jetty, so he took a hopeful turn in that direction as he left and was rewarded by the sight of another ferry easing in towards the jetty. He quickened his pace.

Turnaround was swift on the 901 harbour bus, destination – for Eusden – immaterial. He paid his thirty kroner and took a seat. There were only two other passengers aboard, a couple of tourists in day-glo parkas. But a breathless latecomer joined them at the last minute.

The man pulled off his woolly hat as he sat down and glanced round at Eusden. His hair was short-cropped blond, his face wide, eyes blue and watchful, jaw square. He slid a rolled newspaper out from his jacket and began to study a front-page article. It was the same pink business paper – Børsen – that Burgaard favoured. Eusden glimpsed a familiar name – Mjollnir – in a headline.

The ferry made two stops on the other side of the harbour in Christianshavn, before crossing back again, to Nyhavn. If Eusden stayed on beyond Nyhavn, it meant a longer walk back to the Phoenix. He debated with himself what to do, then yielded to impulse. ‘I’m getting off at the next stop,’ he said, tapping his shadow on the shoulder. ‘What about you?’

The man turned and looked at him with an ironical tilt of one eyebrow. ‘The same,’ he said softly.

‘You’ve been following me.’

‘Have I?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK.’ The admission was casual, as if the fact was self-evident. ‘I have.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought you might be meeting Karsten.’ There was a brittleness in his voice Eusden felt sure he recognized. ‘I’m Henning Norvig, Mr Eusden. We talked earlier. And now we need to talk again.’

TWENTY

The river bus moved away from the jetty through a slush of half-formed ice and headed south. Eusden and Norvig stood watching it go, Eusden’s mind racing to calculate what he should or should not admit. Norvig smiled at him, as if sensing his indecision.

‘For fanden, jeg fryser.’

‘What?’

‘You don’t speak Danish, Mr Eusden?’

‘No.’

‘I said I’m fucking freezing. Why don’t we talk over a drink?’

The Nyhavn canal was lined with bars and restaurants – a colourful, crowded scene in summer, as Eusden well recalled, with diners and drinkers massed at outdoor tables, admiring the elegant yachts tied up along the quay. A cold late afternoon in February provided a different, bleaker scene, relieved only by the reds and yellows of the house fronts and the enticingly twinkling lights of those bars that were open for business. They went into the first one they came to after leaving the jetty.

‘This morning, Karsten was supposed to be here in Copenhagen, but wasn’t, and you weren’t supposed to be in Århus, but you were,’ Norvig opened up as they settled at a table. ‘Now he’s still not here. But you’ve arrived instead. What am I supposed to make of that?’

‘How did you know who I was?’ Eusden countered, aware that this was to be a game of who could learn more from the other.

‘Karsten said he had to meet a woman at the Phoenix this morning before coming on to meet me. When I still hadn’t heard from him this afternoon, I went there to see if they knew anything. The name Burgaard meant zip to them. But Eusden? That was different. You left while I was standing at reception. The guy on the desk pointed you out to me.’ Norvig lit a cigarette, proffering the pack to Eusden, who waved it away. ‘So, I’ve answered your question. How about answering mine?’

‘Well, like you say, Karsten’s gone missing. I’m… trying to track him down.’

‘Because…’

‘He’s a friend.’

‘Yeah. Right.’ The barman approached. Norvig ordered a beer. Eusden nodded his assent and he made it two. ‘How’d you meet him?’

‘Economics conference… at Cambridge… last year.’

‘Uhuh. And since then you’ve become… an item?’

‘An item?’ Belatedly, Eusden caught Norvig’s drift. ‘No. I-’

‘Karsten’s bøsse, Richard. Gay. I’m surprised you didn’t know that. As a friend of his.’

‘How do you know?’ It was the best retort Eusden could manage.

‘We’ve met a few times. It was obvious.’

‘Maybe you’re just his type and I’m not.’

‘Stop fucking me about, Richard. Where’s Karsten?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, that makes two of us, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. It does.’

The arrival of the beers imposed a brief truce, which Norvig extended by sitting back in his chair to savour his first swallow and following it with a thoughtful pull on his cigarette. ‘What do you do for a living, Richard?’

‘I’m a civil servant. I work at the Foreign Office in London.’

‘The Foreign Office?’

‘That’s right. What about you?’

‘Freelance journalist.’

‘Were you meeting Karsten… about a story?’

‘Yes. I was.’

‘Did it involve… Tolmar Aksden?’

Norvig smiled. ‘There it is. That name. Tolmar Aksden. The Invisible Man. Yup. He was on the agenda, all right. Are you interested in him… officially?’