He nodded. ‘You probably think that makes me happy. Not at all. He got off too easily.’

There was laughter in the corridor, and he came to himself for a moment. Then the anger settled in his face again, yanking him back down. ‘They attacked the boy in the forest, so he had to go away. You can ask him yourself. Perhaps you know him? His name is Kyle Basset. He lives in Spain now. You can find him easily. He owns one of Spain’s largest contractors, KB Construcciones SA.’ Carl nodded as he jotted down the name. ‘And they killed Kåre Bruno. Trust me,’ he added.

‘The thought has crossed our minds, but why do you think that?’

‘Bruno sought me out when I was fired. We had been rivals, but now we were allies. Him and me against Wolf and the rest of them. He confided in me that he was afraid of Wolf. That they knew each from before. That Kristian lived near his grandparents and never missed an opportunity to threaten him.’

Jeppesen nodded to himself. ‘It’s not much, I know, but it’s enough. Wolf threatened Kåre Bruno, that’s how it was. And Bruno died.’

‘You sound as though you’re certain of these things. But the fact is you’d already broken up with Kimmie when Bruno died, and the Rørvig assaults occurred after you left.’

‘Yes. But before that I’d seen how the other pupils drew away when the gang strutted down the corridors. I saw what they did to people when they were together. Admittedly not to their classmates, since solidarity is the first thing one learns at that school, but to everyone else. And I just know they attacked the boy.’

‘How can you know?’

‘Kimmie spent the night with me a few times during school weekends. She slept badly, as if there was something inside her that wouldn’t let her alone. She called out his name in her sleep.’

‘Whose?’

‘The boy’s! Kyle’s!’

‘Did she seem shocked or tormented?’

He laughed a moment. It came from down where laughter is a defence and not an outstretched hand. ‘She didn’t seem haunted, no. Not at all. That’s not how Kimmie was.’

Carl considered showing him the teddy bear, but was distracted by the coffee machine’s gurgling. If the coffee makers kept on like that until the dinner was over, all that would remain would be tar.

‘Maybe we could have a cup?’ he asked, without expecting an answer. A cup of mocha would hopefully make up for the hundred hours he hadn’t eaten properly.

Not for me, Jeppesen gesticulated.

‘Was Kimmie evil?’ Carl asked, pouring his coffee and practically inhaling it.

He heard no answer.

When he turned round with the cup to his mouth, nostrils titillated by the aroma of a sun that had once shone on a Colombian coffee farmer’s fields, Klavs Jeppesen’s chair was empty.

The audience was over.

29

She’d walked round the lake from the planetarium to Vodroffsvej and back, taking ten different routes. Up and down the stairs and paths that connected the lake with Gammel Kongevej and Vodroffsvej. Back and forth without getting too close to the bus stop across from Teaterpassagen, where she imagined the men would wait.

Now and then she sat on the planetarium terrace, her back to the window and her eyes focused on the play of light in the lake fountain. Someone behind her marvelled at the sight, but Kimmie couldn’t have cared less. It had been years since she’d abandoned herself to such things. All she wanted to do was see the men who’d done the job on Tine. Get a sense of who her pursuers were, of who was working for the bastards.

Because she didn’t doubt for an instant that they’d return. That was what Tine had been afraid of, and no doubt she’d been right. If they wanted to get hold of Kimmie, they wouldn’t just give up.

And Tine had been the link. But now Tine was no more.

She’d got away swiftly when the grenades went off and the house blew up. A couple of children might have seen her racing past the swimming centre, but that was it. On the other side of the buildings down on Kvægtorvsgade she’d shaken free of her coat and tossed it in her suitcase. Then she’d pulled on a suede jacket and covered her hair with a black scarf.

Ten minutes later she stood at Hotel Ansgar’s well-lit reception desk on Colbjørnsensgade, flashing the Portuguese passport she’d found a few years earlier in one of her stolen suitcases. It wasn’t a one hundred per cent likeness, but on the other hand it was six years old, and who didn’t change during that amount of time?

‘Do you speak English, Mrs Teixeira?’ the friendly porter asked. The rest was just a formality.

For about an hour she sat in the courtyard under the gas heaters with a couple of drinks. That way the hotel staff would get to know her.

Afterwards she slept for nearly twenty hours with her pistol under her pillow and images of a trembling Tine in her head.

It was from there that her world led her as she walked down to the planetarium and after eight hours of waiting finally found what she was looking for.

The man was thin, almost emaciated, and his focus shifted between Tine’s window on the fifth floor and the entrance to Teaterpassagen.

‘You’ll be waiting a long time, you shit,’ Kimmie mumbled, as she sat on the bench in front of the planetarium on Gammel Kongevej.

When it was approximately 11 p.m. the man was relieved of his watch. There was no doubt that the one replacing him had a lower rank. It was evident from the way he approached. Like a dog that was headed for its food bowl, but first had to sniff around to see if it was welcome.

That was why he was the one who had to do the Saturday-night shift, and not the first man. And that was why Kimmie decided to follow the one who was leaving.

She tailed the thin man at a safe distance, and reached the bus at the same moment its doors were closing.

It was then that she saw how mashed up his face was. His lower lip was split, and he had a stitched-up gash above one eyebrow and bruises that ran along his hairline from ear to throat, as if he’d dyed his hair with henna and not rinsed it all off properly.

He was looking out of the window as she climbed aboard. Just sat scowling out across the pavement, hoping to spy his target in his last glimpse. Only when the bus reached Peter Bangsvej did he begin to relax.

He’s off duty now and not busy, she thought, with no one to come home to. That was evident by his attitude. His indifference. Had someone been expecting him, a little girl or a puppy or a warm living room where he could hold his girlfriend’s hand and they could listen to each other’s sighs and laughter, then he would be breathing more deeply and freely. No, he couldn’t hide the knots in his soul and stomach. He had nothing to go home to. No reason to hurry.

As if she didn’t know what that was like.

He got off at the Damhus Inn and didn’t ask any questions about the evening’s entertainment. He was late, something he apparently already knew. Many of the patrons had already paired off and were on the way out to their one-night stands. So he hung up his coat and walked into the spacious room, evidently without ambitions. And how could he have any, the way he looked? He ordered a pint and sat at the bar, glancing across the tables at the throng to see if there was a woman, any woman, who’d look his way.

She removed her headscarf and suede jacket and asked the cloakroom attendant to watch her handbag carefully. Then she glided into the room, her self-confident shoulders back and breasts softly signalling to anyone who could still focus. Some low-ranking, high-volume band on the stage accompanied the cautiously groping dancers. No one on the dance floor under the crystalline sky of glass tubes seemed to have found their special somebody.