Carl took a deep breath. It didn’t sound especially sympathetic to his provincial ears. He squinted his eyes. ‘I still don’t think I completely understand.’

Basset shook his head. He had expected as much. They were from different planets.

‘I’m just saying that since it was easiest to go after Kimmie, then she was the one who’d have to suffer my revenge,’ he said.

‘You didn’t care about the others?’

He shrugged. ‘If I’d had the chance, I would have avenged myself on them, too. I simply haven’t had that chance. You and I each have our own hunting grounds, you might say.’

‘Then Kimmie wasn’t any more actively involved than the others? Who would you say was the prime mover in that gang?’

‘Kristian Wolf, of course. But if all those devils were on the move at once, I believe Kimmie is the one I would stay farthest away from.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She was very neutral when they began on me. Mostly it was Florin, Pram and Kristian Wolf. But when they’d had enough – I was bleeding from my ear, after all, so they were probably scared – then Kimmie started in.’

He flared his nostrils as if he were still able to sense her proximity. ‘They wound her up, you see. Especially Wolf. He and Pram groped her until she was worked up and then they shoved her towards me.’ He clenched his fists. ‘At first she only tapped a little, then it got worse and worse. When she noticed how much it hurt, her eyes grew wider and wider, she breathed deeper and deeper and hit harder and harder. She was the one who kicked me in the abdomen – with the toe of her shoe. And hard.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray that looked identical to a bronze statue on the roof across the street. Basset’s face seemed wrinkled. Only now in the sharp sunlight did Carl notice. Fairly early for such a young man.

‘If Wolf hadn’t intervened she would have continued until I was dead. I’m certain of that.’

‘And the others?’

‘Yes, the others.’ He nodded to himself. ‘I’d say they could barely wait until the next time. They were like spectators at a bullfight. Believe me, I know a thing or two about that.’

The secretary who’d given Carl his coffee entered the office. Slender and attractive in clothes that were dark like her hair and eyebrows. In one hand she held a small envelope that she gave to Carl. ‘Now you have some euros and a boarding pass for the trip home,’ she said in English, offering him a friendly smile.

Then she turned to her boss and slipped him a sheet of paper, which he scanned quickly. The unbridled anger this document induced reminded Carl of the wide-eyed Kimmie that Basset had just described for him.

Without hesitation Basset ripped the paper to shreds and bombarded the secretary with recriminations. His face looked wild, the wrinkles obvious now. The fierce reaction caused the woman to tremble and cast her eyes at the floor in shame. The scene definitely wasn’t nice to witness.

When she closed the door behind her, Basset smiled at Carl, seemingly unaffected. ‘She’s just a stupid little office mouse. Don’t concern yourself with her. Will you be able to make it home to Denmark now?’

He nodded silently and tried to express some form of gratitude, but it was difficult. Kyle Basset was just like the people who’d once done him harm. Devoid of empathy. He had demonstrated it right before Carl’s eyes. To hell with him and everyone like him, the dumb prick.

‘And Kimmie’s punishment?’ Carl said finally. ‘What was that?’

He laughed. ‘Ah, it was pure happenstance. She’d miscarried and had been seriously beaten up. All in all she was quite ill, so she went to her father for help.’

‘Which she didn’t get, I imagine.’ He pictured the young woman whom the father wouldn’t assist, even when she was in the greatest need. Had this lack of love already left its mark in the little girl’s face when she stood between her father and stepmother in the old Gossip photo?

‘Oh, it was nasty, I’ve been told. Her father lived at Hotel D’Angleterre at that time – he always does whenever he’s home – and she just came bursting in. What the hell had she expected?’

‘He got her thrown out?’

‘Head first, I can assure you.’ He chuckled. ‘But first she was given the chance to fish around on the floor for some thousand-krone bills he’d tossed at her. So she got something out of it, but after that it was goodbye and farewell for ever.’

‘She owns the house in Ordrup. Do you know why she didn’t go there?’

‘But she did. And she received the same treatment.’ Basset shook his head. He was positively indifferent. ‘Well, Carl Mørck, if you want to know more, you’re going to have to take a later flight. You have to check in quite early here, so if you’re going to make your 4:20 flight, you’ll have to leave now.’

Carl took a deep breath. He could already feel the plane’s turbulence arousing the anxiety centre of his brain. Then he remembered the tablets in his breast pocket, so he pulled out the teddy bear and then the pills. He set the teddy bear on the edge of the desk and took a sip of coffee so the pills could glide more easily down his throat.

He glanced over his cup at the chaos of papers on the desk, the pocket calculator, the fountain pen, the half-filled ashtray and finally at Kyle Basset’s clenched hands and completely white knuckles. Only then did he look up and see Basset’s face. What he saw was a man who probably for the first time in ages had been forced to surrender to the memory of some searing pain, which people are so good at inflicting on others and themselves.

Basset was staring intensely at the guileless, tiny stump of a stuffed animal. It was as if a lightning bolt of repressed feelings had just struck him.

He fell back in his chair.

‘Do you recognize this teddy bear?’ Carl asked, the pills stuck somewhere between his throat and his vocal chords.

Basset nodded, then for a moment drew strength from the rage that came to his rescue. ‘Yes, Kimmie always had it dangling from her wrist at school. I don’t know why. It had a red silk ribbon around its neck that tied it to her wrist.’

For a moment Carl thought Basset was going to give in and cry, but then his face hardened and the man who could humiliate an office mouse as if it were nothing at all was himself again.

‘Yes, I remember it all too well. It was dangling from her wrist when she beat me senseless. Where the hell did you get it?’

32

It was almost ten o’clock Sunday morning when she awoke in her room at the Hotel Ansgar. The TV was still flickering at the foot of her bed, showing Channel 2 News reruns of the previous night’s events. Even though the police had put in an enormous effort, they hadn’t come any closer to explaining the explosion near Dybbølsbro Station, and therefore the episode had faded somewhat into the background. Now attention was directed more at the American bombing of insurgents in Baghdad and Kasparov’s candidacy for president of Russia, but primarily it was focused on a body that had been discovered in front of the ramshackle red high-rise in Rødovre.

It was probably murder. Several indicators pointed in that direction, the police spokesman said. In particular the fact that the victim had clung to the balcony railing before falling and had been struck on the fingers with a blunt object – possibly the pistol that had been fired at a wooden figurine in the flat the same night. The police were stingy with their information and still did not have a suspect.

That’s what they said, anyway.

She hugged her bundle.

‘Now they know, Mille. Now the boys know I’m after them.’ She tried to smile. ‘Do you think they’re together now? Do you think Torsten and Ulrik and Ditlev are discussing what they should do when Mummy comes after them? I wonder if they’re afraid now.’