“No, it’s partly furnished. He removed all his personal belongings, but most of his furniture is still there. Suits me fine. It’s just a pit stop for me.”
“Do you have his address in California?”
“No, I have his e-mail address, but it’s a Danish university address. In fact, he was causing me a fair amount of hassle a few months ago. I started getting a lot of final demands addressed to him, and the electricity and the landline were cut off. I tried to get hold of Erik for two weeks, but no luck. In the end, I was really angry with him. At long last he got back to me. He said he had been away on a dig. The whole thing was stupid. We had agreed I would pay money into his account and he would pay the utilities, but once he had left, I didn’t hear from him. I presumed he had dealt with it. I certainly didn’t think he would just stop paying the bills. I got him to transfer the bills into my name, temporarily. It was much easier for both of us. He was free to look after his bones and excavations, and I could get the light back on in my fridge and my telephone working again. He asked me to put all the letters aside, and I have. To be honest, some of them look very serious, and I’ve e-mailed him about it but he hasn’t responded. What more can I do? I’m his tenant, not his mother. He had another letter from a debt collector recently,” he said and immediately looked shamefaced.
“I don’t really feel comfortable telling you all this. It’s his private business. But there you have it. Do you want his mail or not?”
“Yes, please,” Søren said quickly. What Karsten Lindberg was offering was technically illegal, but it would save Søren a lot of paperwork.
Søren went upstairs with him to get the letters. He carried one of Lindberg’s grocery bags.
“What a nice cop you are,” Lindberg said and smiled.
Tybjerg’s apartment was small and impersonal. Two rooms and a stall shower in the kitchen. The kitchen cabinets were worn, and the windows needed cleaning. Søren picked up fifteen letters from debt-collecting agencies and said good-bye. When he got back to the car, Henrik was reading a garden catalogue.
“I’m thinking I might get myself a tiller,” he said. “What do you think? Are you still a real man if you don’t have a tiller?”
“I don’t know about you,” Søren said. “But I’m doing fine without one.”
“Your garden looks like shit,” Henrik sparred. They drove for a while in silence, then he added. “There’s no way Tybjerg is in LA.”
“No,” Søren said. “But that’s what he told his tenant. I wonder why?”
They drove down Falkoner Allé in the direction of Vesterbro. Several times Søren prepared to say something, but Henrik leaned back against the headrest and looked as if he was snoozing. Søren drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and maneuvered the car effortlessly through the traffic. He felt totally isolated. They parked in Kongshøjgade and Henrik let Søren enter Johannes Trøjborg’s stairwell first. The stairs were worn in the middle; it had to be at least thirty years since they were last renovated. On each landing lay scrunched-up juice cartons, sweet wrappers, cans, and in one place a rubber strap that had once been pulled tightly around an addict’s arm. The light worked on the first floor, but from then up all the bulbs were out, and the two men could barely see where they were going. It stank of urine.
“Jesus Christ,” Henrik commented softly.
“Yes, lovely place, isn’t it.”
At last they reached Johannes’s front door. It was quiet. Suddenly Søren’s stomach lurched. Henrik stuck out his hand to ring the bell, but Søren grabbed his arm.
“Look,” he said, pointing. The door was closed, but not completely. A faint crack, almost invisible in the dark stairwell, had caught Søren’s eye.
“I’ve a bad feeling about this,” he said, taking a pencil from his breast pocket and pushing the door. It swung open. The silence was deadly.
“We’re going in,” Søren announced.
The apartment was, if possible, even darker than the stairwell. Søren and Henrik stopped inside a small hallway with a kitchen to the left and a living room to the right. They could see a window, closed curtains, a cast-iron sofa with deep cushions and fabric draped across it; in front of the window was a dining table with four chairs. Henrik went into the kitchen and turned on the light. The kitchen was cluttered and filthy. Empty soft drinks bottles, stale food in opened containers, and a greasy grill, which had been removed from the oven but had never made it to the sink. It stank, and Henrik opened the door under the sink, which brought an over-filled trash can into view. Søren took two pairs of rubber gloves and two pairs of shoe protectors from his inside pocket and handed one set to Henrik. He could see where this was going; he had been a police officer for far too long.