The Redeemer(98)

Harry nodded. 'Sometimes when you walk around here at midnight you can still hear the screams of children coming from there.'

Martine ogled Harry. 'You're joking! Are there ghosts?'

'Well,' Harry said, turning into Sofies gate, 'it might be because families with children have moved in.'

Martine slapped him on the shoulder with a laugh. 'No jokes about ghosts. I believe in them.'

'Me too,' said Harry. 'Me too.'

Martine stopped laughing.

'I live here,' Harry said, pointing to a light blue front door.

'Didn't you have any more questions?'

'Yes, but they can wait until the morning.'

She cocked her head to the side. 'I'm not tired. Have you got any tea?'

A car crawled forward on creaking snow, but pulled into the pavement fifty metres lower down and blinded them with bluish-white light. Harry gave her a thoughtful look as he groped for his keys. 'Just Nescafé. Listen, I'll ring—'

'Nescafé's fine,' Martine said. Harry went to put the key in the lock but Martine was a step ahead. She pushed open the light blue front door. Harry watched it spring back and close against the frame, but it didn't snap shut.

'It's the cold,' he mumbled. 'The building's shrinking.'

Harry slammed the door after them, then they went up the stairs.

'Tidy here,' Martine said, taking off her boots in the hall.

'I don't have a lot of things,' Harry said from the kitchen.

'What do you like best?'

Harry gave that some thought. 'Records.'

'Not the photo album?'

'I don't believe in photo albums,' Harry said.

Martine went into the kitchen and slunk onto one of the chairs. From the corner of his eye Harry watched her tuck her legs under her with the agility of a cat.

'You don't believe?' she asked. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'They destroy the ability to forget. Milk?'

She shook her head. 'But you believe in records?'

'Yes. They lie in a more truthful way.'

'But don't they destroy the ability to forget?'

Harry paused mid-pour. Martine was chuckling. 'I don't believe in this surly, disillusioned inspector. I think you're a romantic, Hole.'

'Let's go into the sitting room,' Harry said. 'I've just bought a great new record. For the moment it comes without any memories attached.'

Martine slipped onto the sofa while Harry put on Jim Stärk's debut record. Then he sat in the green wing chair and caressed the coarse woollen material to the accompaniment of the first guitar notes. He remembered the chair had been bought from Elevator, the Salvation Army's second-hand shop. He cleared his throat. 'Robert may have been having a relationship with a girl who was much younger than him. What do you think about that?'

'What do I think about relationships between younger women and older men?' She chuckled but flushed deep red in the silence that followed. 'Or whether I think Robert liked underage girls?'

'I didn't say that, but a teenager maybe. Croatian.'

'Izgubila sam se.'

'Pardon?'

'That's Croat. Or Serbo-Croat. We used to spend the summer in Dalmatia when I was small, before the Salvation Army bought Østgård. When Daddy was eighteen he went to Yugoslavia to help with recon-struction after the Second World War. He got to know the families of a lot of the builders. That was why he committed us to taking refugees from Vukovar.'

'With regard to Østgård, do you remember a Mads Gilstrup, the grandson of the people you bought it off?'

'Oh, yes. He was there for some days the summer we took it over. I didn't speak to him. No one spoke to him, I remember. He seemed so angry and introverted. But I think he liked Thea, too.'

'What makes you think that? If he didn't speak to anyone, I mean.'

'I saw him watching her. And when we were with Thea all of a sudden there he was. But he didn't say a word. He seemed weird, I thought. Almost a bit scary.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. He slept at the neighbours' house on the days he was there, but one night I woke up in the room where a few of the girls slept. And I saw a face pressed against the window. Then it went. I'm almost positive it was him. When I told the other girls they said I was seeing things. They were convinced there had to be something wrong with my eyesight.'

'Why's that?'

'Haven't you noticed?'

'What?'

'Come and sit here, and I'll show you,' Martine said, patting the sofa beside her. 'Can you see my pupils?'

Harry leaned forward and felt her breath on his face. And then he saw it. The pupils inside the brown irises looked as though they had spilt into the iris, forming a keyhole shape.

'It's congenital,' she said. 'It's called iris coloboma. But you can still have normal eyesight.'

'Interesting.' Their faces were so close he could smell her skin and her hair. He breathed in and had the tremulous sensation of slipping into a hot bath. A short, firm buzz sounded.

It took Harry a moment to realise it came from the door. Not the intercom. Someone was standing outside his door on the landing.