The Absent One A Department Q Novel - By Jussi Adler-Olsen Page 0,1

crowd. What a delicious sense of justice it would give her.

But Kimmie didn’t push the woman. In a swarm of people there was always a watchful eye; plus there was something inside her that held her back. The frightening echo from a time long, long ago.

She raised her sleeve to her face and took a deep breath. It was true what the woman beside her had noticed: her clothes stank terribly.

When the light turned green, she made her way over the crossing, her suitcase knocking along behind her on its crooked wheels. This would be its final trip, because the time had come to toss out the old rags.

It was time to slough her skin.

In the center of the train station, a placard displayed the day’s newspaper headlines in front of the railway kiosk, making life bitter for both the hurried and the blind. She’d seen the poster several times on her way through the city, and it filled her with disgust.

“Pig,” she mumbled when she passed the sign, gazing steadfastly ahead. Still, she turned her head and caught a glimpse of the face on Berlingske Tidende’s placard.

The mere sight of the man made her tremble.

Under the PR photo it read: “Ditlev Pram buys private hospitals in Poland for 12 billion kroner.” She spat on the tile floor and paused until her body grew calmer. She hated Ditlev Pram. Him and Torsten and Ulrik. But one day they’d get what they deserved. One day she’d take care of them. She would.

She laughed out loud, making a passerby smile. Yet another naive idiot who thought he knew what went on inside other people’s heads.

Then she stopped abruptly.

Rat-Tine stood at her usual spot a little farther ahead. Crouched over and rocking slightly, with dirty hands, drooping eyelids, and a hand outstretched in mind-blown faith that at least one person in the swarming anthill would slip her a ten-krone coin. Only drug addicts could stand like that hour after hour. Miserable wretches.

Kimmie tried to sneak past her, heading directly for the stairwell to Reventlowsgade, but Tine had spotted her.

“Hi, Kimmie. Hey, wait up, damn it,” she managed in a sniffling moment of lucidity, but Kimmie didn’t respond. Rat-Tine wasn’t good in open spaces. Only when she sat on her bench did her brain function reasonably.

She was, however, the only person Kimmie could tolerate.

The wind whipping through the streets that day was inexplicably cold, so people wanted to get home quickly. For that reason, five black Mercedes idled in the taxi queue by the train station’s Istedgade entrance. She thought there’d be at least one remaining when she needed it. That was all she wanted to know.

She dragged the suitcase across the street to the basement Thai shop and left it next to the window. Only once before had a suitcase been stolen when she’d put it there. She felt certain it wouldn’t happen in this weather, when even thieves stayed indoors. It didn’t matter anyway. There was nothing of any value in the suitcase.

She waited only about ten minutes at the main entrance to the station before she got a bite. A fabulously beautiful woman in a mink coat, with a lithe body not much larger than a size 8, was leaving a taxi with a suitcase on hard rubber wheels. In the past Kimmie had always looked for women who wore a size 10, but that was many years ago. Living on the street didn’t make anyone fat.

While the woman concentrated on the ticket machine in the front entrance, Kimmie stole the suitcase. Then she made off toward the back exit and in no time was down among the taxis on Reventlowsgade.

Practice makes perfect.

There she loaded her stolen suitcase into the boot of the first taxi in the queue and asked the driver to take her for a short ride.

From her coat pocket she pulled out a fat bundle of hundred-krone bills. “I’ll give you a few hundred more if you do as I say,” she told him, ignoring his suspicious glance and quivering nostrils.

In about an hour they would return and pick up her old suitcase. By then she would be wearing new clothes and another woman’s scent.

No doubt the taxi driver’s nostrils would quiver for an entirely different reason then.

2

Ditlev Pram was a handsome man, and he knew it. When flying business class, there were any number of women who had no objections to hearing about his Lamborghini and how fast it could drive to his domicile in the fashionable