Last Train to Helsingør Page 10

  The visitors laughed. Magnus felt his cheeks glow; he had not thought about that. Next time he would have to be a lot more imaginative. Then Miss Karin’s face grew serious.

  ‘Which is why there’s a problem,’ she said. ‘Beautiful though it is, none of my descendants are willing to live at Brokholm because of the wailing girl. It won’t be easy finding a caretaker willing to stay for more than a few nights.’

  Magnus was just about to say that, actually, he’d be happy to oblige if the baroness would do the honours and pass on. That, as a matter of fact, he did not believe a word of all this nonsense about a wailing girl. But at that moment one of his colleagues entered the room.

  ‘There you are. I have been looking for you all morning. A young woman came, told me to give you this.’ He passed Magnus a brown envelope.

  Magnus stuck his hand inside, finding first the crisp stack of bank notes that he had given to the waitress, then a folded note. The message was extremely brief: I couldn’t do it. Sorry.

  From far off, as his legs buckled under him and the room went dark, he heard the voice of Miss Karin. ‘My dear man, are you all right?’

  Room Service

  Bent had finished most of the bottle and was nodding off in the head chef’s chair when the ringing began. He stared at the telephone on the desk in front of him, but the ringing was coming from further away, an old-fashioned sound he had never heard before.

  He emerged unsteadily from the cubicle into the gleaming white of the kitchen, scratching his head.

  Perhaps it was coming from reception? He knew the night manager had not been able to come in because of the snow.

  Whoever it was sounded impatient. As soon as the ringing stopped, it started again.

  He went through the corridor with the red carpet gingerly, for the long-dead dignitaries observing him from their frames on the wall made him uncomfortable. He wasn’t supposed to stray from the kitchen.

  But the ringing was not coming from reception. The light was turned down low, the room deserted and silent.

  Bent pressed his forehead against the door to the street, breathing vodka mist onto the window pane and drawing a face with his finger.

  The snow was heavy in the cone of street light. There was no sound but the wind. No cars outside, no buses, no people, just a silvery penumbra rimmed by darkness, the buildings across the square as obscure as a distant forest.

  It must have been the wind he heard, whistling around the corners of the hotel. That was the trouble with the drink, you couldn’t trust your ears, your own eyes. He yawned, scratched the stubble on his scalp, and headed back to the kitchen.

  On the radio they were talking about the blizzard as though it were the end of the world. Not since 1978, they said, had the country seen snow like it.

  He had just settled back down when the ringing started again. He swore under his breath, switched off the radio and listened hard, hands behind his ears: he heard the water gurgling in the ancient pipes, the humming of the giant fridge, the dripping tap in the pastry section, but still he could not place the sound.

  A thought came to him. There was bound to be a telephone in the dining room, though who could be ringing it at this time of night, in this weather?

  The room was vast, and the empty chairs seemed to glare at him disapprovingly, making him nervous. Snow was trickling down the window panes, drawing strange patterns on the walls, the white tablecloths and the arched ceiling with the artificial sky. Blue light twinkled in the chandeliers, the crystal glasses and the silver, as though the entire room were under water. Bent had to lean over for a while, with his elbows resting on his knees.

  In the end, he found the telephone in the pantry, next to the dumbwaiter they no longer used. It was an old-fashioned telephone mounted on the wall with a sign above it saying Penthouse. It began to ring again, urgently, as he stood there looking at it. Bent did not know the hotel had a penthouse.

  Hesitantly, he lifted the receiver. ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the other end was faint, scratchy and female, barely audible over the yapping dog in the background. It reminded Bent of something, lost in the depths of his memory.

  ‘I wish to place an order, and make it quick.’

  ‘Who is speaking?’ Bent said, trying to rein in his drunkenness. ‘Listen, if you think you’re being funny …’ he began, reckoning it would be someone setting him up for a prank.

  Then he remembered the reception was empty and dark. It was two o’clock in the morning. The city was shut down, nothing moving.

  He closed his eyes, shook his head to try and sober himself up, but the voice continued, far away as though speaking down a pipe.

  ‘What, what? Speak up, man.’

  Maybe this was something they had forgotten to tell him about in the interview. He hadn’t really listened, too desperate to get the job. At his age, with his record, what else was he going to get but the graveyard shift?

  Most nights he had very little to do, and free booze, as much as could drink. No one had discovered yet the vodka bottles he had refilled with water and stored at the back of the shelf in the wine cellar.

  He fished his pad and pencil out of his pocket.

  ‘What would you like to order, madam?’

  ‘Caviar,’ said the woman. ‘Lobster Thermidor. Peach Melba. And champagne. Dom Perignon. Iced. For one.’

  Bent stared at the pad. At night, in the privacy of their rooms, people ordered burgers and club sandwiches. Filthy food that left them satisfied and ashamed. Lobster Thermidor was not on the menu.

  But guests paid a lot of money to stay in the hotel, and he was supposed to cook them whatever they wanted. The head chef had been very specific on that point.

  The woman went on. ‘Oh, and raw fillet steak, chopped up in the usual manner. Silver bowl.’

  She sounded posh and obviously ancient. There was some sort of interference on the line that made it difficult to catch her voice, like dust on an old gramophone record.

  He looked helplessly around the kitchen, but, of course, there was no one he could ask. The night waiter had not turned up. He would have to do everything himself.

  ‘Well, man?’ said the woman.

  ‘Certainly. Coming right up.’

  She said something else after that, something about the snow and the cold, but he couldn’t make it out, and then the line cut and she was gone.

  He had cooked Thermidor on the cruise ships, a lifetime ago, but cooking was like riding a bicycle, you never forgot how. He whistled to himself as he halved the lobster, removed the meat from the tail and claws and placed it back in the shell. He made the sauce with the butter, shallots and cream, taking a swig from the Cognac and wiping his mouth with his sleeve as he stirred.

  On the trolley with the starched white tablecloth he placed the caviar in a silver dish on a bed of ice, surrounded by the unsalted biscuits. Then the grilled lobster and the poached peach in its lake of vanilla ice cream and raspberry sauce. Finally, the silver bowl with the chopped-up sirloin steak, which he took to be for the yapping dog he had heard.

  The garish colours of orange, crimson, white and black swam before his eyes, before he topped the plates with the cloches.

  He took another swig of the Cognac and checked his reflection in the silverware, squinting at his two faces. His eyes were bloodshot. He rubbed the top of his head with his red, scarred hands and rolled down his sleeves to cover his tattoos. Nothing he could do about the scarlet stain across the front of his whites.

  The champagne rattled in its bucket as he pushed the trolley over the uneven tiles. He had never been upstairs to any of the bedrooms before, and was hardly in a fit state now, but what choice was there?

  He found the lift to the penthouse around the corner from the new service lifts, an antique contraption with two metal grilles that had to be pulled across and fastened in turn. There was only one button in there. The lift clanged and shook as it travelled slowly past each floor, making the glasses clink. Ben
t dosed off, waking with a start when the lift shuddered to a halt.

  He emerged onto a small landing that led to a corridor with a single door at the end. The Chinoiserie wallpaper and red-shaded lanterns were like something from another time. It took him a long while to find the switch, and even then the light was no more than a faint glow.

  There was a fusty smell and something else, cloying and mossy, like bath salts. Violets, he thought, just like candied violets.

  The door looked tiny and seemed to get further and further away as he made his way down the corridor, pushing the rattling trolley ahead of him.

  He noticed the door was ajar, the smell of violets stronger than before. He knocked, trying to glimpse something, anything, beyond the darkness.

  ‘Hello? Room service.’

  He knocked again, harder. Most likely she was deaf as a post.

  ‘Room service!’

  Nothing. Perhaps she meant for him to come in and that was why she had left the door open. He stepped in cautiously, wary of the yapping dog. But there was no sign of the creature, nor of the mad woman, just the scent of violets.

  The room was not entirely dark, he saw now. Beyond the bulky contours of the furniture was a large window overlooking the square and the rooftops, the odd street light glimpsed through the snow like a star through thin cloud. He had never see the city like this before, laid out below him, white, clean, frozen.

  There was an armchair there, in front of the window, and beside it a table. He drew a finger across the surface; it came back fuzzy with dust.

  ‘Hello?’ his voice echoed in the empty room.

  He found two doors, one to a bathroom and one to what he assumed was a bedroom, but no one answered his call, and the rooms were draughty and damp.

  The call he had taken in the kitchen seemed like something that had happened a long time ago. There was nothing here, nothing but the scent of violets that came and went and came again.

  What was it about violets, the way they robbed you momentarily of your senses?

  Suddenly he was afraid.

  He ran a bit with the trolley, making a mess of the caviar and crackers and knocking over the champagne flute. It was as though the lift would never come, then an eternity before it reached the kitchen, clattering through every storey. This time he was awake, his eyes wide in the mirror on the panelled wall. The iodine waft of caviar and raw steak was noxious in the small space.

  He sat for a while in the kitchen and looked at the trolley, willing his heart to slow down. He sat there staring until the lobster was stone cold and the ice cream melting. As he looked on, one of the crackers dropped from the silver dish and split in two, the caviar staining the white tablecloth purple.

  He corked the champagne into his fist and drank it straight from the bottle. In time, he fell asleep, his chin resting on his chest, his legs splayed on the cold tiles.

  It was the head chef himself who woke him, shaking him roughly by the arm. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  There was a lot of noise in the room, the clanging of pots, people shouting across at one another. The light was too bright. He squinted, a hand over his eyes.

  ‘There was an order last night,’ he mumbled, his mouth like glue. ‘From the penthouse. But no one was there, no one at all.’

  Someone near him laughed.

  ‘What in God’s name are you talking about? The penthouse hasn’t been used for years, not since the roof caved in.’

  The head chef kicked the champagne bottle, sending it rolling across the floor.

  ‘Go home Bent, you’re drunk. This will be coming out of your wages.’

  They wouldn’t listen. They laughed at him when he showed them the old phone, the pad with the order written in his snarled, drunken hand in the dead of the night.

  He got to his feet and stumbled towards the door. He was almost at the staff exit when he turned around.

  They weren’t supposed to go through the corridor with the pictures. Not with guests around, not in the daytime. But there it was, the portrait of the woman with the stern expression and the long nose, and the little white dog, cradled in her jewelled hand.

  Elizabeth Amalie Rosendahl. Founder.

  Died in the Great Winter Storm of 1978.

  He ran straight out of the front entrance into the glassy darkness of the street, where the snow had turned slushy, and the cars and people had returned as though nothing had happened.

  He bumped into a woman carrying luggage. The bags tumbled noisily on the pavement, and the doorman shouted at him, but it wasn’t till he had reached the other side of the square that something made him turn, and he could have sworn that he saw a light in the window set high up in the roof of the hotel, briefly, like the flicker of an eye.

  This time Bent kept running as fast as he could, barely noticing the people who stopped to stare at the bald man in the check trousers and whites, with the scarlet stain down his chest, skidding across the snow in his clogs and looking as though he had seen a ghost.

  The Ghost of Helene Jørgensen

  Øresund had never been so still, so perfectly flat: a giant silver dish rimmed by a thousand lights twinkling along the Swedish coast. Cecilie cooled her forehead against the window of her office. It was as close to day outside as it is possible for a moonlit winter night to be. Blue and bright and strange, as though the Star of Bethlehem itself had descended on Copenhagen.

  There was a knock on the door. She frowned. The latest admission had been strapped down and sedated earlier in the evening, but the nurses were under strict instructions to fetch her whenever she was needed, no matter how late. She replaced her spectacles, smoothed down her silk shirt and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.

  ‘Enter.’

  A male face appeared in the door. The face was wide and fleshy, the nose big with flayed nostrils from which sprouted several black hairs

  ‘Oh,’ the man said.

  ‘Looking for a patient?’ Cecilie asked.

  Occasionally someone would visit a parent or spouse on the major holidays. She assumed that the man had taken a wrong turn and got himself lost, but he shook his head.

  ‘Actually, I was after Doctor Lindegaard.’

  ‘You’re looking at her.’ She waited patiently for his surprise to pass.

  The man’s eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks red. There was a raw patch above one ear with evidence of repeated scratching.

  ‘You’re really a doctor?’ he asked.

  She let it go. ‘I’m the resident psychiatrist here. And you are?’ she asked.

  The man cast his eyes back out to the corridor, looking left and right, then entered her office and closed the door behind him. Cecilie felt for the panic button in her trouser pocket. The security guard was only fifteen seconds away, if it came to it.

  ‘They let me in. Told them I had an appointment,’ the man said, holding upon his hands in a gesture of apology. ‘I found your name on the internet.’

  ‘An appointment? On Christmas Eve?’ Cecilie said.

  ‘Told them it was an emergency,’ the man said. ‘Which is true.’

  He glanced quickly around her office, seeming to find reassurance in her white coat and stethoscope hanging from a peg behind the door, and, at the other end of the room, the couch with the clean paper napkin spread across the headrest.

  ‘I’m here about me,’ he said. ‘I need your help urgently.’

  The door to Cecilie’s private apartment was ajar, the edge of her bed just visible across the hallway. She closed the door quickly before the man had a chance to look. Then she sat down behind her desk with the view of the sound, switched on the yellow-glowing desk lamp, and pointed to the chair opposite.

  ‘Take a seat for a moment, Mr …?’

  ‘Jørgensen.’ The man sat down, but almost immediately jumped up again and stared wildly at the door. ‘Who’s that?’

  Then Cecilie heard it, too, the echo of approaching footsteps, clogs on concrete, a faint jingle of keys
. The security guard, tall and bearded, stuck his head around the door and glanced threateningly at the visitor.

  ‘Everything all right here, Doctor Lindegaard?’

  Cecilie looked at Jørgensen, who was smiling disarmingly. She nodded. ‘I believe so.’

  ‘He insisted he had an appointment,’ said the guard.

  ‘Really, it’s fine,’ Cecilie said. ‘You can go back to your desk now.’

  The guard looked unconvinced.

  ‘I take it the nurses have brought you down some Christmas dinner?’ she asked, to appease him.

  The guard smiled broadly. ‘I was just about to tuck into it. We’re all meeting up in the staffroom later to light the tree. Won’t you be joining us?’

  Cecilie thought longingly of the expensive bottle of Burgundy waiting in her apartment. She shook her head, smiled and patted the pile of papers on her desk.

  ‘Too much work to do, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, goodnight then,’ the guard said, pausing on the threshold to throw Jørgensen one last menacing look.

  When he had left, Cecilie turned to her visitor.

  ‘The staff here are very protective of me.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Jørgensen. ‘And very wise too, with all those mad people about. A dangerous place for a woman to work, I would have thought.’

  Cecilie felt her shoulders tensing but twisted her mouth into a smile. ‘On the contrary, I prefer it. Life is very predictable in here, safe.’

  ‘Are you saying you prefer lunatics to normal people?’ said Jørgensen.

  ‘It can often be hard to tell the difference,’ said Cecilie under her breath.

  She looked down at her scarred hands and moved them out of sight under the desk. ‘You must understand, Mr Jørgensen, that this is an asylum, a hospital for the mentally ill, not a walk-in medical practice.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, undeterred. ‘And that’s exactly why I am here. I think I am losing my mind. I need … something, to sleep, to calm me down.’