Last Train to Helsingør Read online

  When Hopkins had taken it all in, his gaze fell again on the old man, who was staring up at him with bemused interest.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Hopkins said. ‘But I don’t believe I saw you on my flight.’

  ‘Oh, but I wasn’t.’

  ‘No? So where did you come from?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ the old man said, still smiling. ‘I arrived. I went through baggage reclaim. I picked up a suitcase.’

  Hopkins shook his head. ‘You are supposed to go to the baggage area that’s allocated to your flight. That’s where your suitcase will be,’ he explained patiently.

  ‘You misunderstand,’ said the old man. ‘Whenever I arrive home at Kastrup, I pick up a suitcase. It is always most exciting to see what I get.’

  ‘You can’t just take any old suitcase.’

  ‘Why not? They are right there, on the conveyer belt, freely available. A smörgåsbord, if you like.’

  Hopkins found it hard to maintain an even tone. ‘It’s theft.’

  The old man waved his hand dismissively. ‘Ownership is transient, Mr Hopkins. None of us are here for long. And when something is lost, it is an opportunity for something new to be found in its place, don’t you think?’

  He leaned in close, revealing rather yellow teeth and a breath smelling of brandy. ‘They lose millions of suitcases in airports. It’s not as if anyone is going to notice, is it?’

  Hopkins stared at the old man.

  ‘Wait just a minute,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way you see it, why did you call me?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Hopkins, I took pity on you.’

  Hopkins stepped away, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Look here. Whoever you are, you are obviously mad, and you are breaking the law. I would like to have my suitcase, now.’

  ‘Of course. And Otto here would be delighted to take you back to your hotel.’

  Hopkins spun around. The driver had entered the room soundlessly. Standing up, he was surprisingly big. His eyes, deep-set in folds of pale flesh, were fixed on Hopkins.

  ‘Look,’ Hopkins said, holding up both hands and forcing his voice down into a lower register. ‘I meant no offence. Let me just take my things and be out of here.’

  He returned to the hall, followed closely by the old man and his driver. The suitcase was still there, but he now saw that the address label was missing. He knelt down, unzipped the lid and peered inside. The first item he saw was pink. ‘This isn’t my luggage,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I never pretended it was,’ said the old man. ‘I thought you might have more fun with this one.’

  ‘Where is my suitcase? What have you done with it?’ Hopkins shouted.

  He noticed a long corridor leading from the entrance hall. Seeing what he meant to do, the driver advanced quickly to stop him, but the old man held up his hand.

  ‘It’s quite all right, Otto. Let Mr Hopkins see for himself.’

  There were a number of doors. Hopkins tried the first. He let out a small gasp. The room was full of suitcases, dozens of them stacked up to the ceiling. All of them black, medium-sized with retractable handles and wheels.

  He tried the next room and the two rooms after that. All of them were full of suitcases, varying only slightly in size and style. A paper label had been attached to each with a place name and a date written in blue ink. Morocco, 16 April, 2003. Berlin, 5 December, 1992. Rio de Janeiro, 22 February, 1996.

  ‘Come,’ said the old man, leading Hopkins through to the last room, in which the suitcases were noticeably older. He reached up and pulled one down from the top of a pile, releasing a fine shower of dust.

  ‘My first. Venice, fifth of July, 1976. I took this one by mistake.’

  He opened it carefully, flicking open the brass latches on either side of the handle. A smell of mildew rose from the contents. ‘Look at all this,’ he said. ‘Exquisite jewellery, books of poetry, dresses, underwear of purest silk. You can see the owner before you, can you not? A life, neatly stowed inside a box.’

  He closed the suitcase, affectionately brushed the dust from its lid. ‘I made my money collecting antiques all over the world. After that day, I started on suitcases, too. You won’t find a collection quite like this one.’

  Hopkins opened and closed his mouth. There had to be more than a thousand suitcases in the apartment. ‘Where is mine? Where have you put it?’ he asked in a voice that had scarcely any force to it.

  ‘Ah, yours,’ replied the old man, leaning on his walking stick with Otto blocking the light in the doorway behind him.

  ‘Yours was, shall we say … a little disappointing. I thought to myself, Who travels with five identical white shirts and five identical grey ties? Who rolls his socks and irons his undergarments? Tell me, Mr Hopkins. Have you ever considered wearing different colours, something a little brighter, perhaps? I think it would suit you.’

  Hopkins felt close to tears. ‘I just want my suitcase back. I beg of you, tell me where it is.’

  He wanted to turn back the clock and come out of the plane again and this time go straight to arrivals and pick up his suitcase and go to his hotel and go to bed.

  ‘I have appointments,’ he said. ‘People are expecting me in the morning. I can’t just … there are things I have to do.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the old man, snapping his fingers at Otto. ‘Get Mr Hopkins his luggage. He is quite sure he wants it back.’

  The driver returned with the suitcase. Hopkins zipped it open. It was his. Everything was in place.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, hanging his head.

  ‘Otto, Mr Hopkins is tired. Take him to his hotel,’ the old man said.

  In the lift, the driver’s button eyes were blank, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  Fifteen minutes later, Hopkins was back in his room. Though it was past midnight, it was still not completely dark. Exhausted, he undressed, tumbled straight into bed and fell asleep immediately with one hand on the suitcase safely ensconced on the floor beside him.

  In the morning, he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the apartment with the luggage lost forever to its owners. When he couldn’t delay any longer, he got up and opened the suitcase.

  He rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t his. It was the other suitcase, the one from the old man’s entrance hall. Uppermost inside was a pink shirt and, beneath it, a purple tie with bright flowers and a cream linen suit.

  Hopkins glanced at his own clothes, tossed in a grey heap on the floor. Then he stood in front of the full-length mirror and held up the stranger’s shirt. It smelt faintly of cologne.

  Through the open window came the sounds of the unfamiliar city stirring into life. Soon the rides would start up again, the screaming that was half terror, half pleasure. It would take just a few minutes to stroll across the street, pick up a ticket and walk through the turnstile.

  Hopkins cocked his head and ran a hand through his hair, looking himself up and down. As he pulled on the pink shirt, slowly fastening each of its pearl buttons, his heart began to beat very fast.

  The Tallboy

  He saw the woman coming: her wide eyes as she leant over the passenger seat and looked up at the sign above his shop, the large object under the blanket in the back of her Volvo, the expensive handbag in the crook of her elbow as she opened the door. He saw all this from behind his desk and he knew he had something good.

  ‘It says in the phone book that you buy antique furniture – any antique furniture?’

  She bit her lip, leaving a smear of lipstick on her front teeth.

  ‘You have been correctly informed, best prices you will find anywhere in Copenhagen,’ he said, smiling but not getting up from his chair. Not yet.

  She came closer, her gaze gliding over the wardrobes, dressers and commodes jostling for space in the narrow room, before settling on the mug of coffee and half-finished crossword on his desk. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of the turpentine and linseed oil coming through the open door to the
workshop at the back. He became conscious of his calloused hands, the dark half-moons under his nails.

  ‘I wonder if you could take a look at something for me,’ she said. ‘It’s outside, in the back of my car.’

  ‘What is it?’ he said, still not getting up. No need to seem keen.

  ‘Just an old chest of drawers.’

  As she led him out of the shop, jangling her car keys, he tried not to walk too fast. He could smell her perfume, see the dark roots where her blonde hair parted. She had laid down the back seat of her car to make room for the chest. The size and shape of it gave him a good feeling. When you had been in the business for as long as he had, you developed a nose for these things.

  When she pulled back the blanket, his breath caught in his throat. It was a tallboy the colour of plump chestnuts, luminous in the winter gloom. He winced on seeing how roughly she had handled it. Flame mahogany, most likely Cuban, cut from the underarm of the tree, shipped to Europe and fussed over for months by long-dead cabinet-makers in London, and she had thrown it into the back of her car with nothing but a stained dog blanket for padding.

  ‘It was my father’s. We have had to put him into a home, so …’

  She trailed off and half smiled at him. He noticed that there were dark rings under her eyes and, despite himself, felt a flare-up of sympathy. Though it was now some years in the past, he remembered that his own mother’s illness and eventual death had been a strain. But then again, what did he have in common with this rich woman from the suburbs? He imagined her big villa, the sleek white walls, the designer furniture. How she would have gone through her father’s things, dismissing them as worthless junk, chucking the tallboy in her car to get rid of it. They had no idea, these people, no idea at all.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, stroking his chin. ‘I would need to get it out into the light to have a proper look.’

  It always worked, especially with the larger items. Get them into the shop and people were much less likely to want to take them away again, even if the money was less than they were expecting.

  They worked together on his instructions, carrying first the bottom half into the shop, then the top, carefully slotting it into place. There was a difficult moment when the woman, who seemed to be half in a daze, nearly dropped one of the drawers on the pavement and he couldn’t stop himself from crying out, but she took no notice. Soon they had the tallboy assembled.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  You only had so much luck in life. Once, he had found a diamond necklace at the back of a wardrobe that he had picked up for nothing in a house auction. Another time, a French chair had turned out to be sixteenth-century walnut and extremely rare. The tallboy was better than that.

  It was English, almost certainly mid-eighteenth century. The drawers smelled of cigar boxes and brought to his mind images of the ancient tropical forests of Latin America. She watched as he pulled gently to release the secretaire behind the two fake drawers in the middle, revealing the most extraordinary example of rosewood veneer-work he had ever seen. His heart was beating so hard he thought it must be visible to the woman.

  He took his time, running his hands up and down the sides of the chest, as smooth and dense as marble. He tapped the back, opened each of the little drawers in the secretaire and leant down with a magnifying glass to inspect the intricate inlaid motif on the centre panel, some sort of gargoyle or demon. He noticed that the panel was badly dented and scratched around the edge, but nothing that a little loving care in his workshop wouldn’t put right.

  ‘Yes, it’s as I thought,’ he said, pointing at random to one of the drawers. ‘Do you see that colour difference? This entire panel is reproduction. I expect it was added sometime in the 1960s.’

  ‘I see,’ the woman said.

  ‘You used to get good prices for these, but now, well, the trouble is that there are so many of them on the market, so unless they are in prime condition …’

  He ran his finger over the dented panel.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Yes, I see.’

  He had prepared himself to qualify his response in some way, to answer probing questions, but the woman said nothing more, merely shifted her weight from one foot to the other and looked up at him expectantly.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, finally. ‘Seeing as it’s you, I will give you three thousand kroner for it, take it off your hands.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. Just like that, fine. She watched impatiently as he peeled the three banknotes from the warm, curved wad in his back pocket, then tucked them into her handbag without looking at them, and headed for the door.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want a receipt?’

  But she made a dismissive gesture with her hand, and the next minute she was gone, jumping into her car and pulling out into the midday traffic.

  He watched from behind the window until she had turned the corner and disappeared before locking and bolting the door and drawing down the blind.

  Then he ran back to his desk and shuffled frantically through his papers for his valuation book. He had not been mistaken. A piece of this pedigree could fetch as much as 75,000 kroner at auction. And then there was the intriguing gargoyle figure on the centre panel, something he had never seen before. The tallboy was bound to have provenance – only a matter of looking hard enough.

  He fetched his brushes and rags and set to work. From a box of scraps, he cut tiny pieces of veneer and fixed them with glue, replacing the shards that had splintered away. Then, with a thick waxed crayon he had matched in colour to the flame mahogany, he filled the scratches. He checked that the drawers opened and closed smoothly, and carefully tacked into place the back panel where it had been damaged by the woman’s rough handling.

  Finally, he applied a thin layer of beeswax all across the chest and buffed it by hand till his shirt was soaked with sweat. By the time he was done, it was dark and the traffic had died down in the street outside.

  When he had put away his tools and turned off the light, he stood for a moment in the dark and looked at the tallboy. Next to the other pieces of furniture in the shop, it felt alive and throbbing with energy, like a thoroughbred stallion among rocking horses.

  Upstairs, he made a thorough online search for the demon motif on the front panel. He looked at hundreds of inlaid pictures of trees, flowers and figures, but none remotely resembled the gargoyle figure on the tallboy.

  When he had exhausted all options, he rang a dealer in London who left him on hold for a long time as she searched through her papers and filing cabinets.

  ‘I have something here, but it may not be related. There was this earl in the south-west of England a few centuries ago with a fondness for the macabre: body parts in specimen jars, maidens trapped behind walls, torture, that sort of thing. His coat of arms included a laughing, demonic figure. A bit like the one you’re describing. Send me a photograph and I will let you know for sure.’

  He thanked the dealer and hung up, having no intention whatsoever of sending her a picture.

  ‘Nice try,’ he said out loud, smiling at the thought that he himself would have done exactly the same, then somehow tried to get his colleague to sell him the piece cheaply under the pretence that it wasn’t worth much.

  He made a list of dealers that he was going to approach in the morning. If the woman in London had been right, there were plenty of bloodthirsty collectors out there who would be willing to part with a lot of money to get their hands on the tallboy.

  After supper, he spent a pleasant evening in front of the television, browsing holiday brochures. A nice little winter break and there would still be plenty of money left over. He fell asleep early, his arms aching, his hands stained a deep brown.

  He was woken by a loud knocking sound, or at least he thought he was. He lay in the dark, blinking at the ceiling and trying to work out if the sound had been part of his dream. But there it was again, an urgent rapping of knuckles on the front door downstairs.

  His mind r
aced through the possibilities. Could it be the police? He was an honest man, mostly, but there was no accounting for his customers. Could the coffee table he had bought the day before have been stolen?

  The knocking started up again. Surely, if it had been the police, they would have called out to him by now, ordered him to come and open the door.

  The thought that hit him then was even worse. What if it was a disgruntled customer wanting his money back? What if the blonde woman had realised her mistake and sent someone to fetch the tallboy?

  He tried to ignore it, but the knocking kept on, and it was getting louder. Though he pressed his hands to his ears, it was impossible to shut it out. It was the sort of urgent appeal that compelled you to respond, to obey, to take immediate action.

  He got up, tiptoed down the stairs. The knocking was deafening now. He stood in the shadows of the hallway and glanced towards the back entrance, his heart hammering in his throat. There was still time to slip out, but the back door would only take him through to the yard, and what if there was someone waiting for him out there? He would be trapped and no one would hear him and come to his rescue.

  He peered into the shop. All of a sudden he was afraid. The knocking was not coming from the front door; it was coming from the centre of the room. It was coming from the tallboy.

  He held his ears. The knocking was unbearably loud, panicked and desperate. His heart was beating along with it, pounding on his ribcage. The sound was echoing inside his skull as though it had been hollowed out and a great bell made from it that would not stop ringing. He pulled at his hair, pulled at his pyjamas, tearing them off. And all the time that leprechaun, that gargoyle or devil inlaid in the wood, was glaring at him from the tallboy, mocking him.

  It was as though someone was trapped behind the centre panel, as though he himself was trapped and knocking to get out.