Last Train to Helsingør Read online

  You may ask, Why tell the story now, thirty years later?

  For many years, I avoided Frederiksberg, and declined any engagement, social or professional, near the gardens or the building where I used to live. But the memory of Schliemann eventually faded, as these things do, and in time I managed to persuade myself that what happened had a logical explanation, however tragic, and now belonged safely in the past.

  It was last Saturday afternoon, when, on my way to collect my wife from lunch, I found myself on the very road in Frederiksberg where I used to live. When I passed the apartment building, my eyes drifted upwards subconsciously, if only for a second, and I saw the face in the window on the fifth floor, clear as day, staring at me with dark intent, the cheeks sunken beneath the sharp, pallid cheekbones.

  If you don’t believe me, and you happen to be in Copenhagen, go and see for yourself. You can’t miss the place; it is the most imposing apartment building in Frederiksberg. Look up at the dormer windows set into the roof, to the right of the entrance door. Schliemann will be there waiting, his face set back from the glass, partly obscured by a curtain, the dark hollows of his eyes staring out at someone or something that is never coming back.

  Conning Mrs Vinterberg

  Of Copenhagen, as it went past his window, Roper saw a million lights reflected in black water, a gallery of mirrors by night. There was a twisted gold spire and a curious black tower reaching into the sky like a tree root. He saw yellow buses, women pushing prams as big as barges and crowds of people slowly cycling along the pavement.

  A taxi had been sent to collect him from Kastrup Airport. It was lined with carpet and felt like a warm sock. The driver drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and said nothing.

  Roper was dropped outside an old building fronting the docks. It had a large wooden entranceway with a door set into it, and this door was ajar. On the other side there was a dank passage leading to an inner courtyard, its cobbles shiny with melted snow.

  There were many doors, but Roper followed the instructions the old Danish lady had given him and continued straight ahead, across the courtyard, to the door furthest away. Before entering, he craned his neck to see the sky framed in a dull orange square high above him. There was the distant rumble of an aeroplane.

  The lights went out on the second floor of the stairwell, and Roper was fumbling on the wall for the switch when the sound of a door being opened somewhere above him made his armpits prickle coldly.

  ‘Come on,’ he mumbled, clutching the leather satchel containing the pittance in Danish kroner that he had agreed to pay for the Chinese vase. ‘You’re not afraid of a little old lady now, are you?’

  He felt quite sure that the vase was genuine Qing dynasty. Mrs Vinterberg had described all the markings and colours to him in great detail. Though, of course, as far as she knew it was worthless. ‘A common reproduction artefact. We see a lot of them in London,’ he had told her.

  To Roper’s mind, lying in this way was not unfair. As far as he was concerned, it was caveat venditor: vendor beware. Besides, ridding the elderly of their unwanted clutter was nothing less than an act of charity.

  Finding the light switch, he continued upwards with renewed determination, until he reached the open door.

  ‘Mrs Vinterberg?’ he called softly on entering.

  The hall had a chequerboard floor and wall lamps set into wood panelling. Roper felt as though he had stepped on board a ship, one of the old-fashioned classy liners.

  ‘Hello? Anyone here?’ he said, only to jump at the door shutting with a heavy clunk. Then came the peculiar guttural accent he remembered from the telephone.

  ‘Mr Roper, how do you do.’

  Mrs Vinterberg – a tiny, breakable thing of at least eighty – had been in the hall all along, hovering behind the door. She was dressed eccentrically in a long sequinned caftan with a turban made from colourful silks, and had mournful eyes and waxy skin.

  Roper towered over her as she spoke.

  ‘You will join me for a cup of tea, yes?’

  Without waiting for a reply, she led him through to a cavernous lounge. Roper had to stop in the doorway and steady himself. On every vertical surface there were framed paintings and sketches and photographs. Oriental rugs covered the floor and there were several sofas, tables and gilded lamps. He wondered how many objects he could fit in his suitcase besides the Chinese vase.

  Mrs Vinterberg had set a small table for tea and rattled the cups in their saucers as she poured. Roper took a big mouthful but almost spat it out again.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said, frowning as the hot liquid slid down his throat. It had an aftertaste that was at the same time sweet and unpleasant, like bitter almonds.

  ‘Black China tea,’ Mrs Vinterberg said, smiling mischievously. ‘With a dash of rum.’

  ‘Thank you. It’s … awfully nice of you, Mrs Vinterberg, the tea and everything.’

  Roper forced a smile of the sort that usually worked on old ladies. ‘Now, where would you be keeping that pretty vase of yours?’ he ventured.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Vinterberg, a look of regret passing over her melancholic features. ‘You are in a hurry.’

  ‘No, no,’ Roper lied. ‘Please forgive my impatience. I didn’t mean to rush you.’

  ‘That’s quite all right, Mr Roper,’ she replied. ‘You want to get on, I understand.’

  ‘All in good time,’ he said, sipping his tea. ‘I’m never too busy for a chat. Quite a place you have here, Mrs Vinterberg. Did you collect all these antiques yourself?’

  Having spoken, Roper felt tired all of a sudden and suppressed a yawn that brought tears to his eyes, but Mrs Vinterberg didn’t seem to notice. It was as though her gaze had turned inwards.

  ‘My father bought most of them,’ she said. ‘He owned ships, freightliners, but they took a few passengers too. All over we went. New York, Sydney, Panama, Casablanca, Marseilles. It was a different world then. People took their time over things. I remember a long journey in the summer of 1952, bringing us from Copenhagen to Hamina in Finland and passing by Rouen, Bristol and Newcastle. England has always been special to us Danes, because of what you people did in the war.’

  Roper couldn’t see what any of this had to do with him, nor why Mrs Vinterberg would want to be telling all this to a complete stranger who had merely answered her advertisement in the Sunday Times.

  She suddenly cackled loudly to herself. ‘You know, I love that thing you do in London theatres where drinks are left out in the interval and you can take anything you want.’

  ‘You’re supposed to have paid for them,’ Roper mumbled into his teacup.

  Having listened to the old lady for several more minutes, he began to look irritably at his watch. He had spent a good half hour with Mrs Vinterberg, but she hadn’t as much as mentioned the vase. And now there was this strange tiredness, filling his eyelids with sand.

  ‘Look,’ he said, cutting off another of her rambling anecdotes. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve had rather a long day. Do you think you could possibly fetch that vase now? I have the money right here, and then we can both get on with our business.’ He patted the leather satchel.

  Mrs Vinterberg sighed and put down her cup. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Not that I’m not enjoying our chat or anything.’

  ‘No, no, you’re right,’ she said, but Roper could tell by the way her shoulders sloped that he had made a mistake.

  ‘It’s just that I don’t get many visitors here any more,’ she said ‘and I don’t care for being alone.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Roper said.

  ‘Everyone I ever knew, who knew me, is dead.’ The old lady’s eyes were fringed with black-tinted tears. ‘Is it so bad,’ she asked ‘to want a little company?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Roper replied.

  He was coming around to the view that humouring Mrs Vinterberg was the shortest route to the Chinese vase. But all of a sudden the old lady’s voice chang
ed. She leant forward and placed a cold hand on his arm.

  ‘Stay, Mr Roper, please. Only for the night.’

  Roper yanked his arm away in surprise. ‘No …’

  ‘Then just until I’ve gone to sleep, please … and I’ll let you go,’ she urged.

  ‘No,’ Roper said, getting up clumsily and knocking over his cup. He felt a spike of ice in his belly. What was happening to his legs?

  ‘Mr Roper, please,’ Mrs Vinterberg said desperately. ‘Sit down and have some more tea.’

  ‘No,’ he shouted, making her flinch. ‘You put something in it, didn’t you?’

  She looked up at him, too calmly, he thought. ‘What do you mean? Mr Roper, are you all right?’

  ‘You did, you did,’ he said grabbing her by the front of her dress. ‘You spiked my tea.’

  ‘You are tired. Long journeys always make one dreadfully tired,’ she said, waving her hands about.

  She was like a bird. He looked at her diminutive wrists, marbled with veins, her imploring eyes, and he knew at once that she was right. The flight had taken it out of him, and he had slept no more than two or three hours the night before.

  He sat back down again and rubbed his eyes, tried to pull himself together.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what got into me.’

  ‘The tea will refresh you. Here,’ she said, pouring. Guiltily, he put the cup to his lips.

  ‘Look, Mrs Vinterberg, we seem to have got off to a bad start,’ he said before drinking another mouthful as she watched.

  Afterwards, when he blinked, it seemed several minutes passed while his eyes were closed. He shook his head, but the room took its time to follow. It was as though the floor had started to move, gently swelling like the sea.

  ‘It is I who should apologise,’ Mrs Vinterberg said. ‘I expect you want to see the vase now?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Roper said, but his voice seemed to come from somewhere outside himself.

  ‘It’s the most beautiful vase you ever saw. An old man, a refugee, gave it to me in Hong Kong in 1955,’ she said, but she was in no hurry to leave her chair.

  Nattering on, she refilled Roper’s cup, but this time he pushed it away. A heaviness had settled on his brain and it took an age before he succeeded in commanding his lips to move.

  ‘Get it now,’ he said, his voice low and slurred. ‘Just get the vase.’

  ‘Say you will stay and I will give it to you. You can have it in the morning,’ said Mrs Vinterberg, who was far away now, as though he were looking at her down the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

  ‘Crazy old bat,’ Roper said, managing with the last of his strength to pull himself up. He tried to seize her by the neck but she easily recoiled from his grasp, causing him to lose his balance. Something crashed to the floor.

  ‘For the last time,’ he gasped, bent over the arm of a chair. ‘Give me the vase. Right now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bloody witch. I’ve had enough of this,’ he said and began to stagger across the oriental rugs, stuffing his pockets with Mrs Vinterberg’s candlesticks and silver trinkets.

  He could still make it down to the street. He would flag down a taxi, catch a late plane back to London.

  But the door he went through did not lead back to the entrance hall. Instead, Roper found himself in a smaller room so full of objects that it was a while before he comprehended what he was looking at: suitcases, at least a dozen of them, stacked on top of one another; neckties divided into colour sections and pinned to a wall; toothbrushes, wristwatches and colognes neatly laid out in rows and fans; boarding cards, wallets, passports, some of them ancient-looking.

  ‘My God, she is mad,’ he whispered.

  Weighed down by the loot in his pockets, he fell to his knees, then onto his back, as he recalled the words of Mrs Vinterberg’s advertisement: Pretty Qing vase. Copenhagen. Must be collected in person.

  Lying prostrate on a Persian rug, he noticed that the floorboards beneath him felt springy and loose. Was that where she kept them, the others who had come to buy her vase?

  ‘They wouldn’t stay,’ said the tiny Mrs Vinterberg, who had come up behind him on her silent feet. ‘No one ever will.’

  Roper could no longer speak, not even scream. A plaintive ship’s horn sounded in the far distance, as Mrs Vinterberg leant over him, her features set in a rueful frown. ‘Goodbye, Mr Roper,’ she said.

  Between her small hands, she held a white cushion with the words Baltic Marine Conference 1957 embroidered in navy blue. Roper, who by now could move only his eyes, turned his gaze to the window as she slowly extended the cushion towards his face.

  He fancied he could see the velvet water of Copenhagen harbour with the million lights reflected in it, but it could have been the sky, shimmering with stars.

  He closed his eyes and in a dream – his last – he saw Mrs Vinterberg come towards him on the wooden deck of a ship, a Chinese vase held aloft in her outstretched hands. The porcelain was the blue-tinged pearly white of a child’s first tooth, the motifs and markings just as she had described them. It was indeed a vase of extraordinary beauty, and he reached for it, almost touching it, as dozens of Danish banknotes slipped from his hand and flew up on the wind, blackening the sky.

  The Night Guard

  Saturday was Leif’s day for visiting the art gallery, but they had called in the morning from his mother’s nursing home, and he had been forced to spend the entire day waiting for her to die, another false alarm.

  By the time he finally made it to the gallery on Sunday afternoon, he was impatient to enter. The staff on the door knew him, so there was no need to show his member’s pass, but he did so anyway, flashing it high as he sailed past the long line of tourists fumbling with their tickets.

  It was a drizzly, miserable winter’s day, but as soon as he was inside, his damp trench coat safely stowed in the cloakroom, it might as well have been summer. The rooms were warm and softly lit, enveloping him like a comforting blanket. It was as though he were strolling through one of the gallery’s sun-drenched Golden Age paintings, along a dusty track towards a pleasant village.

  Nodding at guards who stood at the entrances to the rooms, he began as he always did, not at the beginning, but with the nineteenth-century portraits in the furthest room on the second floor. With his hands clasped at his back, he walked, stopped, walked, stopped, taking in each of the familiar faces and scenes.

  Before leaving the room, he tipped his imaginary hat at the portrait of the man he had always thought of as ‘the Duke’, a curly-haired nobleman on the edge of a merry group of revellers in a Mediterranean street. The women in their brightly coloured shawls, the beggar children, and the lights of the tavern up ahead offered plenty of distractions, yet the Duke alone stared out of the picture, directly at the gallery visitor. By some clever trick, his naked gaze appeared to follow you around.

  Leif always skipped the sculpture rooms, finding the bronzes and marbles pointless when there was a whole building of Technicolor canvases in which to lose himself.

  How stormy the seascapes looked, how bold and stirring. He sat, as he always did, for half an hour on the leather couch in front of an enormous painting depicting a sea battle. He admired the way the artist had hinted at the sunlight breaking through the smoke at the head of the fleet. When he closed his eyes, he thought he could hear it: the shouts from the men, the tumultuous waves, the cannons echoing between the great walls of the battleships. And was that not the finest web of sea spray on his face?

  At four precisely, he took tea in the café beneath the stone arches in the basement, and if it were less busy than usual, he was oblivious, preoccupied by a particularly good almond pastry.

  By half past four, he was back upstairs, striding out among the paintings of landscapes and domestic scenes. He always kept them till last.

  The landscapes, mostly French and Dutch, were luminous and alive, not like paintings at all, but like windows onto a sunnier world.


  He lost himself for a long while in a simple picnic scene under a leafy canopy by a river with a golden meadow in the background and, in the far distance, a mountain range with a road leading tantalisingly away. There was much to commend. The perfect composition of the three people in the scene. The coy demeanour and loose clothing of the ladies. The way the man looked away at the river, amused by something that would for ever remain a secret.

  It must have been just before five that Leif felt the effects of the tea and got up reluctantly to head for the men’s room.

  Had there been an announcement while he was in there? Perhaps when he used the noisy hand drier? Later he supposed there must have been, but all he remembered was the elation he felt upon coming out and finding the long gallery with the leather couch at its centre completely empty.

  How satisfying a visit it was turning out to be, he thought, as he sat down and made himself comfortable. They had even dimmed the overhead lights, a very good idea, on which he would make sure to compliment the management at the next opportunity. He was happy to note from his wristwatch that he had almost a full hour left before he had to walk through the sodden, grey city to his empty apartment.

  For a long time, he devoted himself entirely to his favourite painting in the gallery. It was always reassuring to find the woman still there, feeding geese from a stable door at dawn. How carefree she appeared, despite her obvious poverty, lost in inconsequential thought as one hand scattered the grain, and the other dug deep in her apron for more. A little distance away was a charming tumbledown cottage and, through the open door, you could just about glimpse a man fast asleep in an alcove bed. Leif guessed it must still be warm from the woman who had left it.

  At ten minutes to six, thoroughly satisfied with his afternoon, he began the long walk through the gallery to the exit, meeting no one on his way.