Last Train to Helsingør Page 9

  Brian nodded in its direction, determined not to waste the opportunity at hand. ‘I see you are busy. Hot day for it. Say, could I give you a hand with that spade?’

  ‘No need,’ said Mrs Hoffmann, her cheeks flushed under her wide-brimmed gardening hat. ‘I am almost done. Everything is ready.’

  Ready for what? Brian thought. Not for the first time he wondered whether Mrs Hoffmann was a little dotty. A lot of the ladies were. It was all that time spent in their own company.

  ‘But there is another favour I would like to ask you,’ said Mrs Hoffmann, wiping a strand of white hair away from her face.

  Brian noticed that her hands were covered in scratches, some of them bleeding. ‘Of course, I would be glad to help,’ he said, placing the bicycle onto its rest.

  ‘You are tall and strong and look like a practical sort of chap. I need a light bulb changing in the kitchen, but the ceiling is too high and even when I stand on a ladder I cannot reach.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Brian. ‘I can fix that for you in no time.’

  He had never been inside Mrs Hoffmann’s house before and welcomed the opportunity. In his experience, once you had been invited in and been helpful in one way or another, a handsome tip was sure to follow.

  ‘Good man,’ said Mrs Hoffmann.

  She quickly mounted the few steps to the front door and led Brian into a dingy hall. The dog didn’t look up from its single-minded pawing. A mole, Brian thought, it had caught scent of a mole.

  Mrs Hoffmann had absentmindedly brought the spade in with her. Brian noticed for the first time that she had rather strong arms and big hands for her age. He guessed it came from all that gardening.

  Inside the house it was impossible to tell whether it was night or day, so little light penetrated through the windows. The branches pressed against the glass, producing an odd squeaking sound. There was a strong smell of damp, and the rooms felt cold, in spite of the heat outside.

  Mrs Hoffmann had money all right. Brian noticed several paintings and pieces of porcelain and silver. But the rooms, though expensively furnished, looked as though they hadn’t been decorated in decades. Everything was old and worn and had an abandoned look about it.

  In the hall there were dozens of framed photographs of Mrs Hoffmann with the climbing rose. In one very old black-and-white photograph, the rose was just knee-high. A man and a woman stood protectively on either side of it, as though it were a child. Brian guessed the man was Mr Hoffmann.

  He listened out for creaking floorboards, water running in the pipes, the sound of coughing. Nothing. If he wasn’t dead, Mr Hoffmann had to be asleep or out somewhere, which was just fine by Brian. It was always easier when the ladies were alone.

  Through the living-room door he caught a glimpse of an armchair by the window. The chair was surrounded by tall stacks of books and magazines and had a reading light directly above it. A teacup and a radio stood on a table to one side. When she wasn’t gardening, this was obviously where Mrs Hoffmann passed her time. Perhaps she even slept there, just a pane of glass between herself and her beloved rose.

  The kitchen was bare and almost completely dark. In the corners of the windows pale tendrils had pushed their way in, splitting the wooden frame and leaving a trail of paint flakes on the sill. Brian shuddered. Another few years and the rose might have the whole house down.

  ‘Here we are then,’ said Mrs Hoffmann, pointing to a ladder directly under the ceiling lamp.

  Brian moved towards the ladder, wanting to spin out his good deed for as long as possible. He thought again of the letter that Mrs Hoffmann had tucked away in her pocket.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open your letter?’ he said.

  Mrs Hoffmann shook her head. ‘I know what is in it,’ she said. ‘Now, you should be able to reach from the top step, I think. And here is the new bulb.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, taking the light bulb and trying to think how someone could know what was in a letter without opening it.

  A birthday card? An invitation previously discussed over the telephone? In Mrs Hoffmann’s case, both seemed unlikely.

  The ladder was sturdy enough and when he craned his neck he could see that the old light bulb was still in there. He asked Mrs Hoffmann to check that the lamp was switched off at the socket. Then slowly he stepped up on to the ladder, each step creaking alarmingly under his weight.

  When he had reached the top, he unscrewed the old light bulb and rattled it next to his ear, nothing.

  Then everything happened very slowly. In a split second, at the same time as he became aware of a shadowy movement behind him, Brian Larsen realised three things: the light bulb didn’t need changing; if you wanted the postman to call, the surest way was to post a letter to yourself; and the road had been empty when he had begun to push his bike up the driveway, which meant that no one knew he was here.

  And then he was lying on the floor, a loud crashing sound ringing in his ears. The ladder had somehow landed on top of him. He had trouble focusing. When he did, the first thing he saw was his mobile phone. It must have dropped out of his pocket when he fell.

  It’s all right, he thought. They will be able to trace my phone when I don’t come back to the sorting office later.

  Then Mrs Hoffmann’s spade came down on it, sending glass and metal flying. He guessed that was what she had struck him with. The back of his head felt cold and wet.

  He could just about see Mrs Hoffmann’s muddy clogs, her sturdy ankles, criss-crossed and bleeding from the thorns.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Postman,’ she said somewhere above him. ‘But you see it’s for the rose, it’s time for her feed. This is not the end, very far from it. You will become part of something extraordinary, possibly the greatest climbing rose there has ever been. People will come from all over the world to see it.’

  Brian thought of the dog, its little paws scraping away at the soil and the hole Mrs Hoffmann had been digging when he arrived. Then he thought of the ladder, the way she had set everything up, and he knew that she had done this before.

  ‘Fertiliser,’ he mumbled, his mouth rubbery and wet against the tiles, as his vision slowly darkened. ‘The gardener’s secret.’

  The Wailing Girl

  Every day, as he started up between the tall, straight lime trees to Brokholm Slot, Magnus Hansen began spontaneously to whistle. Though he would only admit it to himself, the baroque castle, nestled like a cube of sugar in the green and brown fields of North Zealand, induced in him a sense of proprietorship.

  Magnus knew every inch of Brokholm, from its hot, dusty attics to its flagstone kitchen floor, worn smooth by generations of servant feet. He was the only one of the visitor guides who could put names to every one of the 378 portraits on the walls. The long-dead aristocrats with their plump faces and naked sideways glances were more familiar to him than his own living relatives.

  Magnus disliked members of the public, their rucksacks and grubby hands. No matter how often he told them not to, they would invariably try to touch things or stray outside the red runners that protected the floors from their dirty shoes.

  Magnus preferred the quiet days when he could wander Brokholm on his own, seek out an empty wing and step over the rope partitions to lie in one of the four-poster beds. Listening to the castle fountains and the peacocks crying in the woods, he would imagine himself a baron, well-fed and surrounded by the riches of his seat. Until, invariably, the present would intrude, announcing itself depressingly with a scratch from his walkie-talkie as another coachload of tourists approached from the main road.

  Magnus could conduct castle tours in his sleep. He had a mind for dates and an intimate knowledge of aristocratic life, eighteenth-century antiques and agricultural implements. This made it all the more disappointing that visitors only ever wanted to hear about the wailing girl, allegedly the ghost of a young maid who was drowned in the moat by a nobleman after giving birth to his child.

  As a guide, he was supposed to mention that, to this day
, the maid could be heard wandering the corridors at night, crying. But Magnus rarely bothered. He didn’t believe in ghosts, nor had he ever seen or heard one at Brokholm, wailing or otherwise. Ghosts, in his opinion, were invented by crafty owners of castles with leaking roofs, mindful that most people would only pay for history if it came coated in blood, gore and garishness.

  His own business was with the physical world, with bricks and mortar, French clocks, priceless tapestries, oriental screens and marble fireplaces, the way the light slanted like buttermilk through the deep window recesses, pooling on the bowing oak floors.

  Magnus did not mix with his colleagues, students mostly, whose tours he considered vastly inferior to his own. He ate his lunch on a bench in the rose garden and pretended to be reading the paper whenever anyone approached.

  After work, his black uniform with the red lapels and shiny buttons would smell of Brokholm’s sweet, exotic woods, chalky walls and heavy brocades. When Magnus closed his eyes and pressed his nose to the fabric, it was almost as though he were there.

  By chance, Magnus had overheard something that he could not stop thinking about. There was a chance, perhaps, that he might one day live at Brokholm as its caretaker.

  The castle was presently occupied by Baroness Feltenborg, who kept a small apartment in the east wing, but she was ninety-five and, after her, no one wanted to live there. Magnus guessed that the younger Feltenborgs preferred their modern homes in Copenhagen to the draughty castle. When the baroness died, the estate would pass to a trust, which would have to employ a live-in caretaker, or so Magnus had pieced together. He could see no reason why the caretaker should not be him.

  Already he imagined how his life would be. At nights and weekends, he would be free to roam the castle. He had his eye on a costume he had seen on the internet: silk stockings, brogues with silver buckles and a wig. He could light fires and candles, eat his dinner in the banqueting hall and, when night came, take his pick of the twenty-eight beds.

  Magnus had never liked old Baroness Feltenborg. Miss Karin, as she insisted on being addressed, had an irritating habit of springing up during his tours. As he and his group of visitors entered a new room, suddenly there she would be, draped on a sofa or standing by a window, a dramatic tableau that made everyone gasp.

  In her booming stage-diva voice, Miss Karin, dressed to the nines and leaning dramatically on a stick, would then hold forth on the wailing girl, while the visitors listened with all the rapt attention they had denied to Magnus.

  The baroness was sprightly for her age, annoyingly so. Magnus began to fantasise about ways in which she might die: a quick shove down the stairs, a gas leak, a box of poisoned chocolates. Until, little by little, an inspired idea formed in his mind.

  It was more difficult than Magnus had thought to recruit an accomplice. After considering a checkout girl in the local supermarket, his hairdresser and a woman who regularly walked her dog past his apartment block, he settled on a young waitress who worked at a café around the corner from his home. From the loud conversations she conducted on her mobile phone, he knew that she was an unemployed actress and struggled for money.

  ‘I have a role for you. It’s unusual, but it’s acting all the same,’ he said to her one day when the café was empty.

  At first she was sceptical, but when he had passed her a brown envelope with twenty large notes inside it, she became more attentive.

  ‘Miss Karin, the baroness, is a dear friend of mine and likes a practical joke,’ he lied. ‘All you have to do is turn up at the castle at one a.m. on Sunday morning. You will find the back door on the latch.’

  As for the job itself, he left that to her thespian talent and whatever imagination she could bring to bear on the part. It was best, he explained, if he knew as little as possible about it.

  ‘Is it not illegal?’ the waitress asked, but by the way her eyes kept sliding to the brown envelope, Magnus could tell that the money had done its work.

  As he left the café, he chuckled to himself, imagining Miss Karin’s contorted face, confronted at last with the fictional spectre with which she had entertained legions of visitors to Brokholm.

  His plan was to stay away and simply turn up for work on the Monday morning, then watch in sombre shock as the corpse of the baroness was carried out on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance. But as the afternoon sun began to fade over Brokholm on Saturday afternoon, he found himself unable to resist witnessing the performance. He had paid good money for it. Besides, it would allow him to spend his first night at the castle. Seeing as he was going to live there in the future, it was about time.

  Magnus raced through the last tour of the day, cutting short his usual script. Afterwards, in front of his colleagues, he made an elaborate show of leaving, getting in his car and driving to the local village, before looping back and parking on a forest track outside the gates.

  By the time he walked up the drive, keeping to one side of it in the deep shade of the trees, the sun was setting, the castle a silhouette against the vivid pink sky.

  Brokholm felt different at night, each creak and snap of the woodwork amplified in the dark. Magnus had forgotten that he would not be able to switch on the lights. He carried a small torch as part of his uniform, but it was too weak to make much difference, and he could barely see his way around. The immensity of the castle, the weight of its thousands of bricks and beams and roof tiles, seemed to press in on him from all sides.

  He had to give himself a stern talking-to: but for the absence of daylight and visitors, the castle was the same as always and thinking otherwise was simply irrational.

  He chose a bedroom in the north wing, near enough to Miss Karin’s quarters to make up for a front-row seat. It smelt of mildew and cold cinders. He decided against the bed, lest it creaked, instead choosing an armchair facing the door. For a while, he tried to sit in complete darkness, but was disconcerted by the sensation of the eighteenth-century baron Otto Feltenborg staring at him from his full-length portrait on the wall. The only way Magnus could stand it was if he kept the torchlight pointed at the baron’s wan face.

  It wasn’t long before he felt ravenous, as he had not eaten since lunch. For a while he contemplated tiptoeing down to the staff kitchen to look for a biscuit or an apple, but decided it was too risky. Eventually, he fell asleep, drooling on his hand.

  It was the wailing that woke him. It had its own rhythm, piercing at first, then unravelling into a series of small sobs. By the direction of the sound, it came from the west wing. Magnus frowned: an interesting choice, to start at the other end of the castle, if a little unnecessary.

  He checked his watch. The actress was early – it had only just turned midnight – but that was all right, Miss Karin would have retired a while ago. By now, the ancient baroness would just be opening her eyes, straining to hear the sound that had woken her.

  As the crying grew louder, another sound mixed in with it that he could not place at first. Doors, he thought. Doors being opened and shut and urgent running footsteps in between. Of course, the waitress would have done her research: a mother looking desperately for the child that was taken from her by her evil lover, or so the tale went.

  She was good, very good, the actress. Though, as the banging and howling neared his room, Magnus thought that perhaps she was going a little too far. Even he was starting to feel uneasy, but he could not very well call out to the actress, unless he wanted to reveal his presence to Miss Karin. Instead, he fumbled with the torch, intending to signal to the girl by way of Morse code that she could skip his room, but the torch would not light. He must have forgotten to switch it off earlier when he fell asleep, and drained the battery.

  Too late, he wished that he had stayed at home after all. The girl’s wailing really was extraordinarily realistic, not just grief-stricken but furious with it. The kind of fury that could find no release, a roar that was more animal than human.

  It occurred to him that he ought to get up, perhaps hide, but all could
do was sit there, frozen to his seat and covering his face with his hands like a small boy, thinking this might make him invisible.

  The last few running steps outside were agony, though he knew that the actress was only doing what he had asked her to. When finally his door was flung open it was as if from a sudden gust of wind, and not by any hand. In the confusion of the blast and the wailing, he saw nothing but a streak of something grey that looked like moonlight. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, the door was slammed shut and the spectacle moved on, like a terrifying train towards the east wing.

  If this was not enough to frighten Miss Karin to death, Magnus didn’t know what would be. He almost had been himself and he was the one who had arranged the whole thing.

  Soon after, the noise stopped altogether. All the same, Magnus waited several hours before leaving, until the light grew grey at the windows and he was certain the girl had left the castle.

  There was nothing on the news about Miss Karin on the Sunday, but then the death of an old baroness from a stroke was hardly the stuff of headlines. It was more disappointing when he arrived for work on the Monday to find no outward sign of disturbance. Despite the drama of Saturday night, it appeared as though nothing had happened.

  Later, during a castle tour, Magnus was astonished to come across the baroness herself in the morning room, arranging a bouquet of chrysanthemums to the delight of his gormless charges.

  ‘Tell us, baroness,’ he said, exasperated after waiting for her to finish her usual tale about the wailing girl. ‘Have you ever heard this ghost yourself?’

  ‘Alas no,’ said Miss Karin. A disappointed murmur spread in the room.

  The old baroness smiled. ‘But then I wouldn’t have. You see, I’m stone deaf. Once I remove my hearing aid for the night, you could walk a marching band through this castle and I wouldn’t hear it.’