Unrest by Jesper Stein

Author:Jesper Stein [Stein, Jesper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Scandi-noir, Crime
Publisher: Mirror Books
Published: 2018-07-18T23:00:00+00:00

31

How about those breasts – and that look? Why am I so weak? Fuck it, said Axel, giving the steering wheel two almighty thumps when he got back into the car. It didn’t have a damn thing to do with breasts; her story had touched him somewhere else completely.

The lost child. Betrayed. No matter how furious he became at reports of women who in some way or another cut fathers off from seeing their children, this one had hit him deeper. The child having to suffer inhuman deprivation because of adults.

He tried to pull himself together; the pulse in his temples was uncomfortable.

But what have I got from her? That Enver Davidi was more a human being than he was a drug addict, a scumbag and a liar? They were always human beings when you got into the case, both the victims and the perpetrators, and the solution to the mystery was usually hidden in what drove them.

And what drove Davidi? Maybe he wanted to make a packet on a drug deal. Maybe he wanted to see his child again. Maybe it was his love for Louie that drove him – the strongest bond of all, but what sort of person would leave his children in the lurch?

He thought of his own parents, of his mother who, one milky-white foggy morning in March 1977, left the family home and was picked up by another man, whom Axel got to know as Leif. Every other weekend.

He had stood in the window of the villa on Fortebakken and watched her getting into a Ford Taunus, which then disappeared into the white nothingness. No one had said anything. He didn’t cry until many months later when he realised one night that she was never going to come back, that he would never again experience her coming into his room, putting a hand on his brow and asking if he had had a bad dream, while the muted sound of the traffic on Grenaavejen rumbled in the background. She was twenty-one years younger than the old patriarch and she had come close to death giving birth to Axel. A fragile soul, his aunt had said about her. He thought of his father, the elegant, well-dressed bon vivant with his fixed routines and very firm hand; a consultant surgeon at Risskov Hospital specialising in lobotomy and a member of the city council for the Conservatives. He had never really known what to talk to him about. When he realised that some children actually talked to their parents as equals, he was shocked – they were like two planets each in their own solar system. The old fellow had drowned his sorrows with a new woman just three months after Axel’s mother had disappeared, but it hadn’t lasted; then there was another and another, and eventually Mona had arrived. And she was still there in the house in Risskov, but his father was gone. He had never really got the colour back in his cheeks again

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