Chapter Text
The absence of something can be easy to miss. But when Carl jolts awake, he can immediately tell by the lack of sound that he’s alone in the room.
Assad’s bed is empty. Carl grabs his phone to see the time. It’s three in the morning.
Carl moves slowly to sit on the edge of his bed. He is most likely currently in some kind of transition zone between being drunk and having a hangover. His head feels fuzzy, and his mouth is dry. The wooden floor creaks quietly below his feet when he stands up.
He finds Assad sitting on the living room couch. The television is turned on, but the sound is muted. The lights from it illuminate Assad’s face. Carl can see that his skin is sweaty, and he has a distant look in his eyes.
“Is everything alright?” Carl says quietly, his voice still rough from sleep.
Assad startles and blinks his eyes a couple of times rapidly. He looks at Carl, and it seems to take him a moment to realize where he is.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Assad says eventually.
I want you to wake me up, Carl thinks.
“I don’t mind,” Carl says instead and moves to sit next to Assad. “A nightmare?”
Assad rubs his eyes and nods slightly. Maybe he should ask Assad if he wants to talk about it, but Carl figures he knows him well enough to predict the answer to that question.
The television is showing some sort of an ocean program. A giant turtle is swimming across the screen, and a man in a scuba suit is holding a camera towards it. The living room is illuminated in shades of blue.
“Have you ever visited the aquarium in Copenhagen?” Carl asks, hoping to distract Assad.
Assad lets out a tired laugh. “You don’t need to do this, Carl.”
Carl furrows his brows. Does Assad seriously think that he would just go back to the bed and leave him to sit by himself when he is clearly feeling distressed? How long has he been sitting here already?
“No, I don’t need to. But you are my friend, it’s not a chore to sit here with you.”
“That’s rich, coming from you. Especially after tonight,” Assad scoffs.
This is not going well. He doesn’t want to fight. And he doesn’t particularly want a reminder about his earlier drunken monology.
“Let’s not talk about that now,” Carl says.
“No, I think we should. At least part of it. Why would you think I spend time with you only out of some weird obligation?”
How did the conversation suddenly turn to be about him? At least Assad doesn’t look lost anymore. Positive thinking, Assad would be proud.
Assad doesn’t give Carl time to reply before he continues. “There are other people I could hang out with, but I don’t. Do you think that maybe signifies something? And please, think about your answer carefully. Because otherwise even if you mean it to be insulting towards yourself, it will be more insulting towards me.”
He wasn’t prepared for this kind of confrontation this early in the morning. Or maybe never. What is there to say to that? He scrambles to reply something.
“Well…you are a nice person and –”
“— and is that why you want to sit here with me in the middle of the night? Because you are a nice person?” Assad cuts him off, challengingly.
This conversation feels a bit like playing chess against a computer that can calculate all his moves in advance. Carl closes his eyes for a moment.
The reason he wants to sit here is the same as the one that made him stay in the hospital for days after Assad got shot. And it has nothing to do with being a nice person.
“I’m here because I care about you. I want to make sure you are okay, and I don’t want you to be alone,” Carl says and looks at Assad in the eyes.
“Right,” Assad nods, as if he had been waiting for Carl to say those words. “So how about this. I will let you sit next to me, and you will stop questioning my motives to stay with you.”
Carl might have just been tricked into admitting something. Well, at least they aren’t arguing anymore. He turns towards the television.
“So, what are we watching?”
Assad exhales through his nose and turns the television’s sound back on. “Have you ever seen a firework jellyfish?”
***
The next day they are in a car when Carl’s phone starts ringing. The plan was to go pick up the garden chairs from John Larsen’s house and then find some coffee. Carl pulls out his phone to see who’s calling.
“Hello?”
“Mette Olsen is dead,” Rose says instantly. Carl taps Assad’s arm to make sure he is listening. “A jogger found her body washed by the shore near Odense this morning.”
Carl and Assad look at each other in surprise.
“Suicide?” Carl asks.
“Probably not. There was bruising around her neck, she was strangled,” Rose informs them. “According to the coroner, she has been dead for about three weeks.”
She went missing three weeks ago which means she has been dead this entire time. Carl had feared this outcome since nobody had seen her for days, but he still feels frustrated. They had just lost an important witness.
“So, she probably wasn’t Hans Eriksen’s killer, but she knew something and had to be silenced for it,” Assad states and furrows his brows.
“Oh, and by the way Carl,” Rose says suddenly, like she just remembered something. “That notebook you were asking about yesterday? It wasn’t a diary. It was a sketchbook, just some drawings of landscapes and animals.”
That’s great. No witness, and the possible clue was a dead end. This case keeps slipping through his fingers.
“Alright, Rose. Anything else new?”
There wasn’t. Carl puts his phone away and stares out of the car window. They need to start asking for alibis now. Find out if somebody in the town had a trip three weeks ago when Mette’s murder took place.
Assad parks the car in front of a large plot. There’s a house, a barn, and a firewood storage shed. Two small children are playing with some toys on the grass. They step out of the car, and Assad waves at the kids who seem to have noticed their arrival.
“Hey! Where is your dad?” Assad yells in their direction. The older child points towards the barn. A large wooden sign above the barn door reads Larsen’s Carpentry Workshop. A noise can be heard from inside, most likely produced by a circular saw.
“I will wait here,” Carl says and digs up a cigarette from his pocket. Assad nods at him and starts heading towards the noise.
Five years ago, Mette Olsen saw Hans Eriksen in the woods. She claimed to not have seen anybody else there, but when Eriksen’s body was found she ended up murdered only days later. She wasn’t hiding the killer’s identity, Carl concludes.
The murderer let her live this long because she, like everybody else, was under the impression that Hans had drowned. When the news of Hans’s murder would have spread, Mette would have known who was in the woods with her that day and connected the dots. She had to be killed in order to stop her from coming forward with the evidence.
But why did she lie in the first place if she wasn’t protecting the murderer? Well, she wasn’t hiding the murder, but she was hiding something. Her affair, most likely. If Hans had drowned, it would have made no difference whether one person or two people saw him headed towards the shore.
Mette had thought that the lie would be inconsequential, and she only told it to hide her relationship. To keep the gossiping townspeople from coming to the correct conclusion regarding her connection to the other person in the forest.
But who was she having an affair with? A married man, according to Emil Lund. That doesn’t narrow things down much. Somebody who owns a car? Even less helpful. Possibly an older man, if you extrapolate the answer from her dating history. Or in other words, they have nothing.
Carl is contemplating all this when something catches his attention. He drops his cigarette to the ground and starts walking towards the kids.
“Can I see that?” Carl says to them and points at a wooden toy one of the kids is holding.
The younger kid quickly gets up and runs away, but the older one offers his toy to Carl. It’s a hand-carved wooden tiger. The style is similar to the wooden fox that was on Mette’s bedside table in the pictures Carl was looking through yesterday.
“Where did you get this?” Carl asks the child who is looking up at him curiously.
“Dad made it,” the child says and smiles proudly.
The two of them are standing near the firewood storage shed. A lot of woodworking tools are scattered around it, and Carl scans around to see…Bingo!
The axe looks new. Most of the other tools around the shed look decades old. They are rusty and the paint is slowly chipping off them. Carl yanks the axe off the stump it has been embedded in. The blade is sharp and clean.
“What’s your favorite animal? Mine’s tiger,” he hears the kid’s voice from next to him.
Carl turns quickly towards the barn. How long has Assad been in there? Surely, he should be out by now. The saw noise from earlier has stopped. Shit, he doesn’t even have a gun with him.
“Fuck,” Carl curses and starts running towards the barn.
“Hey! You can’t say that!” The kid yells after him.
He bursts inside the barn and looks around franticly.
“Carl?” Assad looks confused. But he is alright. He and John Larsen are standing next to each other, both looking towards Carl. Carl tries to signal with his eyes for Assad to step away, and then he turns to towards John.
“Were you in town at the beginning of this month?”
“No, I was visiting some old friends in Copenhagen,” John says slowly. “Why do you ask?”
Carl sees Assad’s eyes widen momentarily. Good, they are on the same page.
“What a coincidence! That’s when Mette Olsen disappeared there.”
“Are you trying to imply something?” John snaps at him.
“Did you have an affair with her?” Assad jumps into the interrogation.
“Absolutely not!” John says and turns angrily towards Assad. Why hasn’t Assad moved further away from him? “I don’t think I have ever even talked to that woman.”
“According to her, that’s not quite true. A diary found in her apartment has proof that the two of you used to sleep together.”
By proof, he means pencil drawings of cats, but John doesn’t need to know that right now.
John’s face turns white. “How would you know something like that? You are not a writer, are you?”
There’s a sentence he has been waiting to hear for the past couple of days. Finally, this ridiculous undercover mission can end.
“Here’s what I think happened,” Carl says. “Five years ago, Hans Eriksen saw you and Mette Olsen in the woods together. He had just moved to the town, so he didn’t think anything about it. But you knew that sooner or later he would find out that you have a wive and realize that the woman who he saw in the woods with you, wasn’t her.”
As Carl keeps talking, the look on John’s face turns more anxious. Carl starts to walk towards him slowly.
“So, in order to save your marriage, you decided to kill him,” Carl continues. “You and Mette left the forest, you drove back home and grabbed your axe and shovel. Then you went back to the forest and waited for Hans until he returned from his fishing trip.”
“And then you killed Mette before she found out that Hans was actually murdered,” Assad finishes for him.
John looks around the barn wildly, almost like he is hoping an escape route would manifest out of the thin air. Then his eyes land on the table next to him and Assad. A sharp looking knife is lying there. Assad notices the knife at the same moment.
“Don’t do anything stupid, your kids are right outside,” Assad says to John sharply. “Try to not make them hate you more than they already will.”
Everything is frozen for a moment. A brief hesitation in John’s face before his eyes turn hard, and he lunges towards the knife. He grabs it, turns it towards Assad, and Carl thinks he can hear himself let out an involuntary sound of despair.
But Assad is faster than John, and he manages to immediately knock the knife out of his hand. He quickly turns John face first on the table, immobilizing him. Carl is still frozen in his spot.
“Why is it that nobody ever listens to me?” Assad sighs, breathing heavily from the exertion. “Carl, find some rope.”
Carl snaps to motion and starts rummaging through the shelves. He finds the rope and throws it to Assad who ties John’s hands behind his back.
“There’s one thing I’m wondering,” Assad says as they step outside and start walking towards the car. “How did you manage to lure Hans in the middle of the woods?”
John sighs, defeated. “I told him Mette had broken her ankle there and that I needed someone to help carry her.”
Turns out it was Hans’s kindness that had gotten him killed in the end. Assad shoves John into the backseat of the car and slams the door shut.
“He loves his wife enough to kill for their marriage but not enough to remain faithful. Interesting morals,” Assad mutters, shaking his head.
Carl hums and pulls the wooden toy out of his pocket where he had shoved it earlier. He absentmindedly turns the tiger around in his hands, its painted smile grinning up at him.
***
Carl is sitting on the pier again, his arms folded across his chest. John Larsen had been taken into custody earlier that day, and the case was finally over. It was time to leave this town behind.
But his mind is still in turmoil. The knife had been too close. He wonders how many times he has to watch Assad almost die in the future. He hadn’t even been able to help Assad today, he had just stood still and watched the knife raise in the air.
“Have you packed already? I thought that you wanted to leave as soon as possible,” Assad’s voice says from next to him. Carl hadn’t noticed his arrival, too lost in his thoughts. Assad sits next to him, tilts his head backwards, and closes his eyes. The sun shines warmly to where they are sitting.
Carl thinks about Marie Eriksen and her grief regarding the last words she had said to her dead husband. And he thinks about Erik Johansen and his email to his estranged son. He deserves to know; Carl had said to him. He looks at Assad who is bathing in the sun. He seems happy and relaxed.
Confession is an interesting word. In Carl’s line of work, it’s used when criminals admit they are guilty of a crime. And religious people use it when they are begging for forgiveness from their gods. Perhaps it’s appropriate that it’s also the word used when it comes to declaring one’s love.
It’s a warm summer day, and Carl feels like he is standing at the edge of something. He takes a deep breath.
“I love you.”
Assad’s eyes snap open and he turns towards Carl like he can’t quite believe what he just heard. His mouth is parted slightly, and he blinks his eyes a couple of times.
“Oh,” he says quietly.
Yeah, oh. That about covers it. Carl forces himself to stay still so he doesn’t do something stupid like run away or jump in the lake.
“I just thought you should know. It doesn’t need to change anything,” Carl says to fill the silence. It’s more that he hopes it won’t change anything. He doesn’t want to go to work the next week, only to find out Assad has left because Carl made things weird by falling in love with him.
“No, that’s not it,” Assad says, the corner of his mouth turning up slightly. “I just didn’t think you would ever admit it.”
Carl’s heart sinks. Assad had known this entire time? It shouldn’t be surprising; he is good at reading people’s emotions. Carl has probably been broadcasting his feelings on thousand different frequencies, and Assad has tried to politely ignore them.
Until now. Until Carl forcibly dragged those feelings into the daylight.
Assad grabs Carl’s arm. “I don’t know where your mind is going, but I promise it’s not like that. Listen to me, Carl. I love you, too. I tried to tell you last night.”
Had he? Carl’s blood is rushing through his ears, it’s hard to focus. Assad’s fingers are wrapped around his wrist, and they feel so warm. He tries to speak, but no noise comes out.
“You have this belief that opening your heart will lead to destruction,” Assad says, his eyes searching Carl’s. “Maybe it’s a survival mechanism. But you shouldn’t settle for that kind of loneliness.”
It’s worth it, the loneliness, if it means getting to keep Assad in his life in any capacity. He knows he is being selfish, but he can’t go back to what his life was before he met Assad.
“We can’t. It will end badly. With Vigga and I –”
“—Is the phrase ‘past performance can’t predict future results’ familiar to you?” Assad interrupts him.
“I know what I’m like. You will get sick of me,” Carl says. He can feel his hands shaking again.
“You have to stop trying to rationalize love,” Assad says with a gentle voice. Their faces are very close, and Carl is reminded of how beautiful Assad’s eyes are. “I know what you are like, too. And I’m still here. I’m not going to leave you.”
Something cracks inside Carl, and he surges forward to close the cap between them. His sudden movement surprises Assad, and their foreheads knock against each other painfully. He leans in again, this time slower. And it’s barely even a kiss because Carl can feel Assad silently laugh against his mouth, and it’s making him smile too.
They pull away seconds or hours later, and the look that Assad gives him makes him dizzy. There is so much love in his eyes, and Carl wonders how he hasn’t noticed it before.
“Do you understand me now?” Assad asks, his voice slightly rough.
“Yes, I understand.”
Part of him is still terrified that this will all go wrong, but maybe that just means he’s dealing with something that actually matters.
“The people in the town were talking about lighting a bonfire. Do you want to stay and watch?”
Right. It’s the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.
“No. Let’s go home.”