Robert Goddard - Found Wanting

His family life was similarly low-key. He married Pernille Madsen, a Mjollnir employee nineteen years his junior, when he was forty-two. Their only child, Michael, was born in 1983. They had subsequently divorced. His sister, Elsa, married a neighbouring landowner in Jutland, and seldom stirred from rural obscurity. His brother, Lars, was the odd one out, cultivating a larger-than-life image as an artist, womanizer and dabbler in politics. As a young man, he had participated in the establishment of the Christiania hippy commune in Copenhagen and had sedulously maintained his anti-Establishment credentials ever since. About the only thing he had in common with Tolmar was that they were both divorced.

In Norse mythology, Mjollnir was Thor’s magical hammer, an instrument of destruction and creation. Tolmar Aksden had chosen the name for his company well. He had specialized in eliminating competitors and turning their failures into his successes. Nor was he finished yet. At sixty-eight, he gave no sign of slowing down. The consensus was that he had a strategy for further expansion, though where, and into what, was, as ever with the man, an open question. And it would remain so, until he chose to reveal the answer.

‘What did you tell the guy?’ Marty demanded as soon as Eusden had finished relaying what he had learnt from Burgaard about the life and times of Tolmar Aksden. They were in the hotel restaurant, where Eusden had found Marty having breakfast when he returned from the coffee bar.

‘I told him I was helping you research your grandfather’s mysterious dealings with Aksden’s great-uncle, Hakon Nydahl. That was it. I said nothing about Anastasia – or Clem’s attaché case.’

‘How did he react?’

‘I think he suspected I wasn’t giving him the full story. But I think he also sensed I suspected the same of him.’

‘What’s he after?’

‘Something to spice up his analysis of Mjollnir’s success.’

‘Which he reckons we can deliver?’

‘He’s betting on it. And I’m happy to let him. He knows where Lars is hanging out and he’s willing to take us to see him. Today.’

‘Mmm.’ Marty frowned sceptically. ‘How can we be sure he’s not getting more out of us than we’re getting out of him?’

‘We can’t. You think I should’ve turned him down?’

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘What are you saying, then?’

‘Why did he insist on meeting you alone?’

‘He’s the shy, retiring type. He described you as “rather loud”.’

‘Bloody nerve.’

‘I promised him you’d be on your best behaviour when we went to see Lars.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘It means don’t pick a fight with the man.’

‘As if I would.’

‘As if.’

‘All right, all right. I’ll be nice. But don’t forget’ – Marty pointed his fork at Eusden for emphasis – ‘I’m in charge.’

Burgaard called for them at eleven o’clock, as agreed. He was clearly wary of Marty and the feeling was just as clearly mutual. They set off in Burgaard’s battered old Skoda and little was said until they had left the city and were driving south through a snow-veiled landscape of farms and forests and empty roads.

‘How many generations of Aksdens have farmed here?’ Eusden asked, as much to break the silence as out of genuine curiosity.

‘Many, I guess,’ Burgaard replied. ‘But Aksdenhøj was never a rich farm. Høj means hill. The ones with names ending in dal – valley – are where the best land is. So, we know why Tolmar did not stay on the farm.’

‘But his sister stuck with it,’ said Marty.

‘Not exactly. She married Henrik Støvring. He owns Marskedal, one of the largest manor farms in east Jutland.’

‘So, what’s happened to Aksdenhøj?’

‘They say Tolmar stays there occasionally. And Lars uses it as a studio.’

‘Is that where we’re going, then?’

‘Yes. With luck, we’ll find Lars there.’

After about ten miles on a main road, they turned off on to a narrower, winding side road. The going was rougher over compacted ice, the snowbanks at the fields’ edges higher as they entered rolling, hillier countryside. Off to one side, down a tree-lined drive, a large, half-timbered, terracotta-roofed manor house came into view.

‘Marskedal,’ Burgaard announced. ‘Nice, yes?’

‘Looks like Elsa Aksden married money,’ said Marty.

‘Or Henrik Støvring did. They say Tolmar’s pumped a lot of cash into the estate.’

‘What do they farm?’

‘Pigs. Bacon’s big business.’ Burgaard pointed to a plain, blank-windowed structure on the other side of the road. ‘There are probably several hundred pigs in there. Aksdenhøj used to be a sheep farm. Not so profitable.’

Another turn-off took them on to a lane that hugged the edge of a birch forest as it climbed into the hills. Aksdenhøj appeared ahead of them at the lane’s end, a quadrangle of thatch-roofed stone buildings on a shoulder of land close to the crest of the hill, sheltered by the forest.

Burgaard beeped his horn as he drove into the cobbled yard. Smoke was climbing from a chimney in one of the buildings, next to which was parked an old Volvo estate. Someone was at home. And Burgaard evidently wished to give them ample warning of their arrival.

‘How well do you know Lars?’ asked Eusden.

‘As well as he’ll let me,’ Burgaard replied with measured ambiguity. He pulled up behind the Volvo and climbed out.

The chill of the hilly air hit Eusden as he emerged from the car. It was colder up here than in Århus and the snow had blanketed the world in silence. The farmhouse itself looked to be shut up. The smoking chimney was on one of the barns that formed the rest of the quadrangle. It clearly no longer served as a barn: high dormer windows had been added to its steeply sloping roof; lights, blurred by condensation, glimmered within.

One of the windows opened as Eusden gazed up at them. A man peered out: grey-haired, balding, ruddy-faced. He shouted something in Danish. Burgaard replied in kind. A shepherding gesture appeared to constitute an invitation to enter. They headed for the door.

The barn had been converted into a dwelling, disconcertingly modern in design and layout. A lobby opened into a large, well-appointed kitchen. Burgaard led the way straight up the wide stairs ahead of them to Lars Aksden’s studio.

It covered the length and breadth of the building beneath the exposed thatch. A gigantic, rhythmically ticking radiator warmed the air, bringing out the pungent smells of oil paint and turpentine. Dozens of paintings – Expressionist nudes and vibrantly hued landscapes – were hung or easelled in view. Dozens more were stacked against the walls. There was an area set aside for relaxation, with couches and rugs, and at the far end, beyond a half-drawn curtain, an unmade bed. A voice from Eusden’s past was singing softly on a hi-fi somewhere in the jumble: Françoise Hardy. As music will, it plunged him into a memory: a trip to Paris with Gemma and Marty in the long hot summer of 1976. He saw a shadow of the same memory cross Marty’s face. Then someone pressed the off-switch.

The floorboards creaked as Lars Aksden moved towards them. He was a big, heavy-footed bear of a man, clad in paint-flecked maroon, with a face like one of his own portraits: deeply scored and passionate. His voice, as he and Burgaard swapped a few more words in Danish, was a fractured growl; his laugh, when it unexpectedly followed, as loud as a roar.

‘Karsten, you are a scheming little bastard.’ Lars pinched Burgaard’s cheek as if he were a naughty child. ‘Introduce us.’

Burgaard did the honours. Handshakes were exchanged, a lingering one in Marty’s case, as Lars murmured his surname and stared thoughtfully at him.