A Conspiracy of Faith (10 page)

She would recall the occasions other people had been in the house. It had been known to happen, though not for some considerable time now.
There was the meeting of the residents’ association. Benjamin’s health visitor. In theory, certainly, someone could quite conceivably have left a phone charger behind, even if it did seem a bit odd, because who on earth would have such a thing with them in someone else’s house?

She could easily pop out and buy a new one while Benjamin was having his afternoon nap. She smiled quietly at the thought of her husband’s astonishment when he asked to see the charger and she would pick it out from among the mittens in the basket. She repeated the sentence over and over in her mind so as to give it the right weight and emphasis.

“What do you mean it’s not ours? What an odd thing to happen. Someone must have left it behind. One of the guests from the christening, perhaps?”

It was a straightforward explanation. Simple, and so unlikely as to be foolproof.

If Carl had ever
been in doubt as to whether Rose could keep a promise, he certainly wasn’t now. Hardly had he presumed to raise his weary voice in protest against her preposterous project of deciphering the message in the bottle than her eyes grew wide and she announced that in that case he could take his sodding bottle, regardless of it being in pieces, and shove it up his fucking arse.

Before he even had time to protest further, she had slung her scruffy bag over her shoulder and stormed off. Even Assad was in a state of shock, standing for a moment as though nailed to the floor, a hunk of grapefruit jammed between his teeth.

And thus they remained in silence for quite some time.

“I wonder if she really will send her sister,” Assad finally ventured. His lips moved in slow motion, returning the grapefruit inelegantly to his hand.

“Where’s your prayer mat, Assad?” Carl growled. “Be a sport and pray it doesn’t happen.”

“A sport?”

“A mate, a good bloke, Assad.”

Carl gestured for him to step closer to the gigantic blowup that covered the partition wall. “Come on, we’ll get this out of the way before she gets back.”

“We?”

Carl nodded in acknowledgment. “You’re right, Assad. Best you do it
yourself. Move it all on to the other wall next to your string and all those cases you’ve been sorting out. Just make sure there’s some space in between, OK?”

Carl sat for a while, considering the original message with a certain degree of attention. Though it had by now passed through a number of hands, and not all of them had treated the material as possible evidence in a criminal investigation, it never even occurred to him not to bother wearing his white cotton gloves.

The paper was so very fragile. Sitting alone with it now gave rise to a quite singular feeling. Marcus called it instinct. In Bak’s terminology it was “nous.” His soon-to-be ex-wife would say it was intuition, a word she could hardly pronounce. But whatever the fuck it was, this little handwritten letter set all his senses alight. Its authenticity was glaringly obvious. Penned in haste, most likely on a poor surface. Written in blood with the aid of some indeterminable instrument. A pen, dipped in blood? No, the strokes seemed too irregular for that. In some places it was as if the writer had pressed too hard, elsewhere not hard enough. He picked up a magnifying glass and tried to get a feeling for the paper’s irregularities, but the document was simply in too poor a state. What once had been an indentation the damp had most likely turned into a blister, and vice versa.

He saw Rose’s brooding face in his mind’s eye and put the document aside. When she returned in the morning, he would give her the rest of the week to grapple with it. Then if nothing transpired, they would have to move on.

He thought about getting Assad to brew him a cup of that sickly sweet goo of his, only to deduce from the mutterings in the corridor that he hadn’t yet finished cursing over having to run up and down the ladder and keep shifting it all the time. Carl wondered whether he should tell him that there was another ladder exactly the same in the storeroom next to the
Burial Club, but frankly he couldn’t be arsed. The man would be finished in an hour anyway.

Carl stared at the old case file concerning the arson in Rødovre. Once he had read through it one last time, he would have to kick it upstairs to the chief so he could file it on top of the alp of cases that already towered on his desk.

An arson in Rødovre in 1995. The newly renovated tiled roof of a select whitewashed premises on Damhusdalen had suddenly collapsed in on itself and the blaze had consumed the entire upper floor in seconds. In the smoldering ruins a man’s body had been found. The owner of the property had no idea whose corpse it was, though a couple of neighbors were able to confirm that lights had been on in the attic windows all night. Since the body remained unclaimed, it was assumed the victim had been some intruding derelict who had failed to exercise proper care with the gas appliance in the kitchenette. Only when the gas company informed police that the main line into the house had been shut off was the case turned over to the Rødovre Police’s homicide section, where it languished in the filing cabinet until the day Department Q was brought into being. There, it might quite conceivably have led an equally anonymous existence had it not been for Assad latching on to that groove in the bone of the little finger on the victim’s left hand.

Carl reached for his phone. He pressed the number of the homicide chief, only to wind up with the misery-inducing voice of Ms. Sørensen instead.

“Very briefly, Ms. Sørensen,” he began, “how many cases—”

“Is that you, Mørck? Let me put you through to someone who doesn’t cringe at the mention of your name.”

One of these days he would make her a gift of some lethally poisonous animal.

“Hello, darling,” came the sound of Lis’s buoyant voice.

Thank Christ for that. Apparently, Ms. Sørensen was not entirely lacking in compassion.

“Can you tell me how many victims have actually been identified in these recent arsons? In fact, how many arsons have we got now, altogether?”

“The most recent, you mean? There are three, and we’ve barely established the identity of one of them.”

“Barely?”

“Well, we’ve got the first name from a medallion he was wearing, but apart from that we don’t actually know who he is. We might even be wrong on the first name.”

“OK. Tell me again where the fires were.”

“Haven’t you read the files?”

“Only sort of.” He exhaled sharply. “One of them was in Rødovre in 1995, I know that. And you’ve got, what…?”

“One last Saturday on Stockholmsgade, one the day after in Emdrup, and the last one so far in the Nordvest district.”

“Stockholmsgade? Sounds upmarket. Do you happen to know which of the buildings was most damaged?”

“Nordvest, I think. The address was Dortheavej.”

“Has any link been established between these fires? What about the owners? Renovation work? Neighbors noticing lights on in the night? Terrorism?”

“None, as far as I know. There’s loads of people on the case, though. You should ask one of them.”

“Thanks, Lis. And I would, but it’s not my case, is it?”

He added some resonance to his voice in the hope of making an impression, then dropped the folder back on the desk. Seems like they know what they’re doing, he thought to himself. But now there were voices in the corridor outside. Most likely those fucking sticklers from Health and Safety had come back to have another go at them.

“Yes, his office is just there,” he heard Assad’s traitorous voice croak.

Carl fixed his eyes on a fly buzzing around the room. If he timed it right, he might be able to swat it in the face of that obsequious worm from Health and Safety.

He positioned himself behind the door with the Rødovre folder raised at the ready.

But the face that appeared was one he had never seen before.

“Hello,” the visitor said, extending a hand. “Yding’s the name. Inspector. Copenhagen West, Albertslund.”

Carl nodded. “Yding? Would that be your first name or last?”

The man smiled. Maybe he wasn’t sure himself.

“I’m here about these latest arsons. It was me who assisted Antonsen in the Rødovre investigation in 1995. Marcus Jacobsen said he wanted to be briefed in person. He told me to have a word with you so you could introduce me to your assistant.”

Carl heaved a sigh of relief. “You just met him. He’s the one climbing about on the ladder out there.”

Yding narrowed his eyes. “The guy I just spoke to, you mean?”

“Yeah. Won’t he do? He took his exams in New York, then all sorts of special training with Scotland Yard in DNA and image analysis.”

Yding rose to the bait and nodded respectfully.

“Assad, come here a minute, will you?” Carl yelled, taking a sudden swat with the Rødovre folder at the fly.

He introduced Yding and Assad to each other.

“Are you finished putting those photocopies up?” he asked.

Assad’s eyelids drooped. Enough said.

“Marcus Jacobsen tells me the original file on the Rødovre case is with you,” said Yding as he shook Assad’s hand. “He said you’d know where it was.”

Assad pointed toward the folder in Carl’s hand at the same instant that Carl was about to have another go at the fly. “That’s it there,” he said. “Was that all?” He was most certainly not on form today. All that carry-on with Rose had put a damper on him.

“The chief was just inquiring about a detail I couldn’t quite recall. Do you mind if I have a quick look through the file?”

“Feel free,” said Carl. “We’re a bit busy here, so perhaps you’ll excuse us while you’re at it?”

He dragged Assad across the corridor and sat down at his desk beneath a poster showing some sandy ruin. It read
Rasafa
, whatever that was.

“Is that furnace of yours on the go, Assad?” he asked, pointing to the tea urn.

“You can have the last cup, Carl. I’ll make fresh for myself.” He smiled, his eyes lighting up in gratitude.

“As soon as What’s-his-face has cleared off again, you and I are going out, Assad.”

“Where to?”

“Nordvest. To see a building that’s been all but burned to the ground.”

“But that’s not our case, Carl. The others will be angry with us.”

“To begin with, maybe. But it’ll blow over.”

Assad looked anything but convinced. Then his expression changed. “I have found another letter in our message,” he announced. “And now I have a very bad suspicion, too.”

“You don’t say. What is it, then?”

“Now I won’t tell you. You will only laugh.”

That sounded like the best news he’d had all day.

“Cheers, thanks,” said Yding. He was poking his head around the door, his eyes fixed on the cup decorated with dancing elephants from which Carl was drinking. “I’ll pop this up to Jacobsen, if that’s all right with you?” He held up a couple of documents in his hand.

They both nodded.

“Oh, and by the way, I said I’d say hello from an acquaintance of mine. I bumped into him just now in the cafeteria. Laursen, from Forensics.”

“Tomas Laursen?”

“That’s him, yeah.”

Carl frowned. “But he won ten million in the lottery and packed it all in. Sick and tired of dead bodies, that’s what he used to say. What’s he doing here? Back in the bunny suit, is he?”

“Sadly, no. Forensics could certainly do with him. The only funny garment he’s got on now is an apron. He’s working in the cafeteria.”

“That’s a joke, right?” Carl pictured the brick shithouse of a rugby player in his mind’s eye. If the slogan on that apron didn’t say something masculine along the lines of
BIG DADDY’S SWEAT RAG
, it would be a comical sight indeed. “What happened? I thought he’d invested in companies all over the shop.”

Yding nodded. “He did. And got cleaned out. Bit of a downer, I’d say.”

Carl shook his head incredulously. That’s what you got for trying to be sensible. It was a good thing he didn’t have a penny himself.

“How long’s he been back?”

“About a month, so he said. Don’t you ever eat in the cafeteria?”

“Do I look like a half-wit? There are ten million stairs to that soup kitchen from down here. I suppose you noticed the lift’s out of order?”