A Conspiracy of Faith (15 page)

“Now, we know the date to be either the sixteenth or the twenty-sixth of February in 1996,” Assad went on unabashed. “We also know the place, and that the kidnapper is a man who is more than one hundred and eighty centimeters tall. Now we need the last words in the line, which are having something to do with his hair.”

“Indeed, Assad. Plus the small matter of sixty-five percent of the rest of the letter,” said Carl.

Apart from that, Assad’s theory seemed to be sound.

Carl grabbed the document, jumped to his feet, and went out into the corridor to look at the blowup on the wall. If he had imagined Yrsa at this moment to be busy plowing through the annual reports of the three firms that had been hit by arson, he could think again. Here she was,
standing in the middle of the corridor absorbing the magnified message in front of her.

“It’s OK, Yrsa, this is something we’re taking care of,” said Carl. Yrsa didn’t budge.

Cognizant of behavioral likenesses among twins, Carl elected simply to shrug and leave well alone. Sooner or later she would presumably succumb to a stiff neck, the way she was standing.

Carl and Assad stood next to her. Looking at Assad’s suggested text and comparing it with the version on the wall, Carl found that faint and yet plausible corroborations, hitherto unseen, somehow seemed to present themselves.

In fact, Assad’s take on the first few lines appeared more than credible.

“Well, it looks right to me,” he said, then sent Assad off to check once again whether any crime had been reported that could even remotely be linked to a case of kidnapping on Lautrupvang in Ballerup in 1996.

Most likely Assad would be able to report back by the time Carl returned from Rødovre.

Antonsen was sitting in the cramped space of his office. The place reeked of banned pipe tobacco and cigarillos. No one ever saw him smoke, though undeniably he did. Rumor had it he remained on the job until the office staff went home just so he could light up in peace. It was years since his wife had proclaimed that he had finally stopped for good. Apparently, she was oblivious.

“Here’s the report on the company on Damhusdalen,” said Antonsen, handing him a plastic folder. “Like it says on the first page, they’re an import-export company whose partners were registered in the former Yugoslavia. So they were probably faced with a difficult transition when the war broke out in the Balkans and everything fell apart at the seams.

“These days, Amundsen and Mujagic A/S is a flourishing business, but when it burned down, they hit bottom financially. At the time, we had no reason to believe the company was anything less than aboveboard, and
that basically would still be our standpoint today. But if you’ve got anything to add in that respect, you’re more than welcome.”

“Amundsen and Mujagic. Mujagic’s a Yugoslavian name, right?” Carl ventured.

“Yugoslavian, Croatian, Serbian. Same difference if you ask me. I don’t think there’s an Amundsen or a Mujagic left in the company these days. You can check if you want.”

Carl rocked gently in his chair and considered the man opposite him.

Antonsen was an all-right policeman. He was a few years older than Carl and had always ranked above him, yet still they’d shared a lot of laughs and professional tussles, all of which had demonstrated that they were two of a kind.

Woe betide anyone who blew his horn at their expense. Moreover, they were both immune to all forms of bullshit, backslapping, and corridor gossip. If anyone on the force, at least in the capital region, was utterly unsuited to diplomacy, political maneuvering, or siphoning public funds to meet their own professional ends, it was Carl Mørck and Antonsen. Which was why Antonsen had never risen to commissioner and Carl had amounted to sod all. Neither of them gave a shit.

But now there was something niggling Carl. That fucking fire. And then, as now, Antonsen had been in charge of the shop.

“My feeling on this,” said Carl, “is that the key to clearing up these recent arsons in Copenhagen lies in this blaze of yours in Rødovre. A body was found in the remains, and the bone of the little finger clearly indicated that the victim had worn a ring for a good many years. Exactly the same thing turns up again with the victims of these latest fires. So I need to know—and I want you to be frank with me on this, Anton—if you consider that case to have been properly handled at the time. I’m asking you straight out, you can tell me your answer and we’ll leave it at that. But I need to know, in view of the way you led the investigation at the time, and with the officers you had on the job. Did you have any personal dealings with that company? Is there anything at all at any point in time that links you to Amundsen and Mujagic A/S?”

“Are you accusing me of acting unlawfully, Carl Mørck?” Antonsen’s eyes narrowed, and all the joviality of earlier fell away.

“Not at all. I just can’t fathom how your boys never got around to establishing with one hundred percent certainty the cause of the blaze and the identity of the body that was found in the ruins.”

“So you’re accusing me of obstructing my own investigation, is that it?”

Carl looked Antonsen in the eye. “If you put it that way, I suppose I am. Am I right? Because if I am, it means I’ve got something to go on.”

Antonsen handed Carl a bottle of Tuborg, which Carl kept in his hand until they were finished talking. Antonsen gulped down a mouthful of his own.

The old fox wiped his mouth and thrust out his lower lip. “We weren’t alarmed by the case, Carl, if truth be told. A roof fire and an unlucky tramp, that’s how we looked at it. And to be honest, I suppose I allowed it all to slide. Not the way you’re thinking, though.”

“How come, then?”

“Because at the time, Lola was shagging someone else at the station, and I was drinking my way through the crisis.”

“Lola?”

“Believe it or not, yes. But listen, Carl. She and I pulled through. It’s all in the past, and everything’s fine now. But I will concede that I ought to have been more on the ball in that particular case.”

“OK, Anton. That’s good enough for me. We’ll stop here.”

Carl stood up and glanced at Antonsen’s pipe, lying there on its side like a boat stranded in a desert. In a moment or two, it would be sailing again. Office hours or not.

“Oh, hang on a sec,” Antonsen said as Carl was halfway through the door. “One more thing. Remember last summer, that murder in one of the high-rises here in Rødovre? I said to you then that if you lot at HQ weren’t nice to Samir Ghazi, I’d personally make sure you wished you’d never heard of me. Now I hear Samir’s applying to come back to us.” He picked up his pipe and began to stroke it. “What’s the story there? Any idea? He’s
not saying a word to me, but as far as I understand it Jacobsen’s been well pleased with him.”

“He was your sergeant, wasn’t he? I’m afraid I haven’t got a clue. Hardly even know him.”

“Well, I can tell you Department A are at a loss to understand it, too. Word is, though, that it has something to do with one of your lot.”

Carl searched his mind. Why should it have anything to do with Assad? On the other hand, he’d been keeping away from Samir since day one. Why would Assad want to do that?

Now it was Carl’s turn to thrust out his lower lip.

“Well, I’ll ask around, but right now I wouldn’t know. Maybe Samir just misses working with his old boss?” He gave Antonsen a wink. “Say hello to Lola for me, eh?”

He found Yrsa exactly where he had left her, in the middle of the corridor in front of Rose’s enormous blowup of the message in the bottle. Her face was pensive, and she was standing with one leg drawn up under her skirt like a flamingo, as if in a trance. Apart from the clothes, it was Rose all over. It was enough to put the wind up a bloke.

“Have you been through those annual reports from the Business Authority?” he asked.

She glanced at him absently, tapping her forehead with a pencil. He was by no means certain she had even registered his presence.

He filled his lungs with air and discharged the question into her face for the second time. The batty woman gave a slight start, her only discernible reaction.

Just as he was about to turn and go, shaking his head in total bewilderment as to what the blazes he was supposed to do with these decidedly original sisters, she began to speak, softly and yet with such clarity he could hear every word.

“I’m good at Scrabble and crosswords and IQ tests and Sudoku, and I’m
not bad at writing verse and occasional songs for confirmations and birthdays and wedding anniversaries. But this isn’t working for me at all.” She turned to face Carl. “Is it OK if you just leave me alone for a bit so I can have a think about this terrible letter?”

Was it OK? She’d been standing there all the time he’d been to Rødovre and back again, and now she wanted him to leave her alone? Seriously, she could pack her gear back in that eyesore of a shopping cart of hers and wheel her tartan robes and bagpipes and all the rest of her junk back to Vanløse or wherever the hell it was she came from.

“Listen, Yrsa,” he said, trying as best he could to be nice. “Either you get those reports back to me in the next twenty-seven minutes, annotated with notes for my guidance, or else I’ll have no option but to ask Lis from the third floor to write out a check on the spot for four hours of your totally superfluous presence here. In which case, you would be wise not to be banking on any pension scheme. Am I making myself clear?”

“My goodness, what a shitload of words, if you’ll excuse my French.” She beamed a smile at him. “Have I told you, by the way, how well that shirt suits you? Brad Pitt’s got one exactly the same.”

Carl cast a glance down at his checked monstrosity from the Kvickly supermarket. All of a sudden, he felt strangely homeless in the basement.

He withdrew into Assad’s so-called office to find the man with his feet up on the top drawer and the phone stuck to the blue-black stubble on his face. In front of him were ten pens, most likely now missing from Carl’s own office, and underneath them reams of paper filled with scribbled names and figures and Arabic friezes. He was speaking slowly and with remarkable clarity. His whole being exuded authority and composure, and in his hand was a Lilliputian cup of aromatic coffee. If Carl didn’t know better, he’d think he was in a travel agent’s office in Ankara, and the manager was in the process of chartering a jumbo jet for thirty-five oil sheiks.

Assad turned to face him and sent him a crinkly smile.

Apparently, he wanted to be left alone as well.

It was like an epidemic.

Perhaps the best thing in the circumstances would be a restorative
snooze in his office chair. He could run a film on the inside of his eyelids about a fire in Rødovre and cross his fingers that the case had been solved by the time he opened them again.

He had just settled into place with his feet on the desk when this alluring and life-prolonging plan was interrupted by the sound of Laursen’s voice.

“Is there anything left of the bottle, Carl?” he asked.

Carl blinked with surprise. “Bottle, what bottle?” Laursen’s food-stained apron gradually came into focus, and Carl returned his feet to the floor. “The bottle, yeah. Well, there’s three thousand five hundred pieces of it each the size of an ant’s dick in a plastic bag in the cupboard here, if that’s what you mean.”

He produced the transparent bag, holding it up in front of Laursen’s face. “Would that be any good to you?”

Laursen nodded and indicated a shard rather larger than the rest at the bottom of the bag.

“I just spoke to Douglas Gilliam, the forensics man from Scotland. He advised me to take the biggest piece remaining of the bottle end and then have a DNA analysis done on the blood traces. That must be it there. The blood’s even visible.”

Carl was about to ask if he could borrow Laursen’s magnifying glass, but found he could see without it. The blood was hardly there, and what little there was looked completely impoverished.

“Didn’t they do that themselves?”

“No, he says they only took samples from the letter itself. But he says we shouldn’t reckon on finding anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s so little of it to test, and because it’s likely to be too old. Besides, the climate inside the bottle and all that time in seawater would be highly detrimental to the genetic material. Heat and cold, and then maybe a drop or two of salt water. The changing light. It all points to the DNA having perished.”