A Conspiracy of Faith (2 page)

Silence.

And then the plop.

The bottle was released.

Carl had woken up
to better prospects.

The first thing he registered was the fountain of acid bubbling in his esophagus. Then, after opening his eyes to see if there was anything that might assuage his discomfort, the sight of a woman’s wrecked and slightly drooling face on the pillow next to him.

Oh, shit, that’s Sysser, he realized in horror, and tried to recall what mistakes he might have made the previous evening that could have led him to this. Sysser of all people. His chain-smoking neighbor. The chattering odd-job woman soon to be pensioned off from Allerød Town Hall.

A dreadful thought struck him. Gingerly, he lifted the duvet only to discover with a sigh of relief that he still had his boxer shorts on. That was something, at least.

“Christ,” he groaned, removing Sysser’s sinewy hand from his chest. He hadn’t had a head on him like this since he’d been with Vigga.

“Please, spare me the details,” he said, encountering Morten and Jesper in the kitchen. “Just tell me what the lady upstairs is doing on my pillow.”

“She’s heavier than she looks, the old bag,” his stepson offered, raising a freshly opened carton of juice to his lips. The day Jesper would discover how to pour the stuff into a glass was something not even Nostradamus would hazard a guess at.

“Yeah, sorry, Carl,” said Morten. “She couldn’t find her key, you see, and you’d already crashed, so I reckoned…”

Definitely the last time anyone catches me at one of Morten’s barbecues, Carl promised himself, and cast a glance into the front room where Hardy’s bed was.

Since his former colleague had been moved in a fortnight ago, all semblance of domestic familiarity had gone down the drain. Not because the elevation bed occupied a quarter of the floor space and blocked the view of the garden. Not because IV bags dangling from stands or filled urine bags made Carl queasy in any way. And not even because Hardy’s utterly paralyzed body emitted an unceasing flow of foul-smelling gases. What changed everything was the guilty conscience all this gave rise to. Because Carl himself possessed full control of his limbs and could chug around on them whenever it suited him. And moreover, he felt he had to compensate for it all the time. To be there for Hardy. To do good for this helpless man.

“No need to have a cow about it,” Hardy had said a couple of months back, preempting Carl as they discussed the pros and cons of moving him away from the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries at Hornbæk. “A week can go by here without me seeing you. I reckon I can do without your tender loving care a few hours at a time if I move in with you, don’t you?”

The thing was, though, that Hardy could be peacefully asleep, like now, and yet still be so present. In Carl’s mind. In the planning of his day. In all the words that had to be weighed before being uttered. It was tiring, a bind. And a home wasn’t meant to fatigue.

Then there was the practical side of things. Laundry, changing the sheets, manhandling Hardy’s enormous frame, shopping, liasing with nurses and authorities, cooking. So what if Morten did take care of all that? What about the rest of it?

“Sleep well, old mate?” he ventured as he approached the bed.

His former colleague opened his eyes and forced a smile. “That’s it then, eh, Carl? Leave of absence over and back to the treadmill. A fortnight gone in a flash. Didn’t half go quick. Morten and I will do all right. Just say hello to the crew for me, eh?”

Carl nodded. Who would want to be Hardy? If only he could change places with someone for a day.

Apart from the usual lot at the duty desk, Carl didn’t meet a soul on his way in. Police Headquarters felt like it had been wiped out, the colonnade winter gray and discouraging.

“What the hell’s going on?” he called out as he entered the basement corridor.

He’d been expecting a raucous welcome, or at least the stench of Assad’s peppermint goo or Rose’s whistled versions of the great classics, but the place was dead. Had they abandoned ship during the fortnight’s leave he’d taken to get Hardy moved in?

He stepped into Assad’s cubbyhole and glanced around in bewilderment. No photos of aging aunts, no prayer mat, no boxes of sickly sweet cakes. Even the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling were switched off.

He crossed the corridor and turned on the light in his own office. The familiar surroundings in which he had solved three cases and given up on two. The place the smoking ban had yet to reach, and where all the old files that made up Department Q’s domain had lain safe and sound on his desk in three neatly ordered piles, according to Carl’s own infallible system.

He stopped dead at the sight of a wholly unrecognizable, gleaming desk. Not a speck of dust. Not a scrap of paper. Not a single closely written sheet of A4 on which he might rest his weary feet and thereafter dispatch into the wastepaper basket. No files. Everything was gone.

“ROSE!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

And his voice echoed through the corridors in vain.

He was little boy lost. Last man standing. A rooster with nowhere to roost. The king who would give his kingdom for a horse.

He reached for the phone and pressed the number for Lis on the third floor, Homicide Division.

Twenty-five seconds passed before anyone answered.

“Department A, secretary speaking,” the voice said. It was Ms. Sørensen,
the most indisputably hostile of all Carl’s colleagues. Ilse the She-Wolf in person.

“Ms. Sørensen,” he ventured, gentle as a purring cat. “This is Carl Mørck. I’m sitting here all forlorn in the basement. What’s going on? Would you happen to know where Assad and Rose are?”

Less than a millisecond passed before she hung up. The cow.

He stood up and headed for Rose’s domain a little farther down the corridor. Maybe the mystery of the missing files would be solved there. It was a perfectly reasonable thought, destroyed when he discovered to his horror that on the corridor wall between Assad’s and Rose’s offices someone had fixed at least ten pieces of chipboard and plastered them with the contents of the missing files.

A folding ladder of shiny yellow larch indicated where the last of the cases had been put up. It was one they’d had to shelve. Their second unsolved case in a row.

Carl took a step back to get the full picture of this paper pandemonium. What on earth were all his files doing on the wall? Had Rose and Assad become completely unhinged all of a sudden? Maybe that was why they’d vanished, bloody imbeciles.

They hadn’t the guts to stick around.

Upstairs on the third floor it was the same story. The place was deserted. Even Ms. Sørensen’s chair behind the counter yawned empty. He checked the offices of the homicide chief as well as his deputy. He wandered into the lunchroom, then the briefing room. It was like the place had been evacuated.

What the fuck was going on? Had there been a bomb scare? Or had the police reform finally got to the point where the staff had been kicked out into the street so all the buildings could be sold off? Had the new, so-called justice minister had a fit? When would the news channel be turning up?

He scratched the back of his neck, then picked up a phone and called the duty desk.

“Carl Mørck here. Where the hell is everyone?”

“Most of them are gathered in the Remembrance Yard.”

The Remembrance Yard? What the hell for? September the nineteenth was six months away yet.

“In remembrance of what? As far as I’m aware, the anniversary of the internment of Danish police officers by the German occupying forces isn’t even remotely around the corner. What are they doing?”

“The commissioner wanted to speak to a couple of departments about adjustments following the reform. Sorry about that, Carl. We thought you knew.”

“But I just spoke to Ms. Sørensen.”

“Most likely she’s had all calls sent on to her mobile. I’m sure that’ll be the explanation.”

Carl shook his head. They were stark raving mad. All of them. By the time he reached the Remembrance Yard, the Justice Ministry would probably have changed everything around again.

He stared through the door at the chief’s soft, enticing armchair. That was one place, at least, where a man could close his eyes without an audience.

Ten minutes later, he woke up with the deputy chief’s paw on his shoulder and Assad’s cheerful, round eyes peering point-blank into his face.

Peace over.

“Come on, Assad,” he said, extracting himself from the chair. “You and I are going downstairs to pull all those sheets of paper off the wall sharpish, you understand? And where’s Rose?”

Assad shook his head. “We cannot, Carl.”

Carl stood up and tucked his shirt into his trousers. What the hell was the man on about? Of course they could. Wasn’t he supposed to be the boss around here?

“Just come on, will you? And get hold of Rose. NOW!”

“The basement’s closed off,” homicide deputy Lars Bjørn butted in. “Asbestos sifting down from the pipe lagging. Health and Safety have been around and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Assad nodded. “I’m afraid this is true, Carl. We had to bring all our stuff up here. There is not much room, but we did find a nice chair for you,” he added, as though it could ever be a comfort. “We are only us two at the moment. Rose did not fancy it, so she is off on a long weekend. She’ll be back later on today, though.”

They might just as well have kicked him in the gonads.

She had sat staring
into the candles until they burned out and darkness wrapped itself around her. It wasn’t the first time he’d left her on her own, but he’d never done it on their anniversary before.

She inhaled deeply and got to her feet. Lately, she’d given up standing by the window to wait for him, had stopped writing his name with her finger on the pane as it steamed up from her breath.

It wasn’t as if there had been no warning signs the time they first met. Her best friend had had her doubts, and her mother had told her straight out. He was too old for her. There was something shifty about him. A man you couldn’t trust. A man you couldn’t fathom.

So now she hadn’t seen her friend or her mother for a very long time. And for that reason her desperation increased while her need for human contact was greater than ever. Who could she talk to? There was no one there.