A Conspiracy of Faith (25 page)

Only when he reached Blekinge did the landscape raise itself into something more becoming. It was said that when the gods distributed rocks across the earth, their hands were unsteady with fatigue by the time they reached Blekinge. While certainly more pleasing to the eye, there was little else to look at but trees and rocks. It was all still Sweden.

Not exactly deck chairs and Camparis, he mused as he drove into Hallabro, passing the usual combination of kiosk, petrol station, and auto repair shop with deals on refinishing jobs before continuing along Gamla Kongavägen.

In the dwindling light of day, the house seemed nicely situated up above the town. A drystone wall marked the boundary of the garden, and
the light shining from three windows indicated that the Holt family had not been unduly alarmed by Assad’s telephone call.

There was a knocker on the door. It was cracked, but he used it anyway. He waited, and heard no frenzied activity from within.

Then he realized it was Friday. Bollocks. Did Jehovah’s Witnesses observe the Sabbath? If Jews observed the Sabbath on the Friday, then presumably it was in the Bible, and Jehovah’s Witnesses followed the Bible to the letter.

He knocked again. Perhaps they weren’t allowed to answer the door? Did the Sabbath prohibit all movement? What was he supposed to do then? Kick the door in? Probably not a good idea in these parts. Most likely everyone kept a hunting rifle under the mattress.

He stood there for a moment and glanced around. The town had tucked itself in for the evening. It was all feet up now, and fuck it, we’ll do it tomorrow.

Carl wondered where the hell he was going to stay for the night in this far-flung outpost. And then suddenly a light went on behind the glass.

The door opened slightly, and the pale and solemn face of a boy aged about fifteen appeared in the crack and stared at him without a word.

“Hello, there,” said Carl. “Are your mum and dad in?”

The boy closed the door just as cautiously as he had opened it, and locked it behind him. The face had been calm and without emotion. Apparently, he knew what to do in a situation like this, and letting uninvited visitors in seemed not to be an option.

A few minutes passed, during which Carl stood staring at the door. Sometimes it helped to be persistent.

A couple of local residents walked past beneath the streetlights, their eyes fixed on him as if to say: Who are you? Faithful watchdogs, every small town had them.

Then eventually the face of a man appeared at the pane in the door. Persistence paid off again.

The face stared at Carl without expression, though clearly perplexed, as though they had been expecting someone else.

And then he opened the door.

“Yes?” he said, delivering the initiative.

Carl produced his badge. “Carl Mørck, Department Q, Copenhagen,” he said. “Are you Martin Holt?”

The man scrutinized Carl’s ID uneasily and then nodded.

“May I come in?”

“What’s it about?” the man replied softly and in perfect Danish.

“Perhaps we could talk about that inside?”

“I think not.” He retreated and was about to close the door again when Carl grasped the handle.

“Martin Holt, may I have a word with your son Poul?”

The man hesitated. “No,” he said after a moment. “He’s not here, so I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

“Then where would I be able to find him, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I don’t know.” He looked Carl directly in the eye. Rather too directly, given the nature of his utterance.

“You mean to say you have no idea of your son’s whereabouts, no address?”

“That’s correct. And now I should like you to leave us in peace. We’re in the middle of Bible study.”

Carl produced a document. “This is the Civil Registration System’s list of persons occupying your home address in Græsted on the sixteenth of February, 1996, the day Poul gave up his studies at the College of Engineering. The names here are those of yourself and your wife, Laila, and your children Poul, Tryggve, Mikkeline, Ellen, and Henrik.” He glanced down, the page. “The civil registration figures here tell me that the children are now thirty-one, twenty-six, twenty-four, sixteen, and fifteen years old. Is that correct?”

Martin Holt nodded and shooed away the boy who stood peering inquisitively over his shoulder. Most likely it was Henrik.

Carl studied the boy furtively. He had the same kind of passive, empty look in his eyes that people get when the only thing over which they have control is when to go to the toilet.

Carl looked back at the man in front of him, who seemed to keep such a tight rein on his family. “We know that Tryggve and Poul were together that day at the college when Poul was there for the last time,” he said. “So if Poul has moved away from home, perhaps I might have a word with Tryggve instead? It won’t take a moment.”

“We no longer speak to Tryggve.” The words were delivered in a voice that was cold and without modulation, but the light of the outside lamp revealed the gray pallor that characterizes people whose burdens at work weigh heavy. Too much to do, too many decisions to make, and too few positive experiences. Gray skin and dull eyes. The last things Carl noticed before the man slammed the door in his face.

Seconds passed, and the outside lamp was switched off. Then the light in the hallway. But Carl knew the man was still there, waiting for him to go.

And then he heard Martin Holt begin to pray.

“Bridle our tongue, dear Lord, so that we may speak not the cruel word that is untrue, the true word that is not the whole truth, the whole truth that is without pity. For the sake of Jesus Christ, our Lord,” he pronounced in Swedish.

“Bridle our tongue, dear Lord” and “We no longer speak to Tryggve.” What was that supposed to mean? Was all mention of Tryggve forbidden? Or Poul, for that matter? Had both been ostracized following whatever it was that had happened? Had they shown themselves to be unworthy of the kingdom of God? Was that what this was all about?

If it was, then it was no business of any officer of the law.

What to do, he wondered. Should he get in touch with the Karlshamn police and ask for assistance? But on what grounds? The family hadn’t done anything they weren’t supposed to. At least, not as far as he could make out.

He shook his head, walked silently away from the door, and got back in the car. He thrust the gear lever into reverse and backed slowly up the road, parking at a discreet distance from the house.

Removing the lid from his thermos, he found the contents to be stone
cold. Brilliant. The last time he had done a stakeout at night had been ten years earlier, and he had been equally reluctant. Damp March nights in a car without a decent headrest, sipping stone-cold coffee from a plastic thermos lid wasn’t exactly what he’d been dreaming of when he’d taken the chance and moved on to Copenhagen Police HQ. And now here he was. Without a clue, apart from this maddening, matter-of-fact instinct of his that told him how to read people’s reactions and what they might lead to.

This man in the house on the hill had not reacted naturally. That much was clear to him. Martin Holt had been just a bit too dismissive, too gray in the face, too insensitive in speaking of his two eldest sons. And too uninterested in what a detective of the Copenhagen police might be doing in this rocky neck of the woods. It wasn’t what people said but rather what they didn’t say that gave the game away when they were hiding something. And that was definitely the case here.

He stared ahead toward the house on the bend, then wedged his coffee cup between his thighs. He would close his eyes now. Power napping, they called it.

Two minutes, that would be enough, he thought to himself, only to wake up twenty minutes later when he became aware that his genitals were being refrigerated by cold coffee.

“Bollocks!” he blurted out loud, flapping at the icy liquid seeping into his trousers. He repeated the utterance a moment later as the headlights of a car swept away from the house and down the road toward Ronneby.

He let the coffee soak into the seat cover and threw the car into gear. The night was dark. Once they were out of Hallabro, only the stars and the car ahead of him stuck out in the pitch black.

They drove ten, maybe fifteen kilometers until the beam of the headlights struck a hideously yellow house on the brow of a hill, built so close to the road that it seemed even a moderate breath of wind might be enough for the ramshackle construction to make a mess of the traffic.

The car turned in and remained in the driveway. After ten minutes, Carl left his Peugeot at the side of the road and cautiously approached the house, sideways like a crab.

Only now did he realize that there were passengers in the car. Motionless and barely visible. Four figures of various sizes.

He waited a few moments, taking note of the surroundings. Quite apart from its color, garish even in darkness, the house was hardly encouraging to look at.

Scrap metal, assorted junk, and machinery no longer in use lay everywhere. It looked like the owner had died years ago and the place had been left to fall apart.

A far cry from the family’s elegant abode in Græsted, Carl thought to himself, his gaze following the headlights of a fast-moving car that swept up the hill from the direction of Ronneby, the beam illuminating the gable end of the house and the yard. For a brief second, a mother’s face, swollen with tears, was made visible through the window of the parked car, and a young woman and two teenagers on the backseat. Everyone in the vehicle seemed to be affected by the situation. They were silent yet clearly upset, their faces filled with fright.

Carl moved forward to the side of the house and put his ear to the rotten wooden cladding. Close up, he could see that only the paint seemed to be keeping the place together.

Inside, words were being exchanged. Two men were arguing, and were obviously far from reaching agreement. The voices were harsh and irreconcilable. It was a shouting match.

When they stopped, Carl hardly had time to catch sight of the man as he slammed the door behind him and almost threw himself into the driver’s seat of the waiting car.

There was a squeal of tires as the Holt family frenziedly reversed onto the road and tore off in a southerly direction. Carl had already made up his mind.

This ugly yellow house was whispering to him.

And he was all ears.

The nameplate read
Lillemor Bengtsen
, but the woman who opened the yellow door was nothing like the little housewife the name suggested. In
her early twenties, with blond hair and slightly overlapping front teeth, she was quite simply adorable, as they used to say in another age.

Maybe Sweden wasn’t that bad, after all.

“I think perhaps you might be expecting me.” He produced his badge. “Would Poul Holt be here, by any chance?”

She shook her head but smiled. For all the ferocity of the disagreement that had just taken place, she had apparently kept herself well out of it.

“How about Tryggve, then?”

“You’d better come in!” she said briskly in Swedish, then indicated a closed door farther inside the house.

“He’s here, Tryggve,” she called into the living room. “I’m going to lie down, OK?”

She smiled at Carl as though they knew each other, then left him alone with her boyfriend.

He was tall and almost painfully thin, but then what had Carl been expecting? He extended his hand and received a firm handshake in response.

“Tryggve Holt,” the young man said by way of introduction. “My father was here to warn me.”

Carl nodded. “My impression was you two weren’t on speaking terms?”

“We’re not. I’m an outcast now. I haven’t spoken to them for four years, but I’ve often seen them parked outside on the road.”

His eyes were calm. They bore no trace of the altercation such a short time ago and seemed unconcerned by the present situation. So Carl went straight to the point.

“We found a message in a bottle,” he said, noting an immediate flicker in the man’s impassive face. “Actually, it turned up in a fishing net off the coast of Scotland some years back, though it only came into our hands at Police Headquarters in Copenhagen a week or so ago.”

Now the reaction was more visible, if not to say undeniable, and what had triggered it were the four words: message in a bottle. As though all these years they had been at the back of his mind. Perhaps he had been
waiting for someone to utter them. Perhaps they were the password to all the mysteries that remained inside him.

He bit his lip. “A message in a bottle, you say?”

“Yes, perhaps you’d like to see it.” He handed the young man a copy of the letter.

In the space of two seconds, Tryggve shrank to three-quarters of his size, twisting around on his own axis and knocking everything within reach to the floor. Had it not been for Carl’s quick reflexes, he would have been knocked over in the same way.

“What’s going on?” It was the girlfriend, standing in the doorway with her hair untied, clad in a T-shirt that only just covered her naked thighs. Already on her way to bed.

Carl indicated the letter.