A Conspiracy of Faith (38 page)

Assad nodded and jabbed again at the document, then turned his head toward the corridor. “Hey, Yrsa, are you coming? I’m now showing Carl what we discovered.”

Carl felt his brow wrinkle. Had Yrsa, that odd female beanstalk, been spending her time on things other than what she was supposed to?

He heard her feet tramping down the corridor loud enough to shame a regiment of U.S. Marines. How could she do that? She weighed maybe fifty-five kilos at the most.

She burst in through the door and had the documents in his face before she’d even come to a halt. “Have you told him about RJ Invest, Assad?”

Assad nodded.

“That’s who made the loan to JPP shortly before the fire.”

“This I have already told him, Yrsa,” said Assad.

“OK. And RJ Invest are loaded,” she continued. “At present, their loan portfolio stands at over five hundred million euros. Not bad for a firm that wasn’t even registered until 2004, wouldn’t you say?”

“Five hundred million euros,” Carl mused. “Everyone’s got that kind of money these days, haven’t they?”

He thought of his own portfolio of pocket fluff.

“RJ Invest didn’t in 2004. They were borrowing from AIJ Ltd. Who in turn borrowed their initial capital in 1995 from MJ AG, who in turn borrowed from TJ Holding. Do you see the link?”

What did she think he was, stupid or something?

“No, Yrsa, I don’t. Unless it’s the letter ‘J.’ And what do they all stand for, anyway?”

Carl smiled, knowing she’d have no answer.

“Jankovic,” Assad and Yrsa replied in unison.

Assad spread the documents out on the desk in front of him. Annual accounts of the four companies they were investigating for the period 1992 to 2009. All had borrowed money, and the lenders were highlighted with a red marker.

All moneylenders with a “J.”

“So what you’re trying to tell me is that the same banking firm was behind all the short-term loans taken out by our four companies prior to their properties burning down?”

“Yes!” In unison again.

Carl studied the documents for a while. This was definitely a breakthrough.

“OK, Yrsa,” he said eventually. “You gather all the information you can find on these four loan companies. Do we know what the other letters stand for?”

She smiled like a Hollywood actor with no other talent. “RJ: Radomir Jankovic. AIJ: Abram Ilija Jankovic. MJ: Milica Jankovic. TJ: Tomislav Jankovic. Siblings. Three brothers, and the sister, Milica.”

“OK. Are they resident in Denmark?”

“No.”

“Where, then?”

“Nowhere you could pronounce,” she replied, her shoulders hovering somewhere in the region of her ears.

She and Assad looked like two schoolkids with a stash of something illegal in their backpacks.

“No, to put it to you straight up, Carl, all four of them are dead some years ago,” said Assad.

Of course they were. What else had he expected?

“They made a name for themselves in Serbia when the war broke out,” Yrsa explained. “Four siblings, arms dealers, and making a packet out of it. A very naughty bunch.” She expelled a grunt that Carl supposed to be a laugh, and Assad picked up the thread.

“Indeed, this is an understatement of Yrsa, to promote understanding,” he added.

Where would he be without Assad?

Carl searched Yrsa’s chuckling face, then looked her up and down. Where the hell did this bizarre creature get her information? Did she speak Serbian?

“I’m guessing, then, that their highly dubious fortune got channeled
into legal lending operations in Western Europe,” Carl said. “But if that’s the kind of case we’re dealing with, then my view is that we should kick it upstairs to some of our colleagues who are a lot better equipped than us to deal with financial crime.”

“You should have a look at this first, Carl.” Yrsa rummaged through her documents. “We’ve got a picture here of the four of them together. It’s quite old, but still useful.”

She placed the photograph on the desk in front of him.

“OK,” he said, digesting the image of four overfed specimens the size of Angus cattle. “A bit on the beefy side, then. Sumo wrestlers, perhaps?”

“Have a good look, Carl,” Assad urged. “Then you will see what we mean.”

He traced Assad’s gaze to the bottom of the photo. The four siblings were sitting in an orderly line at a cloth-covered table. In front of each was a crystal goblet. All four had their hands neatly placed on the table in front of them, as though they had been instructed to do so by a strict mother standing just outside the picture. Four pairs of thickset hands—and each left hand displayed a ring on its little finger. A ring that had practically been engulfed by flesh.

Carl looked up at his assistants, two of the oddest individuals ever to have graced these forbidding corridors. Now they had lifted the case into a new dimension. A case that wasn’t really even theirs.

It was like a surreal dream.

An hour later, Carl’s carefully considered allocation of tasks was messed up again. Deputy Chief Lars Bjørn was on the phone. One of his men had been down in records and overheard an exchange between Assad and that new girl. What was going on? Had they found another link between those arson cases?

Carl outlined the situation, the stuffed shirt at the other end grunting at every second word to indicate that he was listening.

“I want you to send Hafez el-Assad over to Rødovre so Antonsen can be put in the picture. We’ll proceed with the arsons here on our own patch, but you’ll have to take care of the old case yourselves, now that you’re under way,” said Bjørn.

No peace for the wicked.

“I don’t think Assad will want to, to be honest.”

“Well, you’ll have to do it yourself, then, won’t you?”

Lars fucking Bjørn.

“You don’t mean this, surely, Carl? You are pulling my leg, I think?” Great dimples appeared in Assad’s stubble, only to vanish just as quickly.

“Take the car, Assad. And mind your speed once you hit Roskildevej. The traffic boys are out with their lollipops today.”

“If I should think a thought now, it would be that this is very foolish, indeed. Either we must take all the arson cases or not any at all.” He nodded emphatically.

Carl said nothing and handed him the car keys.

Once Assad’s cloud of mother-tongue invective had faded with the echo of his footsteps on the stairs, Carl flopped down on his chair and contemplated the serenade emanating in an earsplitting key from Yrsa’s vocal cords farther down the corridor. He realized how much he missed Rose’s more than occasional muteness. And what the hell was she
doing
, anyway?

He jumped to his feet and went out into the corridor.

Of course. There she was, gawping at the blowup on the wall.

“There’s no point in that now, Yrsa,” he said. “Tryggve Holt’s already given us his take on it, and I’d say he was the best judge, wouldn’t you? What more’s it got to tell us? Not much, if you ask me. So go on back to your office and do something useful, like we agreed.”

She didn’t stop singing until he had finished. “Come here, Carl,” she said, tugging on his sleeve and dragging him with her into her little pink fairyland.

She planted him in front of Rose’s desk, on which was a copy of Tryggve’s version of the message from the bottle.

“Look at this. We’re all in agreement as to the first few lines.”

“Right?”

Carl nodded.

“After that, Tryggve suggests the following.”

“Yeah, and we still don’t know where that scar is,” Carl interjected. “Tryggve never saw it, and Poul never mentioned it to him. But it was exactly the kind of thing Poul would have taken note of, according to Tryggve. Maybe other people’s little peculiarities offset his own. Anyway, go on.”

Yrsa nodded.

“All seems plausible to me.” Carl peered up at the ceiling where another fly suddenly appeared to be laughing at him. He studied it more closely. Was that a spot of white on its wing? It was! This was the same fly he had attempted to obliterate with that bottle of correction fluid. Where the hell had it been hiding?

“So we agree that Tryggve was present when all this was going on, and
that he was conscious,” Yrsa went on, unperturbed. “This passage here is about the kidnapper’s distinguishing marks, and if we put it together with Tryggve’s description of him, we’ve got a pretty good idea of what he looks like. All we need now is the artist’s impression from Sweden.”

She pointed at the lines that followed. “I’m not that sure about the next sentences. The question is whether it really says what we think it does. Read it out loud, would you, Carl?”

“Read it out loud? What for, have you lost your tongue?” Who did she think he was, Mads Mikkelsen?

She slapped him playfully on the shoulder, then pinched his arm for good measure. “Come on, Carl. It’ll give you the feel of it.”

He shook his head in despair and cleared his throat. She was off her head. He read.

She applauded his performance soundlessly with the tips of her fingers.

“Very nice, Carl. Now, I know Tryggve is pretty sure about most of it, but do you think the bit about the wind turbines is right? Some of the other words seem like they might be wrong, too. What if there’s more hidden behind those dots than we’re able to imagine?”

“Poul and Tryggve never spoke about sounds at all. They couldn’t anyway, with gaffer tape over their mouths. But Tryggve does recall a deep rumbling sound every now and then,” Carl said. “What’s more, he said Poul would have been good at coupling sounds and machinery. But the fact of the matter is it could have been anything at all.”

Carl pictured Tryggve reading the message from the bottle for the second time, eyes moist with tears in the growing light of a Swedish dawn.

“The message made an enormous impression on Tryggve. He said it was just like his brother not to bother with punctuation apart from a few dashes, and that Poul always wrote the way he spoke. He said that reading the letter was like hearing him say it out loud.”

Carl released the image from his mind. Once Tryggve had had time to settle down again after the shock, they would have to get him over to Copenhagen.

Yrsa frowned. “Did you ask Tryggve whether there was any wind while they were there in that boathouse? Did you or Assad check with the Met Office?”

“You mean you want to know if it was windy in the middle of February? When isn’t it? Anyway, turbines are on the go even in a breeze.”

“Nevertheless, did you check?”

“Hand it on to Pasgård, Yrsa. He’s the guy we’ve got checking up on the wind turbines. I’ve got another job for you now.”

She sat down on the edge of the desk. “I know what you’re going to say. You want me to talk to those support groups for people who used to be involved in religious sects, am I right?” She drew her handbag toward her and produced a packet of crisps. And even before Carl had formed his reply, she’d burst a hole in it and was busy devouring its contents.

He couldn’t work her out.