A Conspiracy of Faith (41 page)

They were about to reply, but Carl stopped them. “Look closely. The mustache might make him look older than he is. Write down your guess here.”

He tore off a couple of pages from a notepad and handed them to his two assistants.

“To think he’s the one who killed Poul,” Yrsa mused. “It’s almost like he killed someone you knew.”

Carl wrote down his own estimate and took Assad’s and Yrsa’s.

Two of them said twenty-seven. The other said thirty-two.

“Yrsa and I agree on twenty-seven, Assad. What makes you think he’s older?”

“It is simply because of this.” He pointed his finger to a diagonal line issuing from the eyebrow of the man’s right eye. “This is not the wrinkle of a smile.”

He indicated his own face, then lit up in a smile and pointed at the corners of his beaming eyes. “Look at these lines. They go out toward the cheek. And now look.”

He turned his mouth down at the corners. Now he looked just like he
had done when Carl had been giving him a bollocking a few minutes earlier. “Is there not a line just here?” He indicated a point next to his eyebrow.

“Maybe, but it’s hard to tell,” said Yrsa, then mimicked the expression herself and felt for a line with her fingertip.

“That is because I am a happy man. The killer is not happy. A wrinkle like this is something a person is born with, or else it appears because the person is not happy. And if it appears, it will do so only with time. My mother was not so happy, and hers did not come until she was fifty.”

“Perhaps you’re right, Assad. And perhaps you’re not,” said Carl. “But the fact is that all three of our guesses are in the same region, which fits in with Tryggve’s assessment, too. So if he’s still alive, he’ll be somewhere between forty and forty-five now.”

“Could we scan the picture into our system and add a few years onto him?” Yrsa inquired. “Computers can do that, can’t they?”

“Of course, but the risk is you end up with something that may be even more inaccurate than the original. I reckon we should stick with what we’ve got. A decent-looking fellow, more attractive than average, and quite masculine. Otherwise a fairly subdued kind of appearance, a bit conservative, like an office worker.”

“I’d say he looks more like a soldier or a policeman,” Yrsa added.

Carl nodded. The man could have been anything at all. It was usually the way.

He glanced up at the ceiling. That bastard fly again. Maybe he should take the liberty, on behalf of the state, of investing in a can of flyspray. Most likely they’d prefer that to him expending a bullet on the bloody thing.

He forced his thoughts back to the matter at hand and looked at Yrsa. “Get this photocopied, and be sure to send it out to all districts. Do you know how?”

She gave a shrug.

“Oh, and Yrsa, let me see the wording before you put it out, yeah?”

“What wording?”

He sighed. In many ways, she was amazing, but she would never reach Rose’s level. “You need to write a description of what the case is about, Yrsa. Something like: ‘We suspect this person of having committed a murder, and we want to know if anyone has any knowledge of a man of this appearance having been in trouble with the police.’”

“Where does this get us, Carl? What’s the connection? Any ideas?” Lars Bjørn frowned and shoved the photo of the four Jankovic siblings back across the table to the homicide chief.

“I’ll tell you where it gets us. If you want to proceed with your arson cases, you need to look through the criminal registers for Serbs with exactly the same kind of finger ring as our four tubbies here. You might even find a match in the Danish archives, but if I were you, I’d get on to the police in Belgrade pretty sharpish.”

“So you believe the bodies that were found at the scenes of the arsons are Serbs in some way connected to the Jankovic family, and that these rings signify that relationship?” Jacobsen ventured.

“Definitely. And what’s more, my guess is that they were almost born with those rings on, judging by the extent of the deformation of the finger bone in each case.”

“Some kind of crime syndicate?” Bjørn proffered.

Carl gave him a goofy smile. The man was on form for a miserable Monday morning.

Marcus Jacobsen eyed the flattened cigarette packet on the table in front of him as though he might devour it any minute. “Well, we certainly need to research the matter with our Serbian colleagues. If your assumptions are correct, then it would seem membership might even be hereditary. Do we know who’s behind these banking firms now? The four founders are no longer with us, I understand.”

“I’ve got Yrsa looking into that. It’s a limited company, but the majority of the shares are still owned by people called Jankovic.”

“A Serbian crime syndicate lending out money, then?”

“Looks like it. We do know that the companies hit by the arsons all owed money to the Jankovic family at one point or another. What we don’t know is where the bodies come from and why. We’ll gladly leave that one with you.” Carl smiled and shoved another picture across the table.

“This is our presumed perp in the murder of Poul Holt and the kidnapping of his brother. Nice-looking bloke, yeah?”

Marcus Jacobsen considered the portrait in front of him as he would any other. He had seen murderers aplenty in his time.

“I understand Pasgård has made a couple of breakthroughs in the case today,” Jacobsen stated drily. “Good thing he was able to assist you.”

Carl frowned. What the fuck was he on about?

“Breakthroughs? What breakthroughs?”

“You mean he hasn’t told you yet? He’s probably writing his report as we speak.”

Twenty seconds later, Carl was standing in Pasgård’s office. A dingy room—the photo of the incumbent’s family of three failed to cheer the place up, serving instead as a reminder of how immeasurably little the office of a public servant could resemble home.

“What’s going on?” Carl demanded, as Pasgård’s fingers danced across the keyboard of his computer.

“Two minutes, and you’ll have your report. Then the case is all yours.”

It all sounded too fucking efficient by half. Nevertheless, the man swiveled around on his chair what seemed like exactly two minutes later and announced: “You can read it off the screen before I print it out. Make any corrections yourself, if you feel the need.”

Pasgård and Carl had started at HQ at about the same time, but though Carl could hardly be called biddable, the majority of decent jobs had fallen his way, much to the chagrin of an arse-licker like Pasgård.

So Pasgård’s smug little smile now was a thinly veiled manifestation of the infinite pleasure that surged through him as Carl read his report.

When he had finished, Carl turned to face him.

“Nice work, Pasgård,” was all he said.

“Are you off home, or can you put in a couple more hours tonight, Assad?” Carl asked. Hundred to one he didn’t have the balls to say no.

Assad smiled. Most likely he thought of it as a pat on the back. Now they could get on with the job. Questions about Samir Ghazi and the issue of where Assad actually lived were on the back burner.

“Yrsa, you can come along, too. I’ll drop you off at your place. It’s on our way.”

“You mean Stenløse? You must be joking, that’s miles out. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take the train. I love trains, me.” She buttoned her coat and hung her nifty little fake-crocodile-skin bag over her shoulder. Like her thick-heeled brogues, this seemed to be inspired by old English films.

“You can give the train a miss today, Yrsa,” he said. “I want to put you both in the picture on the way, if you don’t mind.”

Reluctantly, she climbed into the backseat, almost like a queen who’d been fobbed off with a taxi. Legs crossed and her bag on her lap. Soon, the cloud of her perfume settled beneath the nicotine-stained roof lining.

“Pasgård’s had word back from the Section for Aquatic Biology. They’ve given us quite a bit to go on. First thing is they’ve now established that the scale comes from a species of trout most often found in fjords, where fresh-water and seawater converge.”

“What about the slime?” Yrsa asked.

“Most likely from common mussels or fjord shrimps. That’ll have to stay unresolved for the time being.”

Assad nodded in the passenger seat next to him and flicked to the first page of Krak’s map of Nordsjælland. After a moment, he placed his finger near the middle of the page. “OK, I see them here now. Roskilde Fjord and the Isefjord. Aha! I had no idea they joined together at Hundested.”

“Oh, my God, don’t tell me you’re going to have to trawl around them both? What a job you’ll have!”

“Right on both counts, Yrsa.” Carl glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Fortunately, we’ve got the help of a sailor with local knowledge. Lives in Stenløse, like you. You probably remember him from that double murder in Rørvig, Assad. Thomasen. The bloke who knew the father of the two who got murdered.”

“Yes, indeed. His first name started with a ‘K’, and he had a fat belly.”

“Exactly. His name’s Klaes. Klaes Thomasen from the police station at Nykøbing. He’s got a boat moored at Frederikssund and knows the fjords like the back of his hand. He’s going to take us out. I reckon we’ve got a couple of hours before it gets dark.”

“You mean we are going to sail on the water?” Assad asked in a quiet voice.

“We’re going to have to if we want to find a boathouse projecting into the fjord.”

“I am not so happy about this, Carl.”

Carl chose to ignore him. “Besides being the stamping ground of the fjord trout, there’s another indication that we ought to be looking for the boathouse in the vicinity of the mouths of the fjords. I’m loath to admit it, but Pasgård has done a very good job. After letting the marine biologists take their samples, he sent the paper on which the message was written to Forensics so that they could have a look at the shadowy areas Laursen picked out. It turns out to be printer’s ink. Or at least the remnants of such.”

“I thought they’d done all that in Scotland,” said Yrsa.

“Their efforts were focused on the written characters rather than the paper itself. But when Forensics ran their tests this morning, it turned out there were remains of printer’s ink all over it.”

“Was it just ink, or did it say anything?” she asked.

Carl smiled to himself. Once, when he was a boy, he and one of the other lads had lain flat out on their stomachs at the fairground in Brønderslev staring at a footprint. Slightly obliterated by rain but still clearly
distinct from the rest. They could make out the imprint of letters that seemed to have been scratched into the sole, but only after some time had elapsed did they realize that they were back to front.
PEDRO
, they read. And before long, they had put together a story that the shoe probably belonged to some machinist from Pedershaab Maskinfabrik who was afraid someone would nick his only pair of safety shoes. So after that, whenever the two lads stuffed away their own shoes in the lockers of the open-air baths at the other end of town, they always had this poor Pedro in mind.

It had been the beginning of Carl’s interest in detective work, and now here he was, somehow back at the start again.

“Turns out the writing was back to front. There must have been a newspaper pressed against the paper for some time, and the lettering rubbed off.”