A Conspiracy of Faith (5 page)

“Well, all right, boss.” Assad rocked back and forth in his worn-out Ecco shoes. “I will begin to photocopy in ten minutes. Originals for you, copies on the wall for me.”

Marcus Jacobsen was looking older all of a sudden. A lot of work had passed over his desk of late. Not least the ongoing gang war and its attendant shootings in the Nørrebro district, but also a series of dreadful fires, all of them arson and resulting in enormous financial losses, as well as having cost human lives. Always at night. If Marcus had slept three hours a day this past week, he’d been doing well. Maybe it was worth being accommodating, whatever Marcus had on his mind.

“What’s up, Chief? Dragging me all this way upstairs again?” Carl said.

Marcus fingered his empty cigarette packet. Poor sod, thought Carl, he’ll never get past withdrawal. “Yes, I know there’s not much room for you up here, Carl. But strictly speaking, I’m not allowed to have you in the basement. And now Health and Safety are on the phone telling me you’re obstructing one of their officers.”

“It’s all sorted, Marcus. We’re having a partition wall put up slap in the middle of the corridor with a door in it and everything. It’ll all be shut off.”

The bags under Marcus’s eyes seemed to grow heavier. “That’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t want to hear, Carl,” he said. “Which is why you and Rose and Assad are going to have to camp out up here. I can’t be taking flak from Health and Safety. There’s enough bother as it is. You know how much I’ve got on my plate at the moment. See for yourself.” He indicated the neat new flatscreen on the wall. TV2 News was running a feature on the impact of the gang war. Calls for a funeral procession through the streets of Copenhagen to honor one of the victims merely inflamed matters further. People were braying about how come the police didn’t just take the troublemakers by the scruff of the neck so the streets could be safe again.

Marcus Jacobsen was indeed a worried man.

“OK, if you move us up here, you can shut down Department Q right now, this very second.”

“Don’t tempt me, Carl.”

“Meaning you lose eight million a year in funding. Wasn’t that what we were allotted, eight million? Hell of a price for petrol for that old wreck we drive around in. Oh, yeah, and three salaries, of course, for me and Rose and Assad. Eight million. Not exactly plausible, is it?”

The homicide chief gave a sigh. Carl had him by the short and curlies. Without that funding, his own department would be short of at least five million a year. Creative redistribution. A bit like a government support scheme for outlying regions. Robbery made legal.

“Solutions, please,” he said eventually.

“Where were you thinking of putting us up here, anyway?” Carl asked.
“In the bathroom? In the window alcove where Assad was yesterday? Or maybe here, in your office?”

“There’s room in the corridor.” Marcus Jacobsen winced noticeably as he spoke. “We’ll find somewhere better soon. That’s been the idea all along, Carl.”

“OK, fine by me. We’ll be needing three new desks, then.” Carl stood and extended his hand as though it was a done deal.

The homicide chief backtracked slightly. “Just a minute,” he said. “I sense something fishy going on here.”

“Fishy? You get three extra desks, and when Health and Safety come back, I’ll send Rose upstairs to pretty up the empty chairs.”

“They’ll never buy it, Carl.” He paused a moment and looked like he might be taking the bait. “Then again…Sit down a minute, will you, Carl? There’s something I want you to have a look at. Remember three or four years ago we assisted our colleagues in Scotland?”

Carl nodded hesitantly. Was Marcus now about to impose bagpipes and haggis on Department Q? It was bad enough with Norwegians once in a while, but Scots!

“We sent them some DNA from a Scot doing time in Vestre, I’m sure you remember. It was Bak’s case. They solved a murder on that count, and now they’ve sent us something in return. A police expert in Edinburgh, Douglas Gilliam, has sent us this parcel. There’s a letter inside. A message in a bottle, apparently. They’ve had a linguist take a look at it and discovered it must be from Denmark.” He picked up a brown cardboard box. “They want to know the upshot, if we ever get a handle on it. It’s all yours, Carl.”

He handed him the box and gestured dismissively, plainly finished with him.

“What do you expect me to do with it?” Carl inquired. “How about passing it on to the post office instead?”

Jacobsen smiled. “Very funny, Carl. Sadly, Post Danmark aren’t exactly specialists in solving mysteries, more in creating them, I’d say.”

“We’re busy enough as it is,” Carl countered.

“I don’t doubt it, Carl. But see what you can do. It’s probably nothing. Besides, it meets all the criteria for Department Q. It’s old, it’s unsolved, and no one else could be arsed.”

Something else to stop me putting my feet up, Carl mused to himself, weighing the box in his hand as he descended the stairs.

But then again.

An hour’s shut-eye was hardly going to be detrimental to Danish–Scottish relations.

“I’ll be finished with it all by tomorrow. Rose is helping me,” said Assad as he considered where the case he now stood with in his hand might originally have fitted into Carl’s three-pile filing system.

Carl growled. The Scottish box was on the desk in front of him. Premonitions tended to stick, and he had a bad feeling about the cardboard box with the broken customs authority seal on it.

“This is a new case, perhaps?” Assad inquired with interest, his gaze fixed on the brown cube. “Who has opened the box?”

Carl jerked his thumb upward in the direction of the third floor.

“Rose, come here a minute, will you?” Carl yelled into the corridor.

Five minutes passed before she appeared: enough time in her view to signal just who was in charge. You got used to it.

“What would you say to being assigned your first proper case, Rose?” He nudged the cardboard box gently across the desk toward her.

He was unable to see her eyes beneath the jet-black fringe of her punk hairdo, but he felt sure they were hardly sparkling with enthusiasm.

“Let me guess,” she said. “It’s to do with child porn or trafficking, am I right? Something you couldn’t be arsed with. In that case, the answer’s no. If you don’t fancy it yourself, you can give it to our little camel driver to amuse himself with. I’ve got other things to be doing.”

Carl smiled. She hadn’t really sworn, and she hadn’t kicked the door frame. And describing Assad as a camel driver was almost a compliment, coming from her. Anyone would think she was in a good mood. He nudged
at the box again. “It’s a letter. A message in a bottle. I haven’t seen it yet. We could unpack it together.”

She wrinkled her nose. Distrust was her partner in life.

Carl pulled the flaps of the box apart, removed handfuls of polystyrene packing, and retrieved a folder that he placed on the desk. Then he rummaged around in more polystyrene and found a plastic bag.

“What’s that inside?” Rose asked.

“Shards from the bottle, I suppose.”

“You mean they broke it?”

“No, they took it apart. There’s a set of instructions in the folder telling you how to put it together again. Should be a piece of cake for a handywoman like you.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and weighed the bag in her hand. “It’s not very heavy. How big was it?”

He shoved the case file toward her. “Read it yourself.”

She left the box where it was and went off down the corridor. Peace at last. In an hour it would be time to go home. He would take the train back to Allerød, buy a bottle of whisky, anesthetize himself and Hardy with a glass each, one with a straw and one with ice. A quiet night in.

He closed his eyes and dozed for all of ten seconds until Assad suddenly made his presence felt in front of him.

“I have found something, Carl. Come and have a look on the wall.”

Funny how being off in the land of nod for only a few seconds always impacted so forcefully on one’s sense of balance, Carl thought to himself, clutching dizzily at the corridor wall as Assad proudly indicated one of the case documents that was affixed to the notice board.

Carl dragged himself back to the real world. “Say that again, Assad. My thoughts were somewhere else.”

“I asked only if you thought the chief might not consider this case in light of all the fires in Copenhagen.”

Carl tested the floor beneath his feet to make sure it was steady, then went up to the wall upon which Assad’s index finger was now planted. The case was fourteen years old. A fire in which a body had been found.
Murder, perhaps, in the area close to the city lake called Damhussøen. A case concerning the discovery of a body so badly burned that neither time of death nor gender could be established. All genetic material had perished. No missing person matched the body. Eventually, the case had been shelved. Carl remembered it well. It had been one of Antonsen’s.

“What makes you think it has anything to do with the arsons going on now, Assad?”

“Arsons?”

“The fire-raising.”

“Because!” said Assad, pointing eagerly at a photograph detailing skeletal remains. “This round groove in the bone of his short finger. It says something about it here, too.” He removed the plastic folder from the notice board and found the page from the report. “Here it is described. ‘As though made by a signet ring over a period of many years,’ it says here. A groove going all the way around.”

“So what?”

“On the short finger, Carl.”

“And?”

“I remember from Department A, there was a body in the first fire that was missing its short finger altogether.”

“OK. The correct term is little finger, Assad. Not short.”

“Exactly. And in the next fire was a groove in the short finger of the man who was found. Just like here.”

Carl’s eyebrows lifted demonstrably.

“I think you should go up to the third floor and tell the chief what you’ve just told me, Assad.”

Assad beamed. “I would never have seen it if it wasn’t for that photo being stuck to the wall in front of my nose all this time. Funny, don’t you think?”

It was as though with her new assignment a chink had appeared in Rose’s impenetrable armor. At any rate, she did not begin by waving the document
in his face and shouting but instead removed his ashtray and placed the letter carefully, almost respectfully, on his desk.

“It’s very hard to read,” she said. “It seems it was written in blood, which gradually absorbed dampness from the condensation and drew it into the paper. Besides, the capitals are poorly done. The heading’s quite clear, though. See how legible it is. It says ‘HELP.’”

Carl leaned grudgingly forward and studied what remained of the capital letters. The paper may once have been white, but now it was brown. Its edges were in tatters in several places, with bits missing, presumably lost when the paper was unfolded after being in the water.

“What tests have been done on it, does it say? Where was it found? And when?”

“It was found off the Orkney Islands. Caught up in a fishing net. In 2002, apparently.”

“In 2002! They weren’t in a hurry to pass it on, then.”

“The bottle had been left on a windowsill and forgotten. That’s most likely the cause of the condensation. It’ll have been in the sun.”