A Conspiracy of Faith (60 page)

They were all there. Mostly former traffic police, but Jannik the maintenance supervisor, too, and one of the commissioner’s old chauffeurs.

Sandwiches, cigarettes, black coffee, and Gammel Dansk. Pensioners were on a cushy number at Police HQ.

“You bearing up all right, Carl?” one of them asked. A bloke he’d sometimes had dealings with in the Gladsaxe Police District.

Carl nodded.

“Dreadful business what happened to Hardy and Anker. Very nasty case indeed. Did you ever get to the bottom of it?”

“Can’t say we did.” He turned his gaze to the window above the row of tables. “You lot don’t know you’re born, having daylight in here. We could do with some ourselves.”

The Burial Club all frowned at once.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“All the rooms down here have got windows in them,” one of them said.

“Not where we are they haven’t.”

Jannik, the maintenance supervisor, got to his feet. “I’ve been here thirty-seven years, and I know every nook and cranny in this old place. Would you be kind enough to show me this room of yours. I’ve to be getting on soon.”

So much for his Gammel Dansk.

“There you go,” Carl said a minute later. He gestured at the wall to which his flatscreen was affixed. “Where’s this window of yours, then?”

Jannik peered. “What do you call that?” He pointed straight at the wall.

“Erm, a wall?”

“It’s plasterboard, Carl. Plasterboard. My lot put it up when this place was turned into a stockroom. There were shelving units all over. Here, and further along where that cute little secretary of yours is. Same shelves the Support Unit later used to store all those helmets and visors. Same shelves
that are cluttering up the bloody place now.” He laughed. “Couldn’t work it out, eh, Carl? Do you want me to knock a hole through so you can see out, or can you do it yourself?”

He could hardly credit it. “What about the other side?” He gestured toward Assad’s cubbyhole.

“That place? That’s never been an office, Carl. It’s a broom cupboard. There’s no window in there.”

“OK. I reckon Rose and I can do without, too, in that case. Maybe later, once they’ve finished clearing this place out and I find Assad another office.”

Jannik shook his head and chuckled.

“Hell of a bloody mess they’re making down here,” he said as they stood for a moment in the corridor. “What’s that there in aid of?” He pointed to what was left of the plasterboard partition, the remains of which were now lined up along the wall from Assad’s case overviews and on past Rose’s office.

“We put up a dividing wall because of those pipes there. There’s asbestos falling from them, apparently. Health and Safety kicked up a fuss.”

“What,
them
?” The maintenance supervisor jerked a finger at the ceiling as he turned to go back to his Gammel Dansk. “You can pull all them down if you want. The heating pipes run through the crawl space now. Those ones on the ceiling have got no use anymore.”

His laugh echoed through most of the basement.

Carl had hardly stopped swearing when Rose appeared. Maybe she’d been doing her job for once.

“They’re both alive, Carl. Lisa Karin Krogh is still critical, but the other one’s going to pull through. They’re pretty sure of that now.”

He nodded. In that case, they’d better get out there and have a word with her.

“As for their religious affiliations, Isabel Jønsson is regular Church of Denmark, and Lisa Krogh belongs to something called the Mother Church. I spoke to their neighbor in Frederiks. It seems to be a weird sect that
keeps itself to itself. The neighbor woman reckoned Lisa Krogh’s husband had been dragged into it by his wife. The husband calls himself Joshua, and she goes by the name of Rachel.”

Carl took a deep breath.

“But that’s not all,” she went on, shaking her head. “Local plod in Slagelse found a duffel bag in the undergrowth at the scene of the accident. Slung out of the vehicle when it crashed, so it seems. And what do you think’s in it? Only a million kroner in used notes, that’s all.”

“Now I have heard it all,” Carl heard Assad say just behind him. “Almighty Allah!”

Almighty Allah, indeed. Carl’s words exactly.

Rose cocked her head. “And to top it all, I’ve just found out that Lisa Karin Krogh’s husband dropped dead on the train between Slagelse and Sorø on Monday evening. About the same time his wife crashed the car. Heart attack, the autopsy says.”

“Fucking hell,” Carl exclaimed with a mounting sense of foreboding. He almost felt a shiver run down his spine.

“I’ll just stop in and see how Hardy’s doing before we go up to Intensive Care,” said Carl. He took the STOP paddle they used to pull in traffic offenders and put it on the dashboard where it could be seen through the windscreen. It was a good way of placating meter attendants in cases of dodgy parking.

“You stay outside, OK? There’s a couple of things I need to ask him.”

Carl found Hardy in a room with a view. Big windows filled with sky, ragged clouds like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle someone had dropped on the floor.

Hardy said he was doing fine. His lungs were on the mend and the tests almost done. “But they don’t believe me when I say I can twitch my wrist,” he said.

Carl let it pass. What good would it do, to crush his hopes?

“I had a session with a shrink today, Hardy. Not Mona, some twerp called Kris. He told me you’d put some things down about me in a report. A report I’ve never seen. Does that ring a bell?”

“All I wrote was that you knew the case better than me and Anker.”

“Why would you feel the need to say that?”

“Because you did. You knew Georg Madsen, the old guy we found murdered.”

“No I didn’t, Hardy. I’d never seen him before in my life.”

“Come off it, you used him as a witness in another case. I don’t recall the details, but I remember you did.”

“You’re remembering wrong, Hardy.” Carl shook his head. “Anyway, it makes no difference now. I’m here on other business. Just thought I’d pop in and see how you were doing. Assad says to say hello. He’s here, too.”

Hardy raised his eyebrows. “Before you go, Carl, there’s something I want you to promise me.”

“Anything at all, mate. Just say the word.”

Hardy swallowed a couple of times before revealing what was on his mind. “Let me come back to your place again. If I can’t, I’ll die.”

Carl looked him in the eye. If anyone could prompt his own expiry by willpower alone, it was Hardy.

“No problem, Hardy,” he replied softly.

Vigga could stay put with that Gherkin bloke of hers from Turbanistan.

They stood waiting for the lift at Entrance 3 when the doors opened and one of Carl’s old instructors from the police academy stepped out.

“Karsten!” Carl exclaimed, extending a hand in greeting. He received a smile in return when the man eventually recognized him.

“Carl Mørck,” he said after a pause. “Older now, I see.”

Carl smiled. Karsten Jønsson. Another promising career that had ended up in the traffic department. Another policeman who had moved sideways so as not to let the system grind him down.

They stood for a moment, exchanging reminiscences and a few words about how being on the force was so much harder now than it used to be, and then they shook hands to say good-bye.

But somehow shaking Karsten Jønsson’s hand gave Carl an odd feeling, before his brain registered why. An unsettling, indefinable something that brought his system to a standstill. First this feeling, then the realization that he was missing something.

It came to him at once. Of course! It was too much of a coincidence.

The man seemed dejected, Carl reflected. He had stepped out of the lift that went up to Intensive Care. His name was Jønsson. That was it.

“Tell me, Karsten, are you here because of Isabel Jønsson?” he asked.

The man nodded. “She’s my younger sister. How would you be involved?” He shook his head, unable to see the connection. “Aren’t you Department A?”

“Not anymore. But listen, there’s no need to worry. I’ve got a couple of questions I need to ask her, that’s all.”

“You’ll have a job. Her jaw’s immobilized, and she’s heavily sedated. I’ve just been with her, and she didn’t say a word. They sent me out again. Seems she’s being transferred to another department. They told me to wait in the cafeteria for half an hour.”

“OK. I think we’ll go up anyway before they move her. Nice running into you, Karsten.”

Another lift pinged its arrival, and a man in a white coat stepped out.

He glanced at them with a somber look.

They stepped in and pressed the button.

Carl had seen the unit countless times before. People unfortunate enough to get in the way of lunatics with weapons often ended up here. Last stop but one for the victims of violent crime.

The medical staff who worked here were top-notch. Of all places on earth, this was where he would probably want to come if things really went wrong.

He and Assad went through the doors and into a hive of activity. It looked like they’d walked in on an emergency. Not the best of times to appear, he could see that.

He showed his ID at the desk and presented Assad as well. “We’re here to ask Isabel Jønsson a few questions. I’m afraid it’s quite urgent.”

“And I’m afraid that won’t be possible at the moment. Lisa Karin Krogh, who’s in the same room as Isabel Jønsson, just passed away a few minutes ago, and Isabel has taken a turn for the worse. Besides that, one of our nurses has just been attacked. There was a man here. He may have tried to kill them, we don’t know yet. Everything’s chaos. The nurse is unconscious.”

They had been sitting
in the waiting area for half an hour while the Intensive Care Unit was in turmoil.

Carl got to his feet and went up to the desk. They couldn’t wait any longer.

“You wouldn’t have any information on Lisa Karin Krogh, would you? The woman who died just now?” he inquired, producing his badge again for the secretary. “I need a phone number for her home address.”

A moment later he stood with a note in his hand.

He took his mobile out of his pocket and went back to Assad, who sat tapping his feet as though they were a pair of drumsticks.

“Stay here and hold the fort,” he said. “I’ll be out by the lifts. Give us a shout when they say we can go in, OK?”

Then he called Rose. “I need some info relating to this number. Names, civil registration numbers of everyone belonging to the address, OK? And Rose, I want you to do it right away, are you with me?”

She huffed a bit but said she would see what she could come up with.

He pushed the button for the lift and went down to the ground floor.

He must have passed the cafeteria fifty times over the years without ever stopping. All that fattening
smørrebrød
at overinflated prices. This time was no different. He was hungry, certainly, but he had a different agenda.

“Karsten Jønsson!” he called out, before catching sight of the fair-haired man craning his neck to see who wanted him.

Carl asked him to come along, and as they walked he explained what had happened upstairs after Jønsson was made to go down and wait.