A Conspiracy of Faith (69 page)

They let him get on, albeit reluctantly. He was right.

Carl nodded to Lars Brande, who was looking pretty shaken. Two men
gone at once. A stabbing, and most likely a death. His team was in tatters. People he thought he knew had let him down unforgivably.

He was gutted, no doubt about it. His brother and the pianist, too, for that matter. Silent, moping faces, all three of them.

“We need to establish René Henriksen’s true identity, so think hard. Is there anything you know that might help us? Anything at all. Has he got kids? If so, what are their names? Is he married? Where has he worked? Where does he do his shopping? What bakery does he use when it’s his turn to get the pastries in? Think!”

Three of the bowling team didn’t react at all. The fourth, the mechanic they called Throttle, shifted uneasily on his bar stool. He didn’t seem quite as affected as the others.

“Actually, I have wondered once or twice how come he never talked about his work,” he said after a moment. “I mean, the rest of us do all the time.”

“And?”

“Well, he always seemed to be so much better off than the rest of us financially, so he must have a pretty decent job. Always got more rounds in after tournaments than we did. So, yeah, I reckon he’s well-heeled in comparison. Take that bag there, for example.”

He jerked his thumb in the direction of the floor behind an adjacent bar stool.

Carl stepped backward at once and found himself staring at an odd-looking sports bag composed of different compartments joined together by zips.

“That’s an Ebonite Fastbreak,” said the mechanic. “Do you want to know what one of them costs? Thirteen hundred, at least. You should see mine. Not to mention the balls he uses…”

Carl wasn’t listening anymore. This was just too incredible for words. Why hadn’t they thought of this before? Here was the guy’s bag, for Chrissake.

He shoved the bar stool away and pulled the bag toward him. It was
like a little suitcase on wheels, the various compartments seemingly able to combine in different ways.

“You sure this is his?”

The mechanic nodded, surprised that his information should create such interest.

Carl waved his Roskilde colleagues over. “Gloves, quick!” he barked.

One of them delved into his pockets and produced a pair of latex examination gloves.

Carl felt sweat begin to drip from his brow and onto the blue sports bag as he opened it. It was like entering some long-forgotten burial chamber.

The first thing he saw was a large, multicolored bowling ball. Smooth and shiny, consummately modern. Then a pair of shoes, a tin of talcum powder, and a small bottle of Japanese peppermint oil.

He held the bottle up in front of the bowling team. “What would he use this for?”

The mechanic stared. “It was just something he did. A drop in each nostril just before a game. Probably reckoned it helped his breathing. For concentration, maybe. You can try it yourself. Wouldn’t recommend it, though. Horrible stuff.”

Carl unzipped the other compartments. Another bowling ball in one, the next empty. And that was it.

“Can I see, too?” Assad asked as Carl straightened up and stepped back. “What about these front compartments? Have you checked them?”

“I was just going to,” Carl replied, his thoughts already elsewhere.

“You wouldn’t know where he bought this bag, I suppose?” he asked no one in particular.

“Off the Internet,” said three voices all at once.

The bloody Internet.

“What about the shoes and the other stuff?” he asked, as Assad pulled a pen from his pocket and proceeded to poke it into the finger holes of one of the bowling balls.

“We get all our gear off the Internet. It’s cheaper,” said the mechanic.

“Didn’t you ever talk about more private things? About your childhoods and growing up? How you got into bowling? The first time you scored over two hundred?”

Come on, you oiks. You’re holding back on me, you must be
.

“Actually, no. Apart from work, the only thing we ever talked about was the game,” the mechanic continued. “And when it was over, we talked about how we’d got on.”

“Here, Carl,” Assad said suddenly.

Carl stared at the piece of paper in his assistant’s hand. It was compressed tightly into a ball.

“I found it at the bottom of the thumbhole,” Assad explained.

Carl stared at him, at a loss. The bottom of the thumbhole, was that what he said?

“That’s right, yeah,” Lars Brande said. “René always lined his thumbholes. His thumbs were rather short. He had this idea that he had to have contact with the bottom. Said it gave him a better feeling of the ball when he put the spin on it.”

Brande’s brother Jonas chipped in: “Everything always had to be just right with him. Lot of rituals. The peppermint oil, the thumbholes, the color of the ball. He couldn’t ever play with a red ball, for instance. Said it took away his focus.”

“Yeah,” the pianist added. It was the first time he had opened his mouth. “And he used to stand like three or four seconds on one leg before making his run-up. We should never have called him Three. Stork would have been better. We’ve often joked about it.”

They all broke into laughter, then stopped just as abruptly.

“This one is from the other ball,” said Assad, handing Carl another wad of paper the same as the first. “I was very careful when extracting it.”

Carl smoothed out the two paper pellets on the counter.

And then he looked up at Assad in disbelief. What the hell would he do without him?

“These are receipts, Carl. Receipts from an ATM.”

Carl nodded. Some bank staff would be putting in overtime now.

A checkout receipt from Kvickly and two withdrawal receipts from Danske Bank. Three small, utterly unremarkable slips of paper.

They were back in business.

His breathing was calm
. It was how he kept the body’s automatic defense mechanisms at bay. If he allowed adrenaline into his veins, his heart would accelerate, and that was the last thing he wanted since he was already bleeding profusely from his hip.

He took stock.

The important thing was that he had got away. He had no idea how they had come so close, but he would analyze that later. Right now, the long and short of it was that there was nothing in his rearview mirror to indicate that he was being followed.

The question was what the police’s next move would be.

There were thousands of Mercs like the one he drove. Many had been taxis; they were all over the place. But if police blocked the roads leading in and out of Roskilde, stopping any one of them would be a simple matter, indeed.

He had to proceed as quickly as possible. Get back home, bundle his wife’s body into the boot along with the most incriminating of his packing cases. Lock the place up, and then get off to the cottage by the fjord.

He would make it his base for the coming weeks.

And if he found it necessary to venture out, he would just have to disguise himself. He had always protested when the team had had their photographs taken with trophies they’d won, and mostly he had succeeded in avoiding it. But they would find photos of him if they were determined enough. No doubt about it.

A couple of weeks on his own at Vibegården was in every respect a good idea. Get the bodies dissolved in the tank. Then get out.

He would have to give up the house in Roskilde, and Benjamin would have to remain with his sister. When the time came, he would collect him again. Two or three years in the police archives and the case would be covered in dust.

He had thought ahead and had already stashed some necessities at Vibegården for just such an eventuality as this. New identity papers and a reasonable amount of money. Not enough for a life of luxury but sufficient to live simply in some out-of-the-way place and then gradually get things started again. The idea of a couple of years’ peace actually appealed to him.

He glanced into the rearview mirror and began to laugh.

They’d asked if he could sing.

“Of course I can, of course I ca-aa-an!” he sang out, chuckling to himself at the thought of the prayer meetings at the Mother Church in Frederiks. Everyone would surely remember how out of tune he sang there. That was the whole idea. So they thought they knew him, but they didn’t.

The fact of the matter was he had a good voice.

But there was one thing he would have to do: find a plastic surgeon who could remove the scar behind his right ear, the gash from the nail when they caught him spying on his stepsister. How the hell did they find out about his scar? Had he been careless with his disguise at some point? He’d always made sure he covered it up ever since that strange boy he killed had asked him how it got there. What was his name again? It had got to the stage now where he could hardly tell them apart.

He let it go and thought instead of what had happened at the bowling center.

If they reckoned they were going to find his prints on that bottle of mineral water, they were mistaken. He had wiped it clean with a serviette while they were questioning Lars Brande. They wouldn’t find anything on the tables or chairs, either. He had been much too careful for that.

He smiled to himself. Yes, he had been meticulous.

And then he remembered the bowling bag. Two bowling balls with his fingerprints all over them, and in the thumbholes two receipts that could lead them to his address in Roskilde.

He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on staying calm so as not to worsen the bleeding.

Nonsense, he thought to himself. They won’t find those receipts. Not to begin with, at least.

No, he had all the time in the world. Maybe they would trace him back to his house in Roskilde in a day or two. But all he needed was half an hour.

He turned down his road and immediately saw the young man on the lawn in front of the house. Standing there, calling Mia’s name.

Another obstacle.

Remove him from the equation. Do it now.

He would park the car a little farther away.

He reached for the blood-covered knife in the glove compartment, then drove slowly past the house, turning his head away as he passed. Her suitor sounded like a randy tomcat, wailing pathetically like that. Did she really prefer that adolescent to him?

And then he noticed the elderly couple across the road peeping through their curtains. How come old people always had to be so nosy?

He speeded up.

There was nothing he could do. Not with witnesses.

They would just have to find the body in the house. What difference would it make? The police already suspected him of serious crimes. He wasn’t sure which, but serious enough.

Maybe after a while they would find a packing case full of prospectuses from estate agents concerning weekend retreats for sale, but what good would it do them? They were in the dark. No documents existed to indicate which of them he had decided to buy.

He had no immediate cause for concern. The deeds to Vibegården were at the house itself, in the box with the money and the passports. There was nothing to worry about.

If only he could staunch this bleeding soon and didn’t get stopped on the way, everything would be all right.

He found the first-aid box and stripped to the waist.

The stab wounds were deeper than he had anticipated. The second of them, especially. He had felt sure he’d jerked Pope’s hand toward him with just the right degree of force, but somehow he had expected him to offer more resistance.

That was why he was bleeding so much. He would have to take the time to remove the traces from the front seat of the Mercedes before he got rid of it.

He found the syringe and the anesthetic and sterilized the wounds. And then he injected himself.

He sat for a moment and looked around the living room. He really hoped they weren’t going to find Vibegården. This was the place where he felt most at home. Away from the world, away from its deceit and all its faithlessness.

Next he prepared the needle and suture. Within a minute, he was able to jab the needle into the flesh around his wounds without feeling a thing.

Another couple of scars for the plastic surgeon, he thought to himself, and laughed.

When he had finished, he inspected his work and laughed once again. It was hardly an expert job, but the bleeding had stopped.

He applied a compress with sticking plaster, then lay down on the sofa. When he was ready, he would go down to the boathouse and kill the children. The sooner he did it, the sooner he could be rid of the bodies. And before long he would be away again.

Ten minutes. Then he would go to the outbuilding and get the hammer.

Twenty minutes went by
before they knew who had made the cash withdrawal and where he lived. The name was Claus Larsen, and it would take them less than five minutes to get to his house.

“What are you thinking, Carl?” Assad asked as Carl negotiated the roundabout on Kong Valdemars Vej.

“I’m thinking it’s a good thing we’ve got backup on our tail and that they remembered to bring their service pistols.”