A Conspiracy of Faith (7 page)

Her name was Isabel, this woman who now housed him, though she was hardly as exotic as her name. Swedish crime novels on the shelves and Anne Linnet on the CD player. This was the straight and narrow.

He looked at his watch. She could be home in half an hour, but there was plenty of time to check whether any unpleasant surprises might be in store. He sat down at her desk and switched on her laptop, growled audibly when it asked for a password. He tried six or seven combinations in vain before lifting the desk-protector to discover a comprehensive list of Internet passwords. It was always the same: women such as Isabel either used birthdays, the names of their children or dogs, phone numbers, or
simply a straight sequence of digits, often in descending order, or they wrote down their passwords and concealed them no more than a couple of meters from the keyboard so they could read them without getting up.

He read her dating correspondence and noted to his satisfaction that in him she had found the man she had been seeking for some time. Perhaps he was a couple of years younger than she had imagined, but what woman would decline?

He went through her e-mail contacts on Outlook. One of them was a regular correspondent. His name was Karsten Jønsson. A brother, perhaps, or the ex-husband. It wasn’t important. The significant thing was the suffix of his e-mail address: police.dk.

Not good, he thought to himself. When the time came, he would have to refrain from violence and instead make do with verbal abuse or simply leave his dirty laundry around the house, which according to her online dating profile was one of her major turn-offs.

He fished the little BlueTinum flash drive out of his pocket and stuck it into the USB port. Skype account and contacts, all at once. Then he typed his wife’s mobile number.

She would be shopping at this time. Always the same routine. He would suggest she buy champagne and put it in the fridge, ready.

At the tenth ring, he frowned. She had never failed to answer before. If there was one thing his wife clung to, it was that mobile of hers.

He called again. No answer.

He leaned forward and stared down at the keyboard, feeling his cheeks flush.

She had better have a good explanation. Revealing unknown aspects of her personality now might force him to demonstrate some new aspects of his own.

And she wouldn’t like that. She wouldn’t like that at all.

“Well, I must say
that Assad’s observation has given us food for thought, Carl,” said the chief, wriggling his shoulders into his leather jacket. In ten minutes he would be standing on a street corner in the Nordvest district, studying bloodstains from the night’s shooting. Carl did not envy him.

He nodded. “You agree with Assad, then? That there might be a connection between the fires?”

“That same groove in the victims’ finger bones in three out of four incidents. It certainly gives us something to think about. We’ll just have to wait and see. The material’s with the pathologists, so it’s their shout now. But the nose, Carl…” He tapped an index finger against his distinctive protuberance. Not many noses had been poked into as many rotten cases as Jacobsen’s had. Most likely Assad and Jacobsen were right. There was a connection. Carl sensed it himself.

He mustered a semblance of authority in his voice, no easy matter on the wrong side of ten o’clock. “You’ll be taking over from here then, I assume.”

“For the moment, yes.”

Carl nodded. Now he could go back downstairs and mark the old arson case closed as far as Department Q was concerned.

It would look good in the statistics.

“Come and see, Carl. Rose has something to show you.” The reverberating voice made it sound like a troop of howler monkeys from Borneo had
appropriated the lower chambers. Assad certainly had no problems with his vocal cords, that much was plain.

He stood beaming, clutching a ream of photocopies. As far as Carl could make out, they weren’t case documents. More like blowups of something fragmentary that at best could be described as blurred.

“Look what she did.”

Assad pointed down the corridor at the partition wall the joiner had just put up in order to contain the asbestos contamination. Or rather, he pointed to where it ought to have been visible. For both the wall and the door in it were completely covered with photocopies that had been meticulously put together to form one single image. If anyone wanted to come through, they would need a pair of scissors.

Even at a distance of ten meters, it was clear that this was an enormous blowup of the message in the bottle.

HELP
, it read, spanning the entire width of the corridor.

“Sixty-four sheets of A4, no less. Great, is it not, Carl? These are the last five in my hand here. Two hundred and forty centimeters high and one hundred and seventy wide. Big, yes? Is she not clever?”

Carl stepped a couple of meters closer. Rose was on her knees with her backside in the air, sticking Assad’s copies into place in the bottom corner.

Carl considered first her backside, then the work the two of them had produced. The enormous blowup had its advantages and its drawbacks, that much was obvious straightaway. Areas where the letters had been absorbed into the paper were a blur, whereas others containing practically illegible, spidery handwriting that the Scottish forensics team had tried to reconstruct suddenly became meaningful.

The upshot of it all was that at a stroke they now had at least twenty more legible characters to add to the puzzle.

Rose turned toward him for a second, ignoring his little wave and dragging a stepladder out into the middle of the corridor.

“Get up there, Assad. I’ll tell you where to put the dots, yeah?”

She shoved Carl aside and positioned herself in the exact spot where he had been standing.

“
Not too hard, Assad. We need to be able to rub them out again.”

Assad nodded from on high, pencil at the ready.

“Start underneath ‘HELP’ and in front of ‘he.’ My eye makes out three distinct blotches, one before ‘he’ and two after. Are you with me?”

Assad and Carl considered the mottled stains on the paper. They looked like gray cumulus clouds alongside the touched-up “h” and “e.”

Then Assad nodded and placed a dot on each of the three blotches.

Carl took a step to one side. It seemed reasonable enough. Underneath the clearly legible heading
HELP
, the two characters that followed were flanked by visible blurs. Seawater and condensation had played their part. The three blood-written characters had long since dissolved and been absorbed into the pulp. If only they could figure out what they were.

He stood watching for a moment as Rose bossed Assad around. It was a meticulous business. And where would it lead, when it came down to it? To endless hours of guesswork, that was where. And what for? The message could go back decades. Besides, it was still quite possible that it might all have been just a practical joke. The hand seemed clumsy, as though it belonged to a child. A couple of Cub Scouts, a little nick in the finger, and there you have it. But then again…

“I’m not sure about this, Rose,” he ventured. “Maybe we should just forget all about it. We’ve enough to be getting on with as it is.”

He noted with bewilderment the effect of his words. Rose began to quiver, like jelly. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought she was about to burst into laughter. But Carl knew Rose all too well, and for that reason he retreated. Only a step, but enough to avoid the explosive splutter of invective that suddenly showered toward him.

It meant that Rose was dissatisfied with his meddling. He wasn’t so gormless that he didn’t get the gist.

He nodded. Like he said, there was plenty else to be getting on with. He knew of at least two folders of important case documents which, positioned correctly, would cover his face nicely while he caught up on his sleep. Rose and Assad could amuse themselves with their little puzzle while he took care of business.

Rose registered his cowardly retreat. She turned slowly and looked daggers at him.

“Ingenious idea, though, Rose. Very well done,” he blurted out, but he was cutting no ice.

“I’ll give you a choice, Carl,” she hissed. Assad, at the top of the ladder, rolled his eyes. “Either you shut your gob, or else I’m off home. And for your information, I might just send my twin sister over instead, and do you know what’ll happen then?”

Carl shook his head. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know. “Let me guess. She’ll be over here with three kids and four cats, a pair of lodgers, and some shit of a husband. Am I right? Your office’ll be a bit cramped, yeah?”

She planted her fists firmly on her hips and leaned menacingly toward him. “Whoever filled you with that crap doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Yrsa’s living with me, and she’s got neither cats nor lodgers.” The word “MORON!” lit up in her black-painted eyes.

He held up his hands in front of him in capitulation.

The chair in his office beckoned.

“What’s all that about her twin sister, Assad? Has Rose threatened to send her over before?”

Assad bounced jauntily up the steps of the rotunda alongside him, but Carl could already feel the lead accumulating in his legs.

“Don’t take things so personal, Carl. Rose is like sand on a camel’s back. Sometimes it makes the arse itch and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all a question of how thick-skinned a person is.” He turned his face to Carl and flashed two neat rows of pearly white enamel. If anyone’s arsehole had been armored with hard skin through the years, it was probably his.

“She has told me about her sister, Yrsa. I remember her name because it sounds like Irma, the supermarket. I don’t think they are very good friends together,” Assad added.

Yrsa? Is anyone really called that anymore? Carl wondered as they reached the third floor, his heart valves dancing the fandango.

“All right, boys?” said a delightfully familiar voice on the other side of the counter. Lis was back! Lis, forty years of eminently well-preserved flesh and brain cells. A true gift to the senses, in stark contrast to Ms. Sørensen, who smiled benevolently at Assad while rearing her head toward Carl like a cobra poked with a stick.

“Tell the detective inspector what a lovely time you and Frank had together in the States, Lis.” The heron smiled ominously.

“It’ll have to wait, I’m afraid,” Carl replied swiftly. “Marcus is waiting for us.”

He pulled in vain at Assad’s sleeve.

Thanks for fuck all, Assad, he thought to himself as Lis’s glowing red lips gleefully related the events of a whole month spent in America in the company of a wilted husband who had suddenly turned into a bison in the double bed of their rented motor home. These were images Carl tried with all his might to erase from his mind’s eye, along with thoughts of his own involuntary celibacy.

“Bloody old hag,” he muttered under his breath. Assad wasn’t much better, either. Not to mention the lucky bastard who had ensnared Lis. And then there was Médecins Sans Frontières or whatever they called themselves, who had enticed Mona, the focus of his desire, and dragged her away to darkest Africa.

“When does that psychologist of yours come home again, Carl?” Assad asked as they stood outside the door of the briefing room. “What was her name, now? Mona, is that right?”

Carl chose to ignore Assad’s cheeky smile and opened the door. Most of Department A were there already, rubbing their eyes. They had spent a couple of exhausting days on the outside, up to their ears in society’s quagmire, but now Assad’s discovery had hauled them back to the surface again.

It took Marcus Jacobsen ten minutes to brief his team, and both he and
Lars Bjørn seemed more than a little excited. Assad’s name was mentioned several times. His beaming smile was met by the narrowed eyes of his colleagues, clearly puzzled as to how this monkey of a cleaning assistant had suddenly appeared in their midst.

But no one had the energy to ask questions. Essentially, Assad had discovered a highly plausible link between old and new cases of arson. All the bodies found in the remains of the blazes shared the same groove in the bone of the little finger of the left hand, apart from the one body on which that finger was missing. It transpired that the pathologists had made a note of it in each case, though no one had made the connection.