Mercy (29 page)

Carl looked it up on the map. It was only a few hundred yards away from where Daniel Hale had burned to death on the Kappelev highway. He remembered standing there. It was the road he’d looked down as they’d surveyed the countryside. The road with the windmill.

He felt the adrenalin starting to pump faster. Now they had an address. And they could drive there in twenty minutes.

‘Should we call down there first then, Carl?’ Assad handed him the phone number.

He gave his helper a blank look. So it wasn’t always pearls of wisdom that fell from the man’s lips. ‘That’s a great idea, Assad, if we want to find an empty house.’

Originally it must have been an ordinary farm with a farmhouse, pigsty and barn arranged around a cobblestone courtyard. The house was so close to the road that they could look right into the rooms. Behind the whitewashed buildings were three or four larger ones. A couple of them had presumably never been put to use. This seemed in any case true of a building thirty to forty feet high, with gaping holes where the windows should have been set in. It was incomprehensible that the authorities had ever allowed something like that to be built. It completely ruined the view down to the fields, where yellow carpets of rapeseed gave way to meadows so green that the colour couldn’t possibly be reproduced in any painting.

Carl scanned the landscape but didn’t see a soul. Not near any of the buildings, either. The farmyard seemed just as neglected as everything else. The whitewash on the house was flaking off. Piled up by the road, a little further to the east, were heaps of junk and building debris. Aside from the dandelions and flowering fruit trees that towered over the corrugated Eternit roof, the whole place looked terribly bleak.

‘There is no car in the courtyard, Carl,’ said Assad. ‘Maybe it was a long time ago when somebody lived here.’

Carl clenched his teeth, trying to fend off his disappointment. His guts told him that Lars Henrik Jensen wasn’t here. Damn it. Damn it to hell.

‘Let’s go in and look around, Assad,’ he said as he parked the car fifty yards further along the road.

They set off in silence. Through the hedge they reached the back of the house and a garden where fruit bushes and ground-elder were fighting for space. The bay windows of the house were grey with dirt and age. Everything seemed deed.

‘Look at this,’ whispered Assad, pressing his nose against one of the windowpanes.

Carl leaned in to look. The inside of the house seemed abandoned too. It was almost like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, except there were no banners or thorn bushes. Dust covered the tables, the books and newspapers, and all sorts of papers. In one corner cardboard boxes were piled up that had never been unpacked, and there were carpets that were still rolled up.

Here was a family whose life had been interrupted during a happier time.

‘I think they were in the process of moving in when the accident happened, Assad. That’s what the man at Risø said too.’

‘Yes, but look over there in the back then.’

Assad pointed at a doorway on the other side of the room. Light was streaming in, and the floor behind was polished and shiny.

‘You’re right,’ said Carl. ‘It looks different.’

They made their way through a herb garden where the bumblebees buzzed around flowering chives and reached the other side of the house, down in one corner of the courtyard.

Carl moved close to the windows, which were fastened shut. Through the first panes he was able to get a glimpse of a room with bare walls and a couple of chairs. He pressed his forehead against the window and saw the room take shape. There was no doubt it was in use. A couple of shirts lay on the floor. The blankets on the box mattress had been pushed aside, and on top of them lay a pair of pyjamas, a kind that he was certain he’d seen in a department store catalogue not long ago.

He concentrated on controlling his breathing and instinctively placed his hand on his belt, where he’d worn his service weapon for years. But it was months since he’d carried a gun.

‘Someone slept in that bed recently,’ he said quietly to Assad, who was looking through the windows a little further away.

‘Somebody was also here,’ said Assad.

Carl went over and looked inside. Assad was right. The kitchen was neat and clean. Through a door in the wall directly across from them, they could see the dusty living room that they had looked into from the other side. It was like a mausoleum. A sacred place, not to be disturbed.

But the kitchen had definitely been in use quite recently.

‘A deep freezer, coffee on the table, an electric kettle. There are also a couple of full bottles of cola over there in the corner,’ said Carl.

He turned towards the pigsty and the other buildings behind it. They could continue their search without getting a court order, but they’d have to suffer the consequences afterwards if it proved to be fruitless since they couldn’t very well claim that the opportunity would be lost if they searched the house at some other time. Actually, they could wait until morning. Yes, it might even be better to come back the next day. Maybe someone would be home by then.

He nodded. It was probably best to wait and follow proper legal procedures. He took a deep breath. In reality, he didn’t feel like doing either.

As Carl stood there thinking, Assad suddenly took off. For a man with such a compact, heavy body, he was surprisingly nimble. He crossed the yard in a couple of bounds and then went out into the road to wave down a farmer who was driving his tractor.

Carl went over to join them.

‘Yes,’ he heard the farmer say as he approached, the tractor idling. ‘The mother and son still live there. It’s a bit odd, but apparently she’s set up home in that building over there.’ He pointed to the last of the adjacent buildings. ‘I think they must be in. At least, I saw her outside this morning.’

Carl showed the man his police badge, which prompted the farmer to turn off the tractor.

‘What about the son?’ said Carl. ‘Is his name Lars Henrik Jensen?’

The farmer squinted one eye to think. ‘Nay, I don’t think that’s his name. He’s a real strange, tall one. What the devil is his name?’

‘So it’s not Lars Henrik?’

‘No, that’s not it.’

See-saws and merry-go-rounds. Back and forth and up and down. Carl had been through this rollercoaster ride, countless times before. And he was sick and tired of it, among other things.

‘You say they live in that building over there?’ Carl pointed.

The farmer nodded, launching a blob of snot over the bonnet of his brand-new Ferguson tractor.

‘How do they make a living?’ asked Carl, gesturing at the open countryside.

‘I don’t know. I lease a few acres from them. Kristoffersen, over there, leases some too. They’ve got some fallow land that’s subsidized, and she must also have a small pension. And a couple of times a week a van arrives from somewhere, bringing plastic items for them to clean, I think. It also brings them food. I think the woman and her son manage somehow.’ He laughed. ‘This is farm country, you know. Out here we usually have everything we need.’

‘An official van from the municipality?’

‘No, it sure isn’t. It’s from some shipping company or something like that. It’s got a sign on the side that you sometimes see on ships on TV, but I don’t know where it’s from. All that stuff with oceans and seas has never interested me.’

After the farmer chugged off towards the windmill, Carl and Assad studied the buildings beyond the pigsty. Strange that they hadn’t noticed them from the road, because they were quite large. It was probably because the hedges had been planted so close together and had already sprouted leaves, thanks to the warm weather.

In addition to the three buildings surrounding the courtyard and the unfinished structure, there were three low buildings located close together next to a level area covered with gravel. Presumably at one time the plan had been to lay asphalt over there. By now weeds had sprung up everywhere, and the only gap in the greenery was a wide path connecting all the buildings.

Assad pointed at the narrow wheel tracks on the path. Carl had already noticed them. The width of a bicycle wheel, but parallel. Most likely from a wheelchair.

Carl’s mobile rang, shrill and loud just as they were approaching the building that the farmer had pointed out. He saw Assad’s expression as he cursed himself for not turning off the ringtone.

It was Vigga. Nobody could match her ability to call him at the most inconvenient moments. He’d stood in the ooze of putrefying corpses as she asked him to bring home cream for their coffee. She’d called him when his mobile lay in his jacket pocket under a bag in the police car, as he was in hot pursuit of some suspects. Vigga was good at that sort of thing.

He set the ringtone to OFF.

It was then that he raised his head and looked straight into the eyes of a tall, gaunt man in his twenties. His head was strangely elongated, almost deformed, and one entire side of his face was marred by the craters and stretched skin created by burn scars.

‘You can’t come here,’ he said in a voice that belonged neither to an adult nor a child.

Carl showed him his police badge, but the man didn’t seem to understand what it meant.

‘I’m a police officer,’ Carl said in a friendly tone. ‘We’d like to talk to your mother. We know this is where she lives. I’d appreciate it if you’d ask her if we could come in for a moment.’

The young man didn’t seem impressed by either the badge or the two men. So he probably wasn’t as simple-minded as he first appeared.

‘How long am I going to have to wait?’ asked Carl brusquely. The man gave a start. Then he disappeared inside the house.

A few minutes passed, as Carl felt the pressure increase in his chest. He cursed the fact that he hadn’t taken his service weapon out of the armoury at police headquarters even once since he’d come back from sick leave.

‘Stay behind me, Assad,’ he said. He could just picture the headlines in tomorrow’s newspaper: ‘Police detective sacrifices assistant in shooting drama. For the third day in a row, Deputy Police Superintendent Carl Mørck from Department Q creates a scandal.’

He gave Assad a shove to emphasize the seriousness of the situation and then took up position close to the door. If they came out carrying a shotgun or anything like that, at least his assistant’s head wouldn’t be the first thing the muzzle pointed at.

Then the young man came out and invited them in.

She was sitting in a wheelchair, smoking a cigarette. It was hard to guess her age, since she looked so grey and wrinkled and worn out, but judging by the age of her son, she couldn’t be more than sixty-one or sixty-two. She sat hunched over and her legs looked strangely awkward, like branches that had been snapped in half and then had to find some way to grow back together. The car crash had really left its mark on her; it was pitiful and sad to see.

Carl looked around. It was a huge room. A good twenty-five hundred square feet or more, but in spite of the twelve-foot-high ceiling, the place reeked of tobacco. He followed the spiralling smoke from her cigarette up to the skylights. There were only ten Velux windows, so the room was quite dim.

There were no walls for separate rooms. The kitchen was closest to the front door, the toilet off to one side. The living-room area, filled with furniture from IKEA and with cheap rugs on the cement floor, extended for fifteen or twenty yards and then ended at the space where the woman presumably slept.

Aside from the nauseating air in the room, everything was meticulously neat. This was where she watched TV and read magazines and apparently spent most of her life. Her husband had died, so now she had to manage as best she could. At least she had her son to help her out.

Carl saw Assad’s eyes making a slow survey of the room. There was something devilish in his eyes as they slid over everything, occasionally pausing to zoom in on some detail. He was extremely focused, his arms hanging at his sides and feet planted firmly on the floor.

The woman was reasonably friendly, although she shook hands only with Carl. He made the introductions and told her not to be nervous. They were looking for her elder son, Lars Henrik. They wanted to ask him some questions; nothing special, it was just a routine matter. Could she tell them where they might find him?

She smiled. ‘Lasse is a seaman,’ she said. So she called him Lasse. ‘He’s not home right now, but he’ll be back ashore in a month. So I’ll let him know. Do you have a business card I can give him?’

‘No, unfortunately.’ Carl attempted a boyish smile, but the woman wasn’t buying it. ‘I’ll send you my card when I get back to the office. I’d be happy to.’ He tried the smile again. This one was better timed. It was the golden rule: first say something positive, then smile in order to seem sincere. To do it in reverse could mean anything: flattery, flirtation. Anything that was to one’s advantage. The woman knew that much about life, at least.

Carl made as if to leave and grabbed hold of Assad’s sleeve. ‘All right, Mrs Jensen, we have a deal. By the way, what shipping line does your son happen to work for?’

She recognized the sequence of statement and smile. ‘Oh, I wish I could remember. He works on so many different ships.’ And then came her smile. Carl had seen yellow teeth before, but never any as yellow as hers.

‘He’s a first officer. Isn’t that right?’

‘No, he’s a steward. Lasse is a good cook. He’s always been good with food.’

Carl tried to picture the boy with his arm on Dennis Knudsen’s shoulder. The boy they called Atomos because his deceased father had manufactured something for nuclear reactors. When had the son developed his knowledge about cooking? In the home of the foster family who beat him? In Godhavn? When he was a young boy at home with his mother? Carl had also been through a lot in life, but he couldn’t fry an egg. If it weren’t for Morten Holland, he didn’t know what he’d do.

‘It’s wonderful when things go well for one’s children. Are you looking forward to seeing your brother again?’ Carl asked the disfigured young man who was watching them suspiciously, as if they’d come to steal something.