The Purity of Vengeance (51 page)

Rose stepped inside. Everything was silent. Such was death.

They stood staring at the deceased for a moment, and then Rose let out a faint sigh. “I’d say that was her bridal bouquet, Carl,” she said.

Carl swallowed twice.

 • • • 

“Come on, let’s get out of here, Rose. What we just did was the height of stupidity,” said Carl as they came back out into the garden and stood for a second at the wrecked door. He picked up the metal doorknob from where he’d dropped it on the lawn, wiping it thoroughly with his handkerchief before tossing it back onto the ground. “I hope you haven’t had your fingers all over the place in there,” he said.

“Of course I haven’t. I was too busy thinking about getting a good swing in with my bag if you got shot to pieces,” she replied. How considerate of her.

“Give me the flashlight,” she commanded. “I hate tagging along behind. Can’t see a thing.”

She waved it about like an excited schoolboy engaged in nocturnal antics, so nobody for miles around would be in the slightest doubt that a break-in might be going on. Carl hoped the bloke with the garbage bin wasn’t still on the prowl.

“Keep the beam on the ground, Rose,” he instructed.

She did as she was told.

And then she stopped in her tracks.

The spot of blood in the grass wasn’t big, but it was there. She shone the flashlight around the area, finding a second patch in the driveway. And then a trail of drips, almost unnoticeable, leading to the outbuilding.

Carl’s gut feeling returned at full force. An unpleasant knot in his stomach.

If only they’d seen this before they broke in, he would have called for assistance. Now things weren’t quite as straightforward.

He pondered for a second.

Maybe they’d get away with it anyway. They had seen enough on the premises to indicate something suspicious might be going on. Surely that would be to their advantage? And who was to say
they
were responsible for breaking in?
They
certainly didn’t have to tell anyone.

“I’m going to call this in to Glostrup,” he said. “We could do with making it more official.”

“Didn’t you say Marcus Jacobsen told you to stay away from Curt Wad?” Rose asked, the beam of her flashlight sweeping between the three doors of the outbuilding.

“That’s true.”

“So what are you doing here at his house?”

“You’re right, but I’m going to call Glostrup anyway,” he replied, pulling his mobile out of his pocket. The Glostrup lads would be able to tell him what car Curt Wad owned and could put out an alert right away. Maybe Wad’s car was out there somewhere with an injured person in the boot, and that person might be Assad. Carl’s imagination was running riot.

“Wait,” said Rose suddenly. “Look!”

She shone the flashlight on the padlock that hung from the middle door of the old stables. A regular padlock of the sort you could get for ten kroner in Netto. Only this one, if examined closely, had two marks on it that could only be fingerprints.

She rubbed some spit on them, then sucked her finger.

It tasted of blood.

Carl looked closer at the lock, then took his pistol from its holster. The easiest course would have been to blow it to pieces, but Carl opted for the less dramatic solution, hammering the butt of his weapon down on the padlock until his fingers throbbed with pain.

Rose gave him a rare pat of approval when finally it gave way.

“It won’t make much difference now,” she said, feeling around for a light switch inside the door.

They blinked a couple of times as the flickering fluorescent light revealed a room that could have belonged to almost any outhouse in the town where Carl grew up. Shelves along one wall, with flower pots on them, discarded pans and receptacles, and wizened flower bulbs that hadn’t seen soil for years. Against the other wall was a humming deep freezer, in front of it a steel ladder leading up through a trapdoor to a loft where Carl could see a dimly illuminating naked lightbulb, 25 watts at most.

He climbed up and looked around a room cluttered to the gills with framed pictures, old mattresses, and heaps of black bin liners from which old clothes spilled.

He shone the flashlight over the sloping, hessian-clad walls and found himself thinking the place must have made a great den for the youngsters who had grown up here.

“Oh, God! Carl!” Rose suddenly exclaimed from below.

She was standing at the deep freezer with the lid raised and her head drawn back. Carl’s heart began to pound.

“This is gross!” she said, twisting her face in disgust.

OK, Carl thought to himself. If it was Assad she’d found in there, she’d have said something else.

He climbed down and peered into the freezer. It contained a number of transparent plastic bags, inside which were human fetuses. He counted eight. Eight small lives that never were. He wouldn’t have called it gross. The sight that confronted him gave rise to quite different emotions.

“We don’t know the circumstances here, Rose.”

She shook her head and tightened her lips. It was obvious she was deeply affected.

“The blood you saw out there could be from one of these bags. Maybe the new doctor dropped one in the driveway, maybe it dripped onto the flagstones. That could explain the fingerprints as well.”

Again she shook her head. “No, the blood out there is fresh, and these fetuses are frozen stiff.” She gestured toward the contents of the freezer. “Do you see a hole in any of these bags?”

It was an excellent observation. He seemed to be lagging behind at the moment.

“Listen, we’re not going get this sorted without help,” he said. “As I see it, there are three options. Either we get out of here while we’ve still got time, or we call Glostrup and inform them of our suspicions, which I reckon is what we should do. The third thing is we ought to try Assad’s office phone again,” he added. “He might be back now, for all we know.” He nodded as if to convince himself. “Maybe he’s finally got his mobile charged.”

He took out his phone. Rose shook her head. “Can you smell something burning?” she asked.

Carl couldn’t. In the meantime he got Assad’s voicemail at HQ again.

“Look,” said Rose. “There.” She pointed toward the ceiling.

He glanced up as he dialed Assad’s mobile. Was that smoke up there or just dust swirling in the dim light?

He watched as Rose’s swaying backside disappeared up the ladder while a phone company message informed him the subscriber was unavailable.

“There
is
something smoldering,” she called down to him. “But it’s coming from where you are.”

She was down the ladder in no time. “That loft extends farther than the space down here. There must be another room behind there,” she said, pointing to the end wall. “And right now there’s smoke coming from somewhere inside it.”

Carl saw right away that the wall seemed to consist of two large sheets of plasterboard.

If there’s a room behind that wall, there’s no way in from here, he thought, then saw the first wisps of smoke begin to seep out.

Rose leaped forward and started thumping her fist exploratively against the wall elements. “Listen! That one’s solid enough, but this one sounds hollow,” she said excitedly. “Like it’s metal or something. There’s a sliding door here, Carl, I know there is.”

He nodded and glanced around. Unless the door was activated by remote control, somewhere in the room there had to be the means to open it.

“What are we looking for?” Rose asked.

“A switch, wiring, anything on the wall that looks out of place,” he replied with a rising sense of panic.

“What about over there?” she said, pointing at the wall above the freezer.

Carl’s eyes scanned the surface until he saw what she meant. She was right. There was a line, a crack that seemed to indicate a repair of some kind.

His eyes followed its path to an old brass fitting above the freezer that looked like it had once belonged on a ship or to some large machine.

He lifted it from the nail on which it hung and behind it discovered a small metal flap, which he opened.

“Shit,” he blurted, as the smoke leaking out between the plasterboards thickened. Instead of a switch, the little panel behind the flap contained a display and a keypad with letters and numbers on it. Finding the combination that would activate the mechanism and open the sliding door seemed out of the question.

“People use all sorts of things for codes: the names of their kids, civil registration numbers, the wife’s birthday, lucky numbers. What the hell are we supposed to do?” Carl ranted, as he began to look around for something that might break down the wall.

In the meantime, Rose’s contrastingly calm systematic logic kicked in.

“We begin with what we can remember, Carl,” she said, stepping up to the keypad.

“Which is sod all in my case. The man’s name is Curt Wad and he’s eighty-eight years old. That’s all I can remember.”

“All right, no need to get your knickers in a twist. I get your drift,” Rose rejoined.

She typed in some characters: P-U-R-I-T-Y-P-A-R-T-Y. Nothing. T-H-E-
C-A-U-S-E. Nothing.

One by one she tried names and figures from the records and cuttings on Curt Wad that she’d been poring over during the past days. Even his wife’s birthday had stuck in her memory.

Then she paused for a moment and pondered, while Carl’s attention was divided between the smoke coming out of the wall and the passing headlights that occasionally swept over the building.

All of a sudden she lifted her head toward him, indicating that behind the emo eyeliner and Gothic demeanor resided the germ of an idea that seemed both logical and plausible.

He watched her fingers as they typed.

H-E-R-M-A-N-S-E-N

There was a click. The wall elements slid open and revealed a hidden room filled with smoke that now billowed forth toward them. At the same moment the abrupt infusion of oxygen sent a flame leaping into the air.

“Shit!” Carl yelped. He snatched the flashlight from Rose’s hand and plunged into the room.

He saw another freezer and shelving that looked like it housed an archive. But it was the limp figure that lay outstretched on the floor that focused his gaze and all of his senses.

The fire licked at Assad’s trouser legs. Carl dragged him out, yelling for Rose to throw her coat over their colleague and suffocate the flames.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, he’s hardly breathing,” she stuttered in a frenzy, Carl glancing back into the room only to note that the fire had taken hold to the extent that the idea of retrieving anything at all from inside was futile.

The last thing he noticed before they dragged Assad outside were the words daubed in blood on almost every available surface of the cramped little room, “ASSAD WAS HERE!” And then, on the floor by the deep freezer, the melting remains of a lighter that looked remarkably like the one Carl had left on his desk only hours before.

 • • • 

The paramedics arrived first and attended to Assad. They put him on a stretcher, an oxygen mask pumping life back into his lungs.

Rose was silent as the grave. The way she looked, she was liable to break down any minute.

“He’s going to be all right, yeah?” Carl asked the ambulance crew, struggling to contain a turmoil of emotions he hardly knew he possessed. He raised his eyebrows in a feeble attempt to stem the tears, but they came anyway. “For fuck’s sake, Assad. Come on, mate!”

“He’s still alive,” one of the men replied. “But a case of smoke inhalation like this is often going to be fatal. There can be thermal damage, burns to the respiratory system, poisoning. You should be prepared for the worst. The blow to the back of his head looks nasty, too. There may well be a fracture of the skull and internal hemorrhaging. Do you know him well?”

Carl gave a slow nod. This was hard on him, but nothing compared to how Rose was taking it.

“There’s always a hope,” said the paramedic, as firemen shouted instructions to one another and began rolling out hoses.

Carl put his arm around Rose and felt her trembling.

“It’s going to be OK, Rose. He’ll pull through, I know he will,” he told her, realizing how empty the words sounded.

When the medic arrived in a response vehicle a moment later, he proceeded to tear open Assad’s shirt to gain a quick impression of his heart rate and breathing, but something seemed to get in the way. He tore some more, and removed a handful of papers from Assad’s clothing, tossing them aside onto the ground.

Carl picked them up.

There were two distinct sets. One consisted of a number of sheets stapled together. On the front was written
THE CAUSE: MEMBERSHIP LIST.

The second was a thin folder:
FILE NO. 64
.

40

September 1987

It was twenty past
five and Nete had knitted row upon row.

Beneath the wide-open windows, people of all shapes, sizes, and ages had passed by, some even pausing momentarily in front of the building. But there had been no sign of Curt Wad.

Nete tried to recall her last conversation with him. The exact moment she had put the phone down. Hadn’t she been left feeling that he had swum into her net? And yet she had been mistaken. Or had she?

Perhaps he was standing down there behind the trees, keeping watch. Could he have seen Philip Nørvig enter and fail to come out again? Was that it?

She rubbed the back of her head pensively. Without Curt Wad there would be no triumph, no peace of mind, and now she felt nervous tension building into a headache. If she didn’t take her medicine straightaway, the migraine would set in and she had neither the time nor the energy to contend with it. At this moment she needed more than ever to think clearly and be at the ready.

She went into the bathroom, her head beginning to pound, took her pills from the medicine cabinet, and realized there was only one left.

No matter, there’s another bottle in the cupboard with the table linen, she thought. She stepped back out into the hallway and looked along its length at the closed door of the dining room. She would have to go in there again, to the sight of the silver cutlery, the decanter, the crystal glasses, and the corpses that had now consumed their last supper.