Søs frowned and drew back.
“Pregnant?” She said the word as if it were in the same category as contagion, leprosy, and the bubonic plague. “No, I’m positive that she wasn’t.” She glanced over at her lover and rolled her eyes.
“How can you be so sure?”
“How do you think? If she was as together as everybody thought, she wouldn’t have had to borrow tampons from me every time she got her period.”
“You’re saying that she had her period just before she disappeared?”
“Yes, the week before. We always got our periods at the same time when I was working for her.”
He nodded. That was something she would know. “Do you know if she had a lover?”
“I’ve already been asked that a hundred times before.”
“Refresh my memory.”
Søs took out a cigarette and tapped it firmly on the table. “All the men stared at her as if they wanted to throw her down on the table. How would I know if one of them had something going on with her?”
“In the report it says that she received a valentine telegram. Did you know it was from Tage Baggesen?”
She lit her cigarette and disappeared behind a blue haze. “No, I didn’t.”
“So you don’t know whether there was something going on between them?”
“Something going on? This was five years ago, as I’m sure you’ll recall.” She blew a cloud of smoke right at Carl’s face, eliciting a wry smile from her lover.
Carl moved back a bit. “Now, listen here. I’m going to take off in four minutes. But before I do, let’s pretend that we want to help each other out, OK?” He looked Søs right in the eye; she was still trying to hide her selfloathing behind a hostile expression. “I’ll call you Søs, OK? I’m usually on first-name terms when I share a smoke with someone.”
She moved the hand with the cigarette to her lap.
“So now I’m going to ask you this, Søs. Do you know about any incidents that happened just before Merete disappeared? Anything we ought to investigate further? I’m going to rattle off a list of possibilities, so just stop me if I come to anything relevant.” The nod he gave her wasn’t returned. “Phone conversations of a personal nature? Little yellow notes that were left on her desk? People who behaved toward her in an unprofessional manner? Boxes of chocolates, flowers, new rings on her fingers? Did she ever blush while staring into space? Was she having a hard time concentrating during those last few days?” He looked at the zombie sitting across from him. Her colorless lips hadn’t moved a millimeter. Another dead end. “Did her behavior change in any way? Did she go home earlier? Did she leave the parliament chamber to make calls on her cell phone out in the corridor? Did she arrive later than usual in the morning?”
Again he looked up at Søs, giving her an emphatic nod, as if that might wake her from the dead.
She took another puff of her cigarette and then ground the butt out in the ashtray. “Are you done?” she asked.
He sighed. Stonewalled! What else did he expect from this cow? “Yeah, I’m done.”
“Good.” She raised her head. For a moment he saw a woman who possessed a certain gravitas. “I told the police about the telegram and about her meeting someone at Café Bankeråt. I saw her write that down in her appointment diary. I don’t know who she was going to meet, but it did make her cheeks flush.”
“Who could it have been?”
She shrugged.
“Tage Baggesen?” he asked.
“It could have been anybody. She met so many people at Christiansborg. There was also a man who was part of a delegation who seemed interested. But there were lots of men who were interested.”
“A delegation? When was that?”
“Not long before she disappeared.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“After five years? God, no.”
“What sort of delegation?”
She gave him a surly look. “Something to do with research on the immune system. But you interrupted me,” she said. “Merete also received a bouquet of flowers. There was no doubt she had some sort of relationship that was quite personal. I have no idea what was connected with what, but I’ve told the police all this before.”
Carl scratched his neck. Where had this information been recorded?
“Who did you talk to about this, if I might ask?”
“I don’t remember.”
“It wasn’t Børge Bak from the Rapid Response Team, was it?”
She pointed her index finger at Carl, as if to say “Bingo.”
That damned Bak. Did he always leave out so many details when he wrote up his reports?
Carl looked over at Søs’s chosen cellmate. She wasn’t exactly lavish with the smiles. Right now she was just waiting for him to disappear.
Carl nodded to Søs and stood up. Between the bay windows hung various tiny studio photographs in color, as well as a couple of large black-and-white pictures of Søs’s parents, taken in better days. They must have been quite attractive at one time, but it was hard to tell, given the way Søs had scratched and scored all the faces in the photos. He leaned down to look at the small framed pictures. From the clothes and posture, he recognized one of the many PR photos of Merete Lynggaard. She too had lost most of her face in a network of scratches. So Søs collected pictures of people she hated. Maybe he could have won a place for himself if he’d made an effort.
For once Børge Bak was alone in his office. His leather jacket was even more creased than usual. Indisputable proof that he was working hard, day and night.
“Didn’t I tell you not to come barging in here, Carl?” He slammed his notepad on the desk and glared at him.
“You fucked up, Børge,” said Carl.
Whether it was the use of his first name or the accusation, Bak’s reaction was instantaneous. All the furrows on his forehead went vertical, reaching right up to his comb-over.
“Merete Lynggaard got a bouquet of flowers a few days before her death. And from what I’ve heard, she never used to receive flowers.”
“So what?” Bak’s expression couldn’t have been more condescending.
“We’re looking for someone who might have committed a murder. Has that slipped your mind? A lover could be a likely candidate.”
“We looked into all that.”
“But it wasn’t included in your report.”
Bak shrugged. “Take it easy, Carl. You, of all people, should talk about other people’s work. The rest of us are working our asses off while you’re just sitting on your backside. Don’t you think I know that? I put what’s important into the report, and that’s that,” he said, smacking his pad on the desktop.
“You neglected to include the fact that a social worker named Karin Mortensen observed Uffe Lynggaard playing a game that indicated he remembered the car accident. Maybe he also remembers something from the day when Merete disappeared. But apparently you didn’t pursue that angle very far.”
“Karen Mortensen. Karen spelled with an
e
, not an
i
, Carl. Try listening to yourself. And don’t come here trying to teach me anything about being thorough.”
“Does that mean you realize how significant this piece of information from Karen Mortensen could be?”
“Shut the fuck up. We checked it out, okay? Uffe didn’t remember shit about anything. That kid’s got nothing upstairs.”
“Merete Lynggaard met a man a few days before she died. He was part of a delegation on research into the workings of the immune system. You didn’t put anything about that in your report either.”
“No, but we looked into it.”
“So then you must know that a man got in touch with her, and there was clearly strong chemistry between them. That’s what her secretary, Søs Norup, says she told you, at any rate.”
“Yes, damn it. Of course I know that.”
“Then why isn’t it in your report?”
“I don’t know. Probably because it turned out that the man was dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yes, burned to death in a car accident the day after Merete disappeared. His name was Daniel Hale.” He enunciated the name carefully, so that Carl would take note of what a good memory he had.
“Daniel Hale?” Apparently Søs had forgotten his name over the years.
“Yes, he was working on the placenta research that the delegation was trying to get funded. He had a laboratory in Slangerup.” Bak presented these facts with supreme self-confidence. He had a good handle on this part of the case.
“If he didn’t die until the following day, he still could have had something to do with Merete’s disappearance.”
“I don’t think so. He came home from London on the afternoon she drowned.”
“Was he in love with her? Søs hinted that might be the case.”
“If so, I feel sorry for the man. She wasn’t having any of it.”
“Are you sure, Børge?” His colleague clearly wasn’t comfortable hearing Carl use his first name. So that settled things — he was going to hear it nonstop. “Maybe it was this Daniel Hale she had dinner with at Bankeråt. What do you think, Børge?”
“Listen, Carl. There’s a woman in the cyclist murder case who’s talked to us, and now we’re hot on the trail. I’m busy as fuck right now. Can’t this wait until some other time? Daniel Hale is dead. He wasn’t even in the country when Merete Lynggaard died. She drowned, and Hale didn’t have shit to do with it, OK?”
“Did you try to find out whether Hale was the person she had dinner with at Bankeråt a week earlier? There’s nothing about it in the report.”
“Listen to me! The investigation finally pointed to the likelihood that her death was an accident. Besides, there were twenty of us on the case. Go ask somebody else. Now, get out of here, Carl.”
24. 2007
If he relied exclusively on
his sense of smell and hearing, it was hard to distinguish the basement in police headquarters from Cairo’s teeming alleyways on Monday morning when Carl arrived at work. Never before had that venerable building ever reeked so much of cooking smells and exotic spices, and never before had those walls heard the likes of such twisted tones.
A secretary from Admin who had just been down to the archives glared at Carl as she passed him, her arms filled with case files. Her expression said that in ten minutes the whole building was going to know that everything had run amok down in the basement.
The explanation was to be found in Assad’s pygmy office, where a sea of baked goods and pieces of foil holding chopped garlic, little green bits, and yellow rice adorned the plates on his desk. No wonder it was causing raised eyebrows.
“What’s going on here, Assad?” shouted Carl, turning off the cassette player. Assad merely smiled. Evidently he wasn’t aware of the cultural gap that was presently in the process of gnawing its way deep under the solid foundations of police headquarters.
Carl dropped heavily onto the chair across from his assistant. “It smells wonderful, Assad, but this is the police department. Not a Lebanese takeaway in Vanløse.”
“Here, Carl. And congratulations, Mr. Superintendent, one might say,” replied Assad, handing him a buttery dough triangle. “This is from my wife. My daughters cut out the paper.”
Carl followed Assad’s hand as he gestured around the room. Now he noticed the brilliantly colored tissue paper draped over the bookshelves and ceiling lights.
This was not going to be easy.
“I also took some to Hardy yesterday. I have read most of the case files to him out loud now, Carl.”
“Is that right?” He could just picture the nurses as Assad fed Egyptian rolls to Hardy. “You mean you went to see him on your day off?”
“He is thinking about the case, Carl. A fine man. He is a fine man.”
Carl nodded and took a bite. He planned to go and see Hardy tomorrow.
“I have put together all the papers about the car accident on your desk, Carl. If you like I can also talk a little about what I have been reading.”
Carl nodded again. Before he knew it, his assistant would be writing the report before they were even done with the case.
In other parts of Denmark on Christmas Eve in 1986, the temperature was up to six degrees Celsius, but on Sjælland they weren’t as lucky, and it had cost ten people their lives. Five of them died on a narrow country road that ran through a wooded area in the Tibirke Hills; two of them were the parents of Merete and Uffe Lynggaard.
They had tried to pass a Ford Sierra on a stretch of road where the wind had created a carpet of ice crystals, and that’s where things went terribly wrong. No one was assigned blame, and no lawsuits were filed for damages. It was a simple accident, except that the outcome was anything but simple.
The car they tried to pass ended up in a tree and was still burning when the fire department arrived, while the car belonging to Merete’s parents lay upside down fifty yards farther away. Merete’s mother was thrown through the windshield and landed in the thickets, her neck broken. Her father was not as lucky. It took him ten minutes to die. Half of the engine block had punctured his abdomen and a tree branch had pierced his ribcage. It was assumed that Uffe remained conscious the whole time, because when the firemen cut him out of the car, he watched their efforts with wide-open, frightened eyes. He refused to let go of his sister’s hand, even when they pulled her out on to the road to give her first aid. He never let go, even for a second.
The police report was simple and brief, but the newspaper reports were not. It was too good a story.
In the other car, a little girl and her father died instantly. The circumstances were especially tragic because only the older boy escaped relatively unharmed. The mother was in the last stages of pregnancy, and the family had been on its way to the hospital. While the firemen tried to put out the blaze under the hood of the car, the mother gave birth to twins with her head resting on the body of her dead husband and one leg pinned beneath the car seat. In spite of heroic efforts to cut all of them out of the car in time, one of the babies died, and the newspapers had a guaranteed front-page story for Christmas Day.