Bak’s hunched shoulders produced a couple of folds in his leather jacket, the only sign of how tense this information was making him feel.
Carl went for the jugular. “That’s not all, Børge. Did you happen to know, for example, that Daniel Hale was gay? Or that he was out of the country during the period when he presumably was in contact with Merete Lynggaard? You should have taken the trouble to show Hale’s photo to Merete’s secretary, Søs Norup, or to the head of the delegation, Bille Antvorskov. Then you would have known at once that something wasn’t right.”
Bak slowly sat down. Thoughts were clearly swirling around in his head. Of course he’d been involved in tons of cases since then, and the workload in the department had always been onerous, but damned if Bak wasn’t feeling an urge to squirm.
“Do you think we can still rule out the possibility that some sort of crime was committed?” Carl turned to look at his boss. “What do you think, Marcus?”
“We assume that you’re going to investigate the circumstances surrounding Daniel Hale’s death. Am I right, Carl?”
“We’re already working on that.” Again he turned to Bak. “I’ve got a former colleague up in Hornbæk in the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries who’s really on the ball and knows how to think.” He tossed the photos on the desk in front of Marcus. “If it hadn’t been for Hardy, I wouldn’t have come in contact with a photographer by the name of Jonas Hess and acquired a couple of photos. They prove that Merete Lynggaard brought her briefcase home with her from Christiansborg on her last day there; they catch her lesbian secretary showing a great interest in her boss; there are ones of Merete having a conversation with someone on the stairs of Christiansborg a few days before she disappeared. A meeting that apparently upset her.” He pointed to the photo of her face and the uneasy look in her eyes. “It’s true that we only have a picture of the guy from the back, but if you compare his hair and posture and height, he actually looks a lot like Daniel Hale, even though that’s not who he is.” Carl then placed one of the photos of Hale from the InterLab brochure next to the others.
“Now I ask you, Børge Bak: Don’t you think it’s rather odd for her briefcase to disappear somewhere between Christiansborg and Stevns? Because you never did find it, did you? And don’t you think it’s also odd that Daniel Hale should die the day after Merete’s disappearance?”
Bak shrugged. Of course he thought so; the idiot just didn’t want to admit it.
“Briefcases go missing,” he said. “She could have left it at a gas station or somewhere else on her way home. We searched her house and her car, which was still on the ferry. We did what we could.”
“Oh, right. OK, you say she might have forgotten it at a gas station, but are you sure about that? As far as I can tell from her bank statement, she didn’t take care of any errands on her way home that day. You didn’t do your homework very well, did you, Bak?”
By now Bak looked ready to explode. “I’m telling you that we put a lot of effort into searching for that briefcase.”
“I think both Bak and I realize that there’s more work for us to do here,” the boss tried to mediate.
More work for “us,” he’d said. Was everybody suddenly going to start meddling in the case?
Carl looked away from his boss. No, of course Marcus Jacobsen didn’t mean anything by it. Because no help was ever going to be forthcoming from upstairs. Carl knew all too well how things were run in this place.
“I’m going to ask you again, Bak. Do you think we’ve covered everything now? You didn’t include Hale in your report, and there was nothing about Karen Mortensen’s observations regarding Uffe Lynggaard. Is there anything else missing, Børge? Can you tell me that? I could use some support right now. Do you get it?”
Bak stared down at the floor as he rubbed his nose. In a second he’d raise his other hand to stroke his comb-over. He could have jumped up and made a hell of a ruckus, considering all the insinuations and accusations being leveled at him. That would have been perfectly understandable, but when it came right down to it, Bak was a detective with a capital
D
. And right now his mind was far away.
Jacobsen gave Carl a look that said “take it easy,” and so Carl kept his mouth shut. He agreed with Marcus. Bak should be given a little time to think.
They sat like that for a whole minute before Bak raised his hand to touch his comb-over. “The skid marks,” he said. “The skid marks from the Daniel Hale accident, I mean.”
“What about them?”
Bak looked up. “As it says in the report, there were none on the road from either of the vehicles. I mean not even a shadow of a mark. It seemed as if Hale wasn’t paying attention and simply veered over the line into the other lane. Then: Kapowwww!” He clapped his hands together. “No one managed to react before the collision occurred. That was the assumption.”
“Yeah, that’s what it says in the police report. Why are you mentioning this now?”
“I was driving past the accident site a few weeks later and remembered where it happened, so I stopped to take a look.”
“And?”
“As the report said, there were no skid marks, but it was easy to see where the accident occurred. They hadn’t yet removed the shattered, scorched tree or repaired the wall, and tracks from the other vehicle were still visible in the field.”
“But? You’re leading up to something here, right?”
Bak nodded. “But then I discovered that there actually were some marks seventy-five feet farther along the road toward Tåstrup. They were already rather blurry, but I could see they were quite short, only about a foot and a half long. And I thought to myself: What if these marks were from the same accident?”
Carl was having trouble following Bak and was annoyed when his boss beat him to it. “So they were marks left by someone trying to avoid a collision?” Marcus asked.
“They could have been, yes.” Bak nodded.
“So you mean Hale was about to collide with something — and we don’t know what that was — but then he put on the brakes and swerved around it?” Marcus went on.
“Yes.”
“And then there was a vehicle in the oncoming lane?” Jacobsen nodded. It sounded plausible.
Carl raised his hand. “The report says that the collision occurred in the oncoming lane. But it sounds like you’re saying that wasn’t necessarily the case. You think it happened in the middle of the road, and at that spot the oncoming vehicle had nothing to do with it. Am I right?”
Bak took a deep breath. “That’s what I thought for a moment, but then I decided otherwise. But now I can see it might have been a possibility, yes. Something or someone could have come into his lane, so Hale had to swerve, and then an oncoming vehicle rammed into his car at full speed right near the central line. Maybe even deliberately. Maybe we could have found signs of acceleration farther along in the oncoming lane if we’d gone another hundred yards down the road. Perhaps the other vehicle sped up in order to be in the perfect position to ram Hale’s car as he swerved into the center of the road to avoid colliding with someone or something.”
“And if that something was a person who stepped into the lane, and if that person and the individual who ran into Hale were in cahoots, then it’s no longer an accident. It’s homicide. And if that’s true, there’s also reason to believe that Merete Lynggaard’s disappearance was part of the same crime,” concluded Jacobsen, jotting down a few notes.
“It’s possible.” Bak was frowning. He wasn’t feeling very good about things at the moment.
Carl stood up. “There were no witnesses, so we’re not going to find out anything more. Right now we’re looking for the driver of the other vehicle.” He turned to face Bak, who seemed to have shrunk inside his black leather jacket.
“I had a suspicion things might have happened the way you just described, Bak. So I just want you to know that you’ve been a big help, in spite of everything. Be sure to come and see me if you remember anything else, OK?”
Bak nodded. He was looking solemn. This had nothing to do with his personal reputation; it had to do with a professional assignment and resolving it properly. The man deserved some respect for that.
Carl almost felt like giving him a pat on the back.
“I have the good and the bad news after my drive to Stevns, Carl,” said Assad.
Carl sighed. “I don’t care which I hear first, Assad. Just go ahead and fire away.”
Assad perched himself on the edge of Carl’s desk. Before long he’d be sitting on Carl’s lap.
“OK, the bad first.” If it was normal for him to accompany bad news with that kind of smile, then he was really going to split his sides laughing when he delivered the good news.
“The man who drove into Daniel Hale’s car is dead too,” Assad said, clearly eager to see Carl’s reaction. “Lis phoned and said it. I have written it just down here.” He pointed to a number of Arabic symbols that could just as well have meant it was going to snow in the Lofoten Islands in the morning.
Carl didn’t have the energy to react. It was so annoying and so typical. Of course the man was dead. Had he really expected anything else? That he was alive and kicking and would immediately confess that he’d impersonated Hale, murdered Lynggaard, and then killed Hale afterward? Nonsense!
“Lis said that he was a thug from out in the sticks, Carl. She said that he was in prison several times for dumb driving. Do you know what she means by ‘thug’ and ‘sticks’?”
Carl nodded wearily.
“Good,” said Assad, and continued reading aloud from his hieroglyphics. At some point Carl was going to have to suggest that his assistant write his notes in Danish.
“He lived in Skævinge in northern Zealand,” he went on. “They found him dead then in his bed with quite a lot of vomit in his windpipe and with an alcohol of at least a thousand. He had also taken pills.”
“I see. When did this happen?”
“Not long after the accident. In the report it says that the whole shit with him came from that.”
“You mean he drank himself to death because of the accident?”
“Yes. Because of post-dramatic stress.”
“It’s called post-
traumatic
stress, Assad.” Carl drummed his fingers on the desk and closed his eyes. There may have been three people out on the road when the collision took place; if so, it was most likely murder. And if it was murder, then the thug from Skævinge really did have something to drink himself to death over. But where was the third person, the man or woman who had waded out in front of Daniel Hale’s car, if that was what actually happened? Had he or she also killed themselves with booze?
“What was the man’s name?”
“Dennis. Dennis Knudsen. He was twenty-seven when he died.”
“Do you have the address where he lived? Are there any relatives? Family members?”
“Yes. He lived with his father and his mother.” Assad smiled. “A lot of twenty-seven-year-olds in Damascus do that too.”
Carl raised his eyebrows. That was as far as Assad’s Middle Eastern experiences came into the discussion at the moment. “You said you also had some good news.”
As predicted, Assad’s smile was so big that it practically split his face open. With pride, one would expect.
“Here,” he said, passing Carl a black plastic bag that he’d set down on the floor.
“OK. And what’s this, Assad? Forty pounds of sesame seeds?”
Carl got up, stuck his hand inside, and instantly touched the handle. Suspecting what it was, shivers ran down his spine as he pulled the object out of the plastic bag.
It was exactly as he thought: a worn briefcase. Just like in Jonas Hess’s photograph, with a big rip not only on the side but also on the top.
“What the hell, Assad!” said Carl, slowly sitting down. “Is her diary inside?” He felt a tingling in his arm when Assad nodded. It felt as if he were holding the Holy Grail.
He stared at the briefcase. Take it easy, Carl told himself, and then opened the locks and flipped up the lid. There they all were. Her time system calendar in brown leather. Her Siemens cell phone and charger, handwritten notes on lined paper, a couple of ballpoint pens, and a packet of Kleenex. It
was
the Holy Grail.
“How. .?” was all he could muster. And then he wondered whether he ought to give it to forensics first, for a closer examination.
Assad’s voice sounded far away. “First I went to see Helle Andersen. She was not home, but then her husband called her on the phone. He was in bed with a hurt back. When she came, I showed her the picture of Daniel Hale, but him she could not remember having seen before.”
Carl stared at the briefcase and its contents. Patience, he thought. Assad would get to the briefcase eventually.
“Was Uffe there when the man brought the letter? Did you remember to ask her that?” He was trying to keep Assad on track.
Assad nodded. “Yes. She says that he was standing right next to her the whole time. He was very interested. He was always that when the doorbell rang.”
“Did she think the man with the letter looked like Hale?”
Assad wrinkled his nose. A good imitation of Helle Andersen. “Not very much. But a little bit. The man with the letter was maybe not as old as him. His hair was a little darker and a little more masculine. Something about his eyes and so on, but that was all she had to say about it.”
“So then you asked her about the briefcase, right?”
Assad’s smile returned. “Yes. She did not know where it was. She remembered it, but she did not know if Merete Lynggaard brought it home with her on the last night then. Because she was not there — remember?”
“Assad, get to the point. Where did you find it?”
“Next to the furnace in their utility room.”
“You went to the house in Magleby to see the antique dealer?”
He nodded. “Helle Andersen said that Merete Lynggaard did everything every day the same way. She noticed this herself over the years. Always the same way. She threw off her shoes in the utility room, but first she looked always in the window. At Uffe. She took every day right away her clothes off and laid it by the washing machine. Not because it was dirty, but because that was where it just lay. She also always put on a bathrobe. And she and her brother watched the same video films then.”