“And what about the briefcase?”
“Well, the home help did not really know about that, Carl. She never saw where Merete put it, but she thought then that it was either in the front hall or the utility room.”
“How the hell were you able to find it near the furnace in the utility room when the whole Rapid Response Team couldn’t? Wasn’t it visible? And why was it still there? I have a pretty good feeling that those antique dealers are very meticulous when it comes to cleaning. How’d you find it?”
“The antique dealer gave me complete permission to look around the house on my own, so I just played it all through in my head.” He tapped his knuckles on his skull. “I kicked off my shoes and hung my coat on the hook in the utility room. I just pretended, because the hook was not there anymore. But then I pictured in my head that she maybe was holding something in both hands. Papers in one hand and the briefcase in the other. And then I thought that she could not take off her coat without first putting the other things down that she had in her hands first.”
“And the furnace was the closest thing?”
“Yes, Carl. Just right next to me.”
“But afterward, why didn’t she take the briefcase with her into the living room or her home office?”
“I will get to that, Carl, just in a minute. I looked up at the furnace, but the briefcase was not there so. I did not think it would be either. But do you know what I saw, Carl?”
Carl just stared at him. Obviously Assad would answer his own question.
“I saw that just between the furnace and the ceiling there was at least a whole three feet of air.”
“Fantastic,” replied Carl feebly.
“And then I thought that she would not lay the briefcase down on the dirty furnace because it once belonged to her father, so she took care of it.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“She did not
lay
it, Carl. She
set
it up on the furnace then. The way you set a briefcase on the floor. There was plenty of room.”
“So that’s what she did, and then it toppled over behind the furnace.”
Assad’s smile was confirmation enough. “The rip on the other side is new. See for yourself.”
Carl closed the briefcase and turned it around. It didn’t look very new, in his opinion.
“I wiped off the briefcase because it was covered with dust, so maybe the rip looks a little dark now. But it looked very fresh when I found it. This is true, Carl.”
“Confound it, Assad — you wiped off the briefcase? And I suppose you’ve also touched everything inside?”
He was still nodding, but with less enthusiasm.
“Assad.” Carl took a deep breath so he wouldn’t sound too harsh. “Next time you find something important in a case, you keep your mitts off it, OK?”
“Mitts?”
“Your hands, damn it, Assad. You can destroy valuable evidence when you do something like that. Do you understand?”
He nodded. No longer enthusiastic. “I pulled my sleeve down over my hand, Carl.”
“OK. Good thinking, Assad. So you think the other rip happened in the same way?” He turned the briefcase around again. The two rips were undeniably similar. So the old rip hadn’t come from the car accident back in 1986.
“Yes. I think it was not the first time that the briefcase fell behind the furnace. I found it completely squeezed tight in between the pipes behind the oil furnace. I had to tug and pull to get it out. Merete tried the same thing, I am just sure of that.”
“And why didn’t it ever fall down more than twice?”
“It probably did, because there was a big draft from the wind in the utility room when you opened the door, but maybe it did not fall all the way down.”
“Let’s go back to my other question. Why didn’t she take it with her into the house?”
“She wanted to have her peace when she was home. She did not want to hear her mobile telephone, Carl.” Assad raised his eyebrows, and his eyes grew big. “This is what I think.”
Carl looked inside the briefcase. Merete brought it home; that much seemed logical. Inside were her appointment diary and maybe also notes that in certain situations might prove useful. But she usually brought home lots of documents to review; there was always plenty of work she could be doing. She had a landline, but very few people had that number. Her cell phone was for a wider circle; that was the number on her business card.
“And you don’t think she could hear her cell phone inside the house if she left it in her briefcase in the utility room?”
“No way,” said Assad in English.
Carl hadn’t realized he knew any English.
“So, here you are. Two grown men having a cozy little chat?” said a bright voice behind them.
Neither of them had heard Lis from the homicide department come down the hallway.
“I have a couple more things for you. They came in from the southeast Jutland district.” Her perfume filled the room, almost a match for Assad’s incense, but with an entirely different effect. “They apologize for the delay, but some of the staff have been off sick.”
She handed the folders to Assad, who was profuse in his eagerness to accommodate, then gave Carl a look that could stir any man deep in the groin.
He stared at Lis’s moist lips and tried to recall when he’d last had any intimate contact with the opposite sex. The image of a pink two-room apartment belonging to a divorcée clearly appeared all too clearly in his mind. She’d had lavender blossoms in a bowl of water and tea-light candles and a bloodred cloth draped over the bedside lamp. But he couldn’t remember the woman’s face.
“What did you say to Bak, Carl?” asked Lis.
He emerged from his erotic reverie and looked into her light blue eyes, which had turned a bit darker now.
“Bak? Is he wandering around upstairs whining?”
“Not at all. He went home. But his colleagues said that he was as pale as a ghost after talking to you in the boss’s office.”
Carl connected Merete Lynggaard’s cell phone to the charger, hoping the battery wasn’t dead. Assad’s eager fingers — shirtsleeves notwithstanding — had touched everything inside the briefcase, so a forensic examination would be hopeless. The damage had already been done.
Only three pages in the notebook had any writing on them; the rest were blank. The notes were mostly about the municipal home-help arrangement and schedule planning, respectively. Very disappointing and no doubt indicative of the daily life that Merete had left behind.
Then he stuck his hand into a side pocket and pulled out three or four crumpled pieces of paper. The first was a receipt from April 3, 2001, for a Jack & Jones jacket.
The rest were some of those folded sheets of white A4 paper that could be found in the bottom of any healthy boy’s schoolbag. Handwritten in pencil, more or less illegible, and of course undated.
Carl aimed the desk lamp at the top one, smoothing it out a bit. Only ten words. “Can we talk after my presentation regarding the tax reform?” Signed with the initials TB. Countless possibilities, but “Tage Baggesen” would be a good guess. At least that was what Carl chose to believe.
He smiled. Yeah, that was a good one. Baggesen had wanted to talk to Merete Lynggaard, had he? Well, it probably hadn’t done him much good.
Carl smoothed out the next piece of paper and quickly scanned the message; it gave him an entirely different feeling in his bones. This time the tone was very personal. Baggesen was backed into a corner. It said:
“I don’t know what will happen if you go public with it, Merete. I beg you not to. TB.”
Then Carl picked up the last sheet of paper. The writing had been almost completely rubbed off, as if it had been taken out of the briefcase over and over. He turned it this way and that, deciphering the sentences one word at a time.
“I thought we understood each other, Merete. The whole situation pains me deeply. I implore you again: Please don’t let it go any further. I’m in the process of divesting myself of the whole thing.”
This time there were no initials serving as a signature, but there was no doubt that the handwriting was the same.
Carl grabbed the phone and punched in the number for Kurt Hansen.
A secretary in the office of the Conservative Party answered. She was polite but told him that unfortunately Kurt Hansen was unavailable at the moment. Would he care to wait on the line? As far as she could tell, the meeting would be finishing in a couple of minutes.
Carl looked at the pieces of paper lying in front of him as he waited with the receiver to his ear. They had been in the briefcase since March 2002, and most likely for a whole year prior to that. Maybe it was something trivial, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Merete Lynggaard had kept them because they might be important at some point, but maybe not.
After listening to a few minutes of chit-chat in the background, Carl heard a click and then Kurt Hansen’s distinctive voice.
“What can I do for you, Carl?” asked the MP, not bothering with any introductory remarks.
“How can I find out when Tage Baggesen proposed legislation for a tax reform?”
“Why the hell would you want to know that, Carl?” He laughed. “Nothing could be less interesting than what the Radical Center thinks about taxes.”
“I need to establish a specific time.”
“Well, that’s going to be difficult. Baggesen presents legislative proposals every other second.” He laughed again. “OK, joking aside. Baggesen has been the traffic policy chairman for at least five years. I don’t know why he withdrew from the tax chairmanship. Wait just a minute.” Hansen placed his hand over the phone as he mumbled something to someone in his office.
“We think it was in early 2001 under the old government. Back then he had more opportunity for that sort of shenanigan. Our guess is March or April 2001.”
Carl nodded with satisfaction. “OK, Kurt. That fits in with what I thought. Thanks. You couldn’t transfer me to Tage Baggesen, could you?”
He heard a few beeps on the line before he was connected with a secretary who told him that Baggesen was out of the country on a fact-finding trip to Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany to take a look at tram networks. He’d be back on Monday.
Fact-finding trip? Tram networks? They had to be kidding. A holiday was what Carl would call it. Pure and simple.
“I need his mobile number. Would you be so kind as to tell me what it is?”
“I don’t think I’m allowed to do that.”
“Now listen here, you’re not talking to some farmer from Funen. I can find out that number in a matter of minutes, if I have to. But don’t you think Tage Baggesen would be sorry to hear that your office refused to assist me?”
* * *
There was a lot of crackling on the line, but it was still possible to hear that Baggesen’s voice sounded anything but enthusiastic.
“I’ve got some old messages here, and I just need to have an explanation from you,” Carl said, his tone mild. He’d already seen how the guy could react. “It’s nothing special; just a formality.”
“Go ahead.” The sharp tone of voice was clearly trying to distance itself from their conversation three days ago.
Carl read the messages, one after the other. By the time he got to the last one, Baggesen seemed to have stopped breathing on the other end of the line.
“Baggesen?” Carl said. “Are you still there?”
And then he heard only a beeping on the phone.
I hope he doesn’t throw himself into the river now, thought Carl, trying to remember which one ran through Budapest. He took down the piece of paper with the list of suspects and added Tage Baggesen’s initials to item number four: “‘Colleagues’ at Christiansborg.”
He had just put down the phone when it began to ring.
“Beate Lunderskov,” said a woman’s voice. Carl had no idea who she was.
“We’ve examined Merete Lynggaard’s old hard drive, and I’m sorry to say that it has been very efficiently wiped clean.”
Now it dawned on Carl who she was. One of the women from the Democrats’ office.
“But I thought you kept hard drives because you wanted to save the information on them.”
“That’s true, but apparently nobody informed Merete’s secretary, Søs Norup.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she’s the one who erased it, according to the note printed very neatly on the back. It says: “Formatted on March 20, 2002, Søs Norup.’ I’m holding it in my hand.”
“But that was almost three weeks after Merete disappeared.”
“Yes, so it would appear.”
Damn Børge Bak and his gang. Had they done anything in this investigation by the book?
“Couldn’t we send it in for closer analysis? There must be people who can retrieve erased data that’s been buried deep,” said Carl.
“I think that’s already been done. Just a minute.” He could hear her rummaging around, and then she was back, a note of satisfaction in her voice. “Yes, here’s the report. They tried to reconstitute the data at the Down Under shop on Store Kongensgade in early April 2002. There’s a detailed explanation as to why they weren’t successful. Do you want me to read it to you?”
“That’s not necessary,” he replied. “Søs Norup apparently knew how to make a proper job of it.”
“Apparently. She was a very meticulous sort of person.”
Carl thanked her and hung up.
He sat there staring for a moment before he lit a cigarette. Then he picked up Merete Lynggaard’s worn diary from the desk and opened it with a feeling that bordered on reverence. That was the way he always felt when he had the chance to examine a lifeline to the last days of a murder victim.
Like the notes he’d already seen, the handwriting in the diary was almost illegible and showed signs of great haste. Capital letters written down in a hurry.
N
s and
G
s that weren’t closed up; words that ran into each other. He started with the meeting with the placenta special-interest group on Wednesday, February 20, 2002. Farther down on the page it said: “Café Bankeråt 6:30 p.m.” That was all.