She could tell him that she knew nothing about this, but it didn’t matter. She’d already paid her debt to him. Long ago.
That very evening Lasse and his brother set up cameras and turned on the floodlights. Two blindingly bright objects that turned night into day and revealed the overwhelming squalor of her prison; once again she had a full view of the room in all its filthy detail. It was so terrible to be confronted with her own degradation that she chose to keep her eyes closed for the first twenty-four hours. The place of execution may have been put on display, but the condemned chose darkness.
Later they stretched wires across both mirrored panes to a pair of detonators, which could break the glass in a so-called emergency. Finally, right outside, they rolled into position cylinders containing compressed oxygen and hydrogen, as well as “flammable liquids,” as they called it.
Lasse informed her that everything was ready. After her body had exploded, they would run her through their composter, and then they’d blow up the whole fucking place. The explosion would be audible for miles. This time the insurance company would have to pay. Unforeseen accidents such as this had to be prepared meticulously, and all evidence permanently obliterated.
“Believe me, that’s not going to happen,” she said to herself, planning her revenge.
After a couple of days she sat down with her back to the windows and began digging in the concrete with the tongs. In a few more days she’d be finished, and the tongs surely would be too. Then she’d have to use the plastic toothpicks to puncture her arteries, but that didn’t matter. It could be done, and that was enough.
The digging took her more than a few days. It was more like a week, but by then the grooves were deep enough to withstand almost anything. She’d covered them with dust and dirt from the corners of the room. One letter after another. Once the fire experts from the insurance company came to inspect the scene to find out what had caused the blaze, she was certain that at least a few of the words would be discovered, and then they’d probably be able to figure out the rest of the message. It said: Lasse, the owner of this building, murdered his foster father and Daniel Hale and one of his friends, and after that he murdered me.Take good care of my brother, Uffe, and tell him that his sister thought about him every single day for more than five years.Merete Lynggaard, February 13, 2007, kidnapped and imprisoned in this godforsaken place since March 2, 2002.
35. 2007
What As sad had come across
was a name mentioned in the police report from the deadly accident on Christmas Eve 1986, when Merete Lynggaard’s parents died. The report listed three individuals who were killed in the other vehicle: a newborn baby, a girl who was only eight, and the driver of the car, Henrik Jensen, who was an engineer and the founder of a company called Jensen Industries. After that the report became less specific, as indicated by a row of question marks in the margin. According to a handwritten note, the firm was supposedly “a flourishing enterprise that produced airtight steel containment linings.” There was another brief remark underneath. It said: “a source of pride for Danish industry,” and was apparently also a statement by a witness.
Assad had remembered correctly. Henrik Jensen was the name of the driver killed in the other car. And it was true that name was exceedingly similar to Lars Henrik Jensen. No one could claim that Assad was stupid.
“Take out the tabloids again, Assad,” said Carl. “Maybe they published the names of the survivors. It wouldn’t surprise me if the boy in the other car was Lars Henrik, named after his father. Do you see his name anywhere?” Carl suddenly regretted making Assad do all the work, so he stretched out his hand. “Give me a few of the tabloid articles. And a couple of those over there,” he said, pointing at clippings from the morning papers.
There were horrifying photos from the accident. They were displayed in a lurid context, side by side with pictures of inconsequential people, greedy for fame. The sea of flames surrounding the Ford Sierra had consumed everything, as the photo of the charred wreck documented. It was a real miracle that a couple of medics happened to be driving past and were able to pull the passengers out before the cars burned. According to the police report, the fire department hadn’t been able to reach the scene as quickly as normal. The slippery road had simply been too dangerous.
“Here it says then that the mother was named Ulla Jensen, and both her legs were crushed,” said Assad. “I can’t tell you the name of the boy. It doesn’t say. They just call him the ‘couple’s eldest child.’ But here they write that he was fourteen years old.”
“That fits with the year Lars Henrik Jensen was born, if we can rely at all on that manipulated Civil Registry number from Godhavn,” said Carl. He was studying a couple of clippings from the noon editions of the newspapers.
There was nothing in the first one. The story was printed next to some unimportant reports about political squabbles and minor scandals. The trademark of this newspaper was to follow specific guidelines for what was guaranteed to sell, no matter what it might be. This was apparently an enduring precept because if Carl exchanged this five-year-old issue with one from yesterday, he’d be hard-pressed to know which was more recent.
He was cursing the media and leafing through the next newspaper, when he turned the page and saw the name. It practically jumped out at him. Just what he’d been hoping for.
“Here it is, Assad!” shouted Carl, his eyes nailed to the page. At that moment he felt like a hawk that had spotted its prey from the treetops and then dove in for the kill. A fabulous find. The pressure in Carl’s chest vanished, and an odd feeling of relief passed through his body.
“Listen to this, Assad. ‘The survivors in the vehicle that was torpedoed by wholesaler Alexander Lynggaard’s car were Henrik Jensen’s wife, Ulla Jensen, age forty, one of her newborn twins, and their eldest child, Lars Henrik Jensen, age fourteen.’”
Assad put down the clipping he was holding. His dark brown eyes were squeezed almost shut by a huge smile.
“Hand me the police report from the accident, Assad.” Carl wanted to see whether the CR numbers of those involved might be listed. He ran his finger down the report but found only the numbers for the two drivers, Merete’s father and Lars Henrik’s father.
“If you have the father’s CR number, can you just also find the son’s number fast, Carl? Then we can maybe compare it to the one we got on the boy from Godhavn.”
Carl nodded. That should be easy enough. “I’ll check and see what I can find out about Henrik Jensen, Assad,” he said. “In the meantime, go and ask Lis to check up on the CR numbers. Tell her that we’re looking for an address for Lars Henrik Jensen. If he doesn’t have a place of residence in Denmark, ask her to find out where the mother lives. And if Lis does find his CR number, get her to print out all his addresses since the accident. Take the folder with you, Assad. And hurry.”
Carl got on the Internet and searched for “Jensen Industries,” but came up empty. Then he searched for “airtight steel containment linings for nuclear reactors,” which resulted in a list of various companies, especially in France and Germany. Then he tried the words “lining for containments,” which, as far as he knew, covered more or less the same terminology as “airtight steel containment linings for nuclear reactors.” That didn’t get him anywhere either.
He was about to give up when he found a PDF file that mentioned a company in Køge, and there he saw the sentence “a source of pride for Danish industry”—exactly the same wording as had been included in the police accident report. So this must have been where that quote came from. He sent a silent thank-you to the traffic cop who had dug a little deeper into the material than was normally required. Carl bet the man had eventually ended up working as a detective.
That was as much as he could find out about Jensen Industries. Maybe he had the name wrong. He put in a call to the Registry of Companies and learned that no firms were listed under any Henrik Jensen with that particular CR number. Maybe the company was owned by foreigners, maybe it was registered under another name by a different group of owners, or it could be part of a holding company and registered under the holding company’s name.
Carl took out his ballpoint pen and crossed off the company name on his notepad. As things now stood, Jensen Industries was nothing more than a blank spot in the high-tech landscape.
He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise up to the network of pipes on the ceiling. One day the smoke alarms out in the corridor were going to catch a whiff and set off an infernal racket that would send all the employees in the building out on the street in infernal disarray. He smiled and took an extra-deep drag before blowing a thick cloud toward the door. It would put a stop to his little illegal pastime, but it would almost be worth it just to see Bak and Bjørn and Jacobsen standing outside looking up with anxious annoyance at the windows of their offices, with their hundreds of yards of shelf space filled with archived atrocities.
Then he recalled what John Rasmussen from Godhavn had said — that the father of Atomos, aka Lars Henrik Jensen, might have had something to do with the nuclear research facility at Risø.
Carl looked up the phone number. It might be a dead end, but if there was anyone who knew something about airtight steel containment linings for nuclear reactors, it would be the people at Risø.
The person on duty was very helpful and transferred him to an engineer named Mathiasen, who in turn transferred him to a man named Stein who again passed him on to a Jonassen. Each engineer sounded older than the previous one. Jonassen introduced himself simply as Mikkel, and he was busy, but OK, he was willing to spend five minutes helping the police. What was it Carl wished to know?
He sounded particularly smug when he heard Carl’s question. “You want to know whether I’ve ever heard of a company that made linings for containments here in Denmark in the mid-eighties?” he said. “Yes, of course. HJ Industries was probably one of the world leaders.”
“HJ Industries” the man had said. Carl could have kicked himself. HJ for Henrik Jensen. H-J I-n-d-u-s-t-r-i-e-s. What else?! It was that simple. You’d think the staff over at the Registry of Companies could have suggested something like that when he phoned, for Pete’s sake.
“Henrik Jensen’s company was actually called Trabeka Holding. Don’t ask me why. But the name HJI is still known the world over. Their standards remain the industry’s benchmark. It was a sad thing that Henrik Jensen died so suddenly, and that the company was forced to close soon afterward. But the twenty-five employees couldn’t keep going without his leadership, nor could the company continue to exist without his high demands for quality. Besides, it had just undergone big changes, moving to a different location and expanding, so it was very unfortunate that he died right then. Major assets and expertise were lost. If you ask me, the business could have been saved if Risø had intervened, but back then management lacked the political support to do that.”
“Can you tell me where HJI was located?”
“Yes, the factory was in Køge for a long time. I made several visits there myself. But right before the accident it was moved to a site just south of Copenhagen. I’m not sure exactly where. I can try to find my old phone book; it’s here somewhere. Can you hold on for a minute?”
It took a good five minutes while Carl listened to the man rummaging around in the background as he used his doubtlessly vast intellect to plumb the most vulgar depths of the Danish language. He sounded as if he were really pissed off at himself. Carl had seldom heard anything like it.
“No, I’m sorry,” said Jonassen after he’d finished cursing. “I can’t find it, even though I never throw anything out. Typical. But talk to Ulla Jensen, his widow. I assume she’s still alive; she can’t be very old. She should be able to tell you everything you want to know. A truly fine woman. Too bad she had to suffer so much.”
Carl decided to meet him halfway. “Yes, it’s too bad,” he said, ready to ask one last question.
But the engineer was just getting started. “It was really brilliant, what they were doing at HJI. Just consider the welding techniques. The welds were practically invisible, even if you X-rayed them using the absolutely most advanced equipment. But they also had all sorts of techniques for finding leaks. For instance, they had a pressure chamber that could go up to sixty atmospheres to test the durability of their products. Probably the biggest pressure chamber I’ve ever seen. With incredibly high-tech control systems. If the containment linings could withstand that much pressure, you knew the nuclear energy reactors were getting first-class equipment. That was HJI. Always top-notch.”
The man was so enthusiastic, it almost sounded as if he’d had stock in the business.
“You don’t happen to know where Ulla Jensen is living today, do you?” Carl interjected.
“Nope, but I’m sure you can find out by checking the Civil Registry. I assume she still lives on the company site. They couldn’t throw her out, as far as I know.”
“Somewhere south of Copenhagen, you said?”
“Yes, exactly.”
How on earth could he say “exactly” about a location as imprecise as “south of Copenhagen”?
“If you’re particularly interested in this sort of thing, I’d be happy to invite you down here to visit,” said the man.
Carl thanked him but declined the offer, citing that he was very pressed for time. In reality, he’d always wanted to flatten Risø with a thousand-ton steamroller and sell the scraps to some one-horse town in Siberia as road paving. So when it came to an invitation to take a tour of such an enterprise, it would be a shame to waste his time, since Jonassen had already remarked that he was a busy man.
By the time Carl put down the phone, Assad had been standing in the doorway for several minutes.