Mercy aka The keeper of lost causes

21

The next day everybody was jabbering to Carl about homicide chief Marcus Jacobsen’s TV performance. His fellow passengers on the S-train, people from the emergency services department, and everyone working on the third floor who would bother to condescend to speak to him. They’d all seen it. The only one who hadn’t was Carl.

“Congratulations!” cried one of the secretaries across the courtyard at police headquarters, while other people seemed to be avoiding him. It was very strange.

When he poked his head into Assad’s shoebox of an office, he was immediately met with a smile that nearly cracked the man’s face in half. Which meant that Assad was also well informed.

“So are you very happy now?” Assad asked, already nodding on Carl’s behalf.

“About what?”

“Oi! Marcus Jacobsen talked so good about our department and about you. The nicest words right from start and to finish, I want to tell you. We can be very proud, both of us, that is what my wife said too.” He gave Carl a wink. It was a bad habit. “And so you are going to be police superintendent.”

“What?”

“Just ask Mrs. Sørensen. She has papers for you I should just remember to have said.”

Assad could have saved himself the trouble because the clacking of the Fury’s heels could already be heard in the corridor.

“Congratulations,” Mrs. Sørensen forced herself to say to Carl, as she gave Assad a sweet smile. “Here’s the paperwork you need to fill out. The course starts on Monday. ”

“A lovely woman,” said Assad after she had once again removed her purposeful body from their office. “What course was she talking about, Carl?”

He sighed. “You can’t become a superintendent until you go to school, Assad.”

Assad stuck out his lower lip. “So you are going away from here?”

Carl shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I’m going away from anything at all.”

“Then that I do not understand.”

“You will. But right now, tell me what happened when you went to see Hardy yesterday.”

Assad opened his eyes wide. “I did not like it. That big man under the covers, lying so still. Only his face showing so I could see it.”

“Did you talk to him?”

He nodded. “It was not easy, because he said I should leave. And then a nurse came and she wanted to throw me out the door. But it was OK. She was actually very much pretty in a way.” He smiled. “I think she noticed I thought so, then she went away.”

Carl gave him a blank look. Sometimes dreams of fleeing to Timbuktu could overwhelm him.

“What about Hardy? I asked you about Hardy, Assad! What did he say? Did you read any of the photocopies to him?”

“Yes. For two and a half hours. But then he fell completely asleep.”

“And?”

“Well, then he was sleeping.”

Carl sent a message from his brain to his hands that it was still illegal to strangle people.

Assad smiled. “But I will go over there again. The nurse said a very nice good-bye to me when I left.”

Carl swallowed hard. “Since you’re so good at handling all the harpies, I’m going to ask you to go upstairs and flatter the secretaries one more time.”

Assad’s face brightened. It was obvious he was thinking that would be better than going around wearing green rubber gloves.

Carl sat motionless at his desk for a moment, staring into space. His phone conversation with Karen Mortensen kept popping up in the back of his brain. Was there a tunnel into Uffe’s mind? Was it possible to open it? Were there explanations for Merete Lynggaard’s disappearance lurking somewhere inside there, and all that was needed was to press the right button? Could he use the car accident to find that button? It was becoming more and more crucial to find out.

He stopped his assistant as he was on his way out the door. “Assad, one more thing. I need you to bring me all the information you can find about the car accident that killed Merete and Uffe’s parents. Everything. Lock, stock, and barrel. Pictures, the police report, newspaper clippings. Get the secretaries to help you. I want the information ASAP.”

“ASAP?”

“That means in a hurry, Assad. There’s a certain person by the name of Uffe, and I’d like to have a little talk with him about the accident.”

“Talk with him?” murmured Assad, looking pensive.

Carl had an appointment during his lunch hour that he wished he could cancel. Last night Vigga had kept bugging him about coming to see her marvelous new gallery. It was on Nansensgade, which was not the worst place on the planet, but rent, on the other hand, cost an arm and a leg. Nothing in the world was going to force even a hint of enthusiasm from Carl at the prospect of turning his pockets inside out just so a lousy painter by the name of Hugin could display his work next to Vigga’s cave paintings.

As Carl was leaving headquarters he ran into Marcus in the lobby. The chief came walking briskly toward him, keeping his eyes fixed on the terrazzo floor and its swastika patterns. He knew full well that Carl had spotted him. Nobody at police headquarters was as keen an observer as Marcus Jacobsen. You wouldn’t know that by looking at him, but it was true. It was no accident that he was the boss.

“I hear you’ve been singing my praises, Marcus. Exactly how many cases did you tell those journalists we’d already tackled in Department Q? And according to you, we’re even on the verge of a breakthrough with one of them. You have no idea how happy I am to hear that. That’s really great news!”

The homicide chief looked him in the eye. It was the kind of look that demanded respect. Sure, Marcus knew he’d laid it on too thick, but he had reasons for doing so. And right now he conveyed that knowledge with a single glance. The police force always came first. The money was merely a means to an end. The goal was something the homicide chief himself would decide.

“Well,” said Carl. “I guess I’d better be heading out if I’m going to solve a couple of cases before lunch.”

When he reached the front entrance, he turned around. “Marcus, exactly how many salary levels am I going to go up?” he shouted, as the homicide chief disappeared past the bronze-painted chairs lining the walls. “And by the way, Marcus. Did you have a chance to talk to that crisis counselor yet?”

Carl stepped out into the light and stood there for a moment, blinking at the sun. Nobody was going to tell him how much gold braid would be plastered onto his dress uniform. Knowing Vigga, she probably already knew that he’d been promoted, which meant his pay raise had been spent. Who the hell felt like taking a course for that?

The premises she’d set her sights on had once been an old knitwear shop, which had since housed a publishing company, a typesetter, an art-import business, and a CD shop. By now the opal glass ceiling was the only thing left of the original furnishings. The space was no more than three hundred and seventy-five square feet, but it did have charm-that much he could see. Huge windows faced the passageway down to the lakes, there was a view of a pizzeria, and at the back a view with traces of greenery. And it was almost next door to the Café Bankeråt, where Merete Lynggaard had met someone for dinner a few days before her death. There was nothing boring about Nansensgade with all of its cafés and hangouts. It was a real Parisian-style paradise.

Carl turned around and immediately caught sight of Vigga and her boyfriend passing by the baker’s window. She occupied the street with all the confidence and flair of a matador in a bullring. Her artist’s outfit spoke with all the colors of the palette. She’d always been a festive one, that Vigga. The same, however, could not be said of her sickly-looking male companion, with his tight-fitting black clothes, his chalk-white skin, and dark circles under his eyes. His type could best be found inside the lead-lined coffins in a Dracula film.

“Sweeeetheart,” Vigga called, as she crossed Ahlefeldtsgade.

This was going to be expensive.

By the time the emaciated phantom had taken measurements of the whole place, Vigga had softened Carl up. He would only have to pay two-thirds of the rent; she would pay the rest herself.

She threw out her arms. “The dough’s gonna be pouring in, Carl.”

Yeah, right. Or pouring out, he thought, calculating that his share was going to come to two thousand six hundred kroner per month. Maybe he should take that fucking superintendent’s course, after all.

They went over to Café Bankeråt to read through the rental agreement, and Carl took a look around. Merete Lynggaard had been here. And less than two weeks later, she had vanished from the face of the earth.

“Who owns this place?” he asked one of the girls at the bar.

“Jean-Yves. He’s sitting over there.” She pointed to a man who looked solid enough. There was nothing pretentiously delicate or French about him.

Carl got up. “May I ask you how long you’ve owned this fine establishment?” he asked, taking out his police badge to show it to the man. That wasn’t really necessary, judging by the man’s amiable smile, but once in a while he needed to take the thing out of mothballs.

“I took over the business in 2002.”

“Do you remember exactly when that was?”

“What’s this about?”

“About a member of parliament named Merete Lynggaard. You may remember that she disappeared.”

He nodded.

“And she was here not long before she died. Were you the owner back then?”

He shook his head. “I took over the business from one of my friends on March 1, 2002. But I do remember that the police asked him if anyone here recalled who she’d had dinner with. But nobody did.” He smiled. “Maybe I would have remembered if I’d been here.”

Carl smiled back. Yes, maybe. The owner seemed on the ball. “You came on the scene a month too late. That’s how it goes sometimes,” said Carl, shaking the man’s hand.

In the meantime Vigga had signed all the papers. She’d always been generous with her signature.

“Let me just have a look at everything,” Carl said, taking the papers away from Hugin.

He made a show of placing them on the table in front of him. The standard contract was filled with words too small to read, and his eyes instantly glazed over. All those people out there who are totally oblivious to what could happen to them, he thought. Merete Lynggaard had sat here in this restaurant, enjoying herself as she looked out of the window on a cold February evening in 2002.

Had she expected something else out of life? Or was it really possible that even then she suspected that in a few days’ time she’d be slipping away in the raw, cold waters of the Baltic?

When he got back to the office, his assistant was still fully occupied with the secretaries upstairs, and that suited Carl just fine. The emotional upset of meeting Vigga and her wandering ghost had sapped him of all energy. Only a quick little nap with his feet propped up on the desk and his thoughts buried in dreamland could put him back in the game.

He’d probably been sitting like that for only ten minutes when his meditative state was interrupted by the sensation that all police detectives know only too well-what women call intuition. It was the turmoil of experience bubbling up in his subconscious. The feeling that a number of concrete events would inevitably lead to a specific result.

He opened his eyes and looked at the notes that he’d put up on the whiteboard.

Then he got up and crossed out “The caseworker in Stevns” on the piece of paper. Under the word “Check” it now said: “The telegram-The secretaries at Christiansborg-Witnesses on the ferry Schleswig-Holstein.”

Perhaps Merete Lynggaard’s secretary had something to do with that telegram. Who had actually accepted delivery of the valentine telegram at Christiansborg? Why had he immediately assumed that it had to be Merete Lynggaard herself? At that time there was hardly any other MP who was as busy as she was. So it was only logical that at some point the telegram had to have passed through the hands of her secretary. Not that he suspected the secretary of the vice-chair of a group to be sticking her nose in her boss’s personal affairs. But wasn’t it possible?

It was this possibility that was bothering him.

“So now we have the answer from TelegramsOnline, Carl,” said Assad from the doorway.

Carl looked up.

“They could not tell me what the telegram said, but they had a record of who sent it. It was some funny name.” He looked at his notes. “Tage Baggesen. I got the phone number that he used to order the telegram. They said it came from inside the Folketing. That was all I wanted to say then.” He handed the note to Carl and had already turned to leave. “We are investigating the car accident now. They are waiting for me upstairs.”

Carl nodded. Then he picked up the phone and punched in the number to the parliament.

The voice that answered belonged to a secretary in the office of the Radical Center Party.

She was friendly enough, but was sorry to inform Carl that Tage Baggesen was in the Faroe Islands for the weekend. Would he like to leave a message?

“No, that’s OK,” said Carl. “I’ll contact him on Monday.”

“I have to tell you that Mr. Baggesen will be very busy on Monday. Just so you know.”

Then Carl asked to be transferred to the office of the Democrats.

This time the secretary who answered the phone sounded worn out, and she didn’t know the answer to his question offhand. But wasn’t there a Søs Norup who used to be Merete Lynggaard’s secretary?

Carl confirmed that she was right.

No one really remembered much about Søs, because she’d been there for only a very short time. But one of the other secretaries in the office said that she thought Søs Norup had come from DJØF, the Federation of Jurists and Economists, and had gone back there instead of staying on to work for Merete Lynggaard’s successor. “She was a bitch,” Carl suddenly heard somebody say in the background, and that apparently refreshed everyone’s memory.

Yes, thought Carl with satisfaction. It’s the good, stable arseholes like us who are remembered best.

Then he phoned DJØF, and found out that yes, they all knew Søs Norup. But no, she hadn’t come back to work for them. She had apparently vanished into thin air.

He put down the phone and shook his head. All of a sudden his job had developed into Without a Trace in every direction. He wasn’t particularly excited at the thought of running around after a secretary who might or might not remember something about a telegram that might point to a specific person who might have gone to a restaurant with Merete Lynggaard and might know something about what her state of mind might have been five years ago. Instead, he decided to go upstairs to see how far Assad had gotten with their own secretaries and that damned car accident.

Carl found them in one of the smaller offices with faxes and photocopies and all sorts of scraps of paper spread out on the table in front of them. It looked as if Assad had set up a campaign office in a presidential election. Three secretaries sat there chattering with each other as Assad served tea and nodded diligently every time the conversation moved a small step forward. An impressive effort.

Carl knocked discreetly on the doorframe.

“So, it looks like you’ve found a whole lot of lovely documentation for us.” He pointed at the papers, feeling like the Invisible Man. Only Mrs. Sørensen even bothered to glance at him, and that was something he could have done without.

He retreated to the hallway, and for the first time since his schooldays was filled with jealousy.

“Carl Mørck?” said a voice behind him, tearing him free of the tight grip of defeat and bringing him back on track to victory. “Marcus Jacobsen says that you want to talk to me. Should we set up an appointment?”

He turned around and found himself looking right into the eyes of Mona Ibsen. Set up an appointment?

Hell yes.