Mercy aka The keeper of lost causes

25

“Thank you for arranging this meeting for me, and for agreeing to see me again so soon.” He shook hands with Birger Larsen, adding, “This won’t take long.” He looked around at the familiar faces gathered in the Democrats’ vice-chairman’s office.

“All right, Mørck. I’ve invited all of the people who worked with Merete Lynggaard just before she disappeared. You might recognize a few of them.”

Carl nodded to everyone. Yes, he did recognize some of them. A number of the politicians sitting here might be able to knock the present government out of power during the next election. One could always hope so, at least. Here sat the party spokesperson in a knee-length skirt; a couple of the more prominent members of parliament; and a few people from the party office, including the secretary Marianne Koch, who sent Carl a flirtatious look, reminding him that in only three hours he was due to be crossexamined by Mona Ibsen.

“As Birger Larsen has no doubt told you, we’re investigating Merete Lynggaard’s disappearance one more time, before we close the case. And in that connection, I need to find out anything that might help me to understand Merete’s behavior during those last few days, as well as her state of mind. It’s my impression that back then, at quite an early stage in the investigation, the police came to the conclusion that she fell overboard by accident, and they were probably right. If that was the case, we’ll never know for certain what happened. After five years in the sea, her body would have decomposed long ago.”

Everyone nodded, looking both solemn and sad. These were the people that Merete would have counted among her colleagues. Perhaps with the exception of the party’s new “crown princess.”

“Many things have turned up that point to an accident,” Carl continued, “so you’d have to be a bit of a conspiracy nerd to think otherwise. At the same time, we in Department Q are a bunch of skeptical devils, and that’s probably why we were given this assignment.” Everyone smiled a bit. At least they were listening. “So I’m going to ask all of you a number of questions, and don’t hesitate to speak up if you have anything to say.”

Most of them nodded again.

“Do any of you remember whether Merete had a meeting with a group lobbying for placenta research shortly before she disappeared?”

“Yes, I do,” said someone from the party office. “It was a delegation put together for the occasion by Bille Antvorskov from BasicGen.”

“Bille Antvorskov? You mean the Bille Antvorskov? The billionaire?”

“Yes, that’s right. He put together the group and arranged a meeting with Merete. They were making the rounds.”

“Making the rounds? With Merete Lynggaard?”

“No.” The woman smiled. “That’s what we call it when a special-interest lobby meets with all the parties, one after the other. The group was trying to put together a majority of votes in the Folketing.”

“Would there be a record of the meeting anywhere?”

“Yes, there should be. I don’t know whether it was printed out, but we might be able to find it on the computer belonging to Merete’s secretary.”

“Does that computer still exist?” asked Carl. He could hardly believe what he was hearing.

The woman from the party office smiled. “We always save the hard drives when we change operating systems. When we switched to Windows XP, at least ten hard drives had to be replaced.”

“Aren’t all of you on a network?”

“Yes, we are, but back then Merete’s secretary and a few others weren’t hooked up to it.”

“Paranoid, perhaps?” He smiled at the woman.

“Maybe.”

“Would you be willing to try to find the minutes of that meeting for me?”

She nodded again.

He turned to the rest of the group. “One of the participants at that meeting was a man named Daniel Hale. From what I’ve heard, he and Merete were interested in each other. Is there anyone here who can confirm or expand on this?”

Several people exchanged glances. Apparently he’d hit home again. Now it was just a matter of who wanted to answer.

“I don’t know his name, but I saw her talking to a man down in Snapstinget, the MPs’ restaurant.” It was the party spokesperson who decided to take the floor. She was an irritating but tough young lady who looked good on TV and would obviously hold major ministry posts in the future, when the right time came. “She looked very pleased to see him, and she seemed rather distracted while she was talking with the chairpersons from the Socialist’s and Radical Center’s health committees.” She smiled. “I think plenty of people noticed.”

“Because Merete didn’t usually act that way? Is that what you mean?”

“I think it was the first time anyone here had ever seen Merete’s attention waver. Yes, it was highly unusual.”

“Could he have been this Daniel Hale that I mentioned?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there anyone else who knows about this?”

They all shook their heads.

“How would you describe the man?” was Carl’s next question for the party spokesperson.

“He was slightly hidden by the pillar he was sitting behind, but he was slim and well dressed and suntanned, as far as I remember.”

“How old was he?”

She shrugged. “A little older than Merete, I think.”

Slim, well dressed, a little older than Merete. If she hadn’t said that he was suntanned, the description would have applied to all the men in the room, including himself, if one didn’t mind adding five or ten years at the wrong end.

“I imagine there must have been a lot of documents from Merete’s time that couldn’t simply be dumped on her successor.” He nodded at Birger Larsen. “I’m thinking about appointment diaries, notebooks, handwritten notes, and things like that. Were those sorts of things just thrown out or shredded? No one could really know whether she would be coming back, could they?”

Again it was the woman from the party office who responded. “The police took some of it, and some of it was discarded. I don’t think much was left.”

“What about her appointment diary? Where did that end up?”

She shrugged. “Not here, anyway.”

Marianne Koch broke in. “Merete always took her diary home with her.” Her tone of voice did not invite contradiction. “Always,” she emphasized.

“What did it look like?”

“It was a very ordinary time system calendar, in a worn, reddish-brown leather cover. A daily planner, appointment book, notebook and phone list all in one.”

“And it hasn’t turned up,” Carl added. “That much I know. So we have to assume that it disappeared into the sea with her.”

“I don’t believe that,” the secretary replied at once.

“Why not?”

“Because Merete always carried a small purse, and the diary simply wouldn’t fit inside. She almost always put it in her briefcase, instead, and I can guarantee that she wouldn’t take her briefcase along to stand on the sun deck of a ship. She was on holiday, after all, so why would she take it with her? It wasn’t in her car, either, was it?”

Carl shook his head. Not as far as he could recall.

Carl had been waiting a long time for the crisis counselor with the lovely ass, and now he was starting to feel uneasy. If she’d arrived on time, he would have let his natural charm guide him forward, but now, after having repeated his lines in his mind and practiced his smiles for more than twenty minutes, he was feeling deflated.

She didn’t look particularly guilt-stricken when she finally made her arrival on the third floor, but she did apologize. It was the sort of self-confidence that drove Carl wild. It was also what he’d fallen for when he first met Vigga. That and her infectious laugh.

Mona Ibsen sat down across from him. The light from outside on Otto Mønsteds Gade shone on the back of her neck, creating a halo around her head. The soft light revealed delicate lines on her face; her lips were sensual and a deep red. Everything about her signaled high class. Carl locked eyes with her so as not to dwell on her voluptuous breasts. Nothing in the world could make him want to break out of the state he was in.

She asked him about the case out in Amager. Wanted to know about the specific timeline, actions, and consequences. She asked him about everything that was of no significance, and Carl laid it on thick. A little more blood than in reality. Shots that were a little more powerful, sighs a little deeper. And she stared at him intently, making note of the key points in his story. When he got to the moment when he had to talk about the impression it had made on him to see his dead and wounded friends and how badly he’d been sleeping ever since, she pushed her chair back from the table, placed her business card in front of him, and began to pack up her things.

“What’s going on?” he asked as her notebook disappeared into her leather briefcase.

“It seems to me that you should be asking yourself that question. When you’re ready to tell the truth, make another appointment to see me.”

He gave her a frown. “What does that mean? Everything I just told you is exactly how it happened.”

She pulled the briefcase close to the slight curve of her stomach under the tight skirt. “First of all, I can tell by looking at you that you have no trouble sleeping. Second, you’ve really been exaggerating the details of your whole account. Or did you think I hadn’t read the report in advance?” He was about to protest when she held up her hand. “Third, I can see it in your eyes when you mention Hardy Henningsen and Anker Høyer. I don’t know why, but you’ve got some unfinished business with that incident. And when you mention your two colleagues who weren’t as lucky to escape with their lives and limbs intact, it reminds you of something, and you practically come unglued. When you’re ready to tell me the truth, I’ll be happy to see you again. Until then, I can’t help you.”

He uttered a small sound that was meant as a protest, but it died out of its own accord. Instead, he looked at her with an expression of desire that women no doubt could read but could never know for sure was there.

“Wait a minute,” he forced himself to say before she went out the door. “You’re probably right. I just didn’t realize it.”

He frantically considered what he could say to her before she turned around and made a move to leave.

“Maybe we could talk about it over dinner?” The words just flew out of his mouth.

He saw that he’d misfired badly. It was such a stupid thing to say that she didn’t even bother to deride him.

Instead, she gave him a look that expressed concern more than anything else.

Bille Antvorskov had just turned seventy and was a regular guest on TV2’s Good Morning Denmark and other talk shows. He was a so-called expert, and was therefore presumed to know something about everything between heaven and earth. That’s how it was when Danes took someone seriously; they went all out. But the man also looked good on camera. Authoritative and mature, with striking brown eyes, a distinctive jaw, and an aura that paired the wits of a street kid with the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. And then there was the undeniable fact that he’d amassed a fortune in record time, one that would soon be reckoned among the largest in all of Denmark. On top of which, it was a fortune that had been built on highrisk medical projects carried out in the public interest, which led Danish viewers to prostrate themselves with admiration and respect.

Personally, Carl couldn’t stand the man.

Even in the receptionist’s office, Carl was made aware that time was short and Bille Antvorskov was a busy man. Seated along the wall were four gentlemen, and it was obvious that none of them wanted anything to do with the others. They had placed their briefcases on the floor between their feet and their laptops on their knees. They were all busy as hell, and they all dreaded what they would encounter behind the closed door.

The secretary smiled at Carl, but she didn’t really mean it. He had summarily forced his way into her appointment book; she just hoped he wouldn’t do it again.

Her boss received Carl with a characteristically wry smile and asked politely if he’d ever been in this part of the office complex on the edge of Copenhagen’s harbor. Then he gestured toward the huge picture windows that stretched from one wall to the other, sketching a glass mosaic of the multifarious state of the entire world: the ships, harbor, cranes, water, and sky, fighting for attention in all their grandiosity.

The view from Carl’s office wasn’t quite as good.

“You wanted to talk to me about the meeting at Christiansborg on February 20, 2002. I have it here,” Antvorskov said, typing on the computer keyboard. “Well, look at that: it’s a palindrome. How funny.”

“Say what?”

“The date: 20.02.2002. It’s the same whether you read it backward or forward. I can also see that I was visiting my ex-wife at precisely 8:02. We celebrated with a glass of champagne.” And then he added in English, “Once in a lifetime!” After which he smiled, and that part of the entertainment was over.

“I take it you wanted to know what the meeting with Merete Lynggaard was about?” he went on.

“Yes, that’s right. But first I’d like to hear something about Daniel Hale. What was his role at the meeting?”

“Hmm. It’s funny that you should mention it, but he didn’t actually have a role there. Daniel Hale was one of our most important developers of laboratory techniques. Without his lab and his excellent coworkers, a great number of our projects would have just hobbled along.”

“So he didn’t participate in project development?”

“Not the political or financial side of development, no. Only the technical side.”

“Then why was he at the meeting?”

Antvorskov bit his cheek for a moment, a conciliatory habit. “As far as I remember, he phoned and asked to attend. I no longer recall the reason, but apparently he was planning to invest a lot of money in new equipment, and he needed to keep up to date with political developments. He was a very diligent man; that may have been why we worked so well together.”

Carl caught the man’s self-admiration. Some businessmen made it a virtue to hide their light under a bushel. Bille Antvorskov was of a different breed.

“What was Hale like as a person, in your opinion?”

“As a person?” Antvorskov shook his head. “I have no idea. Reliable and conscientious as a subcontractor. But as a person? I have no idea.”

“So you didn’t have anything to do with him privately?”

This provoked the famous Bille Antvorskov growl that was supposed to pass for laughter. “Privately? I never set eyes on him until the meeting at Christiansborg. Neither he nor I had time for that. And besides, Daniel Hale was never at home. He would fly from Herod to Pilate in an instant. One day in Connecticut, the next day in Aalborg. Back and forth, constantly. I’ve probably scraped together a few free miles myself, but Daniel Hale must have left behind enough to fly a class of schoolkids around the world at least a dozen times.”

“So you’d never met him before that meeting?”

“No, never.”

“But there must have been meetings, discussions, price negotiations. Things like that?”

“You know what? I have staff to handle those things. I knew Daniel Hale by reputation, we had a few phone conversations, and then we were in business. The rest of the collaborative work was handled by Hale’s people and mine.”

“OK. I’d like to talk to someone here at the company who worked with Hale. Is that possible?”

Bille Antvorskov sighed so heavily that the tightly upholstered leather chair he was sitting on creaked. “I don’t know who’s still here. That was five years ago, after all. There’s a lot of turnover in our business. Everyone’s always looking for new challenges.”

“I see.” Was the idiot really admitting that he couldn’t hold on to employees? He couldn’t be. “Could you possibly give me the address of his company?”

Antvorskov frowned. He had staff to handle that.

Even though the buildings were six years old, they looked as if they’d been constructed only a week ago. “InterLab A/S” it said in three-foot-tall letters on the sign in the middle of the landscape of fountains in front of the garage. Apparently the business was doing just fine without its helmsman.

In the reception area Carl’s police badge was scrutinized as if it were something he’d bought in a practical-joke shop, but after a ten-minute wait a secretary arrived to speak with him. He told her that he had questions of a private nature, and with that he was immediately escorted out of the lobby and into a room with leather chairs, birchwood tables, and several glass cabinets full of beverages. Presumably it was here that foreign guests first encountered InterLab’s efficiency. Proof of the laboratory’s high status was everywhere. Awards and certificates from all over the world covered one whole wall, while another two displayed diagrams and photographs of various projects. Only the wall facing the Japanese-inspired driveway leading up to the building had any windows, and the sun was blazing in.

Apparently it was Daniel Hale’s father who founded the firm, but this was long ago, judging by the photos on the wall. Daniel had successfully followed in his father’s footsteps in the short time that he’d been boss, and clearly he’d done so with pleasure. There was also no doubt that he’d been loved and given plenty of incentives in the right direction. A single photo showed father and son standing close together, smiling happily. The father wore a jacket and waistcoat, symbolizing the old days that were on their way out. The son had not yet come of age, which was obvious from his smooth cheeks and big smile. But he was ready to make his mark.

Carl heard footsteps approaching.

“What was it you wanted to know, sir?” said a plump woman wearing flats.

The woman introduced herself as the public relations manager. The name on her ID badge, which was clipped to her lapel, was “Aino Huurinainen.” Finns had such funny-sounding names.

“I’d like to talk to someone who worked closely with Daniel Hale in the time before he died. Someone who knew him well privately. Someone who knew what his thoughts and dreams were.”

She looked at him as if he’d assaulted her.

“Could you put me in touch with someone like that?”

“I don’t think anyone knew him better than our sales director, Niels Bach Nielsen. But I’m afraid he doesn’t wish to speak with you about Mr. Hale’s personal life.”

“And why not? Does he have something to hide?”

She gave him another look as if he were making a serious attempt to provoke her. “Neither Niels nor Daniel had anything to hide. But Niels has never recovered from Daniel’s death.”

He caught the undertone. “You mean they were a couple?”

“Yes. Niels and Daniel were together through thick and thin, both in private and at work.”

For a moment Carl stared into her pale blue eyes. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she suddenly doubled over with laughter. But that didn’t happen. What she had just said was no joke.

“I didn’t know that,” he said.

“I see,” she replied.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a photograph of Daniel Hale, would you? One that you could spare?”

She stretched out her arm a few inches to the right and grabbed a brochure lying on the glass counter next to half a dozen bottles of Ramlösa mineral water.

“Here,” she said. “There ought to be at least ten of them.”

He didn’t get through to Bille Antvorskov on the phone until he’d had a lengthy discussion with the billionaire’s grumpy secretary.

“I’ve scanned a picture that I’d like to e-mail to you. Have you got a couple of minutes to take a look at it?” he said, after identifying himself.

Antvorskov acquiesced and gave Carl his e-mail address. Carl clicked the mouse and looked at the computer screen as he transferred the file.

It was an excellent picture of Daniel Hale that he’d scanned from the brochure the public relations woman had given him. A slender blond man, quite tall, suntanned and well dressed, as everyone had noticed over in the MPs’ restaurant. There was nothing about his appearance to indicate he was gay. Apparently he had other sexual inclinations. About to come out of the closet as a heterosexual, thought Carl, as he pictured the man, crushed and burned to death on the Kappelev highway.

“OK, the e-mail has arrived,” said Bille Antvorskov on the other end of the line. “I’m opening the attachment now.” There was a pause that seemed to go on for a very long time. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Can you confirm that it’s a photo of Daniel Hale? Was this the man who took part in the meeting at Christiansborg?”

“This man? I’ve never seen him before in my life.”