Mercy aka The keeper of lost causes

28

At three o’clock in the morning Carl opened his eyes to pitch darkness. In the back of his mind he had a vague memory of red-checked shirts and nail guns and a clear sense that one of the shirts in Sorø did have the right pattern. His pulse was racing and his mood was glum; he was definitely not feeling good. He simply didn’t have the energy to think about the case, but who could stop the nightmares or keep his sheets from getting clammy?

And now he had to deal with that slimy journalist Pelle Hyttested. Was he going to start digging around? Was one of the headlines in the next issue of Gossip really going to be about a police detective who had fucked up?

What a mess. Just the thought of it made his abdominal muscles contract so they felt like armor plate for the rest of the night.

“You look tired,” said the homicide chief.

Carl dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand. “Have you told Bak that he needs to be here?”

“He’ll be here in five minutes,” said Marcus, leaning forward. “I noticed that you haven’t signed up for the management course yet. The deadline is coming up soon, you know.”

“I guess I’ll just have to wait until next time, won’t I?”

“You know we have a plan here, don’t you, Carl? When your department starts showing results, it would be only natural that you got help from your former colleagues. But it won’t do any good if you don’t have the authority that the title of police superintendent would give you. You don’t really have a choice, Carl. You have to take that course.”

“It won’t make me a better investigator, sitting in a classroom sharpening pencils.”

“You’re the head of a new department here, and the title goes along with the baggage. You’re taking the course-or you’ll have to find somewhere else to do your investigating.”

Carl stared out of the window at the Golden Tower in Tivoli Gardens, which a couple of workmen were making ready for the new season. Four or five times up and down on that monstrous ride and Marcus Jacobsen would be begging him mercy.

“I’ll take that into consideration, Mr. Superintendent.”

The mood was a bit chilly when Børge Bak came in with his black leather jacket draped neatly over his shoulders.

Carl didn’t wait for the homicide chief to initiate the conversation. “So, Bak! That was a hell of a job you lot did on the Lynggaard case. You were up to your necks in signs that everything wasn’t as it should be. Had the whole team caught sleeping sickness, or what?”

Bak’s eyes were like steel, but Carl was damned if he was going to look away.

“So now I want to know if there’s anything else in the case that you’re keeping to yourself,” Carl went on. “Was there someone or something that put the brakes on your excellent investigation, Børge?”

At this point the homicide chief was clearly considering putting on his reading glasses so he could hide behind them, but the scowl on Bak’s face demanded some sort of intervention.

“If we just ignore the last couple of remarks that Carl delivered in his inimitable style”-Marcus raised his eyebrows as he glanced at Carl for a moment-“then it’s easy to understand his point of view, since he’s just discovered that the deceased Daniel Hale was not the man that Merete Lynggaard met at Christiansborg. Which is something that should have been uncovered during the previous investigation. We have to give him that.”

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.”

“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. Ns and Gs 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.

On the following days there was hardly a line that wasn’t filled in; quite a hectic schedule, he could see, but no remarks of a personal nature.

As he approached Merete’s last day at work, a feeling of desperation began settling over him. There was absolutely nothing that might give him any leads. Then he turned to the last page. Friday, March 1, 2002. Two committee meetings and another with lobbyists. That was all. Everything else had been lost to the past.

He pushed the book away and looked down at the empty briefcase. Had it really spent five years behind the furnace for no good reason? Then he picked up the diary again and leafed through the rest of the pages. Like most people, Merete Lynggaard had used only the calendar and the phone list in the back.

He began running through the phone numbers from the beginning. He could have skipped to D or H, but he wanted to keep his disappointment at bay. Under A, B, and C he recognized ninety percent of the names. There was little similarity with his own phone book, which was dominated by names like Jesper and Vigga and a sea of people who lived in Rønneholt Park. It was easy to conclude that Merete hadn’t had many personal friends. In fact, none at all. A beautiful woman with a brain-damaged brother and a hell of a lot of work-and that was it. He reached the letter D, knowing that he wouldn’t find Daniel Hale’s phone number there. Merete didn’t list her contacts by their first names, the way Vigga did; different strokes for different folks. Who the hell would look up Sweden’s prime minister under G for Göran? Besides Vigga, that is.

And then he saw it. The moment he turned the page to H, he knew that the whole case had reached a turning point. They’d talked about an accident, they’d talked about suicide, and finally they’d ended up high and dry. Along the way there had been indications that something was odd about the Lynggaard case, but this page in the phone book practically screamed it out loud. The whole appointment diary was filled with hastily jotted notes. Letters and numbers that even his stepson could have written neater, and that told him nothing. There was nothing pretty about her handwriting; it wasn’t at all what might be expected of a rising star like Merete. But nowhere had she changed her mind about what she’d written. Nothing had been corrected or edited. She knew what she wanted to write every time. Carefully considered, unerring. Except here in her phone book under the letter H. Here something was different. Carl couldn’t be certain that it had anything to do with Daniel Hale’s name, but deep inside, where a cop plumbs his last reserves, he knew that he’d hit the bull’s-eye. Merete had crossed out a name with a thick line of ink. It was no longer possible to read, but underneath it had once said “Daniel Hale” and a phone number. He was sure of it.

Carl smiled. So he was going to need the help of the forensic team after all. They’d better do a good job of it, and quickly.

“Assad,” he called. “Come in here.”

For a moment he heard some clattering out in the corridor, and then Assad was standing in the doorway holding a bucket and wearing the green rubber gloves.

“I’ve got a job for you. The tech guys need to find a way to read this number.” He pointed to the crossed-out line. “Lis can tell you what the procedure is. Tell them we need it ASAP.”

Carl knocked cautiously on the door to Jesper’s room, but of course got no response. Not home, as usual, he thought, noting the absence of the hundred and twelve decibels that normally bombarded the door from inside. But it turned out that Carl was mistaken, which became apparent when he opened the door.

The girl whose breasts Jesper was groping under her blouse let out a shriek that pierced right to the bone, and Jesper’s furious expression underscored the gravity of the situation.

“Sorry,” said Carl reluctantly as Jesper got his hands untangled, and the girl’s cheeks turned as red as the background color of the Che Guevara poster hanging on the wall behind them. Carl knew her. She was no more than fourteen, but looked twenty. She lived on Cedervangen. Her mother had probably looked just like her at one time, but over the years had come to the bitter realization that it wasn’t always an advantage to look older than one was.

“What the hell are you doing here, Carl?” shouted Jesper as he jumped up from the sofa bed.

Carl apologized again and mentioned that he had, in fact, knocked on the door, as the generation gap echoed through the house.

“Just go on with… what you were doing. I just have a quick question for you, Jesper. Do you know where you put your old Playmobil toys?”

Jesper looked as if he were ready to hurl a hand grenade at his stepfather. Even Carl could see that the question was rather ill-timed.

He nodded apologetically to the girl. “I know it sounds strange, but I need them for my investigation.” He turned to look at Jesper, who was glaring at him. “Do you still have those plastic figures, Jesper? I’d be happy to pay you for them.”

“Get the hell out of here, Carl. Go downstairs and see Morten. Maybe you can buy some from him. But you’ll need a fat checkbook for that.”

Carl frowned. What did a fat checkbook have to do with it?

It might have been a year and a half since Carl had last knocked on the door to Morten’s apartment. Even though his lodger moved about upstairs like one of the family, his life in the basement had always been sacrosanct. After all, he was paying his part of the rent, which made all the difference, so Carl didn’t really want to know anything about Morten or his habits that might damage the man’s standing. And that was why he stayed away.

But his worries turned out to be groundless, because Morten’s place was unusually boring. If you disregarded a couple of very broad-shouldered guys and some girls with big tits on posters that were at least three feet high, his basement apartment could have been any senior citizen’s home on Prins Valdemars Allé.

When Carl asked him about Jesper’s Playmobil toys, Morten led the way to the sauna. All the houses in Rønneholt Park were originally equipped with a sauna, but in ninety-nine percent of the cases they had either been torn down or now functioned as a storage room for all sorts of junk and debris.

“Go ahead and have a look,” said Morten, proudly throwing open the sauna door to reveal a room filled from floor to ceiling with shelves bulging with the type of toys that flea markets couldn’t even give away a few years back. Kinder Egg figures, Star Wars characters, Ninja Turtles, and Playmobil toys. Half of the house’s plastic content was on those shelves.

“See, here are two original figures from the series at the toy trade show in Nürnberg in 1974,” said Morten. He proudly picked up two small figurines wearing helmets.

“Number 3219 with the pickax and number 3220 with the traffic cop’s signs intact,” he went on. “Isn’t it insane?”

Carl nodded. He couldn’t have thought of a better word.

“I’m only missing number 3218, and then I’ll have the complete set of workmen. I got box 3201 and 3203 from Jesper. Look, aren’t they fantastic? It’s hard to believe that Jesper ever played with them.”

Carl shook his head. He had definitely thrown away his money on Muscleman Max, or whatever the hell the figure was called; that much was very clear.

“And he only charged me a couple of thousand. That was so nice of him.”

Carl stared at the shelves. If it were up to him, he would have hurled a few well-chosen remarks at both Morten and Jesper, about how he used to get two kroner an hour for spreading manure, back when the price of a hot dog with two pieces of bread rose to one krone and eighty øre.

“Could I borrow a few of them until tomorrow? Preferably those over there,” he said, pointing to a little family with a dog and lots of other stuff.

Morten Holland looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Are you crazy, Carl? That’s box 3965 from the year 2000. I’ve got the whole set with the house and balcony and everything.” He pointed at the top shelf.

He was right about that. There stood the house in all its plastic glory.

“Do you have any others I could borrow? Just until tomorrow night?”

Morten had a strangely stunned look on his face.

Carl probably would have got the same reaction if he’d asked permission to kick him hard in the nuts.