Mercy aka The keeper of lost causes

33

The nightmare started as soon as he passed the newsstand outside the Allerød station, headed for work. The expanded Easter issue of Gossip had come out a week early, and even those who had only a passing acquaintance with Carl now knew that it was his photo, Deputy Detective Superintendent Carl Mørck, that graced a corner of the front page, right under the lead story about the impending wedding of the Danish prince and his French sweetheart.

A couple of locals moved aside in embarrassment as they bought sandwiches and fruit. “Police Detective Threatens Journalist” screamed the headline. And underneath in smaller letters it said: “The Truth about the Fatal Shots.”

The clerk seemed truly disappointed when Carl chose not to personally invest his hard-earned money in a copy of Gossip. But he’d be damned if he’d contribute even one øre to Pelle Hyttested’s livelihood.

Quite a few people on the train stared at Carl, and again he felt the pressure settling in his rib cage.

Things didn’t get better at police headquarters. He’d finished the previous workday listening to the homicide chief reprimand him because of Uffe’s disappearance. Now he was summoned upstairs again.

“What are you staring at, you morons?” he snarled as he walked past a couple of colleagues who didn’t exactly look as if they were aggrieved on his behalf.

“Well, Carl. The question is: What are we going to do with you?” said Marcus Jacobsen. “I’m afraid that next week I’ll be seeing headlines saying you’ve been psychologically terrorizing some poor handicapped person. I’m sure you realize that the media is going to have a field day if anything happens to Uffe Lynggaard.” He pointed at the newspaper. There was a picture of a scowling Carl, taken years earlier at a crime scene. Carl recalled how he’d kicked the press out of the cordoned-off area, and how furious the journalists had been.

“So let me ask again: What are we going to do with you, Carl?”

Carl picked up the tabloid with annoyance and scanned the text in the center of the yellow-and-red layout splotches. They really knew how to drag a man through the mud, those gossip-spewing, low-life reporters.

“I never made any sort of statement about the case to anyone at Gossip,” he said. “All I said was that I would have gladly given up my own life for Hardy and Anker. That’s it. Just ignore it, Marcus, or get our lawyers to go after them.”

He tossed the tabloid on the desk and stood up. Now he’d given his testimony, and it was the truth. What the hell was Marcus going to do about it? Fire him? That would certainly produce some more good headlines.

His boss gave him a resigned look. “The crime program on Channel 2 called. They want to talk to you. I told them to forget it.”

“OK,” replied Carl. His boss probably didn’t dare do otherwise.

“They asked me if there was anything to the Gossip story about you and the shooting episode out in Amager.”

“Is that right? Then I’d like to hear what you told them.”

“I said that the whole thing was pure bullshit.”

“OK, that’s good.” Carl nodded doggedly. “Is that what you really think?”

“Carl, I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to listen carefully. You’ve been on the force for a long time now. How many times during your career have you seen a colleague being pushed into a corner? Think about the very first time you were a cop on the night beat in Randers, or wherever the hell it was, and all of a sudden you found yourself face to face with a bunch of shit-faced farmboys who didn’t like your uniform. Do you remember what that felt like? Then, as the years pass, situations come up that are a hundred times worse. I’ve been through it. Lars Bjørn and Bak have been through it. And plenty of former colleagues who now make their living doing something else have been through it too. Life-threatening situations. With axes and hammers, metal rods, knives, broken beer bottles, shotguns, and all sorts of weapons. How many times can a person handle that sort of situation, and when does he decide he just can’t take it anymore? Who knows? It’s impossible to predict, don’t you think? We’ve all been up shit creek at one time or another. Anyone who hasn’t is not a real cop. We just have to go out there, knowing that we might be out of our depth once in a while. That’s our job.”

Carl nodded, feeling the pressure in his chest take on a new form. “So what’s the verdict on all this, boss?” he said, pointing at the tabloid. “What do you have to say about it? What do you think?”

The homicide chief looked at Carl with a calm expression. Without saying a word, he got up and opened the window facing Tivoli. Next he picked up the newspaper, bent over, and pretended to wipe his backside with it. Then he tossed the whole mess out into the street.

He couldn’t have been more explicit about his opinion.

Carl felt a smile tugging at his lips. Some pedestrian down on the street below was going to be the lucky recipient of a free copy of the TV schedule.

He nodded to his boss. Marcus’s reaction had actually been quite touching.

“I’m close to having new information in the Lynggaard case,” he said in return, and waited to be given permission to leave.

Jacobsen nodded back with a certain show of approval. It was in these sorts of situations that he demonstrated why he was so well liked, and why he’d been able to hold on to the same beautiful woman for more than thirty years. “Just remember that you still haven’t signed up for the management course, Carl,” Jacobsen interjected. “And you need to do that in the next two days. Do you hear me?”

Carl nodded, but didn’t mean anything by it. If his boss was going to insist that he take the course, Marcus would first have to deal with the union.

The four minutes that it took Carl to walk from the homicide chief’s office down to the basement were a gauntlet of scornful looks and disapproving attitude. You’re a disgrace to us all, said some of those eyes. But I don’t give a shit, he thought. They should be giving him their support instead; then he probably wouldn’t have this feeling of a big fat ax hacking into his chest.

Even Assad had seen the article, but at least he gave Carl a pat on the back. He thought the picture on the front page was nicely in focus, but the tabloid cost too much.

It was refreshing to hear a different point of view.

At ten o’clock sharp the phone rang; it was from “the cage,” the front desk at police headquarters. “There’s a man here who says he has an appointment with you, Carl,” said the duty officer coldly. “Are you expecting somebody named John Rasmussen?”

“Yes, send him down.”

Five minutes later they heard hesitant footsteps out in the corridor and then a cautious “Hello, is anybody here?”

Carl forced himself to get up. In the doorway he came face to face with an anachronism wearing an Icelandic sweater, corduroy trousers, and the whole hippie outfit.

“I’m John Rasmussen, the one who was a teacher at the Godhavn children’s home. We have an appointment,” he said, holding out his hand with a sly expression. “Hey, wasn’t that your picture on the front page of one of the tabloids today?”

It was enough to drive you mad. Dressed in that sort of get-up, the man really should have known better than to stare.

After that they quickly established that John Rasmussen did remember Atomos, and then they agreed to go over the case before they took a tour of police headquarters. That would allow Carl the chance to get off with giving him a mini-tour of the ground floor and a brief look out in the courtyards.

The man seemed pleasant enough, if a bit long-winded. Not at all the type that delinquent boys would have the patience to put up with, in Carl’s opinion. But there were probably still a few things that Carl didn’t know about delinquent boys.

“I’ll fax you what we have about him up at the home; I’ve already arranged with the office staff that it would be OK. But I have to tell you that there isn’t much. Atomos’s case file disappeared a few years ago, and when we finally found it behind a bookshelf, at least half of the documents were missing.” He shook his head, making the loose skin under his chin wobble.

“Why did he end up in your institution?”

Rasmussen shrugged. “Problems on the home front, you know. And he’d been placed with a foster family that probably wasn’t the best choice. Which can provoke a reaction, and sometimes things go too far. He was apparently a good kid, but he wasn’t given enough challenges and he was too smart. And that makes for an ugly combination. You see kids like that everywhere in the ghettos where the foreign workers live. They’re practically exploding with untapped energy, those young people.”

“Was he mixed up in any sort of criminal activity?”

“I suppose he was, in a sense, but I think it was only minor stuff. I mean, OK, he had a fierce temper, but I don’t remember him being at Godhavn because of anything violent. No, I don’t recall anything like that, but it was twenty years ago, after all.”

Carl pulled his notepad closer. “I’m going to ask you a few quick questions, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your answers brief. If you can’t answer a question, we’ll just move on. You can always go back to it, if you think of an answer later. OK?”

The man gave a friendly nod to Assad, who offered him one of his viscous, burning-hot substances in a dainty little cup decorated with gold flowers. Rasmussen accepted the cup with a smile. He was going to regret it.

Then he turned to look at Carl. “OK,” he said. “I understand.”

“What’s the boy’s real name?”

“I think it was Lars Erik or Lars Henrik, or something like that. He had a very common last name. I think it was Petersen, but I’ll tell you in my fax.”

“Why was he called Atomos?”

“It was a nickname his father had given him. Apparently he really looked up to his father, who’d died a few years earlier. I think his father was an engineer and had something to do with the nuclear research station at Risø, or someplace like that. But I’m sure you can find out more details when you have the boy’s name and CR number.”

“Do you still have his CR number?”

“Yes. It disappeared with the other documents from his file, but we had a bookkeeping system that was linked to funding from the municipalities and the national government, so the number has been restored to his file.”

“How long was he in your institution?”

“I think he was there about three or four years.”

“That was a long time, considering his age, wasn’t it?”

“Yes and no. That’s how it goes sometimes. It wasn’t possible to find another place for him in the system. He refused to live with a new foster family, and his own family wasn’t able to look after him until then.”

“Have you heard from him since? Do you know what happened to him?”

“I happened to see him, just by chance, some years later, and he seemed to be doing fine. I think it was in Helsingør. He was apparently working as a steward or a first mate, or something like that. He was wearing a uniform, at any rate.”

“You mean, he was a seaman?”

“Yes, I think so. Something along that line.”

I have to get hold of the crew list for the Schleswig-Holstein ferry from Scandlines, Carl said to himself, wondering if it had ever been requisitioned. Again he saw Bak’s conscience-stricken face before him from last Thursday, when they were sitting in Marcus Jacobsen’s office.

“Just a minute,” he said to Rasmussen, and then told Assad to go upstairs and find Bak. He needed to ask him whether they’d ever received a list of personnel on the ferry that Merete Lynggaard had taken. And if so, where was it now?

“Merete Lynggaard? Is this about her?” asked the man, his eyes sparkling like Christmas lights. He took a big gulp of the syrupy tea.

Carl gave him a smile that radiated how incredibly pleased he was to be asked that question. Then he went back to his own questions, without replying.

“Did the boy have psychotic tendencies? Do you remember if he was able to show empathy?”

The teacher looked at his empty cup as if he were still thirsty. Apparently he was one of those people whose taste buds had been tempered back in the macrobiotic days. Then he raised his gray eyebrows. “A lot of the boys who come to us are emotionally abnormal. Of course some of them are given a medical diagnosis, but I don’t remember that happening with Atomos. I do think he was able to show empathy. At least he worried about his mother a lot.”

“Was there any reason for that? Was she a drug addict or something?”

“No, not at all. But I seem to recall that she was quite ill. That was why it took so long before his family could take him back.”

The tour of police headquarters was brief. John Rasmussen turned out to be an insatiable observer, and he commented on everything he saw. If it had been up to him, he would have examined every square foot of the buildings. No detail was too insignificant for Rasmussen, so Carl pretended he had a pager in his pocket that was beeping. “Oh, sorry, I just received the signal that there’s been another murder,” he told the man with a solemn look that the teacher immediately adopted. “I’m afraid I’ll have to say good-bye now. Thanks for your help, Mr. Rasmussen. And I’ll count on receiving a fax from you within an hour or two. All right?”

Silence had settled over Carl’s domain. On his desk in front of him was a message from Bak saying that he knew nothing about any ferry-boat personnel list. Why the hell had Carl expected anything else?

He could hear the murmur of prayers coming from the corner of Assad’s cubbyhole where the rug was positioned, but otherwise no other sound. Carl felt tossed by the storm and swept by the wind. The phone had been ringing off the hook for over an hour because of the fucking tabloid article. Everyone had called, from the police commissioner, who wanted to give him a word of advice, to local radio stations, website editors, magazine journalists, and all sorts of other vermin that crawled about on the fringes of the media world. Apparently Mrs. Sørensen upstairs was finding it amusing to transfer all the calls to Carl, so now he’d switched the phone to silent and activated the caller-ID function, which displayed the number of the incoming call. The problem was that he’d never been good at remembering numbers. But at least for now he didn’t have to put up with anyone else accosting him.

The fax from the Godhavn teacher was the first thing that managed to haul Carl out of his self-imposed torpor.

As expected, Rasmussen was a polite man, and he took the opportunity to offer his thanks and praise to Carl for taking the time to show him around headquarters. The other pages were the promised documents, and in spite of their brevity, they were a gold mine.

The real name of the boy called Atomos was Lars Henrik Jensen. His CR number was 020172-0619, so he was born in 1972. Today he would be thirty-five, which meant that he and Merete Lynggaard were approximately the same age.

Lars Henrik Jensen-what an insanely ordinary name, thought Carl wearily. Why the hell hadn’t Bak or one of those other clowns on the original investigative team been smart enough to print out the crew list from the Schleswig-Holstein? Who knew if it was even possible to dig up the duty roster from so long ago?

He pursed his lips. It would be a huge step forward if it turned out that this guy had worked on the ferry back then, but hopefully that could readily be revealed by making an inquiry to Scandlines. He read over the faxes one more time and then grabbed the phone to call the main Scandlines office.

A voice started speaking even before he had punched in the number. For a moment he thought it was Lis, but then Mona Ibsen’s wax-coated, velvety voice rolled into his ear, leaving him holding his breath.

“What happened?” she asked. “The phone didn’t even ring.”

Yes, that was a good question. She must have been transferred to his phone at the same instant that he picked it up.

“I saw today’s issue of Gossip,” she said.

He swore under his breath. Not her too. If that shitty tabloid only knew how many readers he’d brought in this week, they’d probably put his likeness under their masthead permanently.

“This is a rather unusual situation, Carl. How has it made you feel?”

“Well, it’s not the best thing that’s ever happened to me, I have to admit,” he told her.

“You should come and see me again soon,” she said.

Somehow the offer didn’t seem quite as attractive as it had before. Most likely because of the signal-disrupting wedding ring that had caused interference with his antenna.

“I have a feeling that you and Hardy won’t be free, in a psychological sense, until the killers have been caught. Do you agree, Carl?”

He felt the distance between them grow. “No, not at all,” he said. “It has nothing to do with those bastards. People like us have to live with danger all the time.” He tried hard to recall Marcus’s lecture from earlier that day, but this erotic individual’s breathing on the other end of the line wasn’t helping. “You have to consider that there are plenty of times in a cop’s professional past when things didn’t go wrong. Sooner or later it’s bound to happen.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” she replied. Hardy must have said something similar. “But you know what, Carl? It’s pure bullshit! I’m going to expect to meet with you on a regular basis, so we can figure this whole thing out. Next week there won’t be anything more about you in the tabloids, so we should be able to work in peace and quiet.”

The man Carl talked to at Scandlines was very accommodating. As with similar cases of missing persons, the company had a case file on Merete Lynggaard at hand, and they were able to confirm that the personnel list from that sad day had indeed been printed out back then, with a copy delivered to the police Rapid Response Team. All crew members, both above and below decks, had been interviewed, but unfortunately no one had any information that might indicate what had happened to Merete during the crossing.

Carl felt like banging his head against the wall. What the hell had the police done with that list in the meantime? Used it for a coffee filter? To hell with Bak & Company, and everyone like them.

“I have a CR number,” he told the secretary. “Could you run a search on it?”

“Not today,” he replied. “I’m sorry, but the whole accounting department is away taking a course.”

“OK. Is the list in alphabetical order?” Carl asked. It wasn’t. The captain and his closest subordinates had been listed first; that was common procedure. On board a ship, everyone knew his or her place in the hierarchy.

“Could you check for the name Lars Henrik Jensen?”

The man on the other end of the line gave a weary laugh. Apparently the list was a real whopper.

In the time that it took Assad to finish yet another prayer, splash his face with water from a little bowl in the corner, blow his nose with an expressive blast, and then put on yet another pot of candied water to boil, the clerk in the Scandlines office managed to complete his search. “No, there’s no Lars Henrik Jensen,” he said, and with that the phone call was over.

It was damned depressing.

“Why do you look so gloomy, Carl?” asked Assad with a smile. “Do not think anymore about that stupid picture in that stupid paper. Just think about if you had broken all your arms and legs-that would have been much worse then.”

Undeniably a strange consolation.

“I found out that boy Atomos’s real name, Assad,” Carl said. “I had a feeling that he worked on board the ship Merete disappeared from, but he didn’t. That’s why I look like this.”

Carl received a well-placed thump on the back. “But you found out about the list of the ship’s crew anyway then. Good job, Carl,” Assad said, using the same tone of voice as when a toddler has successfully used the potty.

“Well, it didn’t really lead to anything, but we’ll keep plugging away. His CR number was in the fax from Godhavn, so I’m sure we’ll find the guy. Thank God we’ve got access to all the official registries we have use for.”

He typed in the number on the computer, with Assad standing behind him, and felt like a child about to open a Christmas present. The best moment for every police detective was when the identity of a prime suspect was about to be revealed.

But instead came disappointment.

“What does that mean, Carl?” asked Assad, pointing at the computer screen.

Carl took his hand off the mouse and stared up at the ceiling. “It means the number can’t be found. No one in the whole kingdom of Denmark has that particular CR number. It’s that simple.”

“Didn’t you write it wrong then? Are you sure that is what the fax says?”

Carl checked. Yes, he’d copied the number correctly.

“Maybe it is then not the right number.”

Good guess.

“Maybe somebody changed it.” Assad took the fax from Carl, frowning as he studied the number. “Look at this, Carl. I think someone changed one number or two. What do you think? Isn’t it like scratched in there and there?” He pointed at two of the last four digits. It was hard to see, but on the fax copy there did seem to be a faint shadow surrounding two of the typed numbers.

“Even if only two numbers were changed, Assad, there would be hundreds of possible combinations.”

“Yes, and so what? Mrs. Sørensen can type in the CR numbers in a half hour, if we send some flowers upstairs to her.”

It was unbelievable how the guy had wormed his way into the good graces of that shrew. “As I said, there could be hundreds of possibilities, Assad. And if somebody changed two numbers, maybe they changed all ten. We need to get the original document from Godhavn and examine it more closely before we start trying out number combinations.”

Carl called the institution immediately and asked them to send the original document to police headquarters by messenger, but they refused to comply. They didn’t want the original to get lost.

Then Carl explained how important it was. “It’s likely that you’ve had a counterfeit document in your archives for years.”

His assertion had no effect. “No, I don’t think so,” came the self-confident reply. “We would have discovered it when we reported the information to the authorities to renew our funding.”

“I see. But what if the counterfeiting occurred a long time after the client left the institution? Who on earth would discover it then? You have to consider the possibility that this new CR number didn’t appear in your books until at least fifteen years after Atomos left.”

“I’m sorry, but we still can’t let you have the original document.”

“OK, then we’ll have to get a court order. I find your attitude less than cooperative. We’re investigating a possible murder here. Keep that in mind.”

Neither the fact that they were investigating a murder nor the threat of court involvement was going to do any good; Carl knew that from the start. Appealing to a person’s ego was far more effective. Because who wanted to be saddled with a derogatory label? Not people in the Social Services system, at any rate. The phrase “less than cooperative” was such an understatement that it packed a lot of punch. “The tyranny of the quiet remark,” as one of Carl’s instructors at the police academy liked to call it.

“You’ll need to send us an e-mail first, with a request to see the original,” said the staff member.

Finally he’d hit home.

“So what was the real name then of that Atomos boy, Carl? Do we know how he got a nickname like that?” Assad asked afterward, his foot resting on the open drawer of Carl’s desk.

“They told me it was Lars Henrik Jensen.”

“Lars Henrik. Strange name. Not many people could be called that.”

Probably not where Assad comes from, thought Carl. He was considering making a sarcastic remark when he noticed the oddly pensive expression on Assad’s face. For a moment he looked completely different than usual. More present, more focused. More of an equal, somehow.

“What are you thinking, Assad?” he asked.

It was as if a film of oil slid over his eyes, and their color changed. He frowned and grabbed the Lynggaard file. It took only a second for him to find what he was looking for.

“Can that be a coincidence?” he asked, pointing to a line on the top document.

Carl looked at the name and then realized which report Assad was holding.

For a moment Carl tried to picture everything in his mind, and then it happened. Somewhere inside of him, where cause and effect were not weighed against each other, and where logic and explanations never challenged consciousness, in that place where thoughts could live freely and be played out against each other-right there in that spot, things fell into place, and he understood how it all fitted together.