Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

8

If Carl had ever been in doubt as to whether Rose could keep a promise, he certainly wasn’t now. Hardly had he presumed to raise his weary voice in protest against her preposterous project of deciphering the message in the bottle than her eyes grew wide and she announced that in that case he could take his sodding bottle, regardless of it being in pieces, and shove it up his fucking arse.

Before he even had time to protest further, she had slung her scruffy bag over her shoulder and stormed off. Even Assad was in a state of shock, standing for a moment as though nailed to the floor, a hunk of grapefruit jammed between his teeth.

And thus they remained in silence for quite some time.

“I wonder if she really will send her sister,” Assad finally ventured. His lips moved in slow motion, returning the grapefruit inelegantly to his hand.

“Where’s your prayer mat, Assad?” Carl growled. “Be a sport and pray it doesn’t happen.”

“A sport?”

“A mate, a good bloke, Assad.”

Carl gestured for him to step closer to the gigantic blowup that covered the partition wall. “Come on, we’ll get this out of the way before she gets back.”

“We?”

Carl nodded in acknowledgment. “You’re right, Assad. Best you do it yourself. Move it all on to the other wall next to your string and all those cases you’ve been sorting out. Just make sure there’s some space in between, OK?”

Carl sat for a while, considering the original message with a certain degree of attention. Though it had by now passed through a number of hands, and not all of them had treated the material as possible evidence in a criminal investigation, it never even occurred to him not to bother wearing his white cotton gloves.

The paper was so very fragile. Sitting alone with it now gave rise to a quite singular feeling. Marcus called it instinct. In Bak’s terminology it was “nous.” His soon-to-be ex-wife would say it was intuition, a word she could hardly pronounce. But whatever the fuck it was, this little handwritten letter set all his senses alight. Its authenticity was glaringly obvious. Penned in haste, most likely on a poor surface. Written in blood with the aid of some indeterminable instrument. A pen, dipped in blood? No, the strokes seemed too irregular for that. In some places it was as if the writer had pressed too hard, elsewhere not hard enough. He picked up a magnifying glass and tried to get a feeling for the paper’s irregularities, but the document was simply in too poor a state. What once had been an indentation the damp had most likely turned into a blister, and vice versa.

He saw Rose’s brooding face in his mind’s eye and put the document aside. When she returned in the morning, he would give her the rest of the week to grapple with it. Then if nothing transpired, they would have to move on.

He thought about getting Assad to brew him a cup of that sickly sweet goo of his, only to deduce from the mutterings in the corridor that he hadn’t yet finished cursing over having to run up and down the ladder and keep shifting it all the time. Carl wondered whether he should tell him that there was another ladder exactly the same in the storeroom next to the Burial Club, but frankly he couldn’t be arsed. The man would be finished in an hour anyway.

Carl stared at the old case file concerning the arson in Rødovre. Once he had read through it one last time, he would have to kick it upstairs to the chief so he could file it on top of the alp of cases that already towered on his desk.

An arson in Rødovre in 1995. The newly renovated tiled roof of a select whitewashed premises on Damhusdalen had suddenly collapsed in on itself and the blaze had consumed the entire upper floor in seconds. In the smoldering ruins a man’s body had been found. The owner of the property had no idea whose corpse it was, though a couple of neighbors were able to confirm that lights had been on in the attic windows all night. Since the body remained unclaimed, it was assumed the victim had been some intruding derelict who had failed to exercise proper care with the gas appliance in the kitchenette. Only when the gas company informed police that the main line into the house had been shut off was the case turned over to the Rødovre Police’s homicide section, where it languished in the filing cabinet until the day Department Q was brought into being. There, it might quite conceivably have led an equally anonymous existence had it not been for Assad latching on to that groove in the bone of the little finger on the victim’s left hand.

Carl reached for his phone. He pressed the number of the homicide chief, only to wind up with the misery-inducing voice of Ms. Sørensen instead.

“Very briefly, Ms. Sørensen,” he began, “how many cases-”

“Is that you, Mørck? Let me put you through to someone who doesn’t cringe at the mention of your name.”

One of these days he would make her a gift of some lethally poisonous animal.

“Hello, darling,” came the sound of Lis’s buoyant voice.

Thank Christ for that. Apparently, Ms. Sørensen was not entirely lacking in compassion.

“Can you tell me how many victims have actually been identified in these recent arsons? In fact, how many arsons have we got now, altogether?”

“The most recent, you mean? There are three, and we’ve barely established the identity of one of them.”

“Barely?”

“Well, we’ve got the first name from a medallion he was wearing, but apart from that we don’t actually know who he is. We might even be wrong on the first name.”

“OK. Tell me again where the fires were.”

“Haven’t you read the files?”

“Only sort of.” He exhaled sharply. “One of them was in Rødovre in 1995, I know that. And you’ve got, what…?”

“One last Saturday on Stockholmsgade, one the day after in Emdrup, and the last one so far in the Nordvest district.”

“Stockholmsgade? Sounds upmarket. Do you happen to know which of the buildings was most damaged?”

“Nordvest, I think. The address was Dortheavej.”

“Has any link been established between these fires? What about the owners? Renovation work? Neighbors noticing lights on in the night? Terrorism?”

“None, as far as I know. There’s loads of people on the case, though. You should ask one of them.”

“Thanks, Lis. And I would, but it’s not my case, is it?”

He added some resonance to his voice in the hope of making an impression, then dropped the folder back on the desk. Seems like they know what they’re doing, he thought to himself. But now there were voices in the corridor outside. Most likely those fucking sticklers from Health and Safety had come back to have another go at them.

“Yes, his office is just there,” he heard Assad’s traitorous voice croak.

Carl fixed his eyes on a fly buzzing around the room. If he timed it right, he might be able to swat it in the face of that obsequious worm from Health and Safety.

He positioned himself behind the door with the Rødovre folder raised at the ready.

But the face that appeared was one he had never seen before.

“Hello,” the visitor said, extending a hand. “Yding’s the name. Inspector. Copenhagen West, Albertslund.”

Carl nodded. “Yding? Would that be your first name or last?”

The man smiled. Maybe he wasn’t sure himself.

“I’m here about these latest arsons. It was me who assisted Antonsen in the Rødovre investigation in 1995. Marcus Jacobsen said he wanted to be briefed in person. He told me to have a word with you so you could introduce me to your assistant.”

Carl heaved a sigh of relief. “You just met him. He’s the one climbing about on the ladder out there.”

Yding narrowed his eyes. “The guy I just spoke to, you mean?”

“Yeah. Won’t he do? He took his exams in New York, then all sorts of special training with Scotland Yard in DNA and image analysis.”

Yding rose to the bait and nodded respectfully.

“Assad, come here a minute, will you?” Carl yelled, taking a sudden swat with the Rødovre folder at the fly.

He introduced Yding and Assad to each other.

“Are you finished putting those photocopies up?” he asked.

Assad’s eyelids drooped. Enough said.

“Marcus Jacobsen tells me the original file on the Rødovre case is with you,” said Yding as he shook Assad’s hand. “He said you’d know where it was.”

Assad pointed toward the folder in Carl’s hand at the same instant that Carl was about to have another go at the fly. “That’s it there,” he said. “Was that all?” He was most certainly not on form today. All that carry-on with Rose had put a damper on him.

“The chief was just inquiring about a detail I couldn’t quite recall. Do you mind if I have a quick look through the file?”

“Feel free,” said Carl. “We’re a bit busy here, so perhaps you’ll excuse us while you’re at it?”

He dragged Assad across the corridor and sat down at his desk beneath a poster showing some sandy ruin. It read Rasafa, whatever that was.

“Is that furnace of yours on the go, Assad?” he asked, pointing to the tea urn.

“You can have the last cup, Carl. I’ll make fresh for myself.” He smiled, his eyes lighting up in gratitude.

“As soon as What’s-his-face has cleared off again, you and I are going out, Assad.”

“Where to?”

“Nordvest. To see a building that’s been all but burned to the ground.”

“But that’s not our case, Carl. The others will be angry with us.”

“To begin with, maybe. But it’ll blow over.”

Assad looked anything but convinced. Then his expression changed. “I have found another letter in our message,” he announced. “And now I have a very bad suspicion, too.”

“You don’t say. What is it, then?”

“Now I won’t tell you. You will only laugh.”

That sounded like the best news he’d had all day.

“Cheers, thanks,” said Yding. He was poking his head around the door, his eyes fixed on the cup decorated with dancing elephants from which Carl was drinking. “I’ll pop this up to Jacobsen, if that’s all right with you?” He held up a couple of documents in his hand.

They both nodded.

“Oh, and by the way, I said I’d say hello from an acquaintance of mine. I bumped into him just now in the cafeteria. Laursen, from Forensics.”

“Tomas Laursen?”

“That’s him, yeah.”

Carl frowned. “But he won ten million in the lottery and packed it all in. Sick and tired of dead bodies, that’s what he used to say. What’s he doing here? Back in the bunny suit, is he?”

“Sadly, no. Forensics could certainly do with him. The only funny garment he’s got on now is an apron. He’s working in the cafeteria.”

“That’s a joke, right?” Carl pictured the brick shithouse of a rugby player in his mind’s eye. If the slogan on that apron didn’t say something masculine along the lines of BIG DADDY’S SWEAT RAG, it would be a comical sight indeed. “What happened? I thought he’d invested in companies all over the shop.”

Yding nodded. “He did. And got cleaned out. Bit of a downer, I’d say.”

Carl shook his head incredulously. That’s what you got for trying to be sensible. It was a good thing he didn’t have a penny himself.

“How long’s he been back?”

“About a month, so he said. Don’t you ever eat in the cafeteria?”

“Do I look like a half-wit? There are ten million stairs to that soup kitchen from down here. I suppose you noticed the lift’s out of order?”

The number of businesses and institutions that had not at some point been based somewhere along the six-hundred-meter stretch of tarmac that was Dortheavej could be counted on the fingers of one hand. At present, the street housed crisis support centers, a recording studio, a driving school, arts and cultural activity centers, ethnic associations, and lots more besides. A former industrial neighborhood, seemingly indomitable, unless razed to the ground as in the case of K. Frandsen Wholesalers.

The bulk of the clearance work had been completed in the yard, but the work of the investigation unit had barely begun. Several colleagues walked past without even a nod, but Carl wasn’t surprised. He took this to be a sign of envy, knowing deep down that it probably wasn’t. It didn’t matter, because he didn’t give a shit.

He stood in the middle of the courtyard in front of the entrance to the building and scanned the remains. It was hardly the kind of construction on which a preservation order would be slapped, but the galvanized fencing that surrounded the place was new. A glaring contrast.

“I have seen this kind of thing in Syria, Carl. The paraffin stove overheats, then boom…” Assad mimed an explosion with his hands in the air.

Carl gazed up at the first floor. It looked like the roof had lifted and then fallen into place again. Broad fingers of soot extended halfway up the fiber-cement roof cladding from beneath the eaves. The skylights had been blasted to smithereens.

“This didn’t take long,” he mused, then pondered on what might possess anyone to voluntarily spend even the briefest amount of time in such a charmless and godforsaken place as this. But maybe that was the operative word. Maybe it hadn’t been voluntary at all.

“Carl Mørck, Department Q,” he announced to a passing investigator of the younger generation. “Mind if we have a look? Are the SOCOs done?”

The lad gave a shrug. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be done here until the fucking place has been pulled down,” he said. “But mind where you’re going. We’ve put boards down to stop anyone going through the floor, but there’s no guarantee.”

“K. Frandsen Wholesalers? What did they import?” Assad inquired.

“All sorts of stuff for the printing business. All on the level,” said the investigator. “They had no idea someone had occupied the attic, so everyone who works here was pretty shocked. They were lucky the whole place didn’t go up in smoke.”

Carl nodded. Firms of this kind ought always to be located within six hundred meters of a fire station, like this one. By some stroke of luck, the local fire services had survived the idiotic tendering exercise enforced on the public authority by the EU.

As expected, the entire first floor was wiped out. The sheets of plasterboard used to clad the sloping ceilings hung in tatters, and the partition walls that remained upright were jagged peaks reminiscent of the iron constructions of Ground Zero. It was a world laid waste, black with soot.

“Where was the body?” Carl asked an older man who introduced himself as a representative of the insurance company’s own fire investigation team.

The insurance man indicated a stain on the floor, an obvious answer to the question.

“It was a violent explosion, staggered in two separate blasts with only the briefest interlude between,” the man explained. “The first sparked off the blaze, the second drained the room of oxygen and put it out again.”

“So we’re not talking about the usual relatively slow-burning fire where the victim dies of carbon monoxide poisoning?” Carl said.

“No.”

“Could the man have been rendered unconscious by the first explosion, do you think? And then simply have burned to death in the flames?”

“I can’t say. The remains are so few I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. It’s unlikely we’ll find anything left of the respiratory passages in a case like this, so chances are we’re going to be in the dark as to levels of soot concentration in the lungs and trachea.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to believe the body could be so badly damaged in such a short space of time in this particular fire. I mentioned it to your colleagues over in Emdrup the other day.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Well, my take was that the fire had been arranged so as to hide the fact that the victim had died in a different blaze altogether.”

“You mean the body was moved? What did they say to that?”

“They were in complete agreement, as far as I could tell.”

“So we’re dealing with a murder here? A man is murdered, incinerated, and then moved to another fire.”

“Well, we don’t actually know that he was murdered in the first instance at all. But otherwise, I’d consider it highly likely that the body had been moved here. I just can’t see how such a short-lived blaze, albeit a very violent one, could do that kind of damage to a human body. I mean, we’re talking skeleton here.”

“Have you investigated all three fire scenes?” Assad asked.

“I could have done in principle, as I work for more than one insurance company, but Stockholmsgade was given to a colleague of mine.”

“Were the other fire scenes similar to this one?” Carl asked. “I’m thinking about the actual spaces in which the fires were started.”

“No, apart from them all being unused areas. Hence the suggestion that the victims were homeless.”

“You think all the fires are the same? That all the dead bodies were put inside an empty room and then burned all over again?” Assad inquired.

The insurance man considered this unusual investigator with an unruffled stare. “I think we can proceed from that assumption, yes.”

Carl lifted his gaze and looked up at the blackened collar beams. “I’ve got two questions for you, and then I won’t take up any more of your time.”

“Fire away.”

“Why the two explosions, why not just let the whole place burn to the ground following the first? Any ideas?”

“The only thing I can think of is that the arsonist wanted to limit the extent of the damage.”

“Thanks! My second question is, can we call you if we have any further questions?”

The man smiled and produced a business card. “Of course. My name’s Torben Christensen.”

Carl fumbled around in his pocket for a card of his own, fully aware that none existed. This would be another job for Rose when she came back.

“I do not understand.” Assad stood slightly detached, drawing lines in the soot that covered the sloping wall. Apparently, he was the type who with just the smallest dab of paint on his finger could succeed in getting it all over his clothes as well as on just about every object in his immediate surroundings. At any rate, his face and clothing were now smeared in enough soot to cover a medium-size dining table. “I do not understand the significance of what you are talking about. It must all hang together. The ring on the finger, or the finger that is no longer, and then the bodies and the fires, and everything else as well.” He turned abruptly to face the insurance investigator. “How much money does the company want from you for this place? It is a shitty, old place.”

The insurance man wrinkled his brow. The idea of insurance swindle had now been duly presented, though he was by no means necessarily in agreement. “True, the building itself is somewhat lacking, but the company is certainly entitled to be compensated. We’re talking about fire insurance here. As opposed to coverage for rot and fungus.”

“How much?”

“Oh, somewhere in the region of seven, perhaps eight hundred thousand kroner, I’d say.”

Assad whistled. “Will they rebuild on top of the damaged ground floor?”

“That would be entirely up to the policyholders.”

“So they can pull it all down if that is what they want?”

“Certainly.”

Carl looked at Assad. He was definitely on to something.

As they walked back to the car, Carl got the feeling that they were about to blindside their opponent on the very next bend, and that this time the opposition was not the usual villain but the Homicide Division of the Copenhagen Police.

What a triumph it would be to get an advantage over them.

Carl nodded aloofly to the investigators who were still assembled in the courtyard. Why should he even give them the time of day?

Whatever he and Assad needed to know, they could find out for themselves.

Assad stopped for a moment to decipher a row of graffiti: green, white, black, and red letters daubed across an otherwise neatly rendered wall.

Israel out of Gaza Strib. Palestine for the Palestinians, it read.

“They cannot spell,” Assad commented as he got into the car.

Wonders never cease. I didn’t think you could, either, Carl thought, but kept it to himself.

He started the car and glanced at his assistant, whose gaze was now firmly fixed on the dashboard. Assad was somewhere very far away.

“Hey, Assad, anyone home?”

His eyes didn’t flinch. “Yes, I am right here, Carl,” he said.

After that, not a word passed between them until they were back at Police HQ.