Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

10

When he came home to Rønneholtparken on a night like this, with crap TV resounding through the concrete blocks and silhouettes of women in kitchen windows, he felt like a tone-deaf musician in a symphony orchestra unable to read music.

He still found it hard to grasp how things had come to this. Why he should feel so alone.

If a bookkeeper of ample waist and a computer nerd with upper arms like matchsticks could start families and make them work, why the hell couldn’t he?

Reluctantly, he returned the wave of his neighbor Sysser, who was standing in the frigid light of her kitchen, frying something at the stove. Thank God she’d made her way back to her own place after that dodgy start on Monday morning. If she hadn’t, he’d have been at his wits’ end by now.

He stared dolefully at the nameplate on the door. There were new names on it now, besides Vigga’s and his own. It wasn’t that he felt a lack of company sharing these walls with Morten Holland, Jesper, and Hardy, and even as he stood there he could hear an inviting murmur of activity around the back. Perhaps they were a family of sorts, too.

Just not the kind he had dreamed about.

Normally, his sense of smell could inform him of the evening’s menu the moment he stepped into the hallway. But what wafted into his nostrils now was not the aroma of Morten’s culinary exertions. At least, he hoped not.

“All right?” he called into the front room, where Morten and Hardy were usually to be found. He put his head around the door. There wasn’t a soul in sight. On the patio outside, however, it was all go. At the center, under the warmth of the patio heater, he could just see Hardy’s bed with all his IV apparatus, and around it stood a crowd of neighbors in thermal jackets, stuffing themselves with grilled sausages and throwing bottled beer down their necks. By the gormless looks of them, they’d been at it for a couple of hours at least.

Carl tried to localize the foul odor that had assailed him as soon as he came in through the front door. His nostrils led him to a saucepan on the kitchen counter. The contents most of all reminded him of tinned food that had passed its sell-by date and been reduced to carbon on a glowing red hotplate. Most unpleasant. And a shame about the saucepan, whose future prospects were now decidedly dim.

“What’s going on?” Carl inquired as he came out onto the patio, his eyes fixed on Hardy, who lay motionless under four duvets with a big grin on his face.

“Hardy’s got some feeling back in a small area of his upper arm,” Morten told him.

“So he says, yeah.”

Morten looked like a boy who had just laid hands on his first dirty mag and was about to behold the contents. “So you know he’s got a slight reflex in the index and middle fingers of one hand?”

Carl shook his head and glanced down at Hardy. “What is this, some kind of neurological guessing game? Just make sure it stops when we get to the nether regions, OK?”

Morten revealed wine-tinted teeth in a grin. “And two hours ago, he moved his wrist, Carl. Straight up. Made me forget I had dinner on the go!” He threw his arms wide with glee, revealing the full outline of his corpulent figure. He looked like he was about to leap into Carl’s arms. Carl hoped he wouldn’t.

“Go on then, Hardy, let’s have a look,” he said drily.

Morten pulled back the duvets to reveal Hardy’s chalk-white skin.

“Come on, mate,” Carl reiterated.

Hardy closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, his jaw muscles a clear indication of the extent of his exertion. It was as though he was commanding every impulse in his body along the nerves to this intensely monitored wrist. The muscles in his face began to quiver, and kept doing so for some time until eventually he was forced to exhale and capitulate.

A sigh ran through his audience, accompanied by various expressions of encouragement. But Hardy’s wrist didn’t move.

Carl gave him a comforting wink, then drew Morten toward the hedge.

“You’ve got some explaining to do, Morten. What’s all this supposed to prove? You’re responsible for him; it’s your job, for Chrissake. Stop building the poor sod’s hopes up. What is he, anyway, some kind of circus act? I’m going upstairs to slip into something more comfortable. In the meantime, you’re sending everyone home and putting Hardy back where you found him, understand? We’ll have a talk about this.”

He wasn’t in the mood for excuses. Morten could save them for the rest of the audience.

“Say that again,” Carl said half an hour later.

Hardy’s gaze was calm. He looked dignified, lying there. Two hundred and seven centimeters of life gone wrong.

“It’s right enough, Carl. Morten didn’t see it, but he was standing beside me. I moved my wrist. I’ve got a bit of pain, too. In my shoulder.”

“How come you can’t do it again, then?”

“I don’t really know how I did it, but it was a controlled movement. Not just a spasm.”

Carl put his hand on his crippled friend’s brow. “From what I know, what you’re saying is close to impossible. But OK, I believe you. I just don’t know what to do about it, that’s all.”

“I do,” said Morten. “Hardy still has this little area of his shoulder where he’s got some feeling. That’s where the pain’s coming from. I think it needs stimulating.”

Carl shook his head. “Hardy, are you sure this is a good idea? Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“So what?” Morten intervened. “I’m here with him, so what harm can it do?”

“We’ll run out of saucepans, for a start.”

Carl glanced toward the hallway. One jacket short on the coat hooks again. “Won’t Jesper be here for dinner?”

“He’s with Vigga in Brønshøj.”

That didn’t sound right. What would he be wanting in that freezing garden shed? Besides, Jesper didn’t get on with Vigga’s new boyfriend. Not because the guy wrote poetry and wore thick-rimmed specs, more because he insisted on reading it out loud and being the center of attention.

“What’s he doing there? He’s not skipping school again, is he?” Carl shook his head in despair. The lad only had a couple of months to go before his final exams. With that pathetic new grading system and the government’s miserable reform of upper secondary education, he would have to hang in there and at least pretend to be learning something, otherwise he’d be fucked.

Hardy interrupted his train of thought. “Relax, Carl. Jesper and I go through his homework together every day when he gets home from school. I test him before he goes off to see Vigga. The lad’s doing all right.”

Jesper doing all right? It sounded almost surreal. “Then what’s he doing with his mother?”

“She called him and asked if he’d go and see her,” Hardy replied. “She’s not happy, Carl. She’s fed up with her life and wants to come home again.”

“Home? You mean this home?”

Hardy nodded. Carl had never felt closer to shock-induced collapse.

Morten had to bring the whisky twice.

The night was sleepless, the morning weary and subdued.

Carl was a lot more tired by the time he eventually sat down behind his desk at the office than he had been when he went to bed the night before.

“Any word from Rose?” he inquired as Assad put down a plate in front of him, on which were assembled lumps of some indeterminate substance. Apparently, the man was trying to pep him up a bit.

“I called her last night, but she was out. That is what her sister told me.”

“You don’t say.” Carl wafted away his trusty old friend the fly and then endeavored to pick up one of the syrupy objects from his plate, only to find it surprisingly resistant. “Did this sister of hers say if she would be in today?”

“The sister, Yrsa, will come, but not Rose. Rose has gone away.”

“What? Where’s she gone? Her sister’s coming, you say? Are you winding me up, Assad?” He extracted his fingers from the sticky fly trap on his plate. It felt like he lost skin in the process.

“Yrsa said Rose sometimes goes away for a day or two, but that we should not worry. Rose will return like she always does. This is what Yrsa told me. And in the meantime, Yrsa will come and look after Rose’s job. They cannot afford to lose the money. This is what she said.”

Carl tossed his head back. “You’re kidding? So full-time employees can just swan off whenever it takes their fancy, eh? Not bad, is it? Rose must have lost her marbles.” He would make sure to tell her as much in no uncertain terms as soon as she got back. “And this Yrsa! She won’t get past the desk upstairs, not if I can help it.”

“Oh, but I have already sorted this with the duty officer and Lars Bjørn, Carl. It’s no problem. Lars Bjørn is not arsed, as long as her wages are still paid out to Rose. Yrsa is the temp while Rose is off sick. Bjørn is very happy we were able to find someone so quickly.”

“Not arsed, you say? And Rose is off sick?”

“This is what we call it, am I right?”

It was tantamount to mutiny.

Carl picked up the phone and pressed Lars Bjørn’s number.

“Hello, gorgeous,” said Lis’s voice on the other end.

What now?

“Hi, Lis. I’m trying to get through to Bjørn.”

“I know. I’m taking his calls. He’s in a meeting with Jacobsen and the commissioner about the staffing situation.”

“Can you put me through? I just need to speak to him for five seconds.”

“About Rose’s sister, you mean?”

The muscles in his face tensed up. “This wouldn’t by any chance have anything to do with you, would it?”

“Carl, you know I’m in charge of the temp lists.”

As a matter of fact, he didn’t.

“Are you telling me Bjørn gave the go-ahead for a temp to fill in for Rose, without asking me first?”

“Hey, take it easy!” she exclaimed in English, and snapped her fingers at the other end as though to wake him up from a stupor. “We’re short-staffed. Bjørn’s approving everything at the moment. You should see who we’ve got working in some of the other departments.”

Her laughter did nothing to alleviate his frustration.

K. Frandsen Wholesalers was a limited company with equity amounting to little more than two hundred and fifty thousand kroner but whose value was estimated to be in the region of sixteen million. In the last financial year, ending in September, its paper stocks alone were set at eight million, so at first blush the company hardly seemed to be in financial difficulties. The only problem was that the company’s clients were primarily weeklies and free newspapers, a sector that had taken a hammering during the current financial crisis. Which, as far as Carl could see, might well have impacted rather suddenly and with considerable force on K. Frandsen’s coffers.

This line of inquiry became all the more interesting when similar pictures emerged for the companies owning the premises that had burned down in Emdrup and on Stockholmsgade. The firm in Emdrup, JPP Fittings A/S, turned over some twenty-five million kroner a year supplying mainly DIY stores and major timber outlets. Most likely a thriving business last year, and a struggling one now. The same seemed to be true of the Østerbro company, Public Consult, which earned its money generating tendering projects for leading firms of architects, and which had probably also felt the effects of hitting that nasty concrete wall called recession.

Besides the obvious vulnerability of all three companies in the present financial climate, however, they seemed to have little else in common. Different owners, different clients.

Carl drummed his fingers on the desk. What about the Rødovre blaze in 1995? Would that fit the picture? A business suddenly finding itself struggling against a headwind? This was where he needed Rose. Fucking woman.

“Knock, knock,” said a husky voice at the door.

That’ll be Yrsa, Carl thought to himself, glancing at his watch. It was a quarter past nine. She was even on time.

“What time do you call this?” he said with his back turned. It was something he had learned once. The boss who addressed minions with his back turned reigned supreme.

“I didn’t know we had an appointment,” a rather nasal male voice replied.

Carl whirled around in his chair so fast he carried on half a turn too far.

It was Laursen. Good old Tomas Laursen, forensics officer and rugby player. The man who won a fortune in the lottery, only to lose it again and end up working in the cafeteria on the top floor.

“Tomas. Fucking hell! What are you doing here?”

“Your kind assistant asked me down to say hello.”

Assad put his cheeky face around the door. What was he up to? Had he really been upstairs to the cafeteria? Weren’t his spicy specialties and culinary colon busters enough for him anymore?

“I popped up to buy a banana, Carl,” Assad said, waving the curviform fruit in front of him. Who was he kidding? All the way to the top floor for a banana?

Carl nodded. Assad was a monkey. He’d known all along.

He and Laursen greeted each other with a handshake and squeezed as hard as they could. The same excruciatingly painful joke as always.

“Funny you should turn up, Laursen. I’ve just been hearing about you from What’s-his-face, Yding from Albertslund. I gather your return to the madhouse isn’t entirely voluntary?”

Laursen shook his head deliberately. “Well, it was my own fault, I suppose. The bank put one over on me, told me it was a good idea to borrow with a view to investment. The capital was there, so all I had to do was sign. And now there’s fuck all left.”

“They should cover your losses, the bastards,” said Carl. He had heard it said on the news.

Laursen nodded. There was no doubt that he agreed, but here he was back again. Last man in. Buttering smørrebrød and washing up. One of the finest forensics officers on the force. What a waste.

“Still, I’m happy enough,” he said. “I see a lot of people I know from when I was out in the field, without having to get back out there with them again.” He smiled awkwardly, just like in the old days. “I got sick of it, Carl. Picking at corpses at all hours of the day and night. Not a single day went by the last five years when I didn’t think of jacking it all in. So the money got me out, even if I did lose it all again. That’s how I choose to look at it, anyway. Nothing’s ever so bad as not to be good for something.”

Carl nodded. “You won’t know Assad, of course, but I’m sure he didn’t drag you down here to discuss the cafeteria menu with an old colleague over a cup of peppermint tea.”

“He told me about the message in the bottle. I think I got the gist of it. Can I see the letter?”

The crafty little-!

Laursen sat down as Carl gingerly removed the document from the folder. Assad came waltzing in with a chased brass tray with three minuscule cups on it.

The smell of peppermint thickened the air. “You will most definitely like this tea,” said Assad as he poured. “It will do wonders for all sorts of things.” He grasped his crotch and winked. The message was abundantly clear.

Laursen switched on another Anglepoise lamp and drew the light up close to the document.

“Do we know who preserved this?”

“A lab in Scotland,” Assad replied. He produced the investigation sheet before Carl had even remembered where he had put it.

“The analysis is here.” Assad placed it in front of Laursen.

“OK,” said Laursen after a few minutes. “I see it was Douglas Gilliam who took care of business there.”

“You know him?”

Laursen gave Carl the kind of look a five-year-old girl would when asked if she knew who Britney Spears was. Hardly respectful, but certainly enough to kindle Carl’s curiosity. Who was this Douglas Gilliam when he was at home, apart from some bloke on the wrong side of the border with England?

“You’re not likely to get very far on this,” said Laursen, picking up his cup of peppermint tea between a thick finger and thumb. “Our Scottish colleagues seem to have done everything in their power to preserve the paper and recover the text by means of various forms of light treatment and chemicals. They’ve found minute traces of printer’s ink, but as far as I can see nothing’s been done to determine the origins of the paper itself. In fact, most of the physical investigation seems to be down to us. Have you run this through the Center of Forensic Services out in Vanløse?”

“No, but then I had no idea the technical investigations were incomplete,” said Carl reluctantly. The mistake was his.

“It says so here.” Laursen indicated the bottom line of the lab report.

Why the hell hadn’t he noticed that? Shit!

“Actually, Carl, Rose did tell me this. But she did not think we needed to know where the paper came from,” Assad chipped in.

“Well, on that count she was most certainly wrong. Let me have another look.” Laursen got up and squeezed his fingers into his pocket. It was no easy task. Rugby thighs in tight jeans.

The type of magnifying glass Laursen now produced was one Carl had seen on many occasions. A small square that could be folded out to stand on top of the object. It looked like the lower part of a little microscope. Standard issue for stamp collectors and similar loonies, but the professional version, equipped with the finest of Zeiss lenses, was most certainly a must for a forensics expert such as Laursen.

He placed it on the document, muttering to himself as he drew the lens across the lines of mostly obliterated writing. He worked systematically from side to side, one line at a time.

“Can you see more characters through that glass?” Assad inquired.

Laursen shook his head but said nothing.

By the time he was halfway through the document, Carl was dying for a smoke.

“Just nipping out for a sec, OK?”

His words were hardly noticed.

He sat down on one of the tables in the corridor and stared blankly at all the equipment they had standing around idle. Scanners, copy machines, and the like. The thought annoyed him. Another time, he would have to make sure Rose finished what she was doing before she dropped everything and split. Poor leadership on his part.

It was at this very moment of painful self-awareness that a series of dull thuds suddenly came from the stairs, making him think of a basketball bouncing down a flight of steps in slow motion, followed by a wheelbarrow with a flat tire. He gawped as a person came toward him looking like a housewife who had just stocked up on duty-frees from the ferries that used to ply the Øresund to Sweden. The high-heeled shoes, the pleated tartan skirt, and the garish shopping cart she dragged in her wake all screamed the fifties more than the fifties probably ever did themselves. And at the upper extremity of this gangling individual was a clone of Rose’s head topped with the neatest peroxide perm imaginable. It was like suddenly being in a film with Doris Day and not knowing how to get out.

In a situation like this, a person smoking a filterless ciggie will invariably end up burning his fingers.

“Ow, fuck!” he spluttered, dropping the end on the floor in front of the colorful newcomer.

“Yrsa Knudsen,” she announced, extending a pair of fingers toward him, her nails painted as red as blood.

Never for the life of him would he have believed that twins could be so similar and yet so different.

He had reckoned on taking control from the word go, and yet here he was fawningly answering her inquiry as to the whereabouts of her office: “Down the corridor past all those sheets of paper flapping on the wall there.” He completely forgot what he had been intending to say: his name and rank, and then a reprimand that the situation she and her sister had contrived was entirely against regulations and must cease forthwith.

“I’m expecting a briefing once I’ve got settled in. Let’s say in an hour, shall we?” And off she went.

“What was that, Carl?” Assad asked as Carl stepped back into his office.

Carl glared at him. “I’ll tell you what it was, Assad. It was a problem. More specifically, it was your problem. In an hour from now, I want you to put Rose’s sister in the picture as to what’s on our desk. Are you with me?”

“So that was Yrsa, the lady who walked past?”

Carl closed his eyes in confirmation. “Are you with me? You’re going to brief her, Assad.”

And then he turned to Laursen, who had now almost finished examining the document. “Anything turning up there?”

Laursen, forensics expert turned purveyor of French fries, nodded and indicated something invisible to the human eye that he had apparently placed on a microscope slide.

Carl stuck his head up close. OK, there did seem to be what looked like the tip of a hair, and next to it something tiny, round, and flat, and otherwise almost transparent.

“That’s a splinter of wood,” Laursen said, pointing at the hairlike fragment. “My guess is it came from the point of the writing instrument used by whoever wrote the letter. It was lodged quite deeply and lay in the direction of the pen. The other thing’s a fish scale.”

He straightened up from his rather awkward position and rolled his shoulders. “Perhaps we’ll get somewhere with this after all, Carl. But we need to get it off to Vanløse first, OK? They should be able to determine the wood type relatively quickly, but finding out what kind of fish that scale belongs to is more likely a job for a marine scientist.”

“Highly interesting,” said Assad. “This is a very well-endowed colleague we have here, Carl.”

Well-endowed? Did he really say that?

Carl scratched his cheek. “What more can you say about this, Laursen? Was there anything else?”

“Well, I can’t tell whether the person who wrote it is right- or left-handed, which is quite unusual in cases where the paper is as porous as this. Usually, you can pick out raised areas all going in a certain direction. For that reason we might assume that the letter was written under difficult circumstances. Perhaps against an uneven surface, or with hands that were tied. Maybe just by someone unpracticed in writing. Besides that, my bet is that the paper was used to wrap fish in. As far as I can see, it’s got traces of slime all over it, most likely from a fish. We know the bottle was watertight, so it won’t be from having been in the sea. As for those shadowy areas there, I’m not sure. It could be nothing. Mold, perhaps, or more probably just stains from being inside the bottle.”

“Interesting! What about the message itself? Do you think it’s worth pursuing, or is it simply some prank?”

“A prank?” Laursen retracted his upper lip to reveal two slightly crossed front teeth. It did not mean he was laughing, but simply that whoever was listening would do well to prick up his ears. “I can see indentations in the paper showing the handwriting to be rather unsteady. The splinter we’ve got here drew a narrow, rather deep scratch across the paper until it broke off. In places it’s so sharply done you’d think it was a groove on a vinyl LP.” He shook his head. “So no, definitely not a prank. It looks more like it was written by someone whose hand was shaking. Again due to the circumstances, perhaps, but conceivably because the person was scared to death. So my instinct says yes, this is serious. Of course, you can never tell for sure.”

At this point, Assad interrupted. “When you look so close at the letters and the scratches, can you see more letters?”

“One or two, maybe. But only up to where the point breaks off the writing instrument.”

Assad handed him a copy of the message he and Rose had blown up and stuck to the wall in the corridor.

“Will you not then write the ones you think are missing here?” he said.

Laursen nodded and placed the magnifying glass against the original letter once again. After studying the first couple of lines for another few minutes, he said: “Well, this is my take on it, without putting my head on the block.”

And then he added figures and letters of the alphabet, so that the first lines of the message now ran:

HELP

.he.6 febrary 1996 w… k…naped… got.s.t the.us sdop on.aut.opv… i. Bal… u.-T… man… 18. t.ll…h…r. hair

They stood for a moment and considered the result until Carl broke their silence.

“February 1996! That means the bottle was in the sea for six years before it got caught up in that net.”

Laursen nodded. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure about the year, but the nines were back to front.”

“That’d be why the Scots couldn’t work it out.”

Laursen shrugged. Maybe.

Beside them, Assad stood frowning.

“What’s up, Assad?” Laursen asked.

“It is just as I thought. Very bad shit, indeed,” he sighed, indicating three of the words.

Carl scrutinized the letter.

“If we cannot find more characters in the last part of the letter, then our job will be very, very difficult,” Assad went on.

And now Carl saw what he meant. Of all people on earth, it had fallen to Assad to recognize the full extent of the problem. A man who had lived in the country for no more than a few years. No one would credit it.

Febrary, kidnaped and bus sdop.

Whoever wrote the letter couldn’t spell.