Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

28

“What the hell happened out there in Rødovre, Assad? I’ve never heard Antonsen sound off like that before.”

Assad shifted uneasily in his chair. “Nothing to worry about, Carl. It was a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

A misunderstanding? Presumably the French Revolution had broken out over a misunderstanding, too.

“In that case, you need to explain to me how a so-called misunderstanding can lead to two grown men rolling around the floor of a Danish police station knocking the stuffing out of each other.”

“Stuffing?”

“Yes, the stuffing. It’s an idiom. For Chrissake, Assad, you know perfectly well there was a reason you laid into Samir Ghazi like that. And it’s about time you came clean. I want a decent explanation. Where do you two know each other from?”

“We don’t actually know each other at all.”

“Oh, come on, Assad, don’t give me that. People don’t go around beating up strangers for no reason. If it’s something to do with family reunification or forced marriage or someone’s fucking honor, then I want to know-now! We need to get this into the open, otherwise I won’t have you here, are you with me? Remember, Samir’s the policeman, not you.”

Assad turned his head toward Carl with a wounded look in his eye. “I can leave right now, if that is what you wish.”

“I hope for your sake that my long-standing friendship with Antonsen will be enough for him not to make that decision on my behalf.” Carl leaned across the desk. “Listen, Assad, when I ask you something, I expect you to answer. And if you don’t, it tells me something’s wrong. Maybe something serious enough to affect your residence here in this country, not just lose you this fucking fantastic job of yours.”

“You will perhaps persecute me, then?” Hurt was too mild a word to describe the man’s demeanor.

“Have you and Samir had any altercation with each other before? In Syria, for instance?”

“No, not in Syria. Samir is from Iraq.”

“So you admit there’s a grudge. But you still don’t know each other?”

“Yes, Carl. Would you please not ask me any more about this?”

“I’ll think about it. But if you don’t want me to ask Samir Ghazi for a report on this fight of yours, you’re going to have to give me something to go on and calm me down a bit. And you’re definitely to stay away from Samir from now on, understood?”

Assad sat for a while staring into space before nodding. “I am to blame for one of Samir’s relatives now being dead. It was never my intention, Carl, you must believe this. The truth is I did not even know.”

Carl closed his eyes for a moment.

“Have you committed any crime in this country?”

“No, I swear at you, Carl.”

“Swear to me, Assad. You swear to me.”

“Yes, that is what I do.”

“So this all happened some time ago?”

“Yes.”

Carl nodded. Maybe Assad would open up another day.

“Have a look at this, you two.” Yrsa barged in through the door without knocking. She had a serious look on her face, for once, and was holding a sheet of paper out in front of her. “It’s a fax from the Swedish police in Ronneby. Just in two minutes ago. This is what he looked like.”

She put the fax down on the desk. It wasn’t a photofit, pieced together on a computer. This was the real thing. A proper drawing, with shading and all the rest of it, and in color to boot. A male face, pleasing at first blush, but which on closer inspection displayed a number of jarring elements.

“He looks just like my cousin,” Yrsa commented drily. “A pig farmer from Randers.”

“I had not imagined him to look like this exactly,” said Assad.

Carl hadn’t, either. Short sideburns, dark mustache neatly trimmed back above the lip. Hair slightly lighter, precisely parted. Thick eyebrows almost converging. Unremarkable, half-full lips.

“We need to bear in mind that this drawing may not reflect his true appearance. Remember, Tryggve was only thirteen at the time, and just as many years have passed since all this happened. Our man probably looks different now anyway. But how old would you say he was here?”

They were about to reply, but Carl stopped them. “Look closely. The mustache might make him look older than he is. Write down your guess here.”

He tore off a couple of pages from a notepad and handed them to his two assistants.

“To think he’s the one who killed Poul,” Yrsa mused. “It’s almost like he killed someone you knew.”

Carl wrote down his own estimate and took Assad’s and Yrsa’s.

Two of them said twenty-seven. The other said thirty-two.

“Yrsa and I agree on twenty-seven, Assad. What makes you think he’s older?”

“It is simply because of this.” He pointed his finger to a diagonal line issuing from the eyebrow of the man’s right eye. “This is not the wrinkle of a smile.”

He indicated his own face, then lit up in a smile and pointed at the corners of his beaming eyes. “Look at these lines. They go out toward the cheek. And now look.”

He turned his mouth down at the corners. Now he looked just like he had done when Carl had been giving him a bollocking a few minutes earlier. “Is there not a line just here?” He indicated a point next to his eyebrow.

“Maybe, but it’s hard to tell,” said Yrsa, then mimicked the expression herself and felt for a line with her fingertip.

“That is because I am a happy man. The killer is not happy. A wrinkle like this is something a person is born with, or else it appears because the person is not happy. And if it appears, it will do so only with time. My mother was not so happy, and hers did not come until she was fifty.”

“Perhaps you’re right, Assad. And perhaps you’re not,” said Carl. “But the fact is that all three of our guesses are in the same region, which fits in with Tryggve’s assessment, too. So if he’s still alive, he’ll be somewhere between forty and forty-five now.”

“Could we scan the picture into our system and add a few years onto him?” Yrsa inquired. “Computers can do that, can’t they?”

“Of course, but the risk is you end up with something that may be even more inaccurate than the original. I reckon we should stick with what we’ve got. A decent-looking fellow, more attractive than average, and quite masculine. Otherwise a fairly subdued kind of appearance, a bit conservative, like an office worker.”

“I’d say he looks more like a soldier or a policeman,” Yrsa added.

Carl nodded. The man could have been anything at all. It was usually the way.

He glanced up at the ceiling. That bastard fly again. Maybe he should take the liberty, on behalf of the state, of investing in a can of flyspray. Most likely they’d prefer that to him expending a bullet on the bloody thing.

He forced his thoughts back to the matter at hand and looked at Yrsa. “Get this photocopied, and be sure to send it out to all districts. Do you know how?”

She gave a shrug.

“Oh, and Yrsa, let me see the wording before you put it out, yeah?”

“What wording?”

He sighed. In many ways, she was amazing, but she would never reach Rose’s level. “You need to write a description of what the case is about, Yrsa. Something like: ‘We suspect this person of having committed a murder, and we want to know if anyone has any knowledge of a man of this appearance having been in trouble with the police.’”

“Where does this get us, Carl? What’s the connection? Any ideas?” Lars Bjørn frowned and shoved the photo of the four Jankovic siblings back across the table to the homicide chief.

“I’ll tell you where it gets us. If you want to proceed with your arson cases, you need to look through the criminal registers for Serbs with exactly the same kind of finger ring as our four tubbies here. You might even find a match in the Danish archives, but if I were you, I’d get on to the police in Belgrade pretty sharpish.”

“So you believe the bodies that were found at the scenes of the arsons are Serbs in some way connected to the Jankovic family, and that these rings signify that relationship?” Jacobsen ventured.

“Definitely. And what’s more, my guess is that they were almost born with those rings on, judging by the extent of the deformation of the finger bone in each case.”

“Some kind of crime syndicate?” Bjørn proffered.

Carl gave him a goofy smile. The man was on form for a miserable Monday morning.

Marcus Jacobsen eyed the flattened cigarette packet on the table in front of him as though he might devour it any minute. “Well, we certainly need to research the matter with our Serbian colleagues. If your assumptions are correct, then it would seem membership might even be hereditary. Do we know who’s behind these banking firms now? The four founders are no longer with us, I understand.”

“I’ve got Yrsa looking into that. It’s a limited company, but the majority of the shares are still owned by people called Jankovic.”

“A Serbian crime syndicate lending out money, then?”

“Looks like it. We do know that the companies hit by the arsons all owed money to the Jankovic family at one point or another. What we don’t know is where the bodies come from and why. We’ll gladly leave that one with you.” Carl smiled and shoved another picture across the table.

“This is our presumed perp in the murder of Poul Holt and the kidnapping of his brother. Nice-looking bloke, yeah?”

Marcus Jacobsen considered the portrait in front of him as he would any other. He had seen murderers aplenty in his time.

“I understand Pasgård has made a couple of breakthroughs in the case today,” Jacobsen stated drily. “Good thing he was able to assist you.”

Carl frowned. What the fuck was he on about?

“Breakthroughs? What breakthroughs?”

“You mean he hasn’t told you yet? He’s probably writing his report as we speak.”

Twenty seconds later, Carl was standing in Pasgård’s office. A dingy room-the photo of the incumbent’s family of three failed to cheer the place up, serving instead as a reminder of how immeasurably little the office of a public servant could resemble home.

“What’s going on?” Carl demanded, as Pasgård’s fingers danced across the keyboard of his computer.

“Two minutes, and you’ll have your report. Then the case is all yours.”

It all sounded too fucking efficient by half. Nevertheless, the man swiveled around on his chair what seemed like exactly two minutes later and announced: “You can read it off the screen before I print it out. Make any corrections yourself, if you feel the need.”

Pasgård and Carl had started at HQ at about the same time, but though Carl could hardly be called biddable, the majority of decent jobs had fallen his way, much to the chagrin of an arse-licker like Pasgård.

So Pasgård’s smug little smile now was a thinly veiled manifestation of the infinite pleasure that surged through him as Carl read his report.

When he had finished, Carl turned to face him.

“Nice work, Pasgård,” was all he said.

“Are you off home, or can you put in a couple more hours tonight, Assad?” Carl asked. Hundred to one he didn’t have the balls to say no.

Assad smiled. Most likely he thought of it as a pat on the back. Now they could get on with the job. Questions about Samir Ghazi and the issue of where Assad actually lived were on the back burner.

“Yrsa, you can come along, too. I’ll drop you off at your place. It’s on our way.”

“You mean Stenløse? You must be joking, that’s miles out. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take the train. I love trains, me.” She buttoned her coat and hung her nifty little fake-crocodile-skin bag over her shoulder. Like her thick-heeled brogues, this seemed to be inspired by old English films.

“You can give the train a miss today, Yrsa,” he said. “I want to put you both in the picture on the way, if you don’t mind.”

Reluctantly, she climbed into the backseat, almost like a queen who’d been fobbed off with a taxi. Legs crossed and her bag on her lap. Soon, the cloud of her perfume settled beneath the nicotine-stained roof lining.

“Pasgård’s had word back from the Section for Aquatic Biology. They’ve given us quite a bit to go on. First thing is they’ve now established that the scale comes from a species of trout most often found in fjords, where fresh-water and seawater converge.”

“What about the slime?” Yrsa asked.

“Most likely from common mussels or fjord shrimps. That’ll have to stay unresolved for the time being.”

Assad nodded in the passenger seat next to him and flicked to the first page of Krak’s map of Nordsjælland. After a moment, he placed his finger near the middle of the page. “OK, I see them here now. Roskilde Fjord and the Isefjord. Aha! I had no idea they joined together at Hundested.”

“Oh, my God, don’t tell me you’re going to have to trawl around them both? What a job you’ll have!”

“Right on both counts, Yrsa.” Carl glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Fortunately, we’ve got the help of a sailor with local knowledge. Lives in Stenløse, like you. You probably remember him from that double murder in Rørvig, Assad. Thomasen. The bloke who knew the father of the two who got murdered.”

“Yes, indeed. His first name started with a ‘K’, and he had a fat belly.”

“Exactly. His name’s Klaes. Klaes Thomasen from the police station at Nykøbing. He’s got a boat moored at Frederikssund and knows the fjords like the back of his hand. He’s going to take us out. I reckon we’ve got a couple of hours before it gets dark.”

“You mean we are going to sail on the water?” Assad asked in a quiet voice.

“We’re going to have to if we want to find a boathouse projecting into the fjord.”

“I am not so happy about this, Carl.”

Carl chose to ignore him. “Besides being the stamping ground of the fjord trout, there’s another indication that we ought to be looking for the boathouse in the vicinity of the mouths of the fjords. I’m loath to admit it, but Pasgård has done a very good job. After letting the marine biologists take their samples, he sent the paper on which the message was written to Forensics so that they could have a look at the shadowy areas Laursen picked out. It turns out to be printer’s ink. Or at least the remnants of such.”

“I thought they’d done all that in Scotland,” said Yrsa.

“Their efforts were focused on the written characters rather than the paper itself. But when Forensics ran their tests this morning, it turned out there were remains of printer’s ink all over it.”

“Was it just ink, or did it say anything?” she asked.

Carl smiled to himself. Once, when he was a boy, he and one of the other lads had lain flat out on their stomachs at the fairground in Brønderslev staring at a footprint. Slightly obliterated by rain but still clearly distinct from the rest. They could make out the imprint of letters that seemed to have been scratched into the sole, but only after some time had elapsed did they realize that they were back to front. PEDRO, they read. And before long, they had put together a story that the shoe probably belonged to some machinist from Pedershaab Maskinfabrik who was afraid someone would nick his only pair of safety shoes. So after that, whenever the two lads stuffed away their own shoes in the lockers of the open-air baths at the other end of town, they always had this poor Pedro in mind.

It had been the beginning of Carl’s interest in detective work, and now here he was, somehow back at the start again.

“Turns out the writing was back to front. There must have been a newspaper pressed against the paper for some time, and the lettering rubbed off.”

“Get out!” Yrsa leaned as far forward as her crossed legs would allow. “What did it say, then?”

“Well, if the lettering hadn’t been the size it was, we’d most likely never have known, but as far as I understand it they’ve figured out it says Frederikssund Avis. One of those free local papers that comes out once a week.”

At this point, he had imagined Assad whooping with delight, but there was no reaction.

“Don’t you see? This means we can narrow down the geography considerably, as long as we assume that the piece of paper the message was written on came from within the newspaper’s circulation area. Otherwise, we’d have been looking at Nordsjælland’s entire coastline. Have you any idea how many kilometers that would be?”

“No,” came the curt reply from the backseat.

He hadn’t, either, for that matter.

And then his mobile chimed. He glanced at the display and immediately felt a warm glow inside.

“Mona,” he said in a completely different tone than before. “How nice of you to call.”

He sensed Assad shift uneasily in his seat. Maybe he was no longer quite so confident that his boss was an also-ran in matters romantic.

Carl angled the conversation toward inviting her over that same evening, but that wasn’t why she was calling. It was purely professional this time, she said with a laugh that made Carl’s pulse race. Right now she had a colleague with her, and he would rather like to speak to Carl about his traumas.

Carl frowned. He would, would he? What did his traumas have to do with her male colleagues? His traumas were for her, and her alone. In fact, he’d been saving them up.

“I’m doing fine, Mona, so that won’t be necessary,” he said, picturing the gleam in her eyes.

She laughed again. “I’m sure you’re fine after last night, Carl. It sounds like it, anyway. But before that you weren’t doing too well, remember? And I can’t always be there for you around the clock.”

He swallowed, almost trembling at the thought. He was just about to ask her why not, but decided it would keep until later.

“OK, you win.” He very nearly added “darling” but caught sight of Yrsa’s gleefully attentive eyes in the rearview mirror and thought better of it.

“Tell your colleague he can come and see me tomorrow. We’ve got a lot on the go, though, so I can’t give him much time, OK?”

He had forgotten to invite her over. Shit!

It would have to wait until tomorrow. Hopefully, she would still be interested.

He snapped his mobile shut and forced a smile in the direction of Assad. He had felt like Don Juan when he’d looked at himself in the mirror that morning. The feeling seemed to have gone now.

“Hey-aay, Mona! Tell you, Mona, what I’m gonna do. Get-a my house a-next door to you. Ooh, ooh, Mona!” Yrsa broke into song on the backseat.

Assad gave a start. If he thought he had heard her sing before, he certainly had now. Her voice was in a league of its own.

“I don’t think I am familiar with this song,” Assad said. He turned his head toward the backseat and nodded appreciatively. And then fell silent again.

Carl shook his head. Damn! Now Yrsa knew about Mona, which meant that soon everyone else would know, too. Maybe he shouldn’t have answered the call.

“Just think,” said Yrsa.

Carl glanced at her in the mirror. “Think what?” he replied, ready to launch a counterstrike.

“Frederikssund. Just think, he might have murdered Poul Holt here, near Frederikssund.” Yrsa stared out ahead.

So the Carl and Mona thing had already been dismissed from her thoughts. And yes, he knew what she meant. Frederikssund wasn’t far from where she was living now.

Depravity didn’t discriminate between one town and another.

“So now you’ll try to find a boathouse at the top of one of the fjords,” she went on. “That’s a scary thought, if it’s right. But how come you’re so sure it won’t be further south? Don’t people there read the local rag as well?”

“True. The paper could have been taken away from the Frederikssund area for whatever reason. But we have to start somewhere, and this seems to be the best bet, logically speaking. Am I right, Assad?”

His assistant in the passenger seat said nothing. Most likely he was already feeling seasick.

“This’ll be fine,” said Yrsa and pointed out at the pavement. “Just drop me off here.”

Carl glanced at the GPS. A little farther along Byvej and then Ejnar Thygesens Vej, and they would be at Sandalparken, where she lived. Why did she want out here?

“We’ll run you to the door, Yrsa. It’s no bother.”

He sensed she had excuses piled up at the ready. Something like she needed to get the shopping in. But if she did, she would have to do it later.

“I’ll pop in with you for a second, Yrsa, if that’s OK. I just want to say hello to Rose and have a quick word.”

He noted the look of consternation that spread across her powdered face. “Won’t take a second,” he said again, relieving her of the initiative.

He pulled up outside number nineteen and jumped out of the car. “You stay here, Assad,” he instructed, opening the back door for Yrsa.

“I don’t think Rose is home,” she said as they entered the stairwell. Her expression was one he hadn’t seen before. More subdued than otherwise and rather resigned. It was the kind of look someone would have when leaving an exam room knowing that their performance had been mediocre at best.

“Just wait here for a moment, would you, Carl?” she said, putting the key in the door of her flat. “She may still be in bed, you see. She’s been sleeping a lot of late.”

Carl glanced at the name on the door as Yrsa called out for Rose inside. All it read was Knudsen.

Yrsa called again, then returned.

“She doesn’t seem to be in, I’m afraid. Perhaps she’s out shopping. Do you want me to give her a message?”

Carl wedged his foot inside the door. “Tell you what, I’ll write her a note. Have you got a piece of paper?”

Years of practice and his inborn ingenuity got him farther into her domain. Like a snail propelling itself almost imperceptibly forward. You couldn’t see his feet move, but after a while some distance had been covered, and all of a sudden he was impossible to get rid of.

“The place is a tip,” Yrsa apologized, still with her coat on. “Rose can’t keep things tidy when she’s like this. Especially when she’s on her own in the daytime.”

She was right. The hall was a confusion of jackets and coats, empty boxes, and stacks of gossip magazines.

Carl glanced inside the living room. Rose’s place was a far cry from how Carl imagined an emo girl with a punk hairdo and liquid spleen coursing through her veins would be living. It looked like it had been decorated by some vintage hippie who had just stepped down from a Nepalese mountaintop with a rucksack full of oriental knickknacks. Carl hadn’t seen the like since the time he’d got lucky with a girl from Vrå. Here were incense-burners, great trays of brass and copper with elephants and all sorts of mystical little effigies on them. Tie-dyed tapestries hung from the walls and ox hides were draped over the chairs. If there had only been a defaced American flag as well, they could have been back in the midseventies. And all of it presented beneath a thick layer of dust. Apart from the gossip mags and other glossies, the room contained absolutely nothing to suggest even remotely that the two sisters, Yrsa and Rose, could be the architects of such an anachronistic mess.

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” he replied, his gaze passing over unwashed plates and empty pizza boxes. “How big is the flat?”

“Eighty-three square meters. Besides the living room we’ve got a bedroom each. But you’re right, this isn’t that bad at all. You should see our rooms.”

She laughed, but underneath she would clearly rather plant an ax between his shoulder blades than allow him to move more than ten centimeters closer to the doors of their private bolt-holes. That was what she had just told him, in her own roundabout way. He wasn’t that out of touch with women.

Carl scanned the room for something that stuck out. If you wanted to know people’s secrets, it was always the things that stuck out that gave them away.

He found it almost immediately. A bare polystyrene head, the sort used to put wigs and hats on, and beside it a bowl full of pill bottles. He moved forward to get a closer look at the labels, only for Yrsa to step in front of him and hand him the piece of paper he had asked for.

“You can sit here to write,” she said, motioning toward a dining chair with no laundry on it. “I’ll pass it on to Rose as soon as she gets back.”

“We haven’t got much more than an hour and a half, Carl. Don’t leave it so late another time, OK?”

Carl nodded his appreciation to Klaes Thomasen before turning to look at Assad, who sat in the boat’s cockpit like a cornered mouse. In his bright-orange life jacket he looked completely forlorn, like a nervous child facing his first day at school. He had no confidence whatsoever that the overweight, elderly man at the rudder, who sat filling his pipe with tobacco, would be able to save him from the certain death he was about to meet in the five-centimeter-high waves.

Carl studied the chart beneath its covering of plastic.

“An hour and a half,” said Klaes Thomasen. “And what is it exactly we’re looking for?”

“We need to find a boathouse. One that juts out into the water but most probably rather secluded, away from any accessible road or path. We might not even be able to see it from the fjord at all. To begin with, I reckon we should sail from Crown Prince Frederik’s Bridge and on up to Kulhuse. Do you think we’ll get any farther than that?”

The retired policeman thrust out his lower lip and inserted his pipe. “She’s no racer, just a leisurely old vessel,” he muttered. “Seven knots is all she’ll do. That should suit our hand down below. What do you reckon, Assad? Everything all right there?”

Assad’s complexion, usually so dark, looked now like it had been peroxided. He was not having fun.

“Seven knots, you say. What’s that, about thirteen kilometers per hour?” Carl asked. “We won’t even make it to Kulhuse and back before it gets dark. I’d been hoping maybe we’d get over to the other side of Hornsherred. Over to Orø, then back again.”

Thomasen shook his head. “I can get the wife to pick us up at Dalby Huse on the other side, but we won’t get farther than that. Even then it’ll be getting fairly dark the last part of the way.”

“What about the boat?”

He shrugged. “If we don’t find what we’re looking for today, I can go back out on my own tomorrow and have a scout around. You know what they say: old coppers never rust in a headwind.”

Obviously an idiom of the homemade variety.

“One more thing, Klaes. The two brothers who were held in this boathouse could hear a rumbling sound. Like a wind turbine, something like that. Anything ring a bell?”

He removed his pipe and peered at Carl with the eyes of a bloodhound. “There’s been all sorts of fuss around here about what they call infrasound. They’ve been on about it for years, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it went back to the nineties, too.”

“What’s infrasound when it’s at home?”

“Sort of a hum in the background. Very resonant, infuriating noise. For a long time, they thought it came from the steelworks at Frederiksværk, but it seems that theory was disproved when the place shut down for a period and the noise still went on.”

“The steelworks. Isn’t that out of the way, on a peninsula?”

“You could say. But infrasound can be registered at quite some distance from the source. Some reckon you can hear it up to twenty kilometers away. There’s been complaints from Frederiksværk and Frederikssund, even from Jægerspris on the other side of the fjord.”

Carl gazed out over the water, its surface broken by raindrops. It all looked peaceful enough. Houses and cottages nestling among woodland, lush meadows, and fields. Sailing boats on gentle waters, gulls in flocks. And in this sodden idyll, the undertone of some inexplicable hum. Behind these pleasant facades people were going mad.

“As long as the source and the extent of the noise remain unknown, it’s no use to us,” Carl said. “I’d thought we might check the distribution of wind turbines in the area, but it’s questionable whether they could be the source at all. It seems they were at a standstill all over the country during the days we’re interested in. I think we’ve got a job on our hands here.”

“Can we not go home, then?” came a quiet voice from below.

Carl glanced through the hatch at Assad. Was this really the man who had been in a fistfight with Samir Ghazi? The man who could break down a door with one kick and who once had saved Carl’s life? If it was, then he had plainly gone downhill during the last five minutes.

“Are you going to throw up, Assad?” Thomasen inquired.

Assad shook his head. Which only went to show how little the man knew of the joys of seasickness.

“Here,” said Carl, thrusting a spare pair of binoculars into Assad’s hand. “Just breathe easily and go with the movement of the boat. Try to keep your eye on the coastline there.”

“I cannot leave the bench, Carl,” Assad replied.

“That’s OK. You can see perfectly well through the window.”

“You probably needn’t bother with this stretch here,” Thomasen said, steering directly toward the middle of the fjord. “It’s mostly just sandy beach and fields going down to the water’s edge. Our best bet’s probably to go up toward Nordskoven. That’s all woods down to the fjord, but then quite a few folk live there, so it’s doubtful a boathouse could be kept hidden.”

He gestured toward the road that ran north-south along the eastern side of the fjord. Flat agricultural land, dotted with tiny villages. Poul Holt’s killer certainly couldn’t have holed up on that side of the fjord.

Carl looked at his map. “If the theory about fjord trout is right, and if Roskilde Fjord here isn’t the place to look, then that means we need to be over on the other side of Hornsherred, on the Isefjord. The question is, where? Judging by the map, there don’t seem to be that many possibilities. It’s mostly agricultural land, fields down to the water’s edge. Where could anyone have a hidden boathouse there? And if we carry on to the Holbæk side or farther north toward Odsherred, we’ll be too far, because that would take a lot longer than an hour from the site of the kidnapping in Ballerup.” He suddenly became doubtful. “Or would it?”

Thomasen gave a shrug. “Not if you ask me. My guess would be an hour.”

Carl took a deep breath. “In which case, we just have to hope our theory about that local paper is sound. Otherwise, this is going to be a tall order indeed.”

He sat down on the bench next to the suffering Assad, who was by now a grayish shade of green and trembling. His double chin was in constant motion due to his involuntary regurgitation, and yet he still had the binoculars pressed against the sockets of his eyes.

“Give him some tea, Carl. The wife’ll be upset if he throws up on her covers.”

Carl pulled the basket toward him and poured a cup without asking.

“Get this down you, Assad.”

Assad lowered his binoculars slightly, took one look at the tea, and shook his head. “I will not throw up, Carl. What comes up, I swallow again.”

Carl stared at him, wide-eyed.

“This is how it is when riding camels in the desert. A person can become so weary in his stomach. But throwing up in the desert is to lose too much liquid. It is a very silly thing to do in a desert. That is why!”

Carl gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Well done, Assad. Just keep your eyes peeled for that boathouse, eh? I’ll not bother you anymore.”

“I am not looking for the boathouse, because then we will not find it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it is very well concealed. Perhaps not between trees at all. It may be in a heap of earth or sand, or under a house, or in some thicket. It was not very tall, remember this.”

Carl picked up the other pair of binoculars. His assistant was obviously not all there. He’d better do the job himself.

“If you’re not looking for a boathouse, Assad, what are you looking for?”

“For the thing that rumbles. A wind turbine or some similar thing. Something that can rumble this rumbling sound.”

“I’m afraid that’s going to be difficult, Assad.”

Assad looked at him for a moment as though he had tired of his company. Then he convulsed so violently that Carl drew back to be on the safe side. And when he had finished, he said in what was almost a whisper: “Did you know that the record for sitting against a wall as though in a chair is twelve hours and something, Carl?”

“You don’t say?” He sensed that he probably looked all question mark.

“And did you know that the record for standing up is seventeen years and two months?”

“Get out!”

“Oh, but it is, Carl. An Indian guru. He slept standing up in the night.”

“Really? I didn’t know that, Assad. What are you trying to tell me?”

“Just that some things look more difficult than they are, and some things look easier.”

“I see. And?”

“Let us find that rumbling sound, then we shall speak no more of this.”

What kind of logic was that?

“All right. But I still don’t believe that story about standing up for seventeen years,” Carl rejoined.

“OK, but do you know what, Carl?” Assad looked at him intensely, then convulsed again.

“No, tell me.”

Assad raised his binoculars. “That is up to you.”

They listened and heard the hum of motorboats, the chugging of fishing vessels, motorbikes on the roads, single-engine planes photographing houses and farms so the tax authorities could make new appraisals on which basis to fleece the country’s citizens of their savings. But no constant sound, nothing that might provoke the rage of the National Association of the Enemies of Infrasound.

Klaes Thomasen’s wife picked them up at Hundested, and Thomasen promised to ask around if anyone knew of a boathouse like the one they were looking for. The forest officer at Nordskoven would be a good place to start, he said. The sailing clubs likewise. He assured Carl he would resume the search the following day. The forecast said dry and sunny.

Assad was still looking queasy after they were dropped off and continued south in their own car.

Carl felt a sudden affinity with Thomasen’s wife. He didn’t want Assad to puke on his covers, either.

“Give us a nudge if you’re going to be sick, Assad, yeah?” he said.

His assistant nodded absently. Most likely it wouldn’t be a matter of choice.

Carl repeated the appeal as they came into Ballerup.

“Perhaps we should have a little stop,” said Assad after a pause.

“OK, can you wait two minutes? I’ve something to do first, it won’t take long. It’s on the way to Holte. I’ll drive you home after.”

Assad said nothing.

Carl gazed ahead. It was dark now. The question was, would they even let him in?

“I need to drop in on Vigga’s mother, you see. Something I promised Vigga I’d do. You OK with that? She lives at a care center just around here.”

Assad nodded. “I did not know Vigga had a mother. What is she like? Is she nice?”

It was a question that for all its simplicity was so hard to answer that Carl almost drove through a red light on Bagsværd Hovedgade.

“When you have been there, can you then drop me off at the station, Carl? You are going north, and there is a bus right to my door from there.”

Assad certainly knew how to preserve his anonymity. His family’s, too, for that matter.

“No, I’m afraid you can’t visit Mrs. Alsing now. It’s much too late for her. Come back tomorrow before two o’clock, preferably about elevenish. That’s when she’s most lucid,” said one of the caregivers on evening duty.

Carl produced his police ID. “It’s not a private matter. This is my assistant, Hafez el-Assad. It won’t take a moment.”

The woman stared in astonishment at the badge and then at the odd individual who stood rocking on the balls of his feet at Carl’s side. This was not an everyday occurrence for the staff of Bakkegården.

“Well, I think she’s asleep. She hasn’t been doing too well of late.”

Carl glanced at the clock on the wall. Ten past nine. What the hell was this woman on about? Normally, the day was only just starting for Vigga’s mother about now. She hadn’t been a waitress in Copenhagen’s nightspots for more than fifty years for nothing. She couldn’t be that senile, surely?

They were led, politely but reluctantly, to the area set aside for the center’s dementia sufferers, coming to a halt outside the door of Karla Margrethe Alsing.

“Give us a shout when you want to get out again,” said the caregiver, pointing farther down the corridor. “There’s a staff room just down there.”

They found Karla amid a clutter of chocolate boxes and hair clips. With her long, tousled gray hair and carelessly tied kimono she looked like a former Hollywood actress yet to come to terms with her career’s demise. She recognized Carl immediately and leaned back in a pose, chirping his name and telling him how adorable he was standing there like that. It was plain to see how much Vigga took after her mother.

She didn’t so much as glance at Assad.

“Coffee?” she asked, pouring a cup from a thermos without a lid. The cup looked like it had been used all day. Carl signaled that he was fine without but realized the futility of it. He turned instead to Assad and handed him the cup. If anyone needed a shot of cold coffee left over from this morning, it was Assad.

“Nice place,” said Carl, glancing around at the furnished landscape. Gilded frames, ornate mahogany, brocade. Karla Margrethe Alsing had always taken pride in appearances.

“What keeps you busy, then?” he asked, expecting some lament about how hard it was to read and how bad the television programs had become.

“Busy?” A distant look appeared in her eyes. “Well, apart from this…”

She paused mid-sentence, reached behind the cushion at her back, and produced a luminous-orange dildo resplendent with all manner of nodulations and projections.

“…there’s bugger all to do.”

Assad’s coffee cup trembled on its saucer.