Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

6

“Well, I must say that Assad’s observation has given us food for thought, Carl,” said the chief, wriggling his shoulders into his leather jacket. In ten minutes he would be standing on a street corner in the Nordvest district, studying bloodstains from the night’s shooting. Carl did not envy him.

He nodded. “You agree with Assad, then? That there might be a connection between the fires?”

“That same groove in the victims’ finger bones in three out of four incidents. It certainly gives us something to think about. We’ll just have to wait and see. The material’s with the pathologists, so it’s their shout now. But the nose, Carl…” He tapped an index finger against his distinctive protuberance. Not many noses had been poked into as many rotten cases as Jacobsen’s had. Most likely Assad and Jacobsen were right. There was a connection. Carl sensed it himself.

He mustered a semblance of authority in his voice, no easy matter on the wrong side of ten o’clock. “You’ll be taking over from here then, I assume.”

“For the moment, yes.”

Carl nodded. Now he could go back downstairs and mark the old arson case closed as far as Department Q was concerned.

It would look good in the statistics.

“Come and see, Carl. Rose has something to show you.” The reverberating voice made it sound like a troop of howler monkeys from Borneo had appropriated the lower chambers. Assad certainly had no problems with his vocal cords, that much was plain.

He stood beaming, clutching a ream of photocopies. As far as Carl could make out, they weren’t case documents. More like blowups of something fragmentary that at best could be described as blurred.

“Look what she did.”

Assad pointed down the corridor at the partition wall the joiner had just put up in order to contain the asbestos contamination. Or rather, he pointed to where it ought to have been visible. For both the wall and the door in it were completely covered with photocopies that had been meticulously put together to form one single image. If anyone wanted to come through, they would need a pair of scissors.

Even at a distance of ten meters, it was clear that this was an enormous blowup of the message in the bottle.

HELP, it read, spanning the entire width of the corridor.

“Sixty-four sheets of A4, no less. Great, is it not, Carl? These are the last five in my hand here. Two hundred and forty centimeters high and one hundred and seventy wide. Big, yes? Is she not clever?”

Carl stepped a couple of meters closer. Rose was on her knees with her backside in the air, sticking Assad’s copies into place in the bottom corner.

Carl considered first her backside, then the work the two of them had produced. The enormous blowup had its advantages and its drawbacks, that much was obvious straightaway. Areas where the letters had been absorbed into the paper were a blur, whereas others containing practically illegible, spidery handwriting that the Scottish forensics team had tried to reconstruct suddenly became meaningful.

The upshot of it all was that at a stroke they now had at least twenty more legible characters to add to the puzzle.

Rose turned toward him for a second, ignoring his little wave and dragging a stepladder out into the middle of the corridor.

“Get up there, Assad. I’ll tell you where to put the dots, yeah?”

She shoved Carl aside and positioned herself in the exact spot where he had been standing.

“Not too hard, Assad. We need to be able to rub them out again.”

Assad nodded from on high, pencil at the ready.

“Start underneath ‘HELP’ and in front of ‘he.’ My eye makes out three distinct blotches, one before ‘he’ and two after. Are you with me?”

Assad and Carl considered the mottled stains on the paper. They looked like gray cumulus clouds alongside the touched-up “h” and “e.”

Then Assad nodded and placed a dot on each of the three blotches.

Carl took a step to one side. It seemed reasonable enough. Underneath the clearly legible heading HELP, the two characters that followed were flanked by visible blurs. Seawater and condensation had played their part. The three blood-written characters had long since dissolved and been absorbed into the pulp. If only they could figure out what they were.

He stood watching for a moment as Rose bossed Assad around. It was a meticulous business. And where would it lead, when it came down to it? To endless hours of guesswork, that was where. And what for? The message could go back decades. Besides, it was still quite possible that it might all have been just a practical joke. The hand seemed clumsy, as though it belonged to a child. A couple of Cub Scouts, a little nick in the finger, and there you have it. But then again…

“I’m not sure about this, Rose,” he ventured. “Maybe we should just forget all about it. We’ve enough to be getting on with as it is.”

He noted with bewilderment the effect of his words. Rose began to quiver, like jelly. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought she was about to burst into laughter. But Carl knew Rose all too well, and for that reason he retreated. Only a step, but enough to avoid the explosive splutter of invective that suddenly showered toward him.

It meant that Rose was dissatisfied with his meddling. He wasn’t so gormless that he didn’t get the gist.

He nodded. Like he said, there was plenty else to be getting on with. He knew of at least two folders of important case documents which, positioned correctly, would cover his face nicely while he caught up on his sleep. Rose and Assad could amuse themselves with their little puzzle while he took care of business.

Rose registered his cowardly retreat. She turned slowly and looked daggers at him.

“Ingenious idea, though, Rose. Very well done,” he blurted out, but he was cutting no ice.

“I’ll give you a choice, Carl,” she hissed. Assad, at the top of the ladder, rolled his eyes. “Either you shut your gob, or else I’m off home. And for your information, I might just send my twin sister over instead, and do you know what’ll happen then?”

Carl shook his head. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know. “Let me guess. She’ll be over here with three kids and four cats, a pair of lodgers, and some shit of a husband. Am I right? Your office’ll be a bit cramped, yeah?”

She planted her fists firmly on her hips and leaned menacingly toward him. “Whoever filled you with that crap doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Yrsa’s living with me, and she’s got neither cats nor lodgers.” The word “MORON!” lit up in her black-painted eyes.

He held up his hands in front of him in capitulation.

The chair in his office beckoned.

“What’s all that about her twin sister, Assad? Has Rose threatened to send her over before?”

Assad bounced jauntily up the steps of the rotunda alongside him, but Carl could already feel the lead accumulating in his legs.

“Don’t take things so personal, Carl. Rose is like sand on a camel’s back. Sometimes it makes the arse itch and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all a question of how thick-skinned a person is.” He turned his face to Carl and flashed two neat rows of pearly white enamel. If anyone’s arsehole had been armored with hard skin through the years, it was probably his.

“She has told me about her sister, Yrsa. I remember her name because it sounds like Irma, the supermarket. I don’t think they are very good friends together,” Assad added.

Yrsa? Is anyone really called that anymore? Carl wondered as they reached the third floor, his heart valves dancing the fandango.

“All right, boys?” said a delightfully familiar voice on the other side of the counter. Lis was back! Lis, forty years of eminently well-preserved flesh and brain cells. A true gift to the senses, in stark contrast to Ms. Sørensen, who smiled benevolently at Assad while rearing her head toward Carl like a cobra poked with a stick.

“Tell the detective inspector what a lovely time you and Frank had together in the States, Lis.” The heron smiled ominously.

“It’ll have to wait, I’m afraid,” Carl replied swiftly. “Marcus is waiting for us.”

He pulled in vain at Assad’s sleeve.

Thanks for fuck all, Assad, he thought to himself as Lis’s glowing red lips gleefully related the events of a whole month spent in America in the company of a wilted husband who had suddenly turned into a bison in the double bed of their rented motor home. These were images Carl tried with all his might to erase from his mind’s eye, along with thoughts of his own involuntary celibacy.

“Bloody old hag,” he muttered under his breath. Assad wasn’t much better, either. Not to mention the lucky bastard who had ensnared Lis. And then there was Médecins Sans Frontières or whatever they called themselves, who had enticed Mona, the focus of his desire, and dragged her away to darkest Africa.

“When does that psychologist of yours come home again, Carl?” Assad asked as they stood outside the door of the briefing room. “What was her name, now? Mona, is that right?”

Carl chose to ignore Assad’s cheeky smile and opened the door. Most of Department A were there already, rubbing their eyes. They had spent a couple of exhausting days on the outside, up to their ears in society’s quagmire, but now Assad’s discovery had hauled them back to the surface again.

It took Marcus Jacobsen ten minutes to brief his team, and both he and Lars Bjørn seemed more than a little excited. Assad’s name was mentioned several times. His beaming smile was met by the narrowed eyes of his colleagues, clearly puzzled as to how this monkey of a cleaning assistant had suddenly appeared in their midst.

But no one had the energy to ask questions. Essentially, Assad had discovered a highly plausible link between old and new cases of arson. All the bodies found in the remains of the blazes shared the same groove in the bone of the little finger of the left hand, apart from the one body on which that finger was missing. It transpired that the pathologists had made a note of it in each case, though no one had made the connection.

The autopsies indicated that two of the deceased had worn a ring on their little finger. The cause of the groove in the bone had not been the heat of the blaze, the pathologists stated. A more likely conclusion was that the deceased had worn these rings since youth and that they had thus left their indelible mark on the osseous tissue. Such rings could have had cultural significance along the lines of the binding of feet in China, one pathologist had suggested, whereas another noted that some ritual might have been involved.

Marcus Jacobsen nodded. Something like that. Some kind of brotherhood could not be ruled out, either. Once the ring was on, it was never removed.

The fact that one of the bodies was missing a digit was another matter altogether. There could be any number of reasons for this, including someone having chopped it off.

“All we have to do now is tie up the whys and wherefores,” the deputy chief, Lars Bjørn, concluded.

Almost everyone nodded, some with a sigh. What could be simpler?

“Department Q will notify us as to any similar cases they might turn up,” added the chief, and Assad received a pat on the back from one of the detectives who most definitely wouldn’t be doing any of the donkey work.

And then they were out in the corridor again.

“What was it now you were saying about this Mona Ibsen, Carl?” said Assad, continuing terrier-like from where he’d left off. “Would you not like her to come home again before the bollocks weigh as heavy as cannonballs?”

Back in the basement, everything was pretty much as it had been when they left. Rose had dragged a stool in front of the blowup on the wall, and now she sat pondering so intensely one could almost see her frown from behind.

It seemed she was stuck.

Carl looked at the giant photocopy. It was certainly no easy puzzle to solve. To put it mildly.

She had now gone over all the characters with a felt-tip pen. It might not have been the wisest thing to do, but it did provide a better overview, that much he could see.

She dragged her fingers coquettishly through the bird’s nest of her hair, her nails speckled with marker fluid as though to make everything match.

No doubt she would touch them up with black nail polish before long.

“Does it make any sense to you? Any sense at all?” she asked as Carl tried to read.

HELP

.he……brary……… k…aped… got.s… the.us s.op on…ut.op…… Bal…-T… man… 18. t……… hair…………-Hes got…… hi. rit…r… bl.e.an Mum………ow him-Fr…d…nd…t.in. wit.. B-……retn.d………………-……ing to.il us-…ressd………ace…rst……rother.-We drove…y 1 hour…………y wa.t.r……… win..urb…s……………re-……………………-…………… years

P……

A cry for help, as was obvious from the heading, and, besides that, reference to some man or other, a mother and driving. Signed with a “P,” and that was it. No, it made no sense at all.

What had happened? Where, when, and why?

“I’m pretty sure this is the person who wrote it,” said Rose, pointing her felt-tip at the “P” at the bottom. Who said she was thick?

“I’m also pretty sure that the person’s name consists of two words each of four letters,” she added, tapping Assad’s penciled dots.

Carl’s gaze slid from the felt-tip on her nails to the pencil marks on the photocopied message. Was it about time he had his eyes tested? How on earth could she be so certain there were two sets of four letters? Because Assad had put dots on some blotches? As far as he could see, there were umpteen possibilities.

“I’ve checked the original,” she went on. “And I’ve spoken to that expert in Scotland. We’re both in agreement. Two sets of four letters.”

Carl nodded. That expert in Scotland, she had said. Well, that was it sorted, wasn’t it? As far as he was concerned, she could consult a tartan-clad fortune-teller in Reykjavik, because his eyes were plainly telling him that most of what he saw was bollocks, no matter what Rose might have to say.

“It was definitely written by a male. I’m assuming no one in that situation would sign themselves using a nickname, and I’ve come up with no Danish girl’s names of four letters beginning with ‘P.’ Looking at foreign names, I’ve found only the following that would fit: Paca, Pala, Papa, Pele, Peta, Piia, Pili, Pina, Ping, Piri, Posy, Pris, and Prue.”

She listed them in a heartbeat, not even glancing at her notes. Was she right in the head, this Rose girl?

“Papa. A very strange name for a girl,” Assad grunted.

Rose shrugged. It was something of a turnup, Carl had to admit. Were there really no Danish girl’s names of four letters beginning with a “P”? That was what she said, anyway. Impossible, surely?

Carl glanced at Assad, who looked like he had question marks drawn all over his face. No one could ponder in as spellbound a fashion as his stocky assistant.

“It is not a Muslim name, either,” he said from within his frown. “I can think only of Pari, which is Iranian.”

Carl grimaced. “And Iranians don’t live in Denmark, or what? Never mind, let’s just say this bloke’s called Poul or Paul; that makes things a lot easier, doesn’t it? We’ll have him found in a jiffy.”

At this point, Assad’s frown deepened. “Found in a what, did you say, Carl? Where is that?”

Carl sighed. Perhaps he ought to send his little helper over to see his ex soon. She could teach him idioms that would make his wide eyes roll in his head.

He glanced at his watch. “So his name’s Poul, is that what we’re saying? Well, I’m off on a break, then. Fifteen minutes, and when I get back, you’ve found him, OK?”

Rose did her best to ignore Carl’s tone of voice, though her nostrils flared visibly. “I’m sure Poul’s an excellent candidate. Or Piet, or Peer with two ‘e’s, Pehr with an ‘h,’ or Petr without an ‘e.’ Or it could be Pete, or Phil. The possibilities are endless, Carl. We’re multiethnic now, as well, so there’s all sorts of new names flying around. Paco, Pall, Page, Pasi, Pedr, Pepe, Pere, Pero, Peru…”

“All right, Rose, for Chrissake, that’ll do. Anyone would think this was a register office. And who’s Peru, anyway, when he’s at home? I thought that was a country, not a bloody name…”

“…and Peti, Ping, Pino, Pius…”

“Pius? Yeah, why not bring the popes in while we’re at it? They’re male, at least…”

“Pons, Pran, Ptah, Puck, Pyry.”

“Are you finished?”

There was no answer.

Carl considered once again the signature on the wall. Whatever else he might think, it was hard to conclude otherwise than that the letter had been written by someone whose name began with “P.” So who was this “P”? Piet Hein was hardly a candidate. Who, then?

“The first name may be a compound, Rose. Are you sure there’s no hyphen in there?” He gestured toward the blur. “In which case it could be Poul-Erik, or Paco-Peti, or Pili-Ping.” He tried to transfer his smile to Rose’s face, but she was far away and impervious. Sod it, then.

“All right, should we let this magnified message look after itself for the moment, so we can get on with more important matters and Rose can get her poor nails painted black again?” Carl suggested. “We can hardly avoid coming back to it every now and then. Maybe some bright ideas will emerge. Like when you leave the crossword lying around in the bathroom for the next time you need to go.”

Rose and Assad studied him with wrinkled brows. Crosswords on the toilet? Obviously neither of them spent as much time in there as he did.

“No, hang on a minute. I don’t think we can leave it stuck to that wall. We need to get through the door. Part of our archive’s behind it, in case you’d forgotten. All those old, unsolved cases. You’ve heard of them, I suppose?” He turned on his heels and headed for his office and the comfy chair that awaited him. Rose’s ice pick of a voice halted him in his tracks after only two steps.

“You look at me, Carl.”

He turned with caution and saw her pointing back toward her work of art.

“If you think my nails look like crap, I don’t care. Get it? And besides that, do you see that word up there at the very top?”

“Yes, Rose, I do. In fact it’s about the only thing I can say with any certainty that I do see. It very plainly says ‘HELP.’”

With that, she waggled a blackened finger menacingly in his direction. “Good. Because that’s the word you’ll be wanting to scream if you remove so much as a single sheet of that paper. Do you get my drift?”

He released his eyes from her rebellious gaze and waved Assad to his side.

He would have to put his foot down before long.