A Conspiracy of Faith (30 page)

“Why do you want to know?”

“I need a police artist to do a likeness of a killer. I’ve got a witness in Blekinge who can give a description.”

“So?”

“Well, I need to get it done pretty sharpish, and the Swedish plod seem to be just as good as we are at shutting up shop when it comes to local stations. Like I said, I stood outside this great big yellow building on Erik Dahlbergsvägen in Karlshamn at seven o’clock this morning, staring at a sign that said
Closed Saturday and Sunday. Open weekdays 9
A.M.
to 3
P.M.
And that was that. On a Saturday!”

“So what do you want me to do about it?”

“You could ask your mate in Karlshamn if he could do Department Q in Copenhagen a favor.”

“What’s to say he’s still in Karlshamn? It’s been six years, at least.”

“You’re right, he’s probably moved on by now. Still, if you give me his name, I’ll do a search for him on the Internet. If we’re lucky, he’ll still be on the force. Bit of an apple-polisher, wasn’t he, if I remember right? All you’d have to do is ask him to get on the blower and call a police artist. It won’t be more trouble than that. Wouldn’t you do the same for him if he were to ask?”

Hardy’s eyelids were heavy, not a good sign. “It’ll be expensive on a weekend,” he said after a while. “Assuming there’s a police artist anywhere near your witness, and that he or she might be interested.”

Carl looked at the cup of coffee Morten put down for him on the bedside table. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought it was residue from a can of motor oil concentrated into something blacker.

“It’s a good thing you’re back, Carl,” said Morten. “So I can get going.”

“Get going? Where to?”

“The funeral procession for Mustafa Hsownay. It starts at two o’clock from Nørreport Station.”

Carl nodded. Mustafa Hsownay, another innocent victim of the war between the bikers and the immigrant gangs for control of the hash market.

Morten raised his arm and waved a little flag that looked like Iraq’s. Wherever could he have got it from?

“I went to school with someone from the Mjølnerparken development where Mustafa was shot.”

Others might perhaps have hesitated to share such a flimsy claim to solidarity.

But Morten was in a league of his own.

They lay almost side by side. Carl on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table, Hardy in his hospital bed with his long, lame body turned onto its
side. His eyes had been closed since Carl switched on the television, and the bitter twist of his mouth seemed now to have smoothed.

They were like an elderly couple finally succumbing to the indispensable company of news programs and powdered presenters. Dozing off in front of the box on a Saturday evening. If they were only holding hands, the picture would be complete.

Carl forced open his eyelids and noted that the news program that suddenly flickered in front of him was the last of the day.

Time to get Hardy ready for the night and get some proper shut-eye.

He stared at the screen, at Mustafa Hsownay’s funeral procession moving quietly along Nørrebrogade in a dignified and orderly manner. The cameras showed thousands of silent faces lining the street and pink tulips thrown to the hearse from windows above. Immigrants of all kinds, and just as many native Danes. Many clasping hands.

The cauldron that was Copenhagen had gone off the boil for a moment. The gang war was not the people’s war.

Carl nodded to himself. It was commendable of Morten to have taken part. Not many people from Allerød would have been there. He wasn’t, either, for that matter.

“Look, there’s Assad,” Hardy said quietly.

Carl turned his head. Had he been awake all this time?

“Where?” He glanced back at the screen just in time to see Assad’s round face pop up amid the throng.

Unlike everyone else there, his eyes seemed to be fixed not on the hearse but on the mourners in the procession. His head moved almost imperceptibly from side to side like a predator following its prey through undergrowth. He was concentrating. And then the producer cut away.

“What the…?” Carl muttered to himself.

“He looked like one of them from intelligence,” Hardy snorted.

Carl woke up in his bed at about three o’clock, his heart pounding and his duvet weighing two hundred kilos. He wasn’t feeling well. It was like a
sudden fever. Like a horde of viruses had assaulted him and shut down his sympathetic nervous system.

He gasped for air and clutched at his chest. Why am I panicking? he asked himself, and felt in need of a hand to hold.

He opened his eyes in the darkness.

This has happened before, he thought, instantly recalling his previous collapse and feeling the sweat that made his T-shirt cling to his skin.

After he and Anker and Hardy got shot out in Amager, it had lain dormant inside him, ticking away like a time bomb.

Was it the same thing now?

“Think your way through what happened. It’ll give you some distance,” Mona had told him during his counseling.

He clenched his fists and recalled the impact that traveled through the floorboards when Hardy had been hit and he himself had felt the graze of the bullet against his temple. The feeling of body against body when Hardy pulled him down as he fell, covering him in blood. Anker’s heroic attempt to stop the gunmen, despite being badly injured. And then the final, fatal shot that emptied Anker’s blood so definitively onto the filthy wooden floor.

He went through it, over and over again. Recalling the shame of having done nothing and Hardy’s bewilderment as to why it had all happened.

And his heart continued to pound.

“Bastards, bastards,” he snarled, repeating himself as he reached for the light and a smoke. Tomorrow, he would call Mona and tell her he’d come unstuck again. He would be as charming as he could, though with a smidgeon of added despair. Then, maybe, she’d give him more than a consultation. He could always hope, anyway.

He smiled at the thought and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. Then he closed his eyes, only to feel his heart carrying on like a pneumatic drill again. Was he really ill this time?

He got out of bed with difficulty and edged his way down the stairs. If he was having a heart attack, he didn’t want to be up there all on his own in bed.

And that was where he fell, to be woken up by Morten gently shaking him, a painted Iraqi flag fading on his forehead.

The raised eyebrows of the on-call doctor signaled that Carl had wasted his time. The verdict was short and to the point: overexertion.

Overexertion! An insult, followed by some standard wording about stress and a couple of tablets to take that hammered Carl into the land of nod until way past church time.

By the time he woke up on Sunday, it was half past one in the afternoon and his head was throbbing with all manner of unpleasant thoughts. His heart, though, was beating normally.

“Jesper wants you to call him,” Hardy said from his bed when Carl finally tottered down the stairs. “Are you OK?”

Carl gave a shrug. “There’s some stuff inside my head I can’t control,” he answered.

Hardy forced a smile, and Carl could have bitten off his own tongue. That was the thing about having Hardy around. You always had to think before opening your gob.

“I’ve been thinking about Assad, seeing him on telly last night,” Hardy said. “What do you actually know about him, Carl? Don’t you think you should meet that family of his? Maybe it’s about time you paid him a visit.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Isn’t it normal to take an interest in your partner?”

Partner! Was Assad now his partner all of a sudden? “I know you, Hardy,” he said. “You’re on to something. What is it?”

Hardy drew back his lips in something resembling a smile. It was always gratifying to be properly understood.

“It’s like I saw him in a different light. As if I didn’t know him. Do
you
know Assad, do you think?”

“Ask me if I know
anyone
. Who really knows who, at the end of the day?”

“Where does he live?”

“Heimdalsgade, I think.”

“You think?”

Where does he live? What’s his family like? Was this some kind of interrogation? But Hardy was right. He knew fuck all about Assad.

“What did Jesper want?” he asked, changing the subject.

Hardy raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t finished with Assad. For whatever reason.

“Hardy says you called,” Carl said into his mobile a moment later.

“I did, yeah,” said Jesper. “You can get your savings out of the bank now, Carlo.”

Carl blinked uncontrollably. The lad sounded sure of himself.

“Carl! The name’s Carl, Jesper. If you call me Carlo once more I shall be forced to momentarily go deaf at very decisive moments in your potentially short life, do you get my drift?”

“Got you, Carlo.” He could almost see Jesper laughing at the other end of the connection. “Hope you can hear me now. I’ve found Vigga a bloke.”

“You don’t say. Is he worth two thousand kroner, or is she going to chuck him out with the bathwater tomorrow like she did with her man of letters? Because if she is, you can forget all about your dosh.”

“He’s forty years old. Owns an Opel Vectra and a convenience store. Nineteen-year-old daughter.”

“Well, I never. And where did you dig him up?”

“I put a flyer up in his shop. It was the first one.”

Easy money.

“And what makes you think this Grocer Jack can sweep Vigga off her feet? Does he look like Brad Pitt?”

“Try again, Carlo. Not unless Brad Pitt fell asleep in the sun for a week or two.”

“You mean he’s black?”

“Not black, exactly, but not fucking far off!”

Carl held his breath as the rest of the story was delivered in detail. The man was a widower, endowed with the kind of soulful brown eyes that Vigga was almost bound to find irresistible. Jesper had dragged him down
to the house on the allotment, where the man had heaped praise on Vigga’s paintings and exclaimed with obvious delight that her little place was the most charming he had seen in all his life. And that, apparently, had sealed it. At that very moment, they were having lunch together at some restaurant in the city.

Carl shook his head. He ought to be as pleased as punch, and instead all he felt was an ache in his stomach.

When Jesper was finished, he snapped his mobile shut in slow motion and turned his gaze on Morten and Hardy, who were gawping at him like a pair of stray dogs waiting for some leftovers.

“We’re saved, so it seems. Let’s cross our fingers, anyway. Seems Jesper’s got Vigga paired off with the man of her dreams, so maybe we can stay on here for a while longer.”

Whereupon Morten’s jaw dropped and he clapped his hands with glee. “Oh, how sweet!” he exclaimed. “Who’s the lucky white knight?”

“White?” Carl tried to force his mouth into a smile, but his muscles seemed to be stuck. “According to Jesper, Gurkamal Singh Pannu is the darkest thing north of the equator.”

Did he hear them gasp?