A Conspiracy of Faith (34 page)

He took hold of her chin and turned her face toward him. “What could be so wrong about finding that interesting? It’s their hair you like, isn’t it? Because it’s not allowed in the Mother Church?” He nodded. “I’m right, aren’t I? You’d like to wear your hair like that, wouldn’t you? You’re shaking your head, but I think you would. But listen to me, Magdalena. Did I tell your parents about your little secret? I didn’t, did I? So perhaps I’m not such a bad person, after all.”

He withdrew slightly, taking a knife from his pocket and unfolding the blade. Always so clean and sharp.

“With this knife, I can cut your hair easily.”

He grasped a tuft and sliced it from her scalp, startling the girl and prompting her brother to thrash at his tether, though to no avail.

“There we are!” he said.

She reacted almost as if he had cut into her flesh. What he had just done was obviously a deeply ingrained taboo for a girl who had lived all her life with this dogma of the sanctity of women’s hair.

She sobbed as he taped her mouth. And then she wet herself.

He turned to her brother and repeated the procedure with the gaffer tape and water from the cup.

“And you, Samuel, have your own secrets, don’t you? You look at girls from outside the congregation. I’ve watched you on your way home from school with your older brother. Is that allowed, Samuel?” he asked.

“I’ll kill you as soon as I get the chance, so help me God,” the boy replied, before he too was silenced by tape. It was the only reasonable thing to do.

His decision was right. The girl would be the one to go.

For all her daydreaming, her reverence was the greater, her faith the more entrenched. She would grow up to be a Rachel, or an Eva.

What more did he need to know?

Having reassured them that he would be back to set them free once their father paid the ransom, he returned to the outbuilding and saw that the tank was now quite full. He stopped the pump and rolled up the hose, then plugged in the heating element, which he immersed into the water before flicking the switch. He knew from experience that lye was much more effective once the water temperature rose above twenty Celsius, and at this time of year, the nights could still plunge below zero.

He picked up the container of lye from the pallet in the corner, noting that he would soon be needing more. And then he turned it upside down and poured the contents into the water.

Once the girl had been killed and her body dumped in the tank, the corpse would be dissolved within a couple of weeks.

Then all he had to do was to wade out some twenty meters or so with the hose in his hand and empty the whole lot into the fjord.

With a bit of wind it would wash away from the shore in no time.

He would rinse the tank twice, and all trace would be gone.

Chemistry.

They made an odd
couple as they stood there in Carl’s office, Yrsa with her bloodred lips and Assad, his face so belligerently stubbled that a hug from the man would be tantamount to attempted murder.

Assad was looking highly dissatisfied. Carl couldn’t recall him ever radiating as much disapproval as now.

“It cannot be right what Yrsa is saying! Can we not bring this Tryggve to Copenhagen, Carl? What about the report?”

Carl blinked. He still had in his mind’s eye the image of Mona opening the door into her bedroom, making him rather distracted to say the least. He hadn’t been able to think of anything else all morning. Tryggve and the world’s insanity would have to wait until he was ready.

“Sorry, what did you say?” Carl stretched in his chair. It had been ages since his body had felt this drained. “Tryggve? No, he’s still in Blekinge. I asked him to come to Copenhagen, even offered him a lift, but he wasn’t up to it, he said, and I couldn’t force him. He lives in Sweden, Assad, remember? If he won’t come of his own accord, we’re not going to drag him here without the help of the Swedish police, and it’s early days for that, wouldn’t you say?”

He anticipated a nod from Assad, but it was not forthcoming. “I’ll write a report to send up to Marcus, OK? Then we’ll have to see. Apart from that, I don’t really know how to proceed just at the moment. We’re talking about a thirteen-year-old case that’s never been investigated. It’s up to Marcus whose desk he drops it on.”

Assad frowned, Yrsa likewise. Was Department A going to run off with the honors, after all the work they’d put in? Was that really what he was saying?

Assad glanced at his watch. “We should go upstairs right away and get it sorted. Jacobsen comes in early on Mondays.”

“OK, Assad.” Carl straightened up. “But I want a word first.”

He looked at Yrsa, bouncing on the balls of her feet, full of anticipation as to what might now be revealed.

“That’s me and Assad alone, Yrsa. In private.”

“Oh, I get it,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes. “Men’s talk.” And then she turned on her heel and left them in a haze of her perfume.

He fixed his gaze on Assad, forcing his eyebrows almost to the bridge of his nose, hoping that this might be enough to make his assistant come clean. Instead, Assad peered at him solicitously, as though at any moment he might offer Carl a glass of something for heartburn.

“I was over at your place yesterday, Assad. Heimdalsgade, number sixty-two. You weren’t there.”

A tiny furrow appeared in Assad’s cheek, only to miraculously transform into a cheerful dimple. “What a shame, Carl. You should have called me first.”

“I did, Assad, but there was no answer.”

“It would have been nice, Carl. Some other time, perhaps. Yes?”

“But that’d be somewhere else, wouldn’t it?”

Assad nodded, then lit up. “You mean we should meet somewhere in town? Yes, that would be nice, too.”

“I’d want you to bring your wife along, Assad. I’ve been looking forward to meeting her. And your daughters.”

A pained expression passed fleetingly across Assad’s face, as though his wife was the last person on earth he wanted to drag out in public.

“I had a little chat with some people there at Heimdalsgade, Assad.”

The pained look returned, and Assad narrowed his eyes in puzzlement.

“You don’t live there at all, do you? In fact, you haven’t lived there for
quite a while. And as for your family, they’ve never lived there, have they? So tell me, Assad, where
do
you live?”

Assad threw up his arms. “It’s a very small flat, Carl. There was too little room for us.”

“Shouldn’t you have informed me of a change of address in that case? And given up the lease on the place?”

Assad looked pensive. “You are right, Carl. I will do so right away.”

“So where
do
you live, exactly?”

“We have rented a house. Housing is cheap now, Carl. Many people have two places on their hands. The property market, you know.”

“All right, Assad, I understand. But
where
are you living? I need an address.”

Assad’s head dropped. “OK, Carl. We are renting the place on a fiddle. Otherwise it would be too expensive. Can we not keep the other place on as a postal address?”

“
Where
, Assad?”

“In Holte, Carl. A small house only, on Kongevejen. But will you please call beforehand, Carl? My wife does not care for people turning up all of a sudden.”

Carl nodded. He would return to all this another day. “One more thing. Why would your neighbors from Heimdalsgade say you were Shiite? Didn’t you tell me you were from Syria?”

Assad thrust out his fleshy lower lip. “Yes, I did, Carl. And what about it?”

“Are there Shiites in Syria, Assad?”

The man’s bushy eyebrows relocated halfway up his forehead. “You know, Carl,” he smiled, “Shiites are everywhere.”

Half an hour later, they stood in the briefing room in the company of fifteen Monday-morning miseries, with Lars Bjørn and homicide chief Marcus Jacobsen at the center.

No one was here for fun, that much was obvious.

Jacobsen related to the meeting what Carl had reported. This was procedure in Department A. Questions could be posed along the way.

“Tryggve Holt, brother of the murdered Poul Holt, has informed Carl Mørck that their kidnapper, Poul’s killer, was a man known to the family,” Jacobsen said, some way into his briefing. “For a time, our man had frequented prayer meetings held by the boys’ father, Martin Holt, for local members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It seems everyone had taken it for granted that he would enter the congregation.”

“Have we got any photos of this man?” asked Bente Hansen, a chief inspector and formerly one of Carl’s close colleagues.

Deputy Lars Bjørn shook his head. “I’m afraid not, but we do have both a description and a name: Freddy Brink. Presumably false. Department Q already checked it out and no match came up. Our Swedish colleagues in Karlshamn are sending a police artist over to Tryggve Holt, so we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with.”

Marcus Jacobsen stood at the whiteboard, scribbling keywords.

“So he kidnaps the two boys on the sixteenth of February 1996. That’s a Friday, the same day Poul had taken his younger brother Tryggve with him to the College of Engineering in Ballerup where he studied. This Freddy Brink draws up alongside them in a light-blue van, laughing about what a coincidence it was for them to run into each other so far from Græsted. He offers them a lift home. Unfortunately, Tryggve is unable to provide a closer description of the vehicle, other than it being rounded at the front and square at the back.

“The boys climb into the front, and after a while he pulls in at a secluded lay-by and incapacitates them by means of electric shock. We don’t know how, but presumably he’ll have used some kind of stun gun. The boys are then thrown into the back and a cloth is pressed into their faces, most likely soaked in chloroform or ether.”

“Can I just say at this point that Tryggve Holt wasn’t entirely sure about how things actually proceeded here,” Carl interrupted. “He was only
half-conscious because of the electric shock, and subsequently his brother wasn’t able to tell him much on account of the tape he was gagged with.”

“Indeed,” Jacobsen went on. “But I’m right in thinking, am I not, that Poul gave his younger brother the impression they had driven for approximately an hour, though of course we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this might be incorrect? Poul suffered from some kind of autism, and his grip on reality may not always have been firm, despite his rather exceptional intelligence.”

“Asperger’s syndrome, perhaps? I’m thinking of the wording of his message, and the fact that he made a point of noting the exact date, even in the terrible situation they were in. Isn’t that kind of typical?” Bente Hansen asked, pen to paper.

“Maybe it is, yes.” The homicide chief nodded. “Having reached their destination, the boys were left in a boathouse, which smelled strongly of tar and rotting seaweed. The space was rather confined, with only room enough for a man to stoop rather than stand upright. Probably intended for storing canoes or kayaks rather than rowing boats or sailing boats. And there they were held for four, perhaps five days until Poul was murdered. Exactly how much time elapsed is uncertain. We have to bear in mind that Tryggve was only thirteen at the time and very afraid. As such, he spent much of the time sleeping.”

“Any landmarks to go on?” asked Peter Vestervig, one of the guys from Viggo’s unit.

“None,” Jacobsen replied. “The boys were blindfolded when they were led into the boathouse. However, while they saw nothing outside, Tryggve does say he heard a kind of deep rumbling sound that could have come from wind turbines. They heard it often, though not always as loud. Most likely that would have to do with the wind direction and other meteorological factors.”

He fixed his gaze on his empty cigarette packet on the table. He’d got to the point now where it was all he needed to reenergize himself. Good for him.

“We know,” he went on, “that this boathouse was situated in the shallows, presumably built on stilts, since Tryggve tells us that the water lapped beneath the planks of the floor. The entrance would seem to have been raised about half a meter or so off the ground, meaning that a person would have to literally crawl into the low-ceilinged space inside. Tryggve himself believed it to have been made for canoes or kayaks because of the paddles that were still kept there. And he thought the place might have been constructed from some other kind of wood than would normally be used in the Scandinavian tradition. He remembered it as being very pale in color and rather different in terms of grain, but we’ll know more about that later. Laursen, our old friend from Forensics, discovered a splinter lodged in the paper on which Poul Holt wrote his message, apparently from a sliver of wood Poul used as a pen. That’s with the experts at the moment, but it may be able to tell us what kind of wood the boathouse was made of.”