A Conspiracy of Faith (56 page)

The next morning, when she woke him up, she was already dressed and ready for the day. Sensual, smiling, soaring.

What more evidence did a man need, still pinned down by his duvet, legs heavy as lead?

This woman was superior to him in every way.

“What is the matter with you, Carl?” Assad asked as they climbed into the car.

Carl hadn’t the energy to answer. How could he, when his body felt like
he had been run over by a bus and his nuts were throbbing like a pair of gumboils?

“Vedbysønder coming up here,” said Assad, after the best part of an hour watching the stripes in the middle of the road pass by.

Carl looked up from the GPS and gazed out at a small cluster of farms and cottages, a landscape of fields. Sparsely populated. Decent road surface. Trees and patches of dense vegetation. A good place to collect a ransom.

“Continue on past the building there.” Assad pointed down the road. “We cross over a bridge, and there we must peel our eyes.”

As soon as the first farmhouse appeared by the railway bridge, Carl recognized the place Martin Holt had described to him. Cottages on both sides of the road. The railway running behind the houses on the left. A little farther on a couple of buildings on their own, and then, at an angle, an unpaved byroad leading off toward the tracks. After that, a narrow band of trees and thicker vegetation on the bend. This was the place where at least two of the kidnapper’s victims had dropped their money from the train.

They pulled in at the byroad, which dipped under a little viaduct, switching on the blue light so as to be clearly seen if another vehicle should happen by in the morning haze.

Carl got out of the car with difficulty and considered perking himself up with a smoke. Assad already had his eyes fixed on the earth at his feet.

“It is wet here,” he said, mostly to himself. “Quite wet. It may have been raining recently but not so much. See for yourself.”

He pointed to a set of wheel tracks, clearly visible in the dirt.

“Look. A car drew forward to this place here, very slowly,” he said, getting down on his haunches. “And here he accelerated away, like he was in a hurry.”

Carl nodded. “Either that, or the wheels just span with it being so wet.”

Carl lit his cigarette and looked around. They knew two men had thrown bags containing ransom money out of a train window onto the
field here, but neither of them had seen the car. All they had seen was the flashing strobe light.

In both cases, the train had come from the east, so the bags could have landed anywhere on the field right up to the cottage that stood on its own a couple of hundred meters away. The place looked like it had been done up only recently, so maybe the owners hadn’t been here in 2004 when Flemming Emil Madsen’s father made his drop. Even if they had, they were hardly likely to have seen anything that could give the police something to go on. It was usually the way.

Carl reached his hands behind his neck and stretched, exhaling smoke into the damp air that rose up from the earth with the burgeoning warmth of March. The scent of Mona was still in his nostrils. How the fuck was he expected to think straight now? How could he think about anything but seeing her again?

“Look, Carl. There is a car leaving the house up there.” Assad pointed toward the cottage. “Should we stop it, do you think?”

Carl dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath the sole of his shoe.

The woman behind the wheel looked disconcerted as she pulled in behind the flashing blue light.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is there something the matter with my lights?”

Carl gave a shrug. How was he supposed to know? “We’re interested in this piece of land here. Does it belong to you?”

She nodded. “Up to the trees over there. What about it?”

“Hi, I am Hafez el-Assad,” said Assad, extending a hairy mitt through the car window. “Have you ever seen anyone throw anything from the train here?”

“No, I don’t think so. When were you thinking of?” the woman asked. Her eyes were livelier now that she realized they weren’t about to give her a ticket.

“More than once. Some years ago, perhaps. Have you ever seen a car waiting here?”

“Not years ago. We only moved in recently.” She smiled, plainly relieved. “We’ve just finished rebuilding. You can see we’ve still got the scaffolding around the back.” She pointed toward the house, then turned her gaze to Carl. Perhaps he looked more like a man who knew about scaffolding than Assad.

Carl was about to thank her. To step aside like a customs officer and wish her a safe onward journey. He was about to light up another smoke and think some more about Mona.

“But there
was
a car here the day before yesterday, the same time as that dreadful accident over near Lindebjerg,” the woman went on.

Carl nodded. The wheel tracks in the dirt.

Her expression changed. “There was a car chase, apparently. Two women in one of the vehicles were very badly injured. My brother-in-law’s cousin was one of the paramedics on the scene. He said it was touch and go.”

Fits well enough, Carl thought. Driving could be a hazardous business in the country. What the fuck else was there to do but tear hell for leather around the landscape?

“What sort of car was it?” Assad asked.

The woman twisted her mouth. “We just saw the rear lights, that’s all, and then they were switched off. We can just see the spot from the front room when we’re watching TV. Me and my husband thought it was most likely some couple getting amorous.”

She rocked her head from side to side. Presumably meaning there was no law against it and that she’d done it plenty of times herself.

“But then all of a sudden they weren’t there anymore,” she went on. “We saw another pair of lights, and then both vehicles were gone. My husband reckoned afterward it might have been the same cars that were in the accident.” She smiled apologetically, as if to excuse him. “He’s always one for drama.”

“You say this was on Monday?” Carl glanced across at the wheel tracks. Whoever had pulled in here had chosen a strategic spot indeed. Good view. Close to the railway. And if anything unexpected should happen,
you could be back on the road in seconds. “You mentioned an accident,” he continued. “Where did it occur, exactly?”

“The other side of Lindebjerg. My sister used to live just a couple of hundred meters from the place.” She gave a quick shake of her head. “Moved to Australia she has now, though.”

And then she told them she was going that way herself as it happened, and that she would show them.

The woman drove at fifty kilometers an hour max through the woods, with Carl stuck to her back bumper.

“Should we not turn off the blue light now?” Assad asked a couple of kilometers farther down the road.

Carl rolled his eyes in exasperation. Of course, what was he thinking? Their little convoy must have looked ridiculous, crawling through the woods at a snail’s pace.

“Look.” Assad pointed to a patch of road where the sun was finally drying up the morning dew.

Carl saw it, too. Skid marks on the other side of the road, then ten meters farther along, a second set on their own side.

Assad leaned forward and peered through the windscreen. Probably a car chase was going on inside his head. He looked like he’d be wrenching an imaginary steering wheel any minute and stepping on pedals that weren’t there.

“Over there as well!” he exclaimed, pointing to more marks on the road surface that seemed to show a vehicle had braked violently.

Then the woman in front pulled up and got out.

“This is where it happened,” she said, gesturing toward a tree trunk all but stripped of bark.

They walked around a bit, finding a few remaining shards from shattered headlights and deep gouges in the road surface. Obviously, it had been a very serious accident, though why it had occurred seemed far less clear. They would have to get the details from their colleagues in the traffic department.

“OK, let’s be getting back,” said Carl.

“Would you like me to drive this time, Carl?”

Carl looked at his assistant. All this recent evidence of dangerous driving hardly made the prospect attractive. Definitely not. “We’ll check with the traffic boys first,” he said, and climbed in behind the wheel.

Carl didn’t know the officer who had been in charge of the case and responsible for the on-scene investigations, but he certainly inspired confidence.

“We had the wreck transported to Kongstedsvej so we could carry out a thorough inspection,” the man said over the phone. “We found traces of paint from the other vehicle at various collision points, though as yet we’re not sure of its exact makeup. Dark in color, probably anthracite, but friction at the moment of collision may have affected the exact shade.”

“What about the victims?” Carl asked. “Are they alive?”

He was given a couple of civil registration numbers so he could check for himself.

“So, as far as you can make out, there was a second vehicle involved?”

The officer at the other end laughed. “It’s dead certain there was. We just haven’t gone public with it yet. There are clear indications of a car chase over a stretch of road extending back at least two and a half kilometers before the scene of the accident. High-speed and completely reckless. So if the two ladies involved
are
still alive, it’ll be a miracle.”

“And there’s no sign of the other driver?”

The traffic officer confirmed this.

“Ask him about the women, Carl,” Assad whispered from the passenger seat.

He did so. Who were they? How did they know each other? That sort of thing.

“Well,” the voice replied. “They’re both from the Viborg area, which I suppose makes it all a bit odd, crashing on a country road in the middle of nowhere in southern Sjælland. We can see they were back and forth over
the Storebælt Bridge a few times that day, but that’s not the strangest part.”

Carl sensed that the man had been keeping the best bit until last. Typical traffic department, letting the crime boys know they weren’t the only ones with exciting jobs.

“Oh, and what would that be, then?” he asked.

“The strangest thing is that shortly prior to the accident they rammed the Storebælt toll barrier and then did all they could to avoid being caught up with by police.”

Carl stared again at the road in front of him. This was a turnup. Fucking hell.

“Can you e-mail me the report so I can run through it on the computer here in the car?”

“Now? Let me check with my superior first.”

And then he hung up.

Five minutes later, they were reading through the police report on the two women’s driving. It was anything but the usual. Caught by speed cameras no fewer than four times, twice with each driver, and all on the same day. Toll barrier rammed on the Storebælt Bridge. Dangerous driving on the E20. Pursued by several patrol cars on the same stretch. After which, it seemed they had driven along Route 150 without lights, before ending up crashing on an isolated road leading through woodland.

“Why would they drive from Viborg to Sjælland, back to Fyn, and then over to Sjælland again, and all hell for leather like that? Any ideas, Assad?”