A Conspiracy of Faith (59 page)

“I do beg your pardon, Rose,” he said, gathering all his cool. “In future, we shall endeavor to make our needs more abundantly clear. Now, would you be so kind as to find the information we need right away? It’s rather important, you see, so
in a hurry
would indeed be just the ticket.”

He nodded faintly in the direction of Assad, who responded with a thumbs-up.

Rose tossed her head, seemingly at a loss for what to say.

So this was how she had to be tackled.

“By the way, you’ve got an appointment with the psychologist in three minutes, in case it had slipped your mind,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I’d get my skates on if I were you.”

“What for?”

She handed him a slip of paper with an address on it. “If you run, you might just make it. Mona Ibsen said to tell you she was proud you’re going through with it.”

That did it. There was no shying away now.

Anker Heegaards Gade was only two streets from Police HQ, but still far enough away for Carl to feel like someone had stuffed a vacuum pump into his gob with the sole intention of collapsing his lungs. If this was Mona’s idea of doing him a favor, he might have to have a word with her.

“Glad you could make it,” said Kris the psychologist. “Was it hard to find?”

What was he supposed to say? It was two streets away. Aliens Division. He must have been there a thousand times.

But what was this shrink doing there?

“Only joking, Carl. I’m in no doubt there’s little you wouldn’t be capable of finding. And now you’re probably wondering what I’m doing here, in this building. Actually, a lot of work here in the Aliens Division requires the services of a psychologist. But you realize that, obviously.”

The bloke was giving him the creeps. What was he, a mind reader?

“I’ve got half an hour, max,” said Carl. “We’ve got a job on.”

He didn’t even need to lie about it.

“I see.” Kris made a note in his records. “Next time, I’d like you to make sure you can be here for the full session, OK?”

He produced a folder bulging with documents that must have taken two hours at least to get photocopied.

“Do you know what this is? Have you been informed?”

Carl shook his head, but he could probably hazard a guess.

“You’ve an inkling, at least. I can see that. These are your records. Basic data and all documents pertaining to the incident in which you and your colleagues were shot in that allotment house in Amager. I ought at this
point to tell you that I am also in possession of certain information which I am unfortunately not at liberty to divulge in full.”

“You what?”

“Reports from both Hardy Henningsen and Anker Høyer, with whom you were working on the case in question. Reports that seem to indicate that your knowledge of the case was rather more extensive than theirs.”

“Not to my mind, it wasn’t. Why would they say that? We were together on that job from day one.”

“This is one of the things we might shed a bit more light on during the course of our sessions. My feeling is there’s something that’s got you in a jam here, something you’ve either suppressed completely or don’t want to let out into the open.”

Carl shook his head. What the fuck was this? Was he being accused of something?

“I can assure you there’s no jam, as you put it,” he said, his cheeks fiery with annoyance. “It was a normal case like any other. Apart from the fact that we got shot. What are you getting at?”

“Do you know why you continue to react so strongly to the shooting, such a long time after the event, Carl?”

“Yes, I do. And you’d fucking react the same way, too, if you’d been a millimeter from getting blasted to pieces while two of your best mates weren’t quite so lucky.”

“So you consider Hardy and Anker to have been your friends, is that right?”

“Mates, yeah. Good colleagues.”

“There’s a difference.”

“Maybe. I don’t know if
you
have a quadriplegic living in
your
front room, but I have. Doesn’t that qualify me as his friend?”

“You misunderstand me. I’m in no doubt that you’re a very decent guy in many ways. You’ve probably felt rather guilty about Hardy Henningsen, so I quite understand you’d want to make a special effort in his case. But are you sure your working relationship was as good as you make it out to be?”

“Yes, I am.” This Kris bloke was irritating as fuck.

“Anker Høyer’s autopsy revealed traces of cocaine in his blood. Were you aware of that?”

Carl sank back in what purported to be an armchair. No, he most certainly was not aware of it at all.

“Do you use cocaine, Carl?”

Somehow, the man’s clear blue eyes, previously candidly assessing, were beginning to seem hostile. He had flirted brazenly with him in Mona’s presence. That gay twinkle, lips pursed and smiling at the same time. And now here he was giving Carl the third degree.

“Cocaine? No, I don’t. I hate all that shit.”

Kris the psychologist raised his hands in a mock defensive gesture. “OK, let’s take this somewhere else. Did you have anything to do with Hardy’s wife before she and Hardy married?”

“Are we going to talk about her again?” He glared at the guy, who just sat there impassive as a statue.

“I knew her,” he said after a moment. “She was a friend of a girlfriend of mine. That’s how she and Hardy met.”

“And there was no sexual relationship of any kind?”

Carl snorted. The man had his nose in everywhere. But how all this was supposed to get rid of the pain in his chest, he had no idea.

“You hesitate. Was there?”

“What kind of counseling is this, anyway? When do you get the thumbscrews out? The answer to your question is no. Petting, that’s all.”

“Petting? What would that cover?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kris. You may be gay, but surely you can at least
imagine
mutual bodily exploration of a heterosexual nature?”

“So you got—”

“Listen, I’m not giving details, OK? We snogged and had a good grope, but there was no shagging. Satisfied?”

Kris noted it down.

Then his blue eyes returned to Carl. “To get back to the case. Let’s call
it the nail-gun case, shall we? Hardy Henningsen’s reports suggest that you may have been in contact with those who were later responsible for the shooting. Is that right?”

“No, it fucking well isn’t! He must have got the wrong idea.”

“OK.” He sent Carl the kind of look intended to encourage confidentiality. “The thing is, Carl, if you go to bed with an itchy arse, your fingers are likely to stink when you get up in the morning.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Not him as well?

“Are you cured, then?” Rose asked when he got back to their corridor. He smiled, perhaps rather too ingratiatingly.

“Very funny, Rose. Next time I’m there, I’ll put you down for a course in etiquette.”

“Like that, is it?” She was digging her heels in already. “I hope you’re not expecting me to be friendly
and
PC all at once.”

Friendly? Jesus Christ!

“What have you got on those two women, Rose?”

She gave names, addresses, and ages. Middle-aged, both of them. No known associations with criminal elements. Regular citizens.

“I haven’t got around to Intensive Care yet. I’ll get on to them in a minute.”

“Who owned the vehicle they crashed? I think I forgot to ask.”

“Haven’t you read the accident report? The owner was Isabel Jønsson, but the other woman, Lisa Karin Krogh, was the one driving.”

“Yeah, I know that. Are they Church of Denmark?”

“All over the place, these questions, aren’t they?”

“I need to know. Are they?”

She gave a shrug.

“Find out for me, Rose. And if they’re not, I want you to find out what denomination they otherwise might subscribe to.”

“What am I, a journalist?”

He was just about to hit the roof but found himself interrupted by a sudden commotion of yells and cries from somewhere in the vicinity of the mail department.

“What’s going on?” Assad exclaimed.

“How should I know?” Carl snarled back. All he could see was a man standing at the other end of the corridor with the sidepiece from a steel shelving unit raised above his head, and then one of the uniformed boys leaping from the adjoining corridor to send him flying. The sidepiece came down hard in the process, and the officer fell back in a heap.

At the same moment, the man caught sight of the assembled three members of Department Q, and without hesitation he began to charge toward them wielding the piece of steel. Rose retreated, but Assad stayed put next to Carl.

“Maybe we should let the lads upstairs take care of this, Assad? Get the duty officer down?” Carl suggested, over the man’s unintelligible shouts.

But Assad didn’t answer. He braced himself, legs bent at the knee, upper body leaning forward with his arms out like a wrestler. Their prospective assailant, however, was unperturbed, a fact he would very soon come to regret. At the instant he raised his improvised weapon above his head to strike, Assad sprang into the air and grabbed it with both hands. The effect was astonishing.

The man’s arms buckled at the elbow, and Assad brought down the steel against his shoulder with such force that the crunch of breaking bone was clearly audible.

Presumably for form’s sake, Assad completed his counterstrike by delivering a firm kick to the attacker’s muscle-bound abdomen. It was not a pretty sight, and the sounds that escaped from the desperate man were of the kind a person would hope never to hear again. Carl had never seen anyone so berserk neutralized so swiftly.

While the man on the floor writhed in pain from his fractured collarbone and Assad’s pinpoint strike to his guts, uniformed officers came running.

Only then did Carl notice the handcuffs dangling from the wrist of the man’s right hand.

“We’d just brought him in from Yard 4 on his way to the Magistrates’ Court,” one of the uniformed guys said, snapping shut the handcuffs on the man’s other wrist. “God knows how he managed to get the cuffs off, but the next thing we know he’s away through the cargo hatch and on his way down to the mail department.”

“He wouldn’t have got far,” a second officer said. Carl knew him. An excellent marksman.

It was pats on the back from all around for Assad. What did they care if he had put their charge in the hospital?

“Who is he, anyway?” Carl asked.

“Seems he might be the guy who bumped off three Serbian debt collectors in the space of the last two weeks.”

And now Carl saw the ring grown into the flesh of the man’s little finger.

Carl’s eye caught Assad’s. He didn’t seem surprised in the slightest.

“I saw that,” said a voice behind Carl’s back as the officers dragged the groaning Serb back where he had come from.

Carl swiveled. It was Valde, one of the retired officers who presided over the Burial Club. Deputy chairman, as far as Carl recalled.

“What the hell are you doing here on a Wednesday, Valde? I thought you lot only met up on Tuesdays?”

Valde chortled and stroked his beard. “Well, we were all out for Jannik’s birthday yesterday. His seventieth, so you can imagine. No going soft on tradition there, I’ll tell you.”

He turned to Assad. “Bloody hell, mate. I wouldn’t mind seeing that again. Where did you pick up tricks like that?”

Assad gave a shrug. “Action and reaction. That’s all.”

Valde nodded. “Come into the parlor. You deserve a Gammel Dansk.”

“Gammel Dansk?” Assad was mystified.

“Assad doesn’t drink alcohol, Valde,” Carl explained. “He’s a Muslim. I’ll have his.”