Disgrace (54 page)

The secretary shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid he’s not. David was killed not far out of town a couple of years back. They’d given chase to some hit-and-run driver and it all went wrong. It was a terrible thing. David was such a nice chap.’

Miranda nodded. She wasn’t really listening. She was certain now that there was writing on the paper, but that wasn’t what had caught her attention. It was what was at the bottom of the bottle.

On close inspection through the sand-blown glass, the coagulated mass looked remarkably like blood.

‘Do you think I could take this bottle with me? Is there anyone here I should ask?’

‘Try Emerson. He drove with David for a couple of years. I’m sure it’ll be all right.’ The office lady turned towards the corridor. ‘Hey, Emerson!’ she yelled so the panes rattled in their frames. ‘Come here a minute, will you?’

Miranda said hello. Emerson was a pleasant, stocky man with sad eyebrows.

‘You want to take it with you? Be my guest. I’m certainly not wanting it myself.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s probably just nonsense. But just before David died he remembered the bottle and said he’d better get it opened and do something about it. Some lad off a fishing boat handed it in to him in John O’Groats, and then the boat went down with the lad and everyone else on it a couple of years after. David felt he owed it to the lad to see what was inside. But he died before he got round to it. Not exactly a good omen, is it?’

Emerson shook his head.

‘Take it away, by all means. There’s no good about that bottle.’

That same evening, Miranda sat down in her terraced house in the Edinburgh suburb of Granton and stared at the bottle. It was some fifteen centimetres tall, blue-white in colour, slightly flattened and relatively long-necked. It could have been a scent bottle, though rather on the large side. More likely it had contained eau de cologne and was probably a good age, too. She tapped a knuckle against it. The glass was solid, that much was apparent.

She smiled. ‘And what secrets might you conceal, dear?’ she mused, taking a sip of red wine from her glass before using the corkscrew to scrape out whatever it was that sealed the neck. The lump smelled of tar, but the bottle’s time in the sea had rendered the more exact origins of the material somewhat indeterminate.

She tried to fish out the paper inside, but it was fragile and damp to the touch. Turning the bottle in her hand, she tapped her fingers against the bottom, but the paper budged not a millimetre. This prompted her to take the bottle into the kitchen and strike it a couple of times with a steak hammer.

That helped. The bottle disintegrated into blue crystals that spilled out over the work surface like crushed ice.

She stared at the piece of paper that lay on the chopping board and could feel her brow as it furrowed. Her gaze passed over the shattered glass and she took a deep breath.

Maybe it hadn’t been the best of ideas after all.

‘Yes,’ her colleague, Douglas, in Forensics, confirmed. ‘It’s blood all right. No doubt about it. Well spotted. The way the blood and the condensation have been absorbed into the paper is quite characteristic. Especially here, where the signature’s completely obliterated. The colour of it, and the pattern of absorption. Aye, it’s all typical.’

He unfolded the paper with a pair of tweezers and bathed it in blue light. Traces of blood all over, diffusely iridescent in every letter.

‘It’s written in blood?’

‘Most certainly.’

‘And you agree with me that the heading is an appeal for help? It sounds like it, at least.’

‘Aye, I reckon so,’ Douglas replied. ‘But I doubt we’ll be able to salvage much more than the heading. It’s quite damaged, that letter. Besides, it might be very old. The thing to do now is to make sure it’s properly treated and conserved, and then maybe we’ll have a stab at dating it. And of course we’ll need to have a language expert take a look at it. Hopefully, he’ll be able to tell us what language that is.’

Miranda nodded. She had her own idea about that.

Icelandic.

JUSSI ADLER–OLSEN

MERCY

At first the prisoner scratches at the walls until her fingers bleed. But there is no escaping the room. With no way of measuring time, her days, weeks, months go unrecorded. She vows not go mad. She will not give her captors the satisfaction. She will die first.

Copenhagen detective Carl Mørck has been taken off homicide to run a newly created department for unsolved crimes. His first case concerns Merete Lynggaard, who vanished five years ago. Everyone says she’s dead. Everyone says it’s a waste of time. He thinks they’re right.

The voice in the dark is distorted, harsh and without mercy. It says the prisoner’s torture will only end when she answers one simple question. It is one she has asked herself a million times:

WHY is this happening?

‘Jussi Adler-Olsen tells his stories as wickedly as Dean Koontz and has his detectives work as hard as Stieg Larsson’
Jydske Vestkysten

‘Gripping storytelling. Features all the hallmarks Scandi-book fans have come to adore’
Guardian