Mercy (5 page)

9

2002

Merete had often heard about the little café on Nansengade called Bankeråt, with the strange, stuffed animals, but until that evening she had never been inside.

There, amid the buzz of conversation, she was welcomed with a warm smile and a glass of ice-cold white wine. The evening was off to a promising start.

She had just finished saying that she would be going to Berlin with her brother on the following weekend. That they made the trip once a year, and they’d be staying close to the Zoo.

Then her mobile rang. ‘Uffe was really upset,’ the home help told her.

For a moment Merete sat motionless, her eyes closed, swallowing the bitter pill of what she’d just heard. It wasn’t often that she allowed herself to go out on a date. Why did he have to ruin things?

In spite of the slippery roads she made it home in less than an hour.

Uffe had been shaking and crying almost all evening. That’s what happened occasionally if Merete didn’t come home at the usual time. Uffe didn’t communicate in words, so it could be difficult to decipher what was going on with him. Sometimes it even felt like nobody was there, inside his body. But that wasn’t true at all. Uffe was very much present.

Unfortunately, the home help was clearly distressed. Merete knew she wouldn’t be able to count on her again.

Not until Merete persuaded Uffe to come upstairs to the bedroom and put on his beloved baseball cap did he stop crying, but he was still upset. His eyes looked worried. She tried to calm him down further by describing all the people in the restaurant and the peculiar stuffed animals mounted on the walls. She recounted everything she’d done and thought during the day, and she could see how her words began to soothe him. It was what she had always done in similar situations, ever since he was ten or eleven. Whenever Uffe cried, the sobs came from deep in his subconscious. At those moments, the past and the present became linked inside Uffe. As if he remembered his life before the accident, back when he was a perfectly normal boy. No, that wasn’t right. Not normal. Back then he was an extraordinary boy with a brilliant mind filled with fabulous ideas, and excellent prospects for the future. He’d been an amazing boy. And then came the accident.

For the next couple of days Merete was tremendously busy. And even though her thoughts had a tendency to drift away much of the time, there was no one else who could do her work for her. She arrived at the office at six each morning, and after a hard day she would race along the highway to make it home by six in the evening. Not much time to sort everything out.

So it did nothing to improve her concentration when she found a big bouquet of flowers on her desk.

Her secretary was obviously annoyed. She came from the Danish Association of Lawyers and Economists, where people were evidently much better at drawing the line between work and their personal life. If Marianne had still been Merete’s secretary, she would have swooned and hovered around the flowers as if they were the crown jewels.

No, Merete couldn’t expect much support from this new secretary in terms of personal matters, but maybe that was for the best.

The following day she got a valentine telegram from TelegramsOnline. It was the first valentine card she’d ever received in her life, but it didn’t really feel right since it was almost two weeks past 14 February. Pictured on the front was a pair of lips and the words ‘Love & Kisses for Merete’. Her secretary looked indignant when she handed it over.

Inside the telegram it said: ‘Need to talk to you!’

She sat there for a moment, shaking her head as she stared at the lips.

Then her thoughts shifted back to the evening at the Café Bankeråt. Even though the memory stirred up a wonderful feeling inside her, she knew this just wasn’t going to work. The only thing to do was to put a stop to the situation before anything really developed.

She spent some time formulating what she wanted to say, then punched in his number and waited for the voicemail to pick up.

‘Hi, this is Merete,’ she said lightly. ‘I’ve been giving things a lot of thought, but it’s just no good. My work and my brother make too many demands on me, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. I’m really sorry. Please forgive me!’

Then she picked up her appointment diary from the desk and crossed out his number in the phone section.

At that moment her secretary came in and stopped abruptly in front of the desk.

When Merete lifted her head, she saw the woman smiling in a way that she’d never seen before.

He was standing coatless outside on the steps in the courtyard of the parliament building, waiting. It was bitterly cold, and the colour of his face was not healthy. In spite of the greenhouse effect, February weather was not conducive to spending much time outdoors. He gave Merete a pleading look and didn’t see the press photographer who had just come through the gate from the palace square.

She tried to pull him towards the courtyard entrance, but he was too big and too desperate.

‘Merete,’ he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. ‘Don’t do this. I’m totally devastated.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, shaking her head. She saw the sudden change in his expression. There it was again, that deep, insinuating look in his eyes that made her uneasy.

Behind him the press photographer had raised his camera to his cheek. Damn it. If there was one thing she didn’t need right now it was a tabloid photographer taking their picture.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you!’ she shouted and ran towards her car. ‘It’s just not possible.’

Uffe had looked at her with wonderment when she started to cry as they ate dinner, but it didn’t really affect him. He lifted his spoon as slowly as he always did and smiled every time he swallowed a mouthful. His eyes were fixed on her lips, but he remained far away.

‘Damn it!’ she sobbed, slamming her fist on the table and looking at Uffe with bitterness and frustration etched deep in her soul. Recently that feeling had begun to come over her more and more often. Unfortunately.

She awoke with the dream burned into her consciousness. So vivid, so cherished, so terrible.

That day had begun with a wonderful morning. A slight frost and a thin layer of snow, just enough to enhance the holiday season atmosphere. They were all so full of life. Merete was sixteen, Uffe thirteen. Her father and mother had spent a night together that made them cast dreamy glances at each other from the moment they loaded the car with packages until the moment it all ended. Christmas Eve morning – what an oddly linked and joyous chain of words that was. So filled with promise. Uffe had talked about getting a compact disc player; it was the last time in his life that he expressed any specific sort of wish.

Then they took off. They were happy, and she and Uffe were laughing. Everyone was expecting them at their destination.

Uffe had given her a shove on the back seat. He was more than forty pounds lighter than his sister, but as pushy as a wild little puppy, diving in among the rest of the litter to suckle. Merete shoved him back, taking off her Peruvian cap to use it to bat him on the head. It was then that things got out of hand.

As the car went around a curve in the woods, Uffe hit her again, and Merete grabbed hold of her brother to force him back on to the seat. He kicked and howled and shrieked with laughter, and Merete pushed him down harder. At that instant, as her father chuckled and reached back his hand to give them both a swat, Merete and Uffe looked up. Their car was in the middle of overtaking another vehicle. The red Ford Sierra right next to them had a grey spattering of salt on its side doors. A man and woman in their forties were sitting in front, staring straight ahead. On the back seat sat a boy and a girl, just like them, and Uffe and Merete smiled at the pair. The boy looked like he was a couple of years younger than Merete; his hair was cut short. He caught her gleeful glance as she knocked her father’s arm aside and she laughed back at him, not noticing her father had lost control of the car until the boy’s expression suddenly changed in the light flickering through the spruce trees. For a second the boy’s terrified blue eyes were riveted on hers, and then he was gone.

The sound of metal grinding against metal coincided with the shattering of the side windows on the other vehicle. The children sitting on the back seat fell over just as Uffe toppled against Merete. Behind her, glass was breaking, and in front of her the windscreen was covered by dark shapes bumping against each other. She couldn’t tell whether it was their car or the other vehicle that made the trees along the edge of the road come toppling down, but by then Uffe’s body had twisted around and he was about to be strangled by the seat belt. Then came a deafening crash, first from the other car, then from theirs. The blood on the upholstery and front windscreen was mixed with dirt and snow from the forest floor, and a tree branch pierced the calf of Merete’s leg. A broken tree trunk rammed the bottom of the vehicle and tossed them up in the air for a moment. The crash when they landed with the nose of the car on the road merged with the screeching sound of the Ford Sierra knocking over a tree. Then their car flipped over with a jolt and slid along on its side, into the thickets. Uffe’s arms were sticking up in the air, and his legs were pressed against the back of their mother’s seat, which had been wrenched from the floor. At no time did Merete see her mother or father. She saw only Uffe.

She woke with her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it hurt. She was ice-cold and clammy with sweat.

‘Stop it, Merete,’ she told herself out loud, taking as deep a breath as she could manage. She put her hand to her chest, as if physically trying to wipe away the memory. Only in her dreams did she see all the details with such terrifying clarity. At the time, she hadn’t been able to take them all in – she’d comprehended only the general situation. The flashes of light, screams, blood and darkness, followed by more light.

She took another deep breath and looked down. Lying in the bed beside her was Uffe, breathing with a slight whistling sound. His face was calm. Outside, the rain was quietly trickling through the roof gutters.

She reached out her hand and cautiously stroked her brother’s hair as she pressed her lips tight to hold back the sobs trying to force their way out.

Thank God it was ages since she’d last had that dream.

10

2007

‘Hello, my name is Assad,’ he said. The hairy mitt that he held out towards Carl looked as if it had tried a bit of everything.

Carl didn’t immediately realize where he was or who was talking to him. It hadn’t exactly been a scintillating morning. As a matter of fact, he’d actually fallen sound asleep with his feet propped up on the desk, the Sudoku magazine on his lap, and his chin tucked halfway down in the opening of his shirt, whose usually sharp creases on his shirt now resembled an ECG. His legs were half asleep as he took them down from the desk and stared at the short, dark man standing in front of him. There was no question that he was older than Carl, or that he hadn’t been recruited from the same peasant kingdom that Carl called home.

‘Assad. OK,’ replied Carl sluggishly. But what the hell did this have to do with him?

‘You are Carl Mørck, as it says outside on the door. I must want to help you, they say. Please, is that correct?’

Carl squinted a bit, weighing all the possible interpretations of what the man had just said. Help him?

‘Yeah, I sure as hell hope so,’ was Carl’s reply.

He’d brought this all on himself, and now he was a victim of his own poorly thought-out demands. Unfortunately, he hadn’t realized until now that having someone else in the office across the hall would create obligations. On the one hand, the man had to be kept busy; on the other hand, Carl also had to occupy himself, at least to a reasonable degree. No, he hadn’t thought things through. He would no longer be able to drift through the day, now that he had that man staring at him. He’d thought it would make life easier, having an assistant. The man would have plenty to do while Carl kept busy counting off the hours behind his closed eyelids. The floor had to be washed, coffee had to be made, and documents needed to be added to the case files, which then had to be put away. There would be more than enough tasks to occupy him, he’d thought at first. But now, a little more than two hours later, the man was sitting there, staring at him with big eyes, and everything was nice and neat and tidy. Even the bookshelf behind Carl had been filled with reference books, arranged alphabetically, and the spines of all the ring binders had been numbered and were ready for use. In two and a half hours the man had completed all the work, and that was that.

As far as Carl was concerned, he might as well go home now.

‘Do you have a driver’s licence?’ he asked Assad, hoping that Marcus Jacobsen had forgotten to take that detail into account. If so, the whole question of the man’s employment could be taken up for discussion again.

‘I drive a taxi and a car and a truck and a T-55 tank and also a T-62 and armoured cars and the motorcycles with and without sidecars.’

That was when Carl suggested that for the next couple of hours Assad should sit quietly in his chair and read some of the books on the shelf behind him. He turned around and grabbed the nearest volume, which he handed to his assistant.
Handbook for Crime Technicians
by Detective A. Haslund. Sure, why not? ‘Pay attention to the sentence structure while you’re reading, Assad. It can teach you a lot. Have you read much in Danish?’

‘I have read all the newspapers and also the constitutions and everything else.’

‘Everything else?’ said Carl. This wasn’t going to be easy. ‘Do you like solving Sudoku puzzles, too?’ he asked, handing Assad the magazine.

By the afternoon his back was aching from sitting up straight. Assad’s coffee was an alarmingly potent experience, and Carl’s sleep deprivation had now been given a jolt of caffeine. He had the annoying sensation of blood racing through his veins. That was why he had started leafing through the folders.

A couple of the cases he already knew inside and out, but most of them were from other police districts, and a couple were from before he joined the criminal investigation department. What all of them had in common was that they’d required a massive number of man-hours and had sparked enormous attention in the media. Several of the cases had involved citizens who were well-known public figures. But all of the cases had stranded at the stage where the leads had petered out.

If he sorted them into rough categories, there were three types of cases.

The first and largest category included ordinary homicides of all types in which plausible motives were found, but the perpetrator remained unknown.

The next type of case also involved homicides, but of a more complex nature. It was sometimes difficult to pinpoint a motive, and there could be more than one victim. A conviction may have been handed down, but only with regard to accessories to the crime; the ringleaders or primary perpetrators were never identified. The murder itself may have had a certain random quality to it, and in some instances the act could be designated a crime of passion. The solving of these types of cases could sometimes be aided by lucky coincidences. Witnesses who just happened to be passing by; vehicles that were used in the commission of some other crime; information acquired through other unrelated circumstances, and so on. They were cases that could prove difficult for the investigators unless accompanied by a certain amount of luck.

And then there was the third category, which was a hotchpotch of homicides or presumed homicides linked to kidnappings, rapes, arson, robberies with deadly consequences, certain types of financial crimes, and a number of cases with political undertones. They were all cases the police had failed to solve, and in certain instances the very concept of justice had suffered a serious blow. An infant that had vanished from a pram; a resident of a retirement community who was found strangled in his flat. A factory owner who was discovered murdered in a cemetery in Karup, or the case of the female diplomat at the zoo. Even though Carl hated to admit it, Piv Vestergård’s officiousness, did have a certain value, even if it had been prompted by a desire to win votes. Because every one of these cases was bound to incense any cop worth his salt.

He lit another cigarette and glanced at Assad sitting across from him. A calm man, he thought. If Assad could keep himself occupied the way he was doing at the moment, maybe the situation would work out after all.

Carl put the three stacks of case files on the desk in front of him and looked at his watch. Another half-hour with his arms crossed and his eyes closed. Then they could both go home.

‘What are these kinds of cases then, that you have there?’

Carl peered up at Assad’s dark eyebrows through the slits of his eyelids, which refused to open any further. The man was bending over the desk, holding the
Handbook for Crime Technicians
in one hand. He’d stuck his finger inside as a bookmark, indicating that he’d made quite a bit of headway in his reading. Or maybe he was just looking at the pictures; that was what a lot of people did.

‘You know what, Assad? You’ve interrupted my train of thought.’ Carl suppressed a yawn. ‘Oh well, what’s done is done. OK, so these are the cases that we’re going to be working on. Old cases that other people have given up on. You get it?’

Assad raised his eyebrows. ‘It is very interesting,’ he said, picking up the folder on top. ‘Nobody knows anything about who did what, and like that?’

Carl stretched the muscles in his neck and looked at his watch. It wasn’t even three o’clock. Then he took the folder from Assad and studied it. ‘I’m not familiar with this case. It has something to do with the excavation on the island of Sprogø, when they were building the Great Belt Bridge between Zealand and Funen. They found a body out there, but that’s about as far as they got. The police in Slagelse handled the case. A bunch of slackers.’

‘Slackers?’ Assad nodded. ‘And this comes first for you?’

Carl looked at him, uncomprehending. ‘You’re asking me if this is the first case we’re going to work on? Is that what you mean?’

‘Yes. Is this it then?’

Carl frowned. Too many questions at once. ‘I need to study all of the files before I make up my mind.’

‘Is this very secret?’ Assad carefully placed the folder back on the stack.

‘The case documents? Yes, it’s likely that they contain information not meant for anyone else’s eyes.’

The dark man was silent for a moment. He looked like a boy whose request for an ice-cream cone had been refused, but knows that if he stands there long enough, there’s still a chance he might get one. They stared at each other for so long that Carl ended up feeling confused.

‘What?’ he asked. ‘Is there something specific you want?’

‘Since I am here and I promise to keep my lips sealed and locked and never say anything about what I read, can I look at the folders then?’

‘That’s not your job, Assad.’

‘No, but what is my job right now? I’ve came just to page forty-five in the book, and now my head wants something different.’

‘I see.’ Carl looked around to find some other challenges, if not for Assad’s head, then for his well-proportioned upper arms. He could see that there really wasn’t much for Assad to do. ‘Well, if you promise me on all you hold sacred that you won’t talk with anyone else but me about what you read, then go ahead.’ He pushed one of the stacks of folders a couple of inches towards Assad. ‘There are three piles here, so don’t get them mixed up. I’ve worked out an excellent system, which has taken me a long time to devise. And just remember: No talking to anyone else about these cases, Assad.’ He turned to his computer. ‘And one more thing, Assad. They’re my cases, and I’m really busy; you can see for yourself how many there are. So you shouldn’t expect me to discuss the cases with you. You’ve been hired to do the cleaning and make the coffee and drive me around. If you don’t have anything to do, it’s all right with me if you want to read the files. But that has nothing to do with your job. OK?’

‘OK, yes.’ He stood there a moment, staring at the centre pile of folders. ‘It is some special cases that lie by themselves. I can understand it. I will take the top three folders. I will not get them mixed all up. I will keep them in the folders by themself over in my room. When you need them, then just shout, I then bring them again.’

Carl watched Assad leave the office with three folders under his arm, and the
Handbook for Crime Technicians
at the ready. It had him really worried.

No more than an hour later Assad was once again standing next to Carl’s desk. In the meantime, Carl had been thinking about Hardy. Poor Hardy, who had asked his colleague to kill him. But how could Carl do that? These were not the sort of thoughts that would lead to anything constructive.

Assad placed one of the folders in front of Carl. ‘Here is the only case that I remember for myself. It happened exactly while I was taking Danish language lessons so we read about it in the newspapers. It was so very interesting. That was what I thought back then. Also now.’

He handed the document to Carl, who glanced at it. ‘So you came to Denmark in 2002?’

‘No, in ’98. But I took Danish lessons in 2002. Were you working on that case then?’

‘No, it was the Rapid Response Team’s case, before the reorganization within the police force.’

‘And the Rapid Response Team did it because it had to be fast?’

‘No, because it was …’ He studied Assad’s alert face with the dancing eyebrows. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he corrected himself. Why should he encumber Assad, who had absolutely no background knowledge, with all the intricacies of police procedures?

‘She was a pretty girl, that Merete Lynggaard, I think.’ Assad gave his boss a crooked smile.

‘Pretty?’ Carl looked at the beautiful, vital woman in the photograph. ‘Yes, she certainly was.’