The Keeper of Lost Causes (30 page)

On the following days there was hardly a line that wasn’t filled in; quite a hectic schedule, he could see, but no remarks of a personal nature.

As he approached Merete’s last day at work, a feeling of desperation began settling over him. There was absolutely nothing that might give him any leads. Then he turned to the last page. Friday, March 1, 2002. Two committee meetings and another with lobbyists. That was all. Everything else had been lost to the past.

He pushed the book away and looked down at the empty briefcase. Had it really spent five years behind the furnace for no good reason? Then he picked up the diary again and leafed through the rest of the pages. Like most people, Merete Lynggaard had used only the calendar and the phone list in the back.

He began running through the phone numbers from the beginning. He could have skipped to
D
or
H
, but he wanted to keep his disappointment at bay. Under
A, B,
and
C
he recognized ninety percent of the names. There was little similarity with his own phone book, which was dominated by names like Jesper and Vigga and a sea of people who lived in Rønneholt Park. It was easy to conclude that Merete hadn’t had many personal friends. In fact, none at all. A beautiful woman with a brain-damaged brother and a hell of a lot of work — and that was it. He reached the letter
D
, knowing that he wouldn’t find Daniel Hale’s phone number there. Merete didn’t list her contacts by their first names, the way Vigga did; different strokes for different folks. Who the hell would look up Sweden’s prime minister under
G
for Göran? Besides Vigga, that is.

And then he saw it. The moment he turned the page to
H
, he knew that the whole case had reached a turning point. They’d talked about an accident, they’d talked about suicide, and finally they’d ended up high and dry. Along the way there had been indications that something was odd about the Lynggaard case, but this page in the phone book practically screamed it out loud. The whole appointment diary was filled with hastily jotted notes. Letters and numbers that even his stepson could have written neater, and that told him nothing. There was nothing pretty about her handwriting; it wasn’t at all what might be expected of a rising star like Merete. But nowhere had she changed her mind about what she’d written. Nothing had been corrected or edited. She knew what she wanted to write every time. Carefully considered, unerring. Except here in her phone book under the letter
H
. Here something was different. Carl couldn’t be certain that it had anything to do with Daniel Hale’s name, but deep inside, where a cop plumbs his last reserves, he knew that he’d hit the bull’s-eye. Merete had crossed out a name with a thick line of ink. It was no longer possible to read, but underneath it had once said “Daniel Hale” and a phone number. He was sure of it.

Carl smiled. So he was going to need the help of the forensic team after all. They’d better do a good job of it, and quickly.

“Assad,” he called. “Come in here.”

For a moment he heard some clattering out in the corridor, and then Assad was standing in the doorway holding a bucket and wearing the green rubber gloves.

“I’ve got a job for you. The tech guys need to find a way to read this number.” He pointed to the crossed-out line. “Lis can tell you what the procedure is. Tell them we need it ASAP.”

Carl knocked cautiously on the door to Jesper’s room, but of course got no response. Not home, as usual, he thought, noting the absence of the hundred and twelve decibels that normally bombarded the door from inside. But it turned out that Carl was mistaken, which became apparent when he opened the door.

The girl whose breasts Jesper was groping under her blouse let out a shriek that pierced right to the bone, and Jesper’s furious expression underscored the gravity of the situation.

“Sorry,” said Carl reluctantly as Jesper got his hands untangled, and the girl’s cheeks turned as red as the background color of the Che Guevara poster hanging on the wall behind them. Carl knew her. She was no more than fourteen, but looked twenty. She lived on Cedervangen. Her mother had probably looked just like her at one time, but over the years had come to the bitter realization that it wasn’t always an advantage to look older than one was.

“What the hell are you doing here, Carl?” shouted Jesper as he jumped up from the sofa bed.

Carl apologized again and mentioned that he had, in fact, knocked on the door, as the generation gap echoed through the house.

“Just go on with. . what you were doing. I just have a quick question for you, Jesper. Do you know where you put your old Playmobil toys?”

Jesper looked as if he were ready to hurl a hand grenade at his stepfather. Even Carl could see that the question was rather ill-timed.

He nodded apologetically to the girl. “I know it sounds strange, but I need them for my investigation.” He turned to look at Jesper, who was glaring at him. “Do you still have those plastic figures, Jesper? I’d be happy to pay you for them.”

“Get the hell out of here, Carl. Go downstairs and see Morten. Maybe you can buy some from him. But you’ll need a fat checkbook for that.”

Carl frowned. What did a fat checkbook have to do with it?

It might have been a year and a half since Carl had last knocked on the door to Morten’s apartment. Even though his lodger moved about upstairs like one of the family, his life in the basement had always been sacrosanct. After all, he was paying his part of the rent, which made all the difference, so Carl didn’t really want to know anything about Morten or his habits that might damage the man’s standing. And that was why he stayed away.

But his worries turned out to be groundless, because Morten’s place was unusually boring. If you disregarded a couple of very broad-shouldered guys and some girls with big tits on posters that were at least three feet high, his basement apartment could have been any senior citizen’s home on Prins Valdemars Allé.

When Carl asked him about Jesper’s Playmobil toys, Morten led the way to the sauna. All the houses in Rønneholt Park were originally equipped with a sauna, but in ninety-nine percent of the cases they had either been torn down or now functioned as a storage room for all sorts of junk and debris.

“Go ahead and have a look,” said Morten, proudly throwing open the sauna door to reveal a room filled from floor to ceiling with shelves bulging with the type of toys that flea markets couldn’t even give away a few years back. Kinder Egg figures,
Star Wars
characters, Ninja Turtles, and Playmobil toys. Half of the house’s plastic content was on those shelves.

“See, here are two original figures from the series at the toy trade show in Nürnberg in 1974,” said Morten. He proudly picked up two small figurines wearing helmets.

“Number 3219 with the pickax and number 3220 with the traffic cop’s signs intact,” he went on. “Isn’t it insane?”

Carl nodded. He couldn’t have thought of a better word.

“I’m only missing number 3218, and then I’ll have the complete set of workmen. I got box 3201 and 3203 from Jesper. Look, aren’t they fantastic? It’s hard to believe that Jesper ever played with them.”

Carl shook his head. He had definitely thrown away his money on Muscleman Max, or whatever the hell the figure was called; that much was very clear.

“And he only charged me a couple of thousand. That was so nice of him.”

Carl stared at the shelves. If it were up to him, he would have hurled a few well-chosen remarks at both Morten and Jesper, about how he used to get two kroner an hour for spreading manure, back when the price of a hot dog with two pieces of bread rose to one krone and eighty øre.

“Could I borrow a few of them until tomorrow? Preferably those over there,” he said, pointing to a little family with a dog and lots of other stuff.

Morten Holland looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Are you crazy, Carl? That’s box 3965 from the year 2000. I’ve got the whole set with the house and balcony and everything.” He pointed at the top shelf.

He was right about that. There stood the house in all its plastic glory.

“Do you have any others I could borrow? Just until tomorrow night?”

Morten had a strangely stunned look on his face.

Carl probably would have got the same reaction if he’d asked permission to kick him hard in the nuts.

It was going to be
a busy Friday. Assad had a morning appointment at the offices of the Immigration Service, which was the new name the government had assigned to its old system of sorting out aliens, the Immigration Administration, in order to put a nice face on the situation. In the meantime, Carl would be running all over town taking care of business.

The previous evening he had slipped the little Playmobil family out of Morten’s treasure chamber while his lodger was on duty at the video shop. Right now, the toys were lying on the seat next to him, giving him cold and reproachful looks as he headed into the wilds of northern Zealand.

The house in Skævinge, where the driver Dennis Knudsen had been found after suffocating on his own vomit, was like all the other houses on the road. None of them had even a trace of beauty, yet in their slovenly, workmanlike way, they seemed oddly harmonious with their worn terraces and breeze-block construction. In terms of durable material, the Eternit roofing appeared to match the ready-to-discard, lusterless windows.

Carl had expected a solid-looking construction worker to open the door, or at least the female equivalent. Instead, he found himself facing a woman in her late thirties with such an indeterminate and delicate appearance that it was impossible to determine whether she frequented the corridors of management or worked for an escort service in expensive hotel bars.

Yes, he was welcome to come in; and no, unfortunately both of her parents were dead.

She introduced herself as Camilla and led the way to a living room where traditional Christmas plates, skinny, triangular Amager shelves, and knotted rya rugs made up a significant part of the scenery.

“How old were your parents when they died?” asked Carl, trying to ignore the rest of the hideous decor.

She sensed what he was thinking. Everything in the house was from a past era.

“My mother inherited the place from my grandmother, so it’s mostly her things in the house,” she said. It was obvious that this was not how her own residence would look. “I inherited everything and just got divorced, so I’m going to fix the place up, if I can find the right builder to do the job. So you’re lucky to find me here.”

Carl picked up a framed photograph from the best piece of furniture in the room, a bureau in walnut veneer. It was a picture of the whole family: Camilla, Dennis, and their parents. It had to be at least ten years old, and the parents were beaming like suns in front of a silver wedding anniversary banner. It said: “Congratulations on 25 Years, Grete and Henning.” Camilla was wearing tight jeans that left nothing to the imagination, and Dennis had on a black leather vest and a baseball cap with the logo for Castrol Oil. So all in all it was banners and smiles and happy days in Skævinge.

On the mantelpiece stood a few more photographs. Carl asked who everyone was, and from what she said, he got the feeling that the family hadn’t had a large circle of friends.

“Dennis was crazy about anything that drove fast,” said Camilla, taking him to the room that had once belonged to Dennis Knudsen.

A couple of lava lamps and a pair of massive speakers were to be expected, but otherwise the room was very different from the rest of the house. The furniture was made of light wood and it all matched. The wardrobe was new and filled with nice clothes on hangers. The walls were covered with a sea of certificates, all neatly framed, and above them, on birchwood shelves up near the ceiling, stood all the trophies that Dennis had won over the years. By Carl’s rough estimate there were at least a hundred, maybe more. It was pretty overwhelming.

“As you can see,” she said, “Dennis won every competition he entered. Motorcycle speedways, stock-car races, tractor pulls, rallies, and all classes of motor racing. He was a natural talent. Good at almost everything that interested him, even writing and math, and all sorts of other things. It was very sad that he died.” She nodded, her eyes welling up. “His death took the life out my father and mother. He was such a good son and little brother. He really was.”

Carl gave her a sympathetic look, but he was puzzled. Could this really be the same Dennis Knudsen that Lis had described to Assad?

“I’m glad you’re going to look into the circumstances of his death,” Camilla said. “I just wish you’d done it while my parents were still alive.”

Carl looked at her, trying to figure out what was behind her words. “What do you mean by ‘the circumstances’? Are you thinking about the car accident?”

She nodded. “Yes, the accident and then Dennis’s death a short time afterward. Dennis would sometimes go on a drinking binge, but he’d never taken drugs before. And that’s what we told the police. It was unthinkable, as a matter of fact. He’d worked with teenagers and warned them against taking drugs, but the police wouldn’t listen. All they saw was his criminal record and how many speeding tickets he’d had. So they’d already convicted him in their minds before they even found those disgusting Ecstasy pills in his sports bag.” Her eyes narrowed. “But it didn’t make sense, because Dennis never touched anything like that. It would have slowed down his reactions when he drove. He hated that kind of shit.”

“Maybe he was tempted by the idea of making some quick cash and planned to sell the drugs. Maybe he was just going to try them out. You wouldn’t believe the sort of things we see at police headquarters.”

Now the lines around her mouth hardened. “Somebody got him to take those drugs, and I know who it was. That’s what I told the police back then.”