The Purity of Vengeance (17 page)

“Was the boat ever found?”

“Yeah, in Warnemünde. It was nabbed by a couple of Poles who claimed it had been left moored for ages in Jyllinge before they took it. They didn’t consider it stealing, in any case.”

“What did they say in Jyllinge?”

“They said it wasn’t true. There’d never been a boat.”

“Sounds to me like the Poles half-inched it, then tipped him overboard.”

“They couldn’t have. They had a job on in Sweden from August until October 1987, so they weren’t in Denmark at all during the time he disappeared.”

“How big was this boat? Could it have been moored somewhere with no one noticing?”

“We shall find this out, Carl,” said Assad. He was standing in the doorway with the finest little tray made from genuine imitation silver. Carl considered the minuscule cups with trepidation. The smaller the cups, the more ferocious the contents. And these ones were small.

“Bottoms up, Carl,” said Assad, with fever-plagued eyes. He looked like someone in need of resuscitation.

Carl downed his coffee in one and found himself thinking it wasn’t so bad after all. It was a feeling that lasted all of four seconds before his systems began to react as if he’d imbibed a blend of castor oil and nitroglycerin.

“Good, eh, Carl?” Assad commented.

No wonder his eyes were red.

“OK,” Carl spluttered. “We’ll put Viggo Mogensen on the back burner for now. I’m not sure there’s any link with Rita Nielsen there. Have we got him on the board, Assad?”

Assad shook his head. “The conclusion was he probably drowned in an accident. He was a jolly man who liked a drink. Not an alky, just a tiddler.”

“A
tippler
, Assad. The word is
tippler
, just don’t ask me why, that’s all. What more have we got?” He looked at Rose’s list and tried to suppress the discomfort that arose as the coffee substance reached his stomach.

“Then there’s this one,” said Rose, pointing to another name. “Gitte Charles, it says here. Born 1934 in Tórshavn. Daughter of a grocer, Alistair Charles. The father went bankrupt at the end of the war and the parents divorced. He went back to Aberdeen where he came from, and Gitte and her mother and younger brother moved to Vejle. Trained to be a nurse for a while, but dropped out and wound up working at the mental asylum in Brejning. After that, a few spells as an auxiliary nurse at various places around the country before ending up at the hospital on the island of Samsø.”

Rose nodded slowly to herself as she scanned through the text.

“What comes next is just so typical for people who disappear from one day to the next,” she said. “Listen to this. She works at Samsø’s hospital in Tranebjerg from 1971 to 1980. Seems to be well liked, although she’s caught drunk on the job a couple of times. She goes into therapy for alcohol abuse and all’s well, until one day they catch her stealing surgical spirits. It turns out her drinking problem’s out of control and she gets sacked on the spot. After a few months she’s taken on by the community home health care where she bikes around the island to the elderly and infirm, only then they find out she’s stealing from them, too, so she gets the boot again. From 1984 till the time she disappears, she’s out of work and living on benefits. Not exactly a shining career.”

“Suicide?”

“That’s what they reckoned. She’s seen taking the ferry to Kalundborg and disembarking at the other side, and that’s it. She was dressed nice, but no one spoke to her. Case shelved.”

“So she won’t be on our board either, Assad?”

Assad shook his head. “It’s a strange world we live in,” he said.

So true. And strange, too, that Carl’s flu seemed to be going away, whereas his guts were now on their knees, begging for mercy.

“Back in a minute,” he said suddenly, and shot off down the corridor toward the toilet. Short, shuffling steps with buttocks clenched. This was the last time
ever
he was going to drink that muck again.

He plonked himself down on the toilet seat with his pants round his ankles and his forehead resting against his knees. How could it be possible to get rid of something so quickly that had taken him so long to eat? It was one of those mysteries he had absolutely no desire whatsoever to delve into.

He wiped the sweat from his brow and tried to think about something else. It was all still there, conveniently retrievable from short-term memory. A fisherman from Fyn, an auxiliary nurse, a tart from Kolding, and a lawyer from Korsør. If there was anything at all to link these cases together they could call him Donald Duck. Statistics could be pretty peculiar, so it wasn’t entirely inconceivable that four people could disappear for good the same weekend, completely independently of one another. Why not?

Stranger things had happened. And coincidences occurred by definition when you were least expecting them.

“We’ve found something, Carl,” came a voice from the other side of the cubicle door.

“All right, Assad, hang on. Be with you in a minute,” he replied, knowing full well it wasn’t true. No way was he getting up until his guts had stopped churning. You never knew what might happen.

Carl heard the door shut again and sat for a while, breathing deeply as his peristaltic predicament seemed to ease. They’d found something, Assad had said.

His thoughts went into overdrive. There was something niggling here, and he didn’t know what it was. Something to do with that Gitte Charles woman, if only he could put his finger on it.

One thing he’d noted about the four cases was the ages of those who had disappeared. Rita Nielsen was fifty-two, Philip Nørvig was sixty-two, Gitte Charles was fifty-three, and Viggo Mogensen fifty-four. Not the most typical age for people to vanish without a trace. It happened before that, when you were young and wild and emotional, yes. And later, when illness, loneliness, and life’s disappointments weighed heavy. But these people were neither young nor old, yet still nothing could be derived from the fact. Statistics were indeed unpredictable.

Half an hour later he eventually pulled up his pants and fastened his belt. Sore in the arse and what felt like a couple of kilos lighter.

“That coffee of yours is too strong, Assad,” he said, plonking himself wearily on his office chair.

The cheeky sod laughed. “It’s not my coffee, Carl. You’ve come down with what the rest of us have got. Coughing, sneezing, shitting like a machine gun, and maybe red eyes, too. Two days it lasts, but you are ahead, Carl. Everyone at HQ has been on the crapper, apart from Rose. She has the iron constitution like a camel. You can feed a camel with Ebola and cholera, and all that happens is it gets fatter.”

“Where is she now, Assad?”

“Looking at the Internet, but she’ll be back in a minute.”

“So what is it the two of you have found out?” Carl was skeptical with regard to Assad’s take on his stomach upset, for all he had to do was look at his coffee cup and he felt the spasms return. Which was why, to Assad’s bewilderment, he covered the cup with a sheet of paper.

“Well, you see it’s this Gitte Charles woman. She worked at a place for mentally challenged people. That is what we found out.”

Carl cocked his head. “And . . . ?” he inquired, hearing a clatter of footsteps in the corridor.

Rose burst into the office, mouth wide open, as if she really were brainless.

“We’ve got a connection between Rita Nielsen and Gitte Charles, and it’s right here,” she said, planting an index finger slap in the middle of a printout map of Denmark.

Sprogø.

14

August 1987

She sat as if
stuck to the bench, staring in the direction of the old bunker off Korsgade. It wouldn’t be long before the drug addict came shuffling by with his ugly mongrel.

Satan, the dog was called, a fitting name if ever there was one. Yesterday the canine monster had got hold of a cocker spaniel, and only a swift kick from a man in wooden clogs had prompted the beast to let go. The addict had of course threatened to do the bloke in and set the dog on him, but nothing had come of it. There were too many onlookers, and Nete had been one of them.

A dog like that didn’t deserve to strut about in her city, she had thought to herself, and now she had decided to kill two birds with one stone.

The sausage she’d placed at the bottom of Korsgade, at the foot of the old concrete bunker left over from the war, had been injected with henbane extract, a sufficient dose for present purposes. The slobbering mongrel wouldn’t be able to resist once it began sniffing around where it always did its business and happened upon an unexpected meal. A dog like that with its jaws around a treat couldn’t be stopped by any man. Not that she thought its master would bother to try. He was certainly not as fussy as other dog owners when it came to what his pet stuck its nose into. But still, one could never tell.

She waited only a few minutes before she caught sight of the panting beast dragging its owner along the path called Peblinge Dossering. It took less than ten seconds for it to pick up the scent of the bait, and in one quick lunge the sausage was wolfed.

As far as she could see, it went down in one.

When they passed by her bench, she stood up calmly, noting the time on her watch and limping on behind.

She knew the man couldn’t be bothered doing the whole circuit around all four lakes, but she also knew it wouldn’t take that long. The walk around Peblinge Lake would take about fifteen minutes at the pace they were going, and with the concentrated dose she’d injected into the meat she felt sure they wouldn’t get that far.

As they approached Dronning Louise’s Bridge, the dog suddenly seemed unable to maintain its direction. Its owner kept jerking the leash, only for the animal to continue veering erratically.

On the other side of the bridge the man steered his dog down to the path that ran along the opposite side of the lake and began to chastise it for its stubbornness. He stopped when it began to growl and turned to face him, teeth bared.

They stood in a motionless face-off for a minute, perhaps two. Nete leaned against the elaborate railing of the bridge, as if entranced by the view across the lake to the Pavilion restaurant.

But she was absorbed in something else entirely. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the dog sit down heavily and look around in bewilderment, as though it no longer knew which way was up or down. Its tongue flopped out of its mouth. She knew it was a symptom.

Any second now it’ll jump in the lake to drink, she thought to herself, but it didn’t. It was already too late for that.

Not until the dog fell onto its side, panting and eventually becoming still, did it dawn on the moron at the other end of the leash that something was terribly wrong.

With a look of both perplexity and impotence he jerked the leash and yelled, “C’mon, Satan,” but Satan wasn’t going anywhere. The sausage and the henbane had made sure of it.

Ten minutes was all it took.

 • • • 

For an hour she sat listening to classical on the radio. It soothed her mind and allowed her to think constructively. She had seen the effects of the henbane and had no further worries in that respect. Now it was all a question of whether people could stick to the times of their appointments. She was in no doubt they would come. Ten million kroner was a great deal of money indeed, and was anyone in the kingdom unaware that she was good for it, and a lot more besides? Oh, they would come all right, she reassured herself as the radio news time approached.

The headlines were uninspiring. The Minister for Church Affairs was in the GDR, and proceedings had just begun against an Israeli citizen who had leaked secrets about nuclear weapons.

Nete got up to go to the kitchen and prepare some lunch when she heard Curt Wad’s name mentioned.

She felt herself shudder, as though she had been prodded with something sharp, and held her breath as if it was the only remedy.

The voice was the same as two years before. Clear, self-assured, and arrogant. The theme, however, was new.

“The Purity Party stands for much more than countering the soft stance of our politicians on immigration. The issue of childbirth in the lowest and weakest social groups is also of paramount concern to us. Whether they are born retarded, grow up to be substance abusers, or are genetically predisposed to delinquency, children born of parents with severe social problems are often a considerable burden on society, and one that costs us billions of kroner every year,” Wad opined, allowing his interviewer little chance to get a word in edgeways. “Imagine how much we would save if criminal parents were stripped of the right to have children. The welfare authorities would become almost superfluous. Prisons would be depopulated. Or what if we were relieved of the astronomical expense of looking after unemployed immigrants who come here with the sole purpose of draining public coffers, dragging entire families with them, and filling our schools with children who understand neither our language nor our customs? Imagine the effect if large families living on public benefits and allowing their hordes of children to fend for themselves were suddenly no longer permitted to multiply with such tenacity and produce offspring they are incapable of looking after. This is a matter of . . .”

Nete slumped down in her chair and looked out over the tops of the chestnut trees. Her stomach turned. What man would be the judge of whether a person was eligible to live or not?

Curt Wad, of course.

For a moment she thought she would throw up.

 • • • 

Nete was standing before her father. There was a darkness about him, a bitterness she had never seen before.

“All through school I defended you, Nete. Do you realize that?”

She nodded, knowing it to be true. More times than she cared to recall they had been summoned to the dismal classroom, where her father had protested against the headmaster’s and the schoolmistress’s threats. But each time, he had softened up sufficiently to listen to the charges and promise she would mend her ways. He would teach her to abide by the word of God and to think twice about what words she took in her mouth. He would lead her onto a better path and correct her licentious behavior.